Yvan Muller Racing’s Thed Björk says the new World Touring Car Cup will be a very different experience, as the Cyan Racing-contracted driver will now be racing a spec Hyundai i30 N TCR, which will be very different to his bespoke Volvo S60 TC1 from last year.

Björk will now race for Yvan Muller, Cyan Racing’s development driver and consultant from 2017, and will carry the #11 on his car, with no “reigning” champion in WTCR, with both Björk and Team WRT’s Jean-Karl Vernay having won the WTCC and TCR titles last year.

“I’m really questioning why I didn’t get #1,” joked Björk to TouringCarTimes. “But then, I’m the world champion until they make a new world championship, so I think I can bear to live with the number 11 if I can call myself world champion until the next one.”

Getting his first taste of the new Hyundai i30 N TCR in testing, Björk explained the experience is already very different to last year.

“Last year we were testing for months and months, and now, it’s one week before the start of the season and we start to test, so it’s different,” said Björk. “Last year, we were in it to win it, that was the only goal we had, this year, it’s to drive as well as possible and see how it works.

“It’s also very different because I don’t have any information like I’m used to in the car. For example, in the Volvo car, anything within the rules, we could do, like adapt my display for example. I could have it show different pressures, values, everything; and now, we have nothing. We are a customer team, we buy the support and we are locked out of the system; the car we have is the car we have. It’s slower than a TC1 car and you can’t adapt it so much, so it feels like going back ten years and I have to try and adapt back to that to be fast. I need to find a new key, so this will be a new challenge even though I won the championship last year.”

Björk won two races on his way to the 2017 WTCC title, and says it’s that kind of consistency that will be key in the WTCR, with a number of very competitive and experienced drivers entered in the championship.

“It feels like it’s really back to the old basic kind of touring car racing with old drivers mixed in with the brand-new ones, and I’m sure that it will be a hard fight against them as well,” said Björk. “We will have a lot of different winners, also because of these three races during the weekend, so it’ll be nice for the audience, and for me, I’ll keep racing, doing what I love, it feels good.

“I won last year’s championship by being consistent, and I’ll just keep working on that and scoring points all the time, because when you mix this up with (Gianni) Morbidelli, (Fabrizio) Giovanardi, (Gabriele) Tarquini…so many things are going to happen in the races, and if I can watch what they do and stay out of trouble, that’ll be my plan. I’ll not change that approach, that was my strength.”