Boardman to skip Marrakech round

The SUNRED Engineering driver raced a car on-loan from SEAT Sport Spain in the first two rounds of the season in Brazil and Mexico, and was due to do so again in Morocco before switching to the new machine for the following round at Pau.

However, a decision has been taken by Special Tuning UK, which has purchased the ex-BTCC machine and will help SUNRED to run it for the rest of the year, to test the car before the French round instead of racing in Morocco.

"Basically, with us having to convert the car from diesel to petrol and adjusting it from BTCC-spec to WTCC-spec, there wouldn't have been time to do both," Special Tuning UK's team manager Emlyn Evans told AUTOSPORT.

"The next few races are so close together that by the time we got back from Morocco, we'd have to have been pretty much leaving for France already.

"In the long-term, both ourselves and Tom thought it would be far more beneficial to let him test the car first, get some mileage under his belt, so that we can head to Pau and then Valencia on the front foot."

The British driver's announcement means that Tom Coronel will be SUNRED's only representative in Morocco.