Having admitted that pre-season testing hadn't gone as well as expected, Alex Zanardi endured a difficult start to his World Touring Car Championship campaign in Brazil to end the opening weekend of racing without any points on the board.

The BMW Team Italy-Spain driver qualified down in 14th place on the grid at the Curitiba circuit but saw his chances of a good run in the opening race ended on the opening lap, when contact into turn one led to a puncture that forced him to pit and drop off the lead lap.

As a result he was only able to bring his 320si home to a 15th place finish which left the Italian with plenty to do in race two, with the ROAL Motorsport run team electing to use the second race as something of a test session to try and improve tyre-wear on the rear-wheel drive car.

With that in mind, Zanardi was only able to finish eleventh in race two and he admitted he was hoping for more luck when the series heads to Mexico for the second round of the year at Puebla.

"The first race of the 2008 season started in an unfavourable way for me," he reflected. "A few metres after the red light, someone bumped my BMW on the rear left rim and, even unintentionally, with surgical precision hit the inflation valve of the tyre that got completely broken.

"At that point I couldn't do anything else than get back to the pits for a tyre change, but the race was already compromised. I got the chequered flag in fifteenth position, with the only satisfaction to score a series of fast laps.

"Starting from the back of race two's grid, we decided to experiment with the setup to verify tyre degradation in high temperature conditions. I finished eleventh, but most of all we obtained some interesting data that I hope will turn out to be useful in the next races, maybe with a little less of rotten luck!"