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A revamped World Touring Car Championship (WTCC) is kicking off this weekend in Marrakech, with new cars and drivers like Citroën and Sébastien Loeb.

Sébastien Loeb, Citroën C-Elysée (Photo: WTCC)

We crunched some numbers for you ahead of this new season.

2 - Number of categories racing on track. TC1 is for the new-spec cars, while TC2 is for smaller teams running previous generation models.

3 - Number of former F1 drivers on the grid: Gabriele Tarquini (Honda), Tiago Monteiro (Honda) and Gianni Morbidelli (Chevrolet).

4 - Number of world champions on the grid: Yvan Muller (4), Rob Huff, (1), Gabriele Tarquini (1) and of course... Sébastien Loeb (9), who comes from the WRC.

Yvan Muller, Rob Huff, Sébastien Loeb, Gabriele Tarquini (Photo: WTCC)

6 - Number of manufacturers represented: Citroën, Honda, Lada and Chevrolet, plus old generation BMW and Seat.

12 - Number of countries the WTCC will visit starting this weekend Morocco. After that it's France, Hungary, Slovakia, Austria, Russia, Belgium, Argentina, United States, China, Japan and Macao.

15 - Number of nationalities amongst the drivers: we have Frenchman, Chinese, Italian, Argentinian, Portuguese, British, Dutch, Hungarian, Moroccan, Serbian, German, Russian, Czech, Spanish and Japanese... but no Canadians!

37 - Number of victories to Yvan Muller's name. That's a series' record by the way.

Enjoy the season!

From press release

CTCC and DBA USA are pleased to announce their partnership for the 2014 season. The partnership will provide DBA with the opportunity to promote their brand and expand their reach in the Canadian market.

Disc Brakes Australia (DBA) is an Australian owned manufacturer, designer and global marketer of after-market and OE disc brake rotors.

DBA is proud to have supported CTCC driver Damon Sharpe during his successful drive to two consecutive Touring Class championships in 2012 and 2013. This season will see DBA expand their support to all Touring Class drivers.

Photo: Blanchet Motorsports

At each event, DBA will reward one of the Touring Class drivers that finish the feature race of the event with a pair of DBA rotors.

“We are looking forward to partnering with CTCC,” stated Yoni Kellman of DBA USA LLC. “It will give DBA an opportunity to showcase its product with some of the top drivers in Canada.”

“DBA is a perfect fit for CTCC,” commented John Bondar, President of CTCC. “Their products will help to enhance competition in our already extremely competitive Touring Class which will help to showcase the quality of their products.”

From GMM

La Gazzetta dello Sport, the influential Italian sports daily, speculated on Friday that Ferrari could be poised to make a change at the top.

It has long been rumoured that Stefano Domenicali, the fabled Maranello team's chief, might not survive too many more disappointing seasons at the helm.

"(I) say to all those jealous people wanting this job: they have to fight for it!" Domenicali told F1's official website last week.

According to Gazzetta, however, 48-year-old Domenicali might finally be losing the support of Ferrari president Luca di Montezemolo.

Fernando Alonso, Ferrari F14-T, Bahrain (Photo: WRi2)

Montezemolo left the Bahrain circuit last Sunday part-way through the grand prix, declaring that watching "slow" Ferraris gave him "great pain".

Now, at an event at the Ferrari museum in Maranello on Friday, Montezemolo reportedly said: "I already know what you want to ask.

"My reply is that we will leave no stone unturned to be where we need to be. We will work day and night to improve and make the decisions that we need to take."

Wondered Gazzetta correspondent Andrea Tosi: "(Will there be) changes at the top of the Gestione Sportiva?"

From GMM

Californian Gene Haas will start negotiating more seriously with engine manufacturers, now that the World Motor Sport Council has approved his 2015 application to race in F1.

"Now the really hard work begins," Haas said in a statement on Friday.

Last week, he had warned that the entire project was "up in the air", including the identity of the team's 2015 engine supplier.

"As things go forward it will be clearer, but you can't really do anything until we actually have been notified that we're a participant," he had said.

He seemed to contradict speculation he could bring the Ford name back to the grid, in collaboration with the former F1 supplier Cosworth.

"There's only three engine suppliers, you've got Renault, Mercedes, Ferrari," said Haas.

Mercedes has the best package at the moment in F1 (Photo: WRi2)

"Next year there will be Honda, but probably Honda is not really viable.

"We have talked to Mercedes and with Ferrari, just preliminary discussions, but we haven't nailed anything down yet. I guess that would be the next move," he revealed.

And the FIA said "further investigations" are ongoing for another "high standard" application filed by Forza Rossa.

It is believed Forza Rossa is the name of former HRT boss Colin Kolles' new Romanian-backed project.

A document created by supplier Delphi Automotive in May 2006 and released Friday by a congressional committee confirms that a General Motors engineer, Ray DeGiorgio, agreed to a redesign of the now-recalled ignition switch without changing the part...

A change in the way it measures currency in Venezuela will cause Fiat Chrysler Automobile's Chrysler Group LLC unit to take a $130 million charge in its first quarter, Chrysler said today in a filing with federal regulators.

Most General Motors dealers continue to wait as parts that were expected to arrive this week to repair faulty ignitions on millions of recalled small cars only trickle in. The wait is disruptive to business, some dealers said today.

A congressional committee said today there were "failures within the system" over the handling of flawed ignition switches in General Motors vehicles, which have been linked to 13 deaths.

Chevrolet is dropping the top on the Corvette Z06 for 2015 and the convertible is being billed as the Stingray for owners who want it all.

The co-owner of a California luxury-car dealership pleaded guilty in federal court to making illegal political campaign donations in the name of a foreign national, according to court documents.

The 2003 Saturn Ion was supposed to be a pivotal car for GM. Instead, it came to represent the compromises and corner cutting that almost destroyed GM and now find the company in a global recall of some of its most popular models.

More than 80 percent of consumers in the United States, Australia and Britain believe connected-vehicle technology will make driving safer, a new survey by the University of Michigan finds.

Christian Von Koenigsegg and Drive are back with another installment of and#8220;Inside Koenigsegg.and#8221; Episode 3 focuses on the One:1's active rear wing.

The Canadian province of Ontario plans to sell its remaining shares of General Motors Co. in the next year as part of a review of its state-owned assets.

Melvin Betancourt, design manager for Ford Motor, speaks before the 2015 Transit Skyliner concept van is unveiled at Galpin Auto Sports in California on Thursday.

This is the new 2015 Corvette Z06 convertible, the Stingray for owners who want it all, shown a little earlier than we expected. Buyers get the

In a day when every automaker seems to be eager to latch on to the smallest details -- a few pounds of weight shaved here and there, some silly feature designed to keep you and your family protected in an accident, a flashier infotainment setup --...

Toyota is recalling certain RAV4, Yaris,

BMW is recalling 489,000 vehicles worldwide due to a possible engine-bolt defect, widening a repair program that was initiated in China.

Federal safety regulators said today they have closed an investigation into complaints of reduced power in Ford F-150 pickup trucks, stopping short of requesting a recall. The probe covered about 360,000 trucks.