Photo: Castrol Honda WTC Team

Honda working on intensive test programme to catch Citroën

The Castrol Honda World Touring Car team will soon embark on a tough development programme throughout the winter, with a number of upgrades planned for their cars and the three customer cars of Zengõ Motorsport, Proteam Racing and NIKA Racing for the 2015 season, in a bid to catch Citroën after the French manufacturers’ dominating performance this year.

Honda, heading into their third full year in the FIA World Touring Car Championship, and their second with the new TC1 class Honda Civic, begin testing next week, with another new car being built which will mean six Honda Civic TC1s, though only five are set to be on the grid with one kept as a test car.

The team narrowly missed out on a second win of 2014 at Macau, when Tiago Monteiro’s car suffered a power steering failure just 8km away from the finish line, so performance and reliability will be the target to allow the Japanese marque to compete at the front next year.

“We have a big development plan ahead and it starts in ten days,” said Monteiro to TouringCarTimes. “All the way up until the first race we have a lot of days testing, more than we had to develop the whole car, which is good because we need it obviously, and Honda realise we need to test, we were delayed at the start of last year and we have a lot of ground we need to recover.

“We have many updates we’ll try in ten days, and we have some ideas where to improve. Citroën have been amazingly fast, but Honda have been clear that they want to win, so they’re trying to give us the means to make it happen.”

Whether Honda can take the fight to Citroën from the season opening round, Monteiro is cautious:

“We’re not going to arrive and dominate just like Citroën did, although it’d be amazing, but if we can fight with them that’s where we should be. We have several good updates coming, but they’re not going to stand still, but maybe their margin of improvement is smaller than ours.”