Nika Racing postpone return again, now targeting the Nürburgring

Nika Racing have again announced that they will not make the upcoming round of the World Touring Car Championship, this time electing to skip the Moroccan round, again citing commercial and logistics as the catalyst.

The privateer Swedish squad lodged a full season entry for young Swede John Bryant-Meisner, but after missing Morocco will have missed a full third of the season.

The team’s initial plan was to return with the Honda Civic WTCC that they raced at selected rounds in 2015 with Rickard Rydell and Néstor Girolami, but at the last moment sold the car to Zengö Motorsport, who are themselves yet to race the car as they await an engine which should be available for the Nürburgring event.

Nika Racing then rekindled their relationship with RML and Chevrolet, purchasing Hugo Valente’s Chevrolet Cruze for the 2016 season which had been run by Campos Racing for the past two seasons, but so far they’ve deferred their return with that car for three consecutive race meetings.

“Marrakech is not the ideal track to make the WTCC debut for John, especially when he is completely new to the car and the WTCC series,” said the team in a statement. “Therefore, the team will use the remaining weeks until Nürburgring to let John get used to the car and be more familiar with all the different technical parts and learn all about the vital communication with our engineers and our race crew.

The team also signed off with:
“Hopefully, this will be our last message of this kind. The team really longing to return to the race track and will not wait a day more than necessary.”

The Nürburgring race is scheduled for May 28th at the end of the month.