Honda show strong pace in shortened Donington Park test

The new Honda Civic Tourer showed its pace in the rain-hit test session at Donington Park yesterday, with 2012 champion Gordon Shedden just one-thousandths shy of Andrew Jordan’s time, and was set to go faster before he spun off on oil at McLeans.

The team have seemingly been struggling for pace in testing up until now. The team are fielding a pair of new Honda Civic Tourers this season with a new engine built by Neil Brown Engines, and are set to go head-to-head with customer team Eurotech Racing, and usual rivals Triple Eight, Motorbase Performance and West Surrey Racing this season as they fight for their fourth drivers’ title.

Gordon Shedden only completed five hot laps, setting a best time of 1:11.088, before his off at McLeans, and didn’t take any further part in the session when the rain came down.

Likewise team-mate Matt Neal had limited running, setting eight laps in total, with only three hot laps, with his second lap fast enough to put him sixth overall, with neither driver choosing to take part when the rain fell just over an hour into the day.

“It was a bit of a shame that it rained when it did, as it’d been good to get some good dry running this afternoon, but it’s the same for everybody,” said Shedden to TouringCarTimes. “The balance of the car is pretty good, if we were to race here tomorrow I’d be happy enough with what we’ve got, we’ve still got a bit of tweaking to do for Brands Hatch.

“Every week the car improves. It’s still taking a bit of understanding, we’ve not had the cold weather like last year but we’ve had a lot of wet weather which has disrupted testing.”

Shedden’s off at McLeans was the result of an incident involving another driver, which brought out the second of three red flags during the four hour test.

“Jack Clarke went off at Craners, I believe kept on through the gravel and took the sump off it and rejoined at McLeans, I was the next car through and went off on his oil, so it wasn’t my issue,” Shedden added.

Honda Racing team manager Peter Crolla says the weather wasn’t too welcome, so the team has altered its plan slightly ahead of the opening meeting at Brands Hatch.

“The conditions didn’t really play into our favour, as we were hoping for a full dry day, so we’re going to regroup and test at Silverstone (on Wednesday), which will be our last test of the season all being well before the start of the season,” he said to TouringCarTimes.

“We just want to make sure we’ve covered all the objectives, race runs, qually runs, tyre options and not leave anything to chance.”

In terms of the car’s pace, which at Donington Park seemed much improved with both Shedden and Neal in the top six despite setting only eight hot laps between them, the team are now more comfortable with the new Civic Tourer.

“We were pretty satisfied. There appears to be a little bit of a feeling that we were sandbagging in recent weeks, but far from it, we’ve been out there trying just as hard as everyone else, and I think today was probably representative of that, we’re well in the mix but so are the usual suspects.Andy Jordan’s still strong as you’d expect him to be, Jason (Plato) will be there, and Adam Morgan is looking super-strong even in such an early stage of running in that car.”