Mattandflash. Flashandmatt. People in and around the Halfords Yuasa Racing Honda Civic Type R British Touring Car Championship team say it like it’s one word: “Mattandflash will be at the track in the morning.” “Have Flashandmatt been out in the cars yet?”
It takes a moment to realise they’re talking about Honda drivers Matt Neal and ‘Flash’ Gordon Shedden (see what they did there?), each a three-time BTCC champion. Both lovely fellas. Both very fast. Both team mates, on and off, since 2006, and always since 2010, hence they’ve become rather tolerant of each other.
So lets rewind back to when they were at Parcmotor Castellolí, not far from Barcelona, Spain, for pre-season testing (see how they got on in the first round of the 2017 season here), where the weather is consistent and where there’s a quite frankly brilliant circuit that could be straight out of Gran Turismo. The circuit has such a vast gradient change and dramatic rocky backdrop that it I can’t believe it isn’t used more for events. It’s 2.5 miles long but squeezed into a relatively small area. Annoyingly, the track is not pictured here, but
Not that things always go smoothly, even when vast armies of articulated trucks are assembled. Some teams there ran out of fuel because the stuff they’d ordered didn’t arrive (the delivery driver instead went to the Catalunya circuit, where Formula 1 testing was taking place). Early the next morning about nine pallets packed with fuel drums – about twice as much as the teams ordered or would need – turned up and figuring out how to get it all home was quite the task.
Meantime Mattandflash had started testing. Gradually. One of the advantages of this year’s Halfords Yuasa Racing Honda Civic Type R – some distance from being the most convoluted team/car name, after the Team Shredded Wheat Racing With Duo Ford Focus – is that a fair amount of it is carried over from last year. Mattandflash tested the bits that have had to be updated as a result of a rule change some years ago. A new supplier was appointed for some control components, but teams were, for a time, allowed to pick and choose from the old supplier or the new one. This season everything has to come from the new one. There were new tyres to test, too.
They are bigger, to better cope with demands that cars place on them as they get faster. Some tyres were marginal last year, particularly a soft ‘option’ tyre that teams are required to use at various stages in a race weekend. Like success ballast, where winning cars are given weights to carry, it’s a slightly contrived way of making the racing closer and allowing smaller teams to target certain races they want to do well in. And, like the success ballast, it works: there’s a 32-strong grid and the racing is extremely close this season (see how the first round at Brands Hatch went here)
Add your comment