Chris Brown is the Lanky Git

Rockingham Circuit in Northamptonshire once again hosted Media Day for the forthcoming HiQ MSA British Touring Car Championship. It also gave the media the first look at the Team sunshine.co.uk liveried Honda Integra that we will be campaigning this season.

I travelled up to Rockingham on the Wednesday morning with the other half, with the aim of arriving just before Martyn and Paul were due to film their pre season introduction for ITV. Sadly due to unforeseen circumstances (The wife took ages to get ready), we didn’t arrive at the circuit until 12:30 – we were hoping to be there about 11:30. Martyn and Paul were already ‘having fun’ in front of the cameras when we eventually arrived.

As it happened there wasn’t much to do on the Wednesday afternoon apart from stand around talking and drinking the free beverages from the Dunlop Café – thanks Dunlop. We also had the team wear to distribute which came courtesy of another team sponsor - ARCO.

Thursday was an early one with some dedicated members of the team being at the circuit by 7:30am. We awoke to a nice blanket of fog, but with a promise of sunshine in the afternoon. On arrival at the circuit though we were greeted by a clear blue sky and more importantly, plenty of sunshine!

We spent most of the morning in the glorious sunshine with the car out in the pit lane for the media to take pictures. We then had various other media shoots, such as the drivers and the cars on the grid etc. The photo shoot that I was most looking forward to, was the one where they strap you in the back of a people carrier with the boot open and get the touring cars to follow close behind, so you can get some shots of the car in motion. Sadly as I didn’t have any public liability insurance sorted yet I couldn’t take part, but the lads from Brooklands78 (Steve & Bob Knightley) got some cracking shots, which you can view on their website.

My own personal moment of humiliation came during the morning session when I went out with my camera to take some pictures of the Motorbase Grid Girls and the photographer stood next to me leant over and very loudly said “It helps if you take the lense cap off…” Yeah thanks mate!! He must have been checking out my gear to notice – lense envy no doubt.

After lunch the circuit allows the public to enter free of charge and the cars took to the track for an afternoon of testing. I have to say that the testing didn’t quite go to plan but was great nonetheless. Both Martyn and Paul were sharing the car and using it as an opportunity to collect data and get some laps in on a dry track.

Between the lads and about 20 laps they managed put in some very quick laps, one of which was a 1min 25.5secs. That’s 1.9secs off the pace of the guys at the front. It’s worth pointing out that the likes of Vauxhall, RAC & Dynamics were running on brand new tyres and were not carrying any success ballast – we were initially running on tyres that are 2 years old. So with new tyres on the Integra we should be able to make at least another half a second, which doesn’t sound much but when you think that the slightly faster S2000 cars will soon pick up some ballast weight when the season starts, we have a very competitive car on our hands.

For the second part of the test session we had some new rubber (tyres) for the car and had hopes of bringing our lap times down even more, however disaster struck. A piston had split in the engine. This spelt an end to our testing for the day and shut the door on the opportunity to find those quicker lap times.

At this point it was getting on for 3pm and it didn’t make sense to change the engine there, so the car was packed up to go back to the workshop where the engine will have to come out to be rebuilt. If your interested, to rebuild an engine like this it costs around £15,000 and it needs to be done every 1000km – so no trips to the supermarket in this motor!

A couple of jokes from the garage, which if you were anywhere near Martyn & Marvin, you probably would have them heard more than a few times!

“Did you know we have a sunroof this year…”

“Have you? How?”

“We got a big sunshine sticker and stuck it on the roof…”

A new Middle East crisis erupted last night as Dubai Television was refused permission to broadcast ‘The Flintstones’.

A spokesman for the channel said:

“A claim was made that people in Dubai would not understand the humour… but we have heard that people in Abu Dhabi Do”.

All in all a great couple of days and very productive, was great to see some familiar faces and get out there with the car and its new livery. We have a very professional and friendly team and I can’t wait for the season to start and get stuck in.

Next stop Brands Hatch on 24th March for the last testing session of the pre season.

BTCC