Gareth Howell: testing with Team Dynamics
By Verity Smith:
I feel good about it, hopefully we'll get to the stage where we'll start the season and see how it goes. If we run out of money then we run out of money. At the moment the team's working really hard to find that extra bit of budget for the second car, I'm helping with everything I can too. The marketing guys aren't sleeping, they're flat out trying to get everything done. Steve and I both want everything to work out like this. Did you have any other offers over the winter? Yes but the difficulty is that there's not a lot of manufacturer budget and I don't come with an open chequebook. I don't have big backers or sponsors so I was pretty sure that most teams weren't worth talking to as they all want you to have plenty of backing. Steve's put faith in me, like he did last year, and I must be doing something right as I'm still here. Hopefully we can just get it all sorted. How does the Honda Civic differ from the Astra you drove last year? It's a lot better. To be honest the Astra had been to the moon and back! This is by far the best touring car I've driven, as you know I've driven the MG as well so I've got experience of all three. It's just a much better race car. With a front-wheel drive race car you want it to be a little bit skittish, one that will let you get the power down on the exits of corners, this car is exactly that. It works really well into the corners and lets you get the power down early. It's quite daunting at first but you can tell why it's a winner. So why has Matt [Neal] gone out in your car now? What we're doing at the moment is to set Matt's car up with all the additions and changes that Team Dynamics wanted compared to the Arena car. There's some areas where we feel the car needs work. I'm running a baseline setup, the same as the Arena setup from last year.
We have pretty similar driving styles so it makes a lot of sense to test like this. I've learned a lot from Matt and this has been a great opportunity for me. I've watched Matt for many years in touring cars and aspired to be racing with him - let alone in the same team. He won't thank me for saying this but he was in touring cars when I was about eight years old so he's a bit of a legend, and now he's back home to roost. So hopefully we can have the success he had last time he was with Dynamics. We should be able to win some races, it's just a shame there's no £250,000 cheque this time! As far as I'm concerned this year the Independent's Championship would be a bonus but I'm just looking for race wins. The whole team is, I know Matt is, and I'm sure that other people are expecting that too. The car is a proven winner, we've added to it and made some changes which will benefit the car so there's no reason why we can't go for wins and maybe even the Championship. |
Hopefully Steve Neal's going to tell me to be at Thruxton at 9 o'clock on the Saturday morning
