In addition to that, we had come from motorsport into a whole raft of green projects and had evolved into other things. We were out of motorsport when this project became an opportunity, so we spoke to Formula 1000 and they said do it, we spoke to EEMS who were keen to help and the only problem then was to find a Honda Insight. It was a great stroke of fortune that we found a lightly damaged car at a breakers yard that we managed to buy at a realistic cost, because the danger was that it is an expensive car and we could have built it as a rally car, taken it out on the stage and it could have fallen apart or not performed. We were going into it blind and having found a damaged car, we repaired it fairly cost-effectively and then went out and tried it.
We got the EEMS support and were able to rebuild the car. One of the big things was that the manual transmission we tried initially was totally unsuitable for rallying, the car is designed as an eco-car and has large spaces between the gears, so we found a CVT transmission car which we have here and competed with the CVT transmission this year. We have worked at getting the most out of the hybrid system and the bio-fuel rather than cheating on emission by making the petrol engine more efficient by conventional means, like tuning it, and have won our class in the championship – which has been a great surprise.
Q:
As you mentioned, the Insight isn’t a car that was designed to tackle the rally stages, so much work had to go into preparing it for competition?
Paul Andrews:
It is a totally unique car for competition and there were no ‘go faster’ components for it, so everything had to be specially made, which has been quite expensive and not always as effective as we hoped. We went to a suspension manufacturer who supported us and gave us discounted products so we have proper rally suspension and adjustable dampers and adjustable ride height, we got a great deal on the roll cage as the people saw the value in the project and everything else we have had to develop ourselves.
