Out of the four events we competed in, we won the class on three of them and a lot of that was down to consistency and reliability - we weren’t always the fastest car in the class on the stages. For 2007, there are a lot of events on smooth tarmac rounds in the championship and we hope the car will be every good on those. Added to the some of the technical developments we hope to do, we are running in Class A which is a production class and aim to get onto the performance level of Class B which is for highly modified cars even though the Insight will still run in Class A.
Q:
Looking at the programme into the new year, where do the developments go from here?
Paul Andrews:
We are discussing a whole raft of developments with partners. We are working with Warwick University who have a hybrid research unit, they have contacts with most of the people in to UK doing serious hybrid research and a lot of the leading edge technology we hope to build into this car to gain performance.
We now have a fleet of Insights that are part of the project; there are four in total for 2007, one of which has very kindly been given to us by Honda. We are looking to develop a circuit race application of the same technology, using a high revving engine and maybe going outside the low emission envelope that we have used this year. But for this car, we are looking at all the parts that need development plus we will keep the low emissions strategy and won’t alter the low emission spec of the car, we will optimise the hybrid system by using more efficient energy storage and we’ll work on the suspension set-up and those things that will get us those few extra seconds on the stages.
Q:
Circuit racing differs greatly to rally stages so do you think the car can be a success there as well?
Paul Andrews:
I think it can be very successful. Once again it has weight advantages, it has excellent aerodynamics and in a high speed environment they should come into play a lot more. A Honda engine is always a good base for a race engine, it is a V-Tec system with variable valve timing and we have been invited to compete in a series where we would actually be running a one litre car in a 1300cc class – so our target would be to make the car competitive with the 1300cc class cars. Whether we could do that or not, we don’t know, but that would be the aim, to get the car up there with the 1300 class.
Q:
In terms of the rallying project as that is where you have done the most work to date, do you think a system like this has the potential to be used at higher levels of the sport, maybe up to British Rally Championship standard?
Paul Andrews:
I would say so in the long term. There is definite areas of advantage but the downside is you carry more weight with a hybrid system because you have batteries, energy storage and electric motors which are all heavy items so that has to be offset against potential performance gains, but there are clear potential advantages.
