“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,” he continued. “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.
“Fortunately we have engineering facilities at our base in Lancashire and we were able to make the exhaust system in-house, but the key modification is a programme for the hybrid system, which had already been part developed in the States. It effectively does the job of a programmable engine management system, but you alter the settings of the hybrid system, so we can re-programme the strategies that control the regenerative braking and the assist to the engine to make it effective for motorsport. That has given us a great benefit and if we had had to develop it ourselves, it would probably have taken two or three years and a lot of money, but as someone had already done the background work, we could take their product and adapt it for our application.
“We knew the car would be quick in a straight line, but we knew we had handling issues. The cars in the championship are all highly developed, the Nissan Micra is the most competitive car in Formula 1000 and that has been developed over a number of years as an effective rally car, so the cars we are competing against have highly developed chassis' and components that can be bought off the shelf to make the car perform well - whereas we have has to start from scratch. We have suffered a bit with handling set-up and have suffered on rough terrain so we hadn't expected, even with straight-line speed, to get the overall results. Once again, it is credit to Honda that the car is so well engineered and so reliable that we ended up doing a lot of rough events that broke a lot of cars and the Insight, despite its technology, was very reliable and had no problems and came through every event with a result.”
![Paul Andrews, Bill Meeson - Oaktec Honda Insight LEV [Pic credit: EEMS]](http://pix.crash.net/thumbs/286197.jpg)
