Team Dynamics Director Matt Neal says that the outfit’s move into TCR is part of a ‘toe in the water’ exercise aimed at understanding the cars better and to prepare for the future in touring car racing.
Neal added some detail about the team’s recent news that it is running a TCR Audi RS3 LMS in the Dubai 24 Hours, where the car ultimately retired just short of eight hours in when Jake Giddings had a heavy crash.
Part of the reason for Dynamics foray into TCR was due to uncertainty about how future regulation changes would pan out, with the British Touring Car Championship set to be adopting hybrid power from the 2022 season.
Whilst Neal also believes there is uncertainty in some of the TCR direction, he says that the decision to race a TCR car has been taken to improve the team’s understanding of the cars.
“You don’t know where [the BTCC] is going to go after 2021,” said Neal to TouringCars.Net. “You don’t know where Europe is going to go.
“We wanted to start having a bit of a toe in the water [exercise] to understand the cars, what makes them tick and what they do and don’t like, and what it takes to run one, just for the future.
“The one good thing about TCR cars is they can keep going and going, which is why they’re a great weapon of choice for 24 Hour races.
“We said we’d look at other events like TCR UK, Stewart Lines’ TCT [Touring Car Trophy] or the TCR Europe series. It all depends on drivers and how the calendar fits.
“We’re open minded at the moment, because we’ve got nothing concrete after this one. We’d like to look at maybe a couple of other Creventic rounds, but we’re just open minded at the minute.
“The one thing we are adamant of is that it can’t affect the core focus of running the Hondas [in BTCC] at the moment. We’re going to look at it, and if we can do it and it stacks up then we’ll do it.”
As well as running their new TCR car in 2019, Team Dynamics will compete in the 2019 BTCC with two new Honda Civic Type-R FK8 cars, after having sold their two 2018 cars to another team in the championship.