DAN ROWBOTTOM
Team Dynamics BTCC driver tells us how the off-season is crucial for the year ahead
The off-season is where the hard yards for the season ahead are put in. From the moment I switched off my Halfords Racing with Cataclean Honda Civic Type R at Brands Hatch in late October after the final round of the British Touring Car Championship in 2021, all thoughts turn to the next campaign.
The contact with the team over the winter is crucial and I, in truth, I probably bother the boys at base too much. I am very fortunate because Team Dynamics, which runs the cars, is only eight miles from my workshop so I pop in all the time. Last week I was there four out of the five weekdays.
I try not to annoy them but there are a number of reasons why it is important. I will chat with the lads in the race shop and try to keep everyone’s spirits up – that is particularly important on ‘doughnut Friday’, where I bring the goodies – and is a great way to build relationships with everyone there. Other times, my engineer Tom Hunt and I will go through set-ups and try to unpick things that we weren’t happy with in 2021. We will look at data from previous meetings and we look at the onboard footage. It means that when we go to each race meeting in
2022, we will have a plan and we will be able to start on the front foot.
Things were very good last year, don’t get me wrong, but it was my first year with the team and in a frontrunning car. Now we have had a year together, I want to cement the fact that I have my faith in them and I trust them.
At the end of any given race weekend, I will put together a report on the car and how the weekend went. That can be a great point of reference for me when I look back with Tom. My team-mate ‘Flash’ Gordon Shedden does a report too and we will compare notes. It is interesting because sometimes we will have different set-ups and, sometimes, we have the same – but on the odd occasion that we have the same set-up, Flash and I are feeling different things from the car. We can both learn from that process. We cover a lot more ground by doing that.
We have also looked at the hybrid systems that are coming into the British Touring Car Championship season with a push-to-pass system from Cosworth Electronics. We have looked at how it is going to work and the different scenarios that we will have to take into account and the base weight of all the cars are going to be higher. That is probably going to be quite good for us because the Honda FK8 carried its success ballast well in 2021. There are some cars on that grid that have not even had to carry success ballast before. It is also going to have an impact on how you use the tyres, so there is a lot more to think about across the duration of the race – but that will be the same for everyone, whereas before it was only really the heavier cars in the top five that were affected.
The BTCC grid is filling up nicely, but I haven’t really been looking over my shoulder to see who is going where. Obviously, it is important to note Dan Cammish and Ash Sutton in the Motorbase Ford Focus cars – they will be strong – but I am not worried about it. I know we have a great squad at Team Dynamics, and I have got arguably one of the quickest guys I am ever going to race with alongside me in Gordon Shedden. So as long as I hang on to Flash’s coattails and we perform like we know we can, we should be at the front of the grid no matter who else is out there in the line-up.
It is the wrong attitude to worry about the others when I know that I have the best team of guys around me and the best car. I know that if we are having a bad day, we will fix it. That means I am approaching the season from a place of great confidence. I just can’t wait for it to start on April 23-34 at Donington Park.
“There will be a lot more to think about in the BTCC this season”