Inside the 2018 Honda Civic Type R BTCC racing car

Some parts, after homologation by the regulators, are available for any of your rivals to see. And if it looks like you’ve gained a notable advantage then, well, there are technical committees and engine committees who might limit your turbocharger’s boost. And if you’re still winning after all of that, then there’s success ballast – applied and removed on a race-to-race basis – to slow you back down again. The only time you’ll actually see the latent, honest pace of a top BTCC car in a season is probably in the build-up to the first race.

Sounds harsh, doesn’t it? But this stuff works. The BTCC has run itself so successfully – and it’s mostly representatives from the teams who make the decisions – that it’s the most-watched British motorsport series going. Crowds average 40,000 and there’s live TV, the entry list is maxed out at 32 cars and sometimes qualifying grids are separated by less than a second from front to back.

And crucial, says Rodgers, is that “they look like road cars. As you know, they’re actually very far detached, but on the circuit they look [similar].”

They even start off as road cars. A new bodyshell rocks up at Team Dynamics HQ – an immaculate building in Droitwich – from where it’s sent off to be dipped. It’s not acid dipping like the old mega-money Super Touring days of the 1990s, where the car comes back so thin you could scrunch it up like a fuel receipt, but it gets rid of the galvanic coating. Then fabrication work on the cage begins. It has already been designed in-house because Team Dynamics gets CAD body data from Honda, and it has been FEA (finite element analysis) tested and approved by boffins at Autocar’s old friends’ place, MIRA proving ground.

If you’ve got some machines and you’ve got proficient welders – and, boy, does Team Dynamics have proficient welders – you can make anything. Even an estate from a hatchback and back again.

Suppliers help the situation, too. Team Dynamics is a technical partner with a lot of component makers, so that's why it doesn’t pay for spark plugs that would cost £1800 a set otherwise, why its own damper and spring experts can advise Bilstein and Eibach precisely what they’d like to run and why this tech will one day make it into road cars. But this BTCC Civic is, they reckon, going to be so fast, because the Civic road car was born with a Type R model in mind in the first place.

Why BTCC's racing is so exciting

This isn’t PR puff. The latest-generation Civic has its fuel tank in a sensible place – by the rear seats – whereas the previous car had it underneath the front seats. For the race car, it was redeployed somewhere that would be safer in a crash anyway, but what it also meant was that the car’s floor wasn’t completely flat.

Today, it is flatter for longer, nothing protrudes beneath it, not even the race car’s exhaust – this gives aerodynamic advantages. And do you remember us reporting, at the Type R’s launch, that Honda’s engineers said that all of the scoops and skirts and addenda were there for an aerodynamic reason? And thinking that you’d hope so too, because if they were there for aesthetics, somebody got it badly wrong? Well, that transfers to the racing car. Granted, the wings are extended to fit the race car’s wider tracks, but the bonnet scoop increases plenum pressure, the fins on the rear spoiler smooth the airflow and prevent turbulence, which causes drag. Most body parts are remoulded in a relatively light but hard-wearing material, but the rear bumper, and its diffuser, is actually off the road car. So, too, is the upper dashboard, as dictated by the regulations.

The key to the BTCC’s success is the thing that can so frustrate engineers: they want to be pushing technical boundaries to create big advantages, but they’re hampered by technical regulations that prevent them from doing it. Here they get a gimme: a road car that’s so quick that the race car will benefit from being derived, however thinly, from it. They say motor racing improves road cars. Sometimes it does but, in a series like this, it’s the other way round too.

Honda Accord Type R used buying guide

CIVIC VIRTUES

Instrument panel

Matt Neal specified these buttons. They look a bit playschool, but it means you can find the right one even when you’re flat in top gear.

Brakes

Brakes are control items from AP Racing, but still teams seek an advantage. Honda’s drivers bed in their own (not all teams ask their main drivers to). At Thruxton, they might make one set last a weekend; at Oulton Park, they’ll change pads after every track session.

Front subframe

The front subframe may be controlled by the regulations, but the suspension pick-up points, welded on by teams, are not. Which is why Honda and Team Dynamics would rather we didn’t photograph their location on the new car.

Exhaust