Friday 3rd February 2012

Honda takes on WTCC

European Civic will enter World Touring Cars as a works outfit this year

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Honda has revealed that it is to enter the FIA World Touring Car Championship (WTCC) with the new Honda Civic.

It will compete in 'selected' rounds of this year's championship, likely to involve the later rounds in Japan, China and Macau, before a full-season campaign begins in 2013.

For the new project, Honda is to build an all-new 1.6-litre four-cylinder direct-injection turbocharged petrol engine, developed to fit the FIA's Super 2000 regulations.

And although the engine will be developed by Honda R&D, Mugen will actually build it. The car itself will be developed by Italian tin-top Honda specialists J.A.S. Motorsport.

The WTCC programme is to be run entirely independently of the Team Dynamics BTCC squad, which is building its own new-shape Civic contenders for the 2012 BTCC.

[ts86net]

Cool! So a 1.6 VTEC turbo-charged road car to come too? That would be awesome (can only imagine my previous Civic VTi with some sort of forced induction as well!)

[touring fan]

Already on another thread.

[Stew2000]

I for a second I thought I was looking at a Focus

[noosh]

While a different set-up entirely they perform more than favourably within the BTCC, very few issues (Well, certain drivers dependant but thats my own hang up) at all last year so should be hugely competitive at WTCC level.
Still a terrible looking touring car though in my book.

[Craiglamuffin]

Aren't Team Aon developing the BTCC Focus as a sort of model for Focus racing elsewhere? Odd that Honda would follow a different model and permit 2 works teams to develop the car to the same purpose independently.

[MG CHRIS]

Craiglamuffin said:

Aren't Team Aon developing the BTCC Focus as a sort of model for Focus racing elsewhere? Odd that Honda would follow a different model and permit 2 works teams to develop the car to the same purpose independently.

Team aon built the global focus as it was called by ford any team could build them but only team aon has built them they original built the mk1 focus know run by motorbase in 2009 to s2000 spec. Ford then announced it would assist in teams building the new focus "global focus" aon then built that with ford backing it was the plan for the start to enter the wtcc.

The honda situation is totaly different team dynamics is building the civic for the btcc with backing from honda uk the wtcc entry is honda R&D with mugen building them the 2 cars are totaly different nothing is shared between the wtcc cars s2000 1.6t and btcc cars ngtc 2.0t.

[bobberz]

What an ugly touring car. I'd rather watch old Jag MkIIs thunder about with copious quantities of bodyroll, but that's just me...