Honda Racing were today at Brands Hatch, Kent for the first public test of the NGTC Honda Civic ahead of the 2012 Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship season.

The team, which took the team’s title as well as guiding both drivers to a 1-2 finish in the drivers championship, took to the track today following a successful preliminary test at the MIRA test track last week where the car underwent extensive system checks to ensure it is fully functional.

“This is the first opportunity we have had to get behind the wheel to really see what the car has got,” said 2011 champion, Matt Neal. “The team are really pleased with the results from the test at MIRA last week and I can’t wait to finally start putting the car through its paces.

“It will be interesting to see how the car performs, but I’m optimistic that we’ll walk away from today confident we have a championship winning car.”

Honda Racing will be using the brand new 2012 version of the Honda Civic built to the next generation touring car specification which we saw last year and which many teams are adopting to this season. Honda are already accustomed to using a turbo engine, which gave them much of the success in 2011, but they’ve started from the ground up with a whole new car.

“The team have all been working incredibly hard since the start of the NGTC programme back in August so everybody’s very excited to see the new car on track for the first time,” commented team boss, Peter Crolla. “It’ll be interesting from the point of view of both drivers and engineers to see how the car behaves on a track where we were very competitive with the S2000 Civic and we can really start to understand and develop the new car.

“The main aim for the day will be to establish a baseline set-up for the car which we can then tune for the various circuits we visit during the season. Initial feedback from the MIRA shakedown was positive so we’re hoping to continue that today and cover some valuable mileage with both Matt and Gordon behind the wheel”.

Following todays test at Brands Hatch, the team will travel to Donington Park to continue development of the car on Thursday.

Photo Credit; btcc.net

James Mappin is the editor-in-chief covering the British Touring Car Championship. You can contact him at james@btcccrazy.co.uk, on twitter @BTCCCrazy or on his personal twitter account @jamesmappin.