Rob Smith declared himself generally happy with the pace he showed during the official pre-season Renault UK Clio Cup test day at Rockingham yesterday (19 March), despite having his planned running limited by a couple of teething troubles.
Getting to grips with his new fourth generation Clio Cup race car with reigning champions Team Pyro, the Evergreen Tyres-backed racer overcame a couple of technical issues to end the day five fastest out of eight competitors, 0.865s slower than the quickest time set by his new team-mate Mike Bushell.
“We’re definitely getting there,” said the 21 year old. “We found half a second between two visits to Brands Hatch over the last couple of weeks, so we’re definitely making the kind of progress we want to. I am really enjoying working with my new team at Pyro, being able to exchange data with my team-mate is really helping my driving – something I was missing last year.
“I think I’ve got my head around the car quite well now, we know what we need to do in terms of set-up to make me comfortable with it so that’s good. We were a bit unfortunate in the first session, we never really had any good tyres to go on and then we had a couple of technical issues in the next two sessions so only did about half of the running we wanted to.”
