"The Silverstone test was really about shaking down the car" said race engineer Ian Smith, "The car has been completely stripped and rebuilt during the winter. We have a number of new systems on the car, particularly the new data acquisition system, that we need to test and refine before the first race. Shane was also concerned about the differential during the last few races last season, we were getting some handling irregularities that we consistent with a differential problem, so we have worked hard on refining our differential settings and we are confident that we will have gained speed as a result."

The weather at Silverstone allowed the team to test in the dry during the morning and then in wet conditions last thing in the afternoon.

"It's always good to run in the wet if you get a chance" Shane said after the test day. "Some teams and drivers will just sit in the garage if it starts raining, we ran a full race distance this afternoon in the wet. If it rains during the race in a couple of weeks, we will have the advantage."

A week later at Thruxton, the team concentrated on refining a setup for a track that Shane had not driven before.

"We had a few problems to sort out after Silverstone" Ian said. "We want to have problems during testing in a way, because it means we can resolve them so that they don't happen again during a race. Thruxton was problem free and we could concentrate on giving Shane plenty of time to learn the track and refining our setup".

Shane's thoughts on the Thruxton test: "This is a very quick track, you are flat on the throttle for over 2/3 of a lap and have to brake from over 160mph for the final chicane. There is no run off there, so I had to spend time working out my braking points. I am happy with the times I set today and this is the only test day at Thruxton for the whole season. None of my likely Championship rivals are here, so I think they've dropped the ball a bit and we will have an advantage going into qualifying for the last race of the season, because we have run here and they haven't".