The WestCoast Racing team is working around the clock to build a brand new Honda Civic car for Gianni Morbidelli, in time for the next week’s event at Singapore.
Morbidelli’s car was destroyed in a massive shunt during the second race at Buriram, two weeks ago. As soon as the wreck of the Civic was trucked back to the pits, it took only a single glance for race engineer Paul Ridgeway to realise that it was damaged beyond repair. Team manager James Nixon then launched the emergency plan to build a new car for Singapore.
A new chassis was ordered from JAS Motorsport in Italy, which was delivered to JAS’ Asian Workshop at Sepang yesterday, September 9th. The chassis arrived at Singapore by truck today, at the same time as the team received the containers with the parts and equipment arriving from Thailand.
Working in a warehouse by the docks, the mechanics have finished stripping the crashed car and tomorrow they will start to build the new Civic, as all the parts that needed to be replaced – including the engine – will arrive at Singapore by air tomorrow morning.
The plan is to load the containers to go to the Marina Bay Circuit’s paddock on Monday, September 12th by lunch time.
“It’s a race against the clock and we hope we can stick to the schedule. We need to thank JAS Motorsport for supplying the chassis and parts in time despite the short notice and SEL that took care of the logistics and transportation. Without them we wouldn’t be able to attempt this,” Nixon commented.
