Following a succession of successful meetings at the Autosport Show in Birmingham last week, plans are now underway for Rob to race the brand new IFR Aspid in the 2009 Britcar Championship. Having organised for James Tucker, Britcar Championship founder and owner, to vet and view the Car, the Aspid was sanctioned to race in Class 3 of the Britcar GT Championship.

Following the approval, IFR founder Ignacio Fernández stated “I’m delighted that teams will now have the opportunity to race the Aspid in this championship series,” says Fernández. “The car was designed from the outset to meet FIA as well as EU regulations, so is unique in being a genuine ready-to-race high performance road car. No additional preparation is required to go racing, so teams will find it extremely affordable.”

“We welcome this all new player to the Britcar grid,” added Tucker. “We created our endurance race car championship in 2002 with a new set of rules to attract a wide diversity of entries and the Aspid brings an exciting new addition to the series that will add to the racing and overtaking spectacle.”

Tucker has confirmed that teams can enter the 270bhp naturally aspirated Aspid sport model in keeping with the series’ power-to-weight ratio regulation. Due to the car’s extreme lightweight design, the 400bhp supercharged supersport model was considered at this stage to give too much of a performance advantage for Britcar racing, but will be considered for a possible new class of higher power-to-weight ratio race cars in the future.

“I knew I wanted to race it when I first heard about the car,” said Hedley. “The Aspid is a brilliant piece of automotive engineering, developed from first principles, and should prove highly competitive. It’s also immensely strong and offers a robust, reliable and cost-effective racing opportunity. Being placed in Class 3 of the Britcar Championship puts us in direct competition with GT3 Ferraris, Porsches, Aston Martins and Lamborghinis. This will give IFR and the waiting public a direct comparison with the big supercar manufacturers and I feel we can more than hold our own. One thing to remember is this is the Sports version with 270 BHP going against the full race version of these supercars, imagine what the 400 BHP Supersports version could do!!”

Hedley added “As well as being an amazing Car to drive and race, I feel this is an also important project that will help mould the direction of the Cars of the future. The Aspid in built to be extremely light and fuel efficient. By using a smaller sized engine than is the norm for a supercar, this efficiency is greatly increased meaning this Car also has very green credentials. With the cutting edge technology and design on this Car, such as twin front disk brakes, ultra-lightweight aluminium Chassis, I would not be surprised to see some if not all of its unique features on a wide variety of production Cars in the near future.”

The car attracted a high level of interest at the Autosport and PistonHeads show, when it was shown for only the second time in the UK, following its debut at the British International Motor show last July. Race car enthusiasts and motor industry professionals had a rare opportunity to see it close-up and examine its exciting new technology and design features. Ignacio Fernández, who put together the team of automotive engineers that created the car, was on hand to explain how the Aspid manages to outperform even a World Rally Championship car as well as most supercars ... and at a fraction of the price.

The award-winning Cataluña based company he founded five years ago, IFR Automotive, was established to help develop innovative green technologies based on new lightweight automotive designs increasingly required for the mainstream car market. For further information on the Aspid road cars please visit www.aspidcars.com.

Rob is due to fly out to the IFR Factory next week to meet the team behind the Aspid and view the new race car.

All of the Team at RobHedley.com are looking forward to seeing the Aspid in the flesh and wish Rob and IFR all the best of luck in 2009.