Aiden Moffat aiming high after Mercedes switch for 2015

18-year-old Aiden Moffat heads into his second full season of the British Touring Car Championship this year with his family-run team, with support from Ciceley Racing, which have now built a Mercedes A-Class for Moffat, who ditches the IP Tech Race Engineering developed Chevrolet Cruze after one season.

Moffat will run with backing from Laser Tools for a second season, pulled the covers off the team’s new car and livery at the Autosport International Show yesterday, and is looking forward to a more positive start this year.

“There are so many things that’ll be different to last year,” said Moffat to TouringCarTimes. “We’re starting off with a much better car and with the team in a much better way, so from the word go we’ve got much better chances. Also last year there was a lot of messing around for us to do before the season, we basically showed up at Brands Hatch and that was that, whereas this year we plan to get a lot of pre-season testing, so I think this year will be a lot different for us.”

The team entered into a technical partnership with fellow one-car team Ciceley Racing last year, which is owned by the Morgan family, with the experience of Paul Ridgway as chief engineer at the team, who helmed the development of their new A-Class last season, and now Aiden Moffat Racing have made the switch to a new-build A-Class as well for 2015.

“At the end of last year we partnered with Ciceley Racing, and Paul Ridgeway was behind that, who’s well known for how good he is, but one thing we struggled with was that we couldn’t get the full benefits of the partnership with two completely different cars,” said Moffat. “One set-up for Adam (Morgan) wasn’t a very good set-up for me, it would actually be quite a long way off. So they had their ideal set-up and then we had to mess about to get mine, but now this year, with two identical cars, we can learn off each other, do back-to-back testing, I think it’ll benefit both of us and the let us get the most out of the car.”

Now in his second full season, after making his debut in the last half of 2013 with the Super 2000 specification Chevrolet Cruze, Moffat hopes to build on his strong end to last year.

“The way last season started I was a bit disappointed. We had a few problems, engine problems, team problems, and we were a lot further back than I’d like to be, but we finished with a top ten at Brands Hatch, so I’m quite proud of how it finished. I’m aiming to get at least one top five finish this season, I think we need to push ourselves really, but we’re not under the illusion it’s going to come easy.”