GREG Wood, Lea's brother, who shares the team management duties with Rob Houseman, stressed the importance of further testing to get the up to speed for the remainder of the season.

"The car was put together in six weeks so that’s a tribute to the team in how competitive he has been," he said.

"Lea is low on mileage time himself and so when he turns up at these race-meetings, he is playing catch-up.

"After the next meeting at Croft, there is a mid-season break so we go and do some testing, try some new things on the car and just get up to that next level again.

"There’s still more to come from the car – the whole year is going to be a learning curve with this car. Everything is brand new on the car and no-one has given us any data so we’ve had to do it all off our own bats from square one. The other cars that we have bought have all had data but, as we bought this one as a shell with no data, it’s all been good so far.

"You can spend as much on a test as you do at a race-meeting and so that has to be taken into consideration. If you can build up a few race meetings when there is no expenditure on things that have gone wrong then that can go into a test budget – if we have an accident, then that’s going to cost us more money and there is no testing.

"This year the grid is so close and it's down to just fractions of a second.

"It’s just having that extra edge."