Evergreen Tyres-backed racer Rob Smith declared himself generally happy with his top five pace from the official pre-season Renault UK Clio Cup test day at Rockingham on Wednesday, 19th March, despite having his planned running limited by a couple of frustrating teething troubles.The championship, now known as the Courier Connections Renault UK Clio Cup in deference to its new headline sponsor, is embarking on a fresh era in 2014 with the introduction of the new fourth generation turbo-powered Clio Cup race car.Making strong progress with the Dunlop-shod Clio in recent weeks, Telford driver Rob – who is also supported by Grouptyre UK and BMTR once again this year – began yesterday’s officially timed run with old tyres bolted on to his car and the 21-year-old ended the session fourth fastest.Achieving the same placing during the second outing, albeit much closer to the outright pace, Rob was just 0.6 seconds shy of the top of the timesheets despite encountering a technical issue which prevented further improvements before the lunchbreak.Determined to try and break into the top three in the day’s final session, the Team Pyro driver did post his quickest time of the test – a lap of 1m31.082 seconds (76.67mph) – but another unfortunate glitch hampered his ultimate speed and he ended the outing fifth on combined times.“We’re definitely getting there”, said the Loughborough University student, “We found half a second between two visits to Brands Hatch over the last couple of weeks, so we’re definitely making the kind of progress we want to. I am really enjoying working with my new team at Pyro, being able to exchange data with my team-mate is really helping my driving – something I was missing last year.“I think I’ve got my head around the car quite well now, we know what we need to do in terms of set-up to make me comfortable with it so that’s good. We were a bit unfortunate in the first session, we never really had any good tyres to go on and then we had a couple of technical issues in the next two sessions so only did about half of the running we wanted to.”Little more than a week now remains until the Courier Connections Renault UK Clio Cup contingent convene at Brands Hatch Indy Circuit in Kent for the opening two rounds of the 2014 championship season on 29th/30th March. As the venue for Rob’s career best Clio Cup result, sixth position during round two last year, hopes are high of a very competitive beginning to his latest campaign.“We’ve kept our powder dry for Brands and not shown our full potential, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it is a bit frustrating we haven’t been able to truly see where we are yet compared to the others”, he added, “I’m really looking forward to Brands, I went well there last year and testing with the new car has been good so we’re feeling positive.”Following pre-event testing at Brands Hatch on Friday, 28th March, qualifying for the opening two races of the season is scheduled to take place at 11.20 on Saturday, 29th March, with race one set to begin at 16.25. On Sunday, 30th March, round two – which will be screened live on Freeview, cable and digital satellite channel ITV4 – will get underway at 15.30.