Going Through Church On Sunday

That, in case you are wondering, is Church, the fast right-hander before the chicane at Thruxton. The old Hampshire aerodrome is one of the relatively few British race circuits which I have never visited in the quarter century or so since I first went through the gate at Brands Hatch to watch qualifying for the 1985 European Grand Prix. I had never thought of the place as particularly interesting before, but as I sat watching the opening races of the British Touring Car Championship I began to revise my opinion.

Yes, it's not the most interesting looking circuit layout. From the right hander of Segrave which leads drivers out of the complex, it's essentially a long blast for a mile and a bit down to the chicane at Club. Yet, watching the touring car boys drifting through Noble and Church at between 120mph and 150mph, sometimes in a full-on four-wheel drift of a kind that one very rarely sees in front wheel drive cars, I began to see the appeal of the place. Leaving Rockingham aside for a minute, it is arguably the closest thing that Britain has to a high speed oval circuit, and with Silverstone long since emasculated, is almost certainly the fastest race track in the country (Silverstone has a faster lap record, but one should bear in mind that this record was set by Michael Schumacher in the all-conquering Ferrari F2004, while the Thruxton lap record is held by the rather less feted Earl Goddard, during a EuroBOSS race ten years back. It's fair to say that a modern F1 car in the hands of a professional driver would be frighteningly fast round the Hampshire circuit.

Yes, it's not quite an oval, but the way the cars followed and drafted each other through the series of fast, flowing corners reminded me of the best aspects of oval racing. And the chicane and the slow 90 degree corners near the beginning of the lap add overtaking opportunities which might otherwise be lacking and to my mind add to, rather than detract from, the circuit's appeal. The recent move by the circuit owners to build a spectator banking on the back stretch of the circuit is a big improvement too, providing spectators with an opportunity to watch drivers fight it out on the most demanding part of the circuit.

What, though, of the state of the series which kicked off last weekend? How has the recession hit Britain's most popular national racing series? The most immediate impact has been that a lot of corporate orange has been repainted sponsor-less white. Championship winning West Surrey Racing's BMWs have lost their RAC backing, while Halfords have deserted Team Dynamics, though the latter would appear to have some backing from the Honda works to continue to race their in-house developed Civic Type-Rs. The most telling sign that all is not entirely well in BTCC-world is that reigning champion Colin Turkington has not returned to defend his title because he couldn't find a drive. With teams not interested in drivers who couldn't either bring sponsors, or pay out of their own deep pockets, the Northern Irishman has been left high and dry. The works SEATS and Vauxhalls have gone, although both manufacturers maintain a presence on the grid through private entries, and just as West Surrey Racing continued to race its MG ZRs after the collapse of the Rover Group, Triple 8 racing are pushing on with their Vectras despite the loss of support from the troubled manufacturer.

Despite these losses though, there was some good racing, and while the back half of the grid appears to be made up of club racers with deep pockets looking for a bit of entertainment on a Sunday afternoon, there's enough competitive cars and drivers at the front to keep things interesting. Indeed, the variation in driver ability helps to show how important a factor it, as well as the machinery, actually is. Compare, for example, Paul O'Neill's third and fourth places in his ancient ex-Team Dynamics Honda Integra with what team owner and mobile phone entrepreneur John George was able to achieve with the same equipment. Equally, Mat Jackson and Fabrizio Giovanardi were a lot quicker than their inexperienced team mates. It's unclear whether Giovanardi, who has only a one-race deal with Triple 8, will see out the season, but at first glance, his dominant victories in races one and two suggest that he could well add another BTCC title to his CV if the money is found to enable to continue his campaign.

That, though, is to forget that the Vauxhalls have always been very quick around Thruxton, and Giovanardi's hit rate at the circuit is particularly high. Jason Plato's Chevrolet Cruze, a more modern machine, being run by the same RML team which runs the works cars in the World Touring Car Championship. And it is not only former champion Plato who might be able to take the fight to Giovanardi. Motorbase's Mat Jackson came close to winning the title a couple of years ago in his family-run ex-Priaulx BMW and Team Dynamics appear finally to have got their new-shape Honda Civic well and truly sorted, and Gordon Shedden took pole, while Matt Neal led until both Hondas shredded their tyres in the first race. The way that Neal progressed through the field in the second race suggests that he too could emerge as a significant title contender and I'd be surprised if Honda didn't regularly challenge for race victories later in the year.

In recent years, touring car racing has been tarnished by endless battles over the rules intended to equalise peformance between cars built to different rules. In particular, the WTCC has seen constant disputes over exactly what is required to ensure a fair fight between front wheel drive, petrol powered Chevrolets, rear-wheel drive petrol powered BMWs and diesel powered, turbo-charged SEATs. There are no diesel powered cars in the BTCC this year, but despite this, Alan Gow's TOCA organisation has arguable an even more difficult challenge on their hands. Not only is there the argument over how best to equalise front wheel drive and the theoretically faster rear-wheel drive cars, but there is the conflict between WTCC-spec S2000 cars, unhomologated BTC-spec S2000 cars (such as the Vauxhalls and Honda Civics), ageing BTC-spec cars (there are now only the two Techspeed Integras now, five years on from the move away from BTC-spec cars), the LPG-p0wered Arena Motorsport Ford Focuses and the two privately entered Vauxhall Vectras now running the standard-issue TOCA engine, a detuned turbo-charged 2 litre engine intended to provide more cheaply the same horsepower and all-round performance as the more expensive S2000-spec normally aspirated 2 litre engines.

It was impressive, therefore, that the only complaints to make the press last weekend concerned the long-ratio first gears that the BMW teams were forced to run in order to nullify the startline advantage the rear wheel drive cars had over their front wheel driven rivals. West Surrey Racing and Motorbase were rather upset by the fact that the first gear they were forced to run appeared not only to slow them away from the line, but to place a tremendous strain on their clutches. Certainly it sometimes seemed that the BMWs were actually considerably slower away from the line than their front-driven rivals. Given time, and perhaps orders for stronger clutches from Motorbase and WSR, I'm sure this can be sorted out. All in all, despite the sponsor-less cars, and in spite of the absence of the reigning champion, the BTCC still looks to be in reasonably good health, certainly when one compares it with the state of the series 10 years back, when the 'Supertourer' era came to an ignominous end with grids of just 8 or 9 cars. If nothing else, it certainly beats going to church on Sunday in my book.

The Ghost of ProCar

At any time, hundred of young racing drivers are plugging away in categories like Formula Renault, Formula BMW and Formula Ford, taking the first steps towards becoming professional racing drivers. In their early years, at least, most will be dreaming of F1 stardom. Most of them will fail. Despite the economic recession, there were 29 drivers on the grid at the last round of the Formula Renault championship at Donington. The odds are that, at most, maybe one of those 29 will ever make it as far as F1. Of the 20 champions that the British series has produced since 1989, just four have gone on to become Grand Prix drivers.

What, then, are the options for those convinced they have what it takes to pursue a life as a paid professional racing driver, but who has found the road to F1 closed off to them? While Formula 1 may be far and away the best paid field of motorsport apart, perhaps, from NASCAR, it is not the only way a racing driver can hope to be paid for plying his trade. There's the Indy Racing League, though it remains predominantly an oval series which perhaps isn't best suited to drivers who learned their craft on the road courses of Europe. There's sports car racing, but with the bulk of the field in both the European and American series made up of private teams backed by wealthy individuals, many of whom are to be found behind the wheel, the scope to find paid drives is limited. Audi, Peugeot and, probably Acura, will most likely be paying their drivers, but the vast majority of entrants in, for example, last weekend's Spa 1000kms, were probably paying for the privilege of being there.

There's always touring cars, although the days when the British Touring Car Championship consisted of major car manufacturers paying F1 veterans substantial money are now long gone. The World Touring Car Championship has a number of works teams and both longtime tintop specialists like Rickard Rydell, Alain Menu and Yvan Muller and ex-F1 men like Nicola Larini, Gabriele Tarquini and Tiago Monteiro. In the end, though, racing 270BHP Super2000 spec touring cars seems a terrible waste of a professional racing driver's talents. The cars have too much grip, too little power, and the results are often determined by a hideously overcomplicated equivalency formula designed to enable petrol and diesel, front wheel drive and rear wheel drive cars to compete on an equal footing.

A far more appealing option, surely, must be the DTM series, which kicked off at Hockenheim last year. Big 4 litre V8 Audis and Mercedes with nearly 500BHP on tap, which can lap a shade quicker than an F3 car, these are proper racing cars. Ex-F1 men, Mika Hakkinen, Jean Alesi and Heinz-Harald Frentzen all found a lucrative second career here, and while they have all now left, the younger Schumacher brother, Ralf, is plying his trade in a year-old Mercedes.

Among the front-runners in the series are a number of former single-seater stars whose path to F1 ran up against the buffers. Paul Di Resta, who nearly took the title last year, was the man who beat Sebastian Vettel to the F3 Euroseries Crown in 2006. Jamie Green is another former Euroseries champion who never quite managed to line up a GP2 drive. Alexandre Premat wound up at Audi after winning in GP2 while Gary Paffett is yet another former F3 champion who couldn't get the backing together to carry on in single seaters. Reigning champion Timo Scheider has been a touring car man for a long time, but he too started out as a race winner in F3 and Formula Renault in the late 1990s. Compared to any other national touring car series in the world, both the quality and international flavour of the driver lineup is remarkable (there are almost as many British drivers in the series as Germans!) Tom Kristensen, who won on Sunday, has had a sportscar career which rivals that of Jackie Ickx.

And why? Because, in a way, it's not really a touring car championship at all. The series owes more than a little to the old ProCar concept. ProCar was originally a Grand Prix support-event which ran in 1979 and 1980. A single-make series for a grid full of BMW's M1s which attracted a grid full of current and recently retired F1 drivers. It is the later, stillborn late 1980s which the DTM most closely resembles, however. Bernie Ecclestone's brainchild, it involved 'silhouette' racers, with F1-derived V10 3.5l engines and carbon fibre chassis with saloon car bodywork. A single Alfa Romeo 164 Procar was built and lapped Monza very quickly, but the championship never saw the light of day.

The modern DTM race cars are, according to those who drive them, more like single seaters than conventional touring cars. As with the old ProCar concept, the saloon-car bodyshape masks a carbon fibre chassis and brakes, suspension and transmission which is much more thoroughbred racing car than modified saloon car. The championship is even, to a fair degree, international, with races in the UK, Italy, Spain and France. How much that has to do with the lack of decent racetracks in Germany is a matter for speculation...

The DTM has all the ingredients for a great race series and yet, watching the opening race at Hockenheim last weekend, I was not convinced. Yes, it didn't help that it happened to be a rather processional race. That can happen in any series, at least any where the rules are not deliberately manipulated to keep things artificially close. There was more to it than that, though. I couldn't help thinking I was watching, in essence, a high speed car advert for Mercedes and Audi.

The teams are all ultimately funded by, and operating at the behest of, these two manufacturers. When the race turned out to be something of an Audi benefit, one wondered whether the Audi drivers would really race each other as hard as they might race their Mercedes rivals. Timo Scheider tailed Tom Kristensen all race long (though Matthias Ekstrom had the race in the bag until the last moment) but never really looked like he would get past. Had Kristensen been a Mercedes man, might he have tried a little harder? Drivers with an eye on their long-term employment prospects don't risk taking their team mates off the road, and that's true across the racing world. In a series which consists, essentially, of two teams of 10 drivers, however, that can significantly stifle the racing.

My other problemwith the DTM is its use of mandatory pit stips. I know I'm beginning to sound like a stuck record on this subject, but pit stops are not, in and of themselves, interesting to watch. They break up the flow of races, make it difficult for those watching track-side to work out quite what is going on, and throw an unnecessary random element into proceedings. In A1GP, in particular, too many races have been decided by a botched wheel-change or a car that wouldn't fire up again. DTM seems not to have quite such problems on this score, but on the other hand, insisting on two mandatory pit stops over the course of a race of not much over an hour is absurd.

The problem of the racing being subservient to the interests of the manufacturers entering the cars can't easily be dealt with - he who pays the piper calls the tune after all. The pit stops, on the other hand.... Why not dump them. And howabout two half an hour races instead of a single hour long race?

Iconic Cars - The Final Part of the Series

My first two choices for my series on iconic racing cars from my youth were, in many ways, polar opposites. The Porsche 962 was stunningly, conspicuously successful, where the Metro 6R4's competition history was a story of opportunities missed and what-might-have-been. The 962 had a kind of elegant simplicity about it's design where the 6R4 looked like it could have come straight off the set of Mad Max - all wildly flared wheel arches and giant spoilers. And, of course, while the 962 as a race car, the 6R4 was a rally car.

My final choice falls between all these stools. Both a rally car and a racing car - successful, but never to quite the extent that it could have been, and a car whose beauty, or otherwise, was always very much in the eye of the beholder. The early 1980s saw the replacement of the old Group 1-6 system for rally, sports and touring cars with three new categories - Group C, for sports prototypes, Group B, which was principally a category for ludicrously overpowered rally cars and Group A, for both rally cars (following the death of Group B, it became the premier rally category from 1987) and touring cars. For me, the archetypal Group A touring car was Ford's Sierra RS Cosworth.

In its early years, Ford's Sierra was something of a problem child for the blue oval. It's then deeply unconventional appearance (since emulated by most of the motor industry) meant that sales were never as great as for its predecessor, the Ford Cortina. Attempts to go racing with it were not entirely unsuccessful, but Rudi Eggenberger's Sierra XR4TIs were rarely any kind of a serious threat to the then-dominant Schnitzer BMW, RAS Volvo and TWR Rover teams in the European Touring Car Championship. There was success in the UK with Andy Rouse's machine picking up the BTCC title in 1985. The XR4TI would not win on the international stage, however, until its final appearance at the last round of the 1986 ETCC at Estoril.

The car that replaced it - the RS Cosworth - had been on the drawing board since Stuart Turner had taken over at the helm of Ford Motorsport Europe in 1983. However, its gestation period was long, not least because of considerable difficulties in finding a gearbox that would cope with the engine's power. There was even a long tug of war between the engineering team and the marketing men over the Cosworth's distinctive "table top" rear wing. The team developing the car insisted it was necessary to counter the considerable aerodynamic 'lift' generated by the car at 180mph and above, while those responsible for selling the road-going versions required by the FIA's Group A homologation rules felt it would be a significant obstacle to selling the necessary 5,000 units.

The car eventually took to the race tracks at the start of the first ever World Touring Car Championship in Monza, but in a farcical turn of events, the two works Sierra Cosworths were disqualified for running the wrong fuel injectors, which left the field open for BMW to score a 1-2-3-4-5 on the international debut for it's M3. The result, however, did not stand, as all the BMWs were excluded for an infringement relating to the thickness of their roof metal, leaving a doubtless baffled Allan Moffat to claim victory in his Holden Commodore.

As it would turn out, the Sierra Cosworth was not immediately competitive anyway. Niggling gearbox and turbo problems caused a number of non-finishes early in the year, while the early Cosworth produced only 340BHP or thereabouts - which was enough to enable the lighter BMW M3 (with around 300BHP) to get on terms with the Cosworth in terms of sheer pace. Ford, though, had an ace up their sleeve in the form of the Evolution version of the car - the RS500 Cosworth. Aston Martin built the required 500 evolution cars, and once they were race-ready, Ford were unbeatable, at least in terms of outright pace, which was not entirely surprising as the power output of the RS500 was reckoned to be in the region of 470BHP. The latter part of the season saw 4 straight victories for theEggenberger Cosworths in the final four races. It was enough for them to clinch the Teams' Championship, though the driver's title went to BMW man Roberto Ravaglia.

The Sierra Cosworth was conceived as a touring car racer, but it would turn out to be a pretty handy rally car as well. The sudden cancellation of Group B, following the death of Henri Toivonen on the Tour de Corse in 1986 saw the 500NHP 4WD monsters replaced with much more sedate Group[ A machinery. The thing is, Lancia aside, no manufacturer had gone to the trouble of building and homologating anything specifically intended for Group A rallying at such short notice. The 2 wheel drive Sierra should never really have been a competitive rally car, but in 1987, it proved good enough to score podium places on the 1000 Lakes and RAC Rallies. Better suited to tarmac rallying than it ever was to mud or gravel, the car took a single outright World Rally win on the 1988 Corsica rally, in the hands of Didier Auriol.

At a national level, the car was more successful still. Jimmy McRae took back to back titles with his Sierra Cosworth in 1987 and 1988, and the sight of the whale-tailed Ford, rear end out at all kinds of angles, became common place in UK rallying through the late 1980s and into the early 1990s. Jimmy's son, Colin, cut his teeth on a Sierra Cosworth as well, picking up a 5th place with one as far back as 1989 on the New Zealand Rally. Only when Toyota, Subaru and Mitsubishi emerged on the scene with their 4WD machinery did the 2WD Cossie fade from competitiveness.

However, in my mind, and I should imagine, that of anyone around to witness it, the Sierra Cosworth is inextricably linked with the glory days of the British Touring Car Championship in the years from 1988 to 1991. OK, so I've said before that one of the things that makes a touring car series interesting is a variety of vehicles, but to be honest, that's of secondary importance to the quality of the machinery itself. Some teams were able to extract as much as 550BHP from their privateer RS500 Cosworths and the sight of these machines, which had far more power than grip, being driven on the limit was far superior to anything the modern 2 litre formula has to offer. Especially when it involved drivers of the calibre of Andy Rouse and Steve Soper. Certainly, I'd be far more interested in seeing what the likes of Fabrizio Giovanardi could have done in those cars than in the underpowered, overly grippy modern Super 2000 cars (if you're curious, there's some admittedly rather poor quality footage on Youtube: see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q5u185DaErY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFKOR1TfjIA&feature=related and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GAUpja6Oa7s&feature=related)

Unfortunately, the success of the Sierra Cosworth was ultimately the undoing of Group A as a touring car formula. Put simply, nobody seemed inclined, or able, to build a top category Group A car which could take the fight to the all conquering Fords. The BTCC ultimately abandoned the Group A ruleset for the Supertourer formula at least in part because the BBC was supposedly uncomfortable about broadcasting what was effectively a fortnightly Ford advert. In the German series, the Sierra was dominant in 1988, before rules changed pegged back its performance in 1989 and banned it altogether come 1990. In the Australian series, it was a front running car as late as 1992 - some 6 years after it had first made its debut, though there, more modern machinery from Nissan and Holden eventually brought an end to its dominance.

Ford's Sierra Cosworth may have missed out on the first (and for many years, only) World Touring Car Driver's Championship but it remains for me the very zenith of the Group A touring car formula - and one of the iconic race cars of the 1980s.

David Leslie - In Memory of a Proper Racer

When I first heard on Sunday afternoon that a small private plane had crashed into a house in Kent, killing all on board, I couldn't help fearing that someone from the motor racing world might have been involved. After the deaths of Colin McRae, Steve Hislop and Bertie Fisher, it somehow seemed a distinct possibility. And so on Monday, looking up BBC News, it turned out to be the case. Sportscar team boss Richard Lloyd and Scottish racing driver David Leslie were amongst the five victims of the accident. Sympathy, obviously, goes out to the family and friends of all five men on board the plane. It was Leslie whose name meant the most to me personally, as a racing fan.

I first remember seeing David Leslie race as a kid attending the Donington 500km sports car race, back in 1989. Sportscar racing was a rather bigger deal back then than it is now, with works teams from Jaguar, Mercedes, Porsche, Nissan and Toyota vying for honours. New to the field for 1989 were the works Aston Martins being run as a joint venture with the Ecurie Ecosse team. The Aston Martin AMR1 was never amongst the quickest C1 cars in its brief sports car racing career, but it looked absolutely fantastic in its clean white blue and red livery. In Leslie's hands, it picked up a 6th place at Donington too. A few weeks earlier, he had gone even better at Brands Hatch, finishing 4th paired with Brian Redman, despite the fact that the late 60s F1 star was by then well past his competitive best.

By that time, Leslie was already in his mid-30s with a substantial career behind him. While the likes of Fernando Alonso and Nico Rosberg were in F1 at the age of 20, Leslie didn't even switch to cars until the age of 23. He was a quick learner, though. In his second season in Formula Ford, he won not one but two National titles. In the following three years, he followed that up with title wins in the now defunct Formula Ford 2000 and Formula Atlantic Series. Thereafter, lack of finance to progress further caused his single seater career to stall somewhat, though he did claim pole at the opening round of the 1983 British F3 championship, ahead of a certain young Brazilian by the name of Ayrton Da Silva...

From there, he took the well trod road into Sportscars. Scottish Businessman Hugh McCaig had taken it upon himself to revive the Ecurie Ecosse sportscar name of the 1950s and became one of the leading lights in the new Group C2 sportscar category during the mid-1980s. David Leslie, as a solid, promising and perhaps importantly, Scottish driver, was recruited to the driving strength. Their successes included winning the teams' title in 1986 and a second place in class in the 1987 Le Mans 24hr race. The team withdrew from C2 in 1988 in order to concentrate on their Aston Martin C1 project. That, however, was killed almost before it had begun, when the parent company ran into trouble and was bought by Ford. The American car giant already owned Jaguar, and could see little point in paying two of its luxury car brands to compete against each other in sports car racing.


Leslie's Ecurie Ecosse C286.

Leslie would go on to drive for Jaguar at Le Mans in 1990 and 1991, but did not finish the event on either occasion. It was his, and McCaig's move into touring car racing in 1992 and 1993 with the Ecurie Ecosse Vauxhall Cavaliers which brought him to wider attention though. McCaig always had a knack for ensuring that his cars were stunningly well turned out, and the Saltire coloured Vauxhalls were no exception.

More importantly, though, the Ecurie Ecosse Cavaliers were quick. Quick enough to embarrass the works team on occasion, and quick enough to allow Leslie to win the end of season TOCA-Shoot Out race at Donington in 1993 (a race perhaps best remembered for Nigel Mansell's messy appearance in a Ford Mondeo). At an age when most racing drivers' careers were beginning to wind down, Leslie finally got himself into a car which would enable him to take outright wins. From there, Leslie established himself as a significant force in British touring cars, driving for Vauxhall, Mazda, Nissan and Proton, taking 9 wins and scoring a best championship position of 2nd in 1999, behind Laurent Aiello at Nissan. He finally bowed out of the series at the end of 2003 after a fruitless couple of years with the Proton Impian.

Leslie's involvement in, and influence over the racing world was not limited to his driving. He played a key role in guiding some of the leading Scottish talents of a generation through their formative racing years. David Coulthard, Dario Franchitti and Allan McNish all acknowledge that Leslie provided invaluable help in furthering their careers. A Monaco GP winner, an Indy 500 winner and a Le Mans winner. Not bad for a small country...

After the end of his touring car career, he took up commentary for Eurosport, working alongside Martin Haven on their coverage of the World Touring Car Championship and the FIA GT series. A quiet, softly spoken man who might not initially seem an obvious candidate for the job of sports commentator. He came across more as a college lecturer than a media pundit (and technically, he was, as he lectured part time in Motorsports Management at Swansea). However, his depth of knowledge and enthusiasm for the sport was nonetheless obvious from the start, and was complemented with an endearingly dry sense of humour. On at least one occasion, he dovetailed commentary duties for the FIA GT series with driving duties for Graham Nash Motorsport's Saleen S7R. "Sorry, got to go now, I'm driving in a few minutes..." Not something I've often heard from a commentator.

I only once met David Leslie, very briefly, at the Knockhill Speedfair in 2006. He was there running demonstration laps in his old Ecurie Ecosse (which he pushed notably closer to the limit than Jackie Stewart did his old championship winning Tyrrell. He came across, though, as a pleasant, approachable man, and to judge by comments made after his death by those from the racing world who knew him, the impression I was given was accurate.

Leslie also took the opportunity that day to race his recently restored 1977 title-winning Formula Ford Royale RP24. It says something about the man's genuine enthusiasm for the sport that he not only went to the trouble of restoring his old car, but raced it with considerable aplomb. Against opposition in much more modern machinery, and despite being slow in a straight line, he stood every chance of winning the race, before his engine gave up the ghost. How many other semi-retired racing drivers in their 50s would go back to their Formula Ford roots in this way? He was a man, who it seemed, simply loved racing. Neil, at Fastest Lap, tells his own story of his exploits in a Shelby Mustang at Laguna Seca back in 1997.


David Leslie in action in his restored Royale RP24 at Knockhill in 2006.

For some people, motorsport is about glamour, fame, 'chasing the dream', making piles of money or being in with the 'in crowd'. It's this mentality which drives ITV's interminable, tedious pre-race features. David Leslie, it seemed to me, was the very antithesis of this kind of attitude. A man for whom it was all about the racing, who in the words of Allan McNish "gave far more to motorsport than it ever gave back to him."

Photos are author's own.

Guilty Pleasures

Now here's a confession. I'd usually think of myself as a racing purist, but I really like the British Touring Car Championship. I know, I know. They use reverse grids, success ballast, rules that are arbitrarily tweaked to ensure parity between the manufacturers, and the back half of the grid is full of wealthy amateurs who really should have no place in a serious racing series.

But still, I like it. The racing is usually pretty close and there are a serious number of potential race winners in the field. There are the full works teams of SEAT and Vauxhall who will always tend to win out over the course of a whole season thanks to their considerably greater resources. Behind them, though, are a good number of semi-works and private efforts that can win races.

West Surrey Racing have been in the business seemingly forever. They ran Ayrton Senna in Formula 3 back in the early 1980s, and these days they run a very effective customer BMW touring car team. Lead driver, Colin Turkington has won on a number of occasions with their s2000 3 series, and even young ride-buyer Tom Onslow Cole has emerged on top on one occasion.




Team Dynamics were the only private team to win BTCC races in the Super Tourer days when manufacturers were spending serious money on the series. These days, they continue to impress as the only private team to have built their own race-winning s2000 car from scratch. Their Honda Civic Type-Rs might look decidedly odd, but they haven't half proved effective. Both Matt Neal and Gordon Shedden have won with them this year, even if they have not been able to repeat the level of dominance they achieved with their loophole-exploiting BTC-spec Honda Integras over the previous two seasons.

The series uses enough standard parts, and has enough restrictions in place on testing and development, that a couple of very small operations have proven quite successful at this level too. Mike Jordan, the late-fortysomething former GT racer, has run consistently towards the front of the field in a two year old ex-Team Dynamics Integra. SEAT Cupra champion Mat Jackson has won with a family-run ex Andy Priaulx BMW (in marked contrast to the complete lack of success enjoyed by Martyn Bell in another ex-Priaulx BMW, thus showing the importance of the driver at this level). Former Clio-cup front runner Adam Jones has also run near the front on occasion in an old SEAT Toledo run by WTCC privateer frontrunners GR-Asia. That's, by my count, about 10 potentially race winning cars. Really not a bad score by any count, and more than most series can boast. I suspect that only the WTCC and NASCAR do better on that score, and the WTCC only because they have a very silly weight penalty system in place and NASCAR because the caution-period rules leave that series a virtual lottery.



So it was with some enthusiasm that I jumped on an early morning bus to get to my local circuit, the 1.3m Knockhill track, to see the series 'in the flesh' for the first time in several years. For those of you not familiar with the eccentric Fife venue, Knockhill is a very short circuit, and even a BTCC car can lap it in around 53s but it is not without its challenges. The blind downhill switchback of Duffus Dip is one, while the 3rd gear slightly off-camber Clark (I refuse to call it Carlube Corner) can also catch out the unwary. Even the equally appallingly named Real Radio Hairpin presents its own difficulties. With the longest braking zone on the circuit, it presents the best passing opportunity the circuit has to offer, but with its steeply uphill exit, the correct line is far from obvious, and many drivers tried various different approaches over the weekend.

As it turned out, the three BTCC races were not absolute classics, and I usually seemed to end up stood in the wrong place to see the action. Knockhill is not the easiest place in the world to overtake (ranking alongside the Brands Indy circuit in this regard) but the racing was certainly close. Darren Turner took victory in the first two races, though Gordon Shedden looked threatening in race one until coming off the worse in a move at Real Radio which put him out of the race. The third race was a touch more hard fought at the front, with Honda drivers Jordan, Neal and Shedden shuffling the lead between them before the local boy took advantage of his circuit knowledge (he's a race instructor at Knockhill by day) to pull out in front. Down the field, there seemed to be almost nothing to split the SEATs (including privateer Jones), the Vauxhalls, the WSR and Jackson-MSport BMWs and Jordan's Honda. In short, the rule makers appear to have done a very good job of equalising the front wheel drive and rear wheel drive cars, the private BTTC-spec cars and the works s2000 cars.



As it turned out, one of the most hard fought battles of all was for the honour of not finishing last, with series-newcomer Alan Taylor and perennial backmarkers Martyn Bell and Fiona Leggate having their own private scrap down the field. Only the other Kartland MG driver, Jason Hughes, appeared to left entirely on his own with nobody to play with. In the circumstances, it was a shame that Chris Stockton's rather pretty Lexus (give or take a couple of Daily Sport logos, anyway) had blown an engine on Saturday and taken no part in the day's races.



So what makes this series work from a spectator's point of view? Firstly, I think, the relative simplicity of the cars provides something of a level playing field between the well organised privateers and the works cars. Secondly, costs have been kept down enough to allow a reasonably sized field to be put together (in stark contrast with the dying years of the Super Tourer formula). Thirdly, the fact that the series now runs to the same rules as the WTCC means that there are plenty of second hand S2000 spec cars around for those willing to try their luck (hence the massed ranks of Seat Toledos and Alfa 156s, although these were largely missing at Knockhill).



The other thing that the series gets right is that it realises that it exists mainly for the benefit of the fans. There are few other series where it is so easy to wander through the paddock and look in on the teams as they prepare and repair the cars. The three-race format gives the spectator plenty of value for money and the drivers are much more willing to interact with the spectators than in most other series of any note.

Downsides? They still haven't sorted out the support package. One make racing remains as dull and monotone as it ever was, and the BTCC support races are all one make races. At Knockhill, this was made the worse by a very sparse Porsche Carrera field and the absence of the at least reasonably quick Formula Renaults. There was one unexpected upside, though. As a keen observer of young talent coming up through the ranks, I really do think we're going to be hearing a lot more of double FBMW-winner, Marcus Ericsson in the years to come.