Alan Gow
The Aussie ex-saloon racer is the man behind the long-running success of the BTCC – and more besides. Steve Cropley joins him on race day
They call him ‘BTCC’S Bernie’ but Alan Gow, boss of TOCA, the organisation that owns and stages the British Touring Car Championship, doesn’t encourage the description. His authority is total, but Gow has a reputation for running things with a lighter touch than others. “In the end,” he says, “we’re all doing this to enjoy it.”
This is why we’re meeting him today. Our mission is to spend – and enjoy – a race day with Gow, Autocar’s Motorsport Hero for 2017. But our original plan – to meet at 6.30am outside his house west of London and then travel the 60 miles further west to Thruxton circuit in his black Porsche Panamera – is in ruins. They’ve shut the M3 motorway again, so Mr Cameraman Papior and I forge into darkest Hampshire by another route, arriving just before 8am and thus in time for breakfast at TOCA’S HQ, an impressive tent-cum-building attached to a bus, Gow’s private lair in the paddock.
8.00AM
Gow has already breakfasted. He has also already delivered the Panamera into the hands of a valeter, who is busy with bucket and suds. The director’s car is one of three Porsches (a Cayenne for the doctors and another official Panamera) that TOCA uses under a deal with the British importer. Today, all three cars will repeatedly be seen on track by circuit and TV audiences. For details-obsessed Gow, making sure they’re immaculate is all part of the show.
8.10AM
While we munch, Gow talks circuit and championship. Although he has been in the UK since the early 1990s, he’s friendly and laconic in an unreconstructed Aussie way, getting a lot said quickly. I’ve got plenty of residual knowledge to make up; the last time I was here, Paul Radisich and his Ford Mondeo were the stars and we parked on the A303 and walked in because Thruxton’s car parks were full.
When I volunteer this, Gow’s expression shows he’s used to BTCC returnees wittering about great racing 20 years ago, and he is at pains to point out that after a dip in the early 2000s, today’s BTCC is booming again. The good old days are now, he reckons. There’s always a full grid of 32 cars and the racing is always close. The season opener at Brand Hatch drew 42,000 spectators and there’ll be 20,000 this weekend. TOCA nowadays has live and highlights ITV deals that put a staggering 260 hours of racing on our screens every season – and that deal (along with Dunlop’s all-important series sponsorship) runs to 2022. Oh, and for today’s races, 21 cars have qualified inside the same second. Get ready for action.
8.20AM
Gow’s eyes are everywhere. He frequently disappears for short periods to check stuff, but he also professes pride and trust in TOCA’S elite permanent staff of 15, who run the whole thing. At race meetings, the TOCA band expands because it also fields its own scrutineers and officials. Chasing details, I’m learning fast, are what makes this thing run so well.
Gow took charge of the BTCC with partners back in 1993, following a saloon racing career of his own in Australia. For a while, he was in a business partnership with the late, legendary Peter Brock, “the most naturally gifted driver I ever met”, but he came to the UK in the early 1990s to “find something new to do”. Under his energetic management, lots of manufacturers joined the series, the stars became household names and the BTCC boomed. But in 2000, Gow was persuaded by the proverbial offer he couldn’t refuse to sell the series.
It was a mistake. The championship was driven rapidly onto the rocks by its new owners and had to be rescued a couple of years later by a new Gowled consortium. “They took just two and a half years to ruin it,” says the director, for whom the memory