HISTORICAL EXCELLENCE
VREDESTEIN HAS AN ILLUSTRIOUS HISTORY - BUT IT’S WHAT’S NEXT THAT SHOULD HAVE YOU PAYING ATTENTION
“A HISTORY OF MILESTONES AND FIRSTS PLACE VREDESTEIN AT THE CUTTING EDGE OF TYRE MANUFACTURE.”
It’s hard to think of a more apt use of the phrase “right tool for the job” than choosing tyres. At a bare minimum they’re a crucial safety feature, keeping you on the black stuff when the British weather throws its worst at you. At their best, they’re transformative, getting the best from your steering and suspension – and your driving chops – whether you’re driving a hot hatch, a supercar, or anything in between. And, as all motoring enthusiasts know, pedigree matters.
Enter Holland-based Vredestein, which has applied its high-end tyre expertise around the world for over 100 years. The company began by making everything from tennis balls to shoes, before gradually turning its attention to keeping cars on the road.
Vredestein isn’t just another tyre manufacturer, churning out budget products to keep the big boys honest. A history of milestones and firsts place it at the cutting edge of tyre manufacture. It has form when it comes to taking winter driving to the next level – in 2005 it introduced the Wintrac xtreme, the first winter tyre with a W speed rating. That’s 168 miles per hour. Less than a decade later it brought out the Wintrac xtreme S, a winter tyre with a Y speed rating – that’s a blow-your-hair-back 186mph, adrenalin fans.
Today, many of its car tyres are designed by Italian automotive design house Giugiaro. Giugiaro is responsible for penning some iconic motoring shapes (the VW Golf MK I, Alfa Romeo Giulia Sprint GT and the Delorean count among its greatest hits), and the close collaboration between the two has been a sensational marriage of form and function. Four R&D centres worldwide ensures the company’s best tyres are ahead of it.
Vredestein is a company you’re going to hear much more about. For one thing, it’s sponsoring the 2017 Autocar awards, but with six factories around the world, including a recently opened plant in Hungary that will manufacture over five million tyres a year, you’re about to notice Vredestein a whole lot more – whatever you drive.
still rankles. Gow is indisputably a canny businessman – everyone tells you so – but there’s no doubt about his full-hearted commitment to the BTCC. Everyone tells you that, too. Despite a variety of other highlevel commitments to motorsport governance (a distinguished term as chairman of the MSA ends this year), his presence at BTCC races is unwavering. Today, Gow’s determination to extend and improve is obvious. “I’m a one-trick pony,” he says, “but I’m also very proud of what we’ve achieved.”
On spectator vantage points outside, the Thruxton faithful are showing their passion for the BTCC, too. Touring car racing won’t start until midday (Thruxton has a noise agreement with a local church), but even with three hours to go, diehards are claiming the prime viewing spots. They’ll watch supporting Ginetta Junior, Renault Clio and Formula 4 races – two rounds of each – to provide punctuation for the main events.
8.50AM
Time for the first check lap in the Panamera. Gow sets off at a good lick, the Porsche’s front-mounted turbo V8 rumbling its potential, but he slows here and there to point out interesting circuit features and check that sponsors’ signs are erect and placed where TV can see them. We’ll do a quicker lap just before the first race, he promises. How quick? He gestures at the dashboard readout from yesterday: 143mph max and 1.11g cornering. Quick enough…
Teams love Thruxton’s fast corners and wide, open spaces to such an extent, I learn, that they’re prepared to live with its time-worn facilities. Planning laws allow only 16 racing days a year here and the place survives mostly on what it earns from this meeting and a bumper British Superbikes fixture. Still, the jokes about the facilities are so oftrepeated that a few years ago, Gow arrived with a spoof British Heritage ancient monument plaque and hung it on Race Control. It’s still there.
9.15AM
We’re introduced to team owner David Bartrum and his team manager, Oly Collins, whose Team Shredded Wheat Ford Focuses stand out due to their vivid yellow and red liveries. They’ve qualified no better than 10th but scored a couple of wins last time at Thruxton and believe they have a chance of podiums.
From 10th? It may sound unlikely to the uninitiated but, as Bartrum explains, the rules have been so cleverly drafted and well tested that even privateer cars can win if they’re well engineered and driven. There’s a success ballast system that keeps everyone near equal. You can’t just spend money to win. As for the series director, Bartrum and Collins have warmer words for him than most entrants usually do for a race boss. Gow is straight-talking, they say. And fair. The playing field is as level as
it can be. Six previous races have had five different winners and 60% of last year’s drivers scored a podium. Any good entrant, it seems, has hope.
10.00AM
We take a look in the bus, the luxurious inner sanctum that bristles with recording and playback technology. Gow and his TOCA colleagues use it for “interviewing” errant drivers with the help of cockpit videos, g-meters, memory sticks from data loggers that track brake, steering and throttle inputs – everything they need to take a fair view of a controversial incident.
How close are cars allowed to race? “Very,” says Gow, the old saloon racer. “Racing is rubbing. You have to expect some paintswapping when you send 32 cars out to try to finish in the same place, and it’d be a sad day if it didn’t happen. What we won’t stand for are deliberate attempts to push other drivers off.”
10.40AM
Gow’s in the bus for a few minutes of private business, so we join the spectators for the pit-lane walk. The BTCC drivers are signing autographs with better grace than any I’ve seen, an important acknowledgement (which seems to pervade the series) that the punter’s presence is key. I’m intrigued to see drivers greeting fans they’ve met at other circuits. “Following BTCC is a hobby for many people,” says Gow, magically appearing out of the crowd. “Some do every race.”
12.08PM
We’ve now had the Ginettas, F4s and Renaults in a trio of hectic races. It’s time for that Panamera sighting lap – no cruising this time. I don’t get a clear view of the speedo, but we’ve got to be doing 120mph through Church, arguably the fastest corner on a UK race circuit – not bad for a limo. “They’re all waiting for me to bin it,” says Gow of the BTCC community, watching the screens, but there’s no chance. Seconds later, we’re stationary at the back of the race field, which is so large that it spreads right back into the chicane.
The engine notes rise, the drivers see green, the cars disappear amid dust and din and we cruise back to the paddock in the big Porsche. Gow watches the first of 16 laps from the steps of Race Control, then prowls the pit wall. Honda-mounted Matt Neal (on pole but unballasted following difficulties in the previous race) beats his fully ballasted team-mate, ‘Flash’ Gordon Shedden, off the start and is never headed. He scores his 60th BTCC win and becomes, with Andy Rouse, the second most prolific BTCC winner after Jason Plato, midgrid today in an unfavoured Subaru, with 90-odd. It’s a Honda 1-2-3 and fuels the opinion of Thruxton I’ve heard from veterans: it’s a front-drive circuit, because those cars are a bit
It’s a long time since anyone cheated, but we keep watching
more stable in the really fast bits (140mph-plus through Church), although exaggerated wear of their left front tyres – Thruxton is “one long, fast right-hander” – means the rear-drive cars (read BMWS) go better in the later laps.
We watch the podium cars drive through a digital tyre reader (every hoop has a unique chip, so race authorities know everyone is legally shod). Then they’re weighed (1280kg max) and have their ground clearance rapidly checked with a gizmo that looks like a long-handled paint roller. Respect for the BTCC’S streamlined procedures is universal, I’m discovering. “It’s a long time since anyone cheated,” says Gow, “but we keep watching.”
2.10PM
On Gow’s suggestion, Papior and I join post chief Ian Chalmers and his marshal team on the notorious Church Corner for the second race – to understand how it feels to stand a couple of metres from full-noise racing cars cornering at 140mph. At first, despite earth banks and catch fencing, it’s all you can do to stand where these brightly coloured projectiles arrive at a speed that defies your ability to focus, rocking and scrabbling on the limit. Down the road, there’s a scary corner exit with a rumble strip that most hit.
Fulfilling the BTCC’S potential for upsets, local driver Rob Collard starts 10th but passes us in sixth courtesy of his BMW’S rear-drive traction. Half a dozen laps on, there’s a huge accident right in front of us, starting at the previous marshals’ post and ending at the one beyond. It sends a VW and two MGS into a new Church run-off Thruxton has just built for £500,000. Two cars drive away, but it takes 45 minutes to recover the third, an MG, and repair the hole it has punched in the Armco.
3.55PM
Collard jumps to third on the restart, muscles his way past two Hondas in the chicane and is leading when the race is red-flagged for the second time, so he is declared winner. The delays, everyone knows, are going to put pressure on the rest of the programme. Thruxton has a 6.30pm curfew and there are four races to go.
5.50PM
By some well-practised juggling of paddock procedures and support races, Gow and his people conjure up enough time for a full-length final race. A complex but well-honed partreversal of race two’s finishers puts two-time champ Colin Turkington on pole for the last race. He storms off the line and is never headed, scoring BMW’S 100th series victory, while the Toyota of Tom Ingram, one of the BTCC’S latest rising stars, is runner-up. Fourth-placed Shedden, by general agreement BTCC’S fastest driver, has garnered the most points from this meeting’s three races.
With a lap to go, Shedden’s teammate, Matt Neal, blatantly jumps the chicane in frustration and steals a place to which he’s emphatically not entitled. This race has been comparatively incident-free but will now result in Neal visiting the bus. Gow has told me he’s often home late from the circuit, and now I see why. He’s also told me that in 24 years, he’s never missed a BTCC race – and after our spectacular, action-packed, day, I understand that, too.
THOMAS INGENLATH, Volvo’s chief designer, wins this year’s Autocar Design Hero award in his fifth year at the Swedish-chinese company, just as he’s about to reveal a car that will usher in a new era of design.
So far at Volvo, Ingenlath has led the creation of a new, full-sized XC90, a familysized XC60 and the new V90, an example of which he specified to his own taste for the Autocar Awards. But it’s the compact XC40, due this autumn, that moves Volvo into a new market slot and pushes its design values further from the “quiet, distinguished” look – as Ingenlath describes it – of recent models.
With a car like the XC40, he says, designers have a responsibility to take people out of their comfort zone. “The day people think they understand what a Volvo is,” he says, “that’s the day to move.” Luckily, some of the most pressing XC40 questions have now been answered by the funky Concept 40.1, already displayed and much praised at international motor shows.
Ingenlath wins Autocar’s award on three qualities above all: adaptability, inspiration and boldness. When he arrived in Gothenburg during the summer of 2012, it was after 20 years in the comparative safety and calm of the mighty Volkswagen Group, where his talent had taken him to the exalted role of design director.
“Coming to Sweden was big for me,” he says. “I had already spoken to people about the journey Volvo was on. I knew about the new architecture, with its great proportions for designers. This meant our cars could develop their own characters. But there was still a question mark over Geely’s ownership and what it would mean.”
Ingenlath says he had early ideas about future Volvos, but he didn’t arrive with “a recipe” in his head. He vividly remembers the short period he describes as “the grace of the early moment” when you see things in a new company very clearly. “It’s a shame,” he says, “that you can’t preserve it for much longer.”
Ingenlath says one of his best Volvo experiences has been watching the company blossom under Geely. He enjoys working in a way that makes your responsibilities clear; from the CEO down, he says, decision makers depend very directly on those around them. There is freedom, he says, but you’re aware of also being directly responsible for your own destiny.
“How you handle that destiny is the crucial thing,” says Ingenlath. “As a small company, you can’t play safe and do a little bit of everything. You have to trust yourself and make quite bold and even drastic decisions. At Volvo, whether you do well or not is your call. For a designer, that’s great. But you have to live up to it.”