BTCC review: Sutton and Subaru on top
It was only the second season in the BTCC for the youngster and the Team Bmr-run Levorg, but that didn’t stop them taking the title
Ash Sutton set a modernday record in the British Touring Car Championship on his way to the title. It’s an accolade that the Team BMR Subaru Levorg driver will reflect on with mixed emotions. Since the series switched to three races per day in 2004, no driver had managed to claim the crown after having a completely pointless meeting. Sutton’s cause was helped by the fact that the big dent in his campaign came at the start but, to win the title, he would have to make up a 48-point deficit.
That shows the size of the task he faced, but he rolled his sleeves up. “I always believed I could win the championship,” explained Sutton. “I knew it would be hard. After leaving Brands, it became a vertical task. But I kept the belief.”
Sutton has a habit of delivering what he says he will. When he stepped into the Renault UK Clio Cup, a series that often takes a learning year before success, he declared that he would only be in it for one season. He won it at his first attempt.
In 2016, he joined the BTCC with Triple Eight MG and said that he wanted the rookie honours and a race win. He did both. Coming into 2017, he thought there was no reason he couldn’t fight for the crown. So it proved.
Sutton said that his tough start was partly down to him learning the tricks of rear-wheel drive, but there were bigger issues. A rule tweak for 2017 evened out the centre of gravity across
“I knew it would be hard. But I kept the belief ”
all engines. That was a blow for the Subaru and its boxer-style engine.
The concept of the car was devised because of the weight-distribution strengths it would offer, but that was taken away. It would have to carry extra weight further up in the engine bay.
It took the Team BMR engineers a while to get their heads around the new dynamics the alterations brought, and privately the team also felt it was lacking in the turbo-boost department (although, after a public spat in 2016, the staff kept those thoughts within the garage). As ever in the BTCC, the boost permitted by the series’ technical chiefs would be a nagging background issue all season.
It wasn’t until Oulton Park in May that Sutton got his campaign going and, by that stage, Subaru had been granted more boost. The team had also ironed out the handling issues to a degree where the car was responding.
“From Oulton, I had a car underneath me that I could work with,” explains Sutton. “I was able to ask it questions and it was giving the answers I wanted. I was also learning about rear-wheeldrive racing [it was Sutton’s first season in a rear-motivated BTCC car]. To begin with, I found that I was wrong-footing myself when it came to overtaking, but by the second round at Donington Park I had learned those lessons.”
It also took a talking-to by the team to calm Sutton down. Technical director Carl Faux said he could see the speed in the team’s new charge, but he needed to take one step back to take two forwards. It reiterated the team’s belief in him.
The key strength of the car was its ability to carry the success ballast applied, including winning with 75kg aboard at Snetterton – a legacy, Sutton said, of the test work done while carrying the maximum ballast. That raised eyebrows up and down the pitlane and there were private mumblings about boost again.
A run of six wins over five meetings banked Sutton’s title success, and set him up to go into the finale at Brands 10 points clear. There was a wobble in Kent when he tumbled to 12th in the penultimate race as his rival Colin Turkington took a sensational win in his WSR BMW 125i M Sport to cling to his title hopes. Sutton, in his first showdown, looked rattled.
In the end, an innocuous tap on the back of Turkington’s car proved to have massive consequences and put him out of the last race, allowing Sutton to claim his maiden title triumph.
One of the subplots was what was going on in the other side of the BMR garage. While James Cole, who took a stylish win at Rockingham, and Josh
Price were not expected to match the phenomenon that was Sutton, two-time champion Jason Plato was. It simply didn’t happen for him. There was a race-two accident into the pitwall at the Brands opener, which ruled him out for the weekend, and he thought that his repaired car wasn’t quite the animal it should have been thereafter.
Plato struggled getting the car into the apex, and that affected his speed coming out of the corners. No matter what set-up he and engineer Paul Ridgway put on the Levorg, it didn’t want to know. Plato was frustrated, but kept his counsel. There was the odd hint to a mystery problem with the chassis, but Team BMR is full of professionals who could not detect a definitive issue.
At Knockhill, there was a breakthrough when a new differential seemed to transform his car. The suspicion was that the old unit had been incorrectly labelled, and it was the crucial factor in changing the handling of the Levorg. It enabled the old Plato to return and he won in Scotland and took three further podiums over the course of the season. But, by that stage, he was already into a supporting role for Sutton’s campaign and finished
12th in the points.
“The accident at Brands caused a tremendous amount of damage all the way through the car,” says Faux. “From the point of impact at the front, through the chassis all the way to the rear suspension, there were so many components damaged, which meant it took more time than we would have liked to get through the problems.
“But when we did the test with both Ash and Jason in each other’s cars [in the middle of the season], it was agreed there was a difference between the cars and it was clear. That test allowed us to improve both cars for both drivers – however, the differential change for Jason’s car was only covering an imbalance that we couldn’t cure with traditional engineering.”
For Turkington, limping out of the finale with damage was the most painful of ways to throw in the title towel. He had just driven the race of his life to climb from 15th to claim an unlikely victory in the penultimate race.
That was probably a highlight of the year for Turkington, who was back ‘home’ after two seasons with
Team BMR. The Northern Irishman’s
“When we did the test with Ash’s and Jason’s cars it was agreed there was a difference”
greatest successes have come alongside Dick Bennetts at WSR, and the combination, now with factory BMW backing, was formidable.
Since Bennetts switched to the two-litre turbo powerplant for his BMWS, they had been motivated by an engine that was designed as a naturally aspirated unit, with the turbo ancillaries bolted on. New for this season was the B48 engine, which was a bespoke turbocharged unit.
There was renewed impetus, but that came to a crashing halt in round one at Brands, when Turkington was involved in a startline crash with Matt Neal’s Team Dynamics Honda Civic.
Turkington has a habit of being a serial points collector, and he overcame that blip by winning at the next two