Greatest non-champion
Steve Soper is one of the greatest names in touring-car racing, yet he never (for keeps) won the BTCC crown. Autosport looks back at his career on home soil
Steve Soper recalls a fine touring car career that didn’t quite yield the BTCC crown
The history books do not record Steve Soper as a British Touring Car champion. His 14 victories don’t put him into the top 20 on the winners’ list either, and yet the 66-year-old is a tin-top legend. Rather like Stirling Moss in Formula 1, Soper isn’t just one of the best drivers not to have won the title, he’s one of the greatest to have appeared in the category.
Soper played pretty much every role in the BTCC: the young champion stripped of the crown through a technicality; a supersub wreaking havoc on the regulars; a serious title challenger who narrowly missed out; the veteran persuaded out of retirement in an attempt to bring success to an uncompetitive car.
In some respects, the first one was the most important – and painful. A single-make king, Soper was third in his first BTCC season in 1982, driving a Class D Austin Metro, and then stepped up to the big time with a Class A rear-wheel-drive Rover Vitesse. Many thought he’d struggle with the change, but they were wrong.
“That season put Steve Soper on the map,” he says. “I’d been messing around with one-make front-wheel-drive championships. I believe my strengths are technical – reasonably good driver with a technical feeling of how to get the car better than most people, so I’d pick a one-make championship in its first year, do it, win it and move on.
“Through being in the right place at the right time I got
[British Leyland sponsor] Hepolite on my side, so we could do what I wanted. With that we secured a Rover. There were a lot of sceptics that said I couldn’t drive a RWD car. Off we went and, compared to FWD, it was so easy! It was a doddle to win races.”
Soper won first time out at Silverstone and ended the
11-round campaign with five victories and three other podiums. His successes included going head to head with BMW ace
Hans Stuck, further raising his stock.
“Cheylesmore BMW Motorsport borrowed Stuck and he did three races,” adds Soper. “It was a good car and we had some fantastic battles together, and most of the time I beat him, and it got their attention. They asked him why he hadn’t won so he had to be complimentary about me! They offered me a contract and I refused, which was probably a mistake, but 1983, the Rover and the BTCC put me into the touring car motorsport world.”
The Rover made him champion too. For a few months. Then the engine-rocker assembly on his Tom Walkinshaw Racing-run machine was found to be illegal. Soper and his team-mates
Pete Lovett and Jeff Allam were thrown out of first, second and fourth in the championship.
“The problem is, back then, Tom Walkinshaw drove a horse and cart through the rulebook and every time they picked them up on something he got away with it,” says Soper. “So when they found something on my car that was no advantage at all – he’d made a hydraulic tappet adjustable for easy maintenance – they got him on that. It wasn’t in the rules.
“It was annoying they took it away.”
At the time, Soper took it quite well because he’d made his point – to himself as well as others: “I was in my element because it was something I didn’t know I could do. Even if we had a good car I still had two team-mates who thought they were better than me. When Stuck came over it raised my game and raised my profile.”
Soper now started his international touring car career and only dropped into the BTCC on the odd occasion over the next few years. But he made an impact whenever he appeared.
In 1984 he started two races, scoring a first and a second, and then in ’88 he played his part in some of the most famous battles the BTCC has ever seen. By then Soper was one of the stars of the crack Eggenberger Ford squad in the European Touring Car Championship. The BTCC was now also on BBC Grandstand, so when Soper turned up to take on UK pacesetter Andy Rouse’s
Ford RS500 it created some memorable battles.
Soper won at Thruxton, while Rouse got his revenge at Brands Hatch and Donington Park. It’s the Brands GP race that stands as one of the BTCC’S finest as the well-balanced Eggenberger machine repeatedly slipped ahead, only to be outpowered by Rouse.
“I enjoyed the races I did with Eggenberger, when I managed to persuade Rudi Eggenberger and Ford to do it,” says Soper.
“That was my push. Rudi didn’t really want to come over to the UK. Andy had something to prove because he wanted that [works] deal. Andy would turn up with the best he had to try to beat us. They were good fun.
“Eggenberger wouldn’t ever build a sprint engine and we
weren’t allowed adjustable boost. I felt my car was better at Brands, but every time we got onto that back straight he blew past me.
“On the last lap when we came out onto the back straight, I was ahead and I hugged the inside, on the right. I knew he couldn’t get past me and going into the next right I wouldn’t have backed off. But on the right was a clown who’d gone off, looking like he was about to rejoin. I am a coward at the best of times and I came off the throttle because I was convinced he was going to come back on the circuit. As he got a wheel onto the circuit he saw us and didn’t go any further. That was a frustration. It was a good race, but it wasn’t great for me because I wanted to win and felt I should have.”
Soper became a BMW driver the following year and more cameo appearances in 1991 netted three further wins. A more sustained programme in ’92 was winless, but Soper did help
Vic Lee Motorsport team-mate Tim Harvey to the drivers’ title.
“My main programme was DTM,” continues Soper. “In 1991 with Prodrive and ’92 with Vic Lee I wanted to come over and do races that didn’t clash. That was my push with the UK. Germany were more than happy for me to do it as long as my priority was DTM.”
He was nevertheless a key player in one of the most infamous moments in BTCC history. Harvey, John Cleland (Vauxhall) and Toyota’s Will Hoy all went to the Silverstone finale with a chance of the crown. After contact on the first lap, Soper charged through to assist Harvey in his fight with Cleland. The result was both the Cavalier and Soper’s BMW in the gravel and Cleland’s famous “the-man’s-an-animal” line.
“If I do a talk at a club night, the Cleland thing is always the first question,” says Soper, hiding quite well his exasperation at having to talk about it again. “There’s a lot of belief it put touring cars on the map. Whether it did I don’t know, but I don’t think it harmed touring cars. It’s a memorable race because there was a lot of aggravation afterwards.
“I believe that Vauxhall had more pressure to win that championship than Toyota and BMW. It started off with David Leslie. I touched him and he punched me and knocked me out [on-track]! From the word go on the first lap they were taking no prisoners. I came out of that looking like the bad guy, which I can live with, but it’s a memorable race, not a great one.”
Apart from the clash, that race did demonstrate Soper’s remarkable ability to charge through a field.
“It did make me wonder what they were doing!” he says, now more interested. “I find leading a race difficult. If I’ve got a clear advantage and can get away, fine. But if I’m in the lead I don’t find it the easiest task. What I find very easy is to overtake. Some of my greatest results have been starting at the back of the grid. I think it’s my one-make background, which gave me racecraft.”
The following season provided Soper’s best chance to win the BTCC for a decade. The deal was late coming together, but Schnitzer committed to a full campaign with the 318i for Soper and Joachim Winkelhock. “Steve gave a major contribution to get our team going,” said team boss Charly Lamm at the time.
“He knew the circuits, he knew the car and he could say, ‘This is better’ or, ‘This side of the car needs improving’.”
Soper duly led Winkelhock in a BMW one-two at the Silverstone opener and soon the two were slugging it out for the title.
“That was perceived to be my championship by everybody, including Schnitzer, not that they were going to tell Jo what to do,” explains Soper. “We probably had as good a car against the opposition as we were ever going to get. I started off well and was leading it, and it became apparent it was between me and
Jo. We were allowed to fight it out, which I respect. When Jo’s on form he’s difficult to beat and he was on form.
“He had a good roll over the last few races, with no failures or accidents. My roll was at the beginning of the year; at the end I
AUGUST 16 2018
had one accident and another accident due to a failure on the car. And he beat me. He beat me fair and square – he probably had the same number of failures.
“There were a couple of races where I just couldn’t beat him. He was just on fire, and that’s irritating. There were other races where I had the advantage so I don’t think there was a lot between us. In a sportscar or prototype I was quicker than him, but in a touring car he was hard to beat. I did feel I was going to win the championship and it didn’t happen.”
That was it as far as BTCC title challenges went. After a part-season in 1994, Soper was more interested in looking elsewhere such as the Japanese Touring Car Championship, which he won with Schnitzer the following year.
“As much as I enjoyed the BTCC and it was potentially the best in the early 1990s as far as TV and manufacturer involvement, I intended to stay away if I could,” he explains.
“I’d already spent 10 to 15 years in England traipsing from circuit to circuit. Every weekend it was the same, so whenever there was anything on the horizon – Germany, Italy, Japan – that was more of an interest to me.
“I quite enjoyed BTCC when I was there, but why go back to something you’ve competed in at its absolute pinnacle with a works team? If I’ve been there and done it, I’d rather do something different.”
Not that BMW always made it easy to stay away. Soper selected a German campaign following his 1995 Japanese title, but came under pressure to race at home instead.
“I picked ADAC Super Tourenwagen Cup, but in the background I kept hearing BMW GB saying they wanted Steve in England,” he says. “I kept my head down and ignored it. We got to about February and my boss Karl-heinz Kalbfell rang me and said, ‘What’s all this that you don’t want to do the UK? It’s your homeland. Forget the deal, they want you in England.’ I was getting nowhere and I said, ‘If you want me to do England I’ll do England’, but his greatest saying was, ‘Are you motivated?’ so I said, ‘If you want to know my motivation, I’m not motivated to do the UK, I’m motivated to do Germany.’
Kalbfell hung up, so Soper, then living in France, knew he’d got his way and ended up doing Germany with Bigazzi.
“I never sat down to make a major effort to win the BTC,”
he adds. “At the time, it wasn’t important in my life to say I’d got that crown. Looking back, maybe I should have changed, but at the time I was employed by the manufacturer I wanted to drive for, they were paying me a reasonable sum of money, and I was racing the cars I wanted to race.
“The BTC wasn’t the be-all and end-all to me. That sounds negative, but it’s more that I enjoyed exploring different avenues, such as when BMW got involved with Mclaren on the GTR. I hated Le Mans, but I loved those cars and the fact that BMW was going off in another direction.”
He was, however, drawn back for one more season. After retiring from driving, Soper was talked into making a return in 2001, with the BTCC now running to the newer, cheaper and slower BTC regulations.
“Peugeot came on the phone and started pushing me to come back to the BTCC,” explains Soper, who restricts his racing to historic events these days. “Initially I said no, but they kept on and on and on, and kept offering more money.
And because the business [his BMW dealership] was still not right, it seemed an obvious set of circumstances to say yes.
“The 406 Coupe wasn’t really capable of winning. It was too big, the wheelbase wasn’t right, and it didn’t have the right engine. Peugeot was desperate to win and we finally led a race at Oulton Park, and the thing lost its oil and blew up. That was it.
“[Team boss] Vic Lee knows how to build a racing car. If the car had the potential to win, he’d have found it.”
Having not won a race and damaged his neck in an accident, Soper retired again. It was not a fitting way for his career to end, but he remains philosophical on his time in the BTCC.
“I had two good shots,” he says. “Through no fault of my own, one was taken away, and the other time Jo was a good driver.
I can’t blame anyone but myself.
“It doesn’t bother me I don’t have a title. You look back at some of the races and championships that got away, but I was still employed and thought of highly at BMW, so at the time it didn’t matter. It’s only years later, you look back and think, ‘Could have had BTC, could have had Germany, could have had two Japans, could have had Le Mans, could have had Bathurst’, but I’m still here.
“I think I had a privileged career. I did what I wanted to do and had a lot of fun.”