NEAL STILL GOING STRONG
BTCC VETERAN ON HIS CAREER
It is unlikely that the British Touring Car Championship will see another driver of the stature of Matt Neal: and that is not just because he is six foot six inches tall. By the end of this season, he is on course to have taken part in more than 650 BTCC races.
Neal’s career is not only about longevity; it has also been about success. He has won at least one race a year in the category since 2002, has taken three overall titles and has helped Honda to numerous team and manufacturer crowns.
This year will be another challenge as Team Dynamics has to build up a new Honda Civic Type R. That is the downside of being a factory squad – the team has to keep its racing range up-to-date with the road-going counterparts.
Also, last week, it was announced that Gordon Shedden, who has driven alongside Neal for 10 seasons at the West Midlands-based team, is off to pastures new and has been linked to a World TCR drive.
While that wouldn’t bother most drivers, it will have a profound effect on Neal for a number of reasons. Shedden has become a close personal friend of Neal’s over the last decade and that will be a blow and Neal is also the joint team owner at Dynamics [along with technical director Barry Plowman]. The team was given to him and Plowman by Neal’s father Steve, who had set up the operation in the first place. While being the owner is a nice position to be in, and one which is unique in the BTCC, it means that Neal has a headache on his hands in terms of organising a last-minute replacement for the departing Scot.
But these are the things that make life in the British Touring Car Championship so challenging, and there aren’t many challenges that Neal hasn’t faced up to since he first took to the BTCC grid in 1991.
With so many races under his belt, Neal himself has noticed that the experience he has from success has changed over 26 years. “I guess the pleasure that comes from the championship has changed a lot over the period I have been racing in it,” explains Neal. “When you start, you just want to be involved in it. It doesn’t necessarily matter if you are competitive or not. You are just pleased to be there.
“Then it quickly becomes a different beast. You start winning races, and that becomes a drug. Then you start doing that more often and you get a title, and that becomes a drug too. Winning becomes the norm and if you aren’t winning, then you aren’t living up to your own standards. The feeling changes.
“For me now, it is more about teamwork and gaining success as a result of all of the work that we put in together. I love the feeling when I drive down the pitlane having won, and I can see the looks on the faces of all the team, knowing what we have achieved together.”
Being the team owner as well as the driver has put extra pressure on. There are lots of things to take into account over a race weekend as well as purely the driving part of it.
“When you are just a driver, you can be relatively selfish,” says Neal. “All you need to think about is your own performance. Nothing else comes into it.”
Over the last few seasons, Shedden has emerged as the more successful of the two Team Dynamics drivers. The Scot is younger by 13 years, but success in the BTCC isn’t necessarily dictated by age. However, since 2013 and in similar machines, Shedden has won 19 races opposed to Neal’s 13.
“I will admit, three or four years ago, I was losing my mojo a bit,” says Neal. “Gordon had improved and his racecraft was strong, but he also had a habit of being lucky. It seemed to desert me a bit too. I would push in free practice and do a good lap, and he would be one hundredth [of a second] quicker than me. Then we would do qualifying, and he would be a fraction ahead again – they weren’t great margins. But it was happening all the time. I was screwing myself up about it, and it just wasn’t happening.”
Neal says that he had to relax, and over the last two seasons he has been back to his best: indeed, he was in the title fight right up until the final round of the 2016 campaign. In 2017, he broke through the 60 wins benchmark at Thruxton and added another win later on in the season at Silverstone.
“I saw an interview with Carl Fogarty on TV. He said that he didn’t enjoy the racing when he was doing it: in fact, he hated it. I had a think about it, and life’s too short, you know? I relaxed a little and enjoyed it more, and the results came again.
“I think that you learn to take things as they come with age. If it happens, it happens. When you win the championship, it’s not like you earn £1 million, is it? The world doesn’t change,” says Neal.
“You could see this with Flash [Gordon] last year: he was getting all concerned about the way the championship was working and that
we didn’t have a chance to fight over the latter part of the season [due to boost regulations]. I told him to chill out. You can’t win the title every season. That’s the outlook you have when you have been around a while.”
And Neal has. Aside from his lengthy time in the BTCC, Neal has had experiences elsewhere. He has tackled Supercars in Australia, a one-off DTM outing, ASCAR, Benelux TCR, the European Touring Car Championship and he is a regular in historic racing, among other things. “I don’t regret having been in the BTCC for so long: it has been one hell of a ride,” says Neal.
“But there are things I would have liked to have done that have probably passed me by now. Le Mans would have been high on that list.
“But the reason I haven’t done those things is that we have had to fight for every penny to go racing. For us, this has been a commercial enterprise, and we wouldn’t have been able to do it without those backers that we have had. We have to justify what we do to investors. If you move onto the world stage – be that the World Touring Car Championship or TCR – then it is almost impossible. I doubt there is a driver there who is solely funded by sponsorship alone.”
And that is a crucial point. For Neal, his career has been enjoyable, but it has also been a fight to maintain his position on the grid. Nothing has been gifted and everything has been striven for.
“There were four or five times in my career where I thought it was all over,” says Neal. “And on most of those occasions, there were phone calls out of the blue which rescued things for me. It has been a fine line sometimes but I am one of the luckiest men in the sport in that regard.”
Although Neal has been so strongly connected with Team Dynamics, there was a two-year spell at Vauxhall in 2008 and 2009 alongside Fabrizio Giovanardi. It was odd to see Neal in the Triple Eight garage, but it was one of those temptations that he simply couldn’t ignore.
Neal says: “Vauxhall phoned me and made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. It was odd to leave home, if you like, but I simply couldn’t resist it. It is a bit like when Flash came to me and told me that he had a problem in terms of his commitments for 2018. I listened, and I realised that he has been given an offer that he simply couldn’t turn down and it is something that could change his life if it works out. I wasn’t going to stand in the way of that. As well as being a great asset to Team Dynamics, Flash is a mate. We will still talk to each other as often as we do now, and I have already offered some guidance, but, boy, 2018 is going to be a very different proposition to the seasons that have gone before.”
Although Neal has been through a huge amount in his career, there are still new things left for the 51-year-old to experience and conquer, and learning a new car and new team-mate for the season ahead will be one of those fresh challenges. ■