Morgan’s bid for BTCC glory
Adam morgan and ciceley motor sport are looking for a step forward in 2019.
After three rounds of the 2016 British Touring Car Championship campaign, Ciceley Motorsport Mercedes-benz A-class racer Adam Morgan was third in the points with two wins. He was fifth at the same stage 12 months later, and in 2018 he was top of the pile.
The overall results in those last three seasons haven’t lived up to the early promise, with last year’s seventh place in the overall standings equalling his best points finish of 2013 and 2015.
He will return to the competition in 2019, and he has a clear objective in terms of the way he’d like the campaign to go.
“It has got to be about the consistency – and we have to iron out the dips that we have experienced in the middle of the season,” says Morgan. “That has to be crucial if we want to be in the hunt at the end of the fight.”
Morgan wasn’t completely out of the picture in 2018 despite his tricky middle of the season. Full ballast thwarted him at Oulton Park, but damage at Croft and Snetterton (where double points where on offer for the final race of the weekend) left him with a run of nine races where he had only picked up points on four occasions.
Morgan says: “That knocked the stuffing out of our challenge. Oulton Park has often been a problem for us – I even had the car go up in flames in 2017. These are the things that you can’t control, but in a championship as close as the BTCC, you can’t afford those things. But I actually think we bounced back pretty well in 2018.”
He did that due to a victory – from his first career pole position in the BTCC – at Rockingham, which was his third win of the campaign. “If things had gone our way, we could have bounced back to third place in the overall standings at Brands Hatch,” says Morgan.
Unfortunately for him, things didn’t go his way at Brands Hatch and he was trapped in the midfield, unable to land the results he needed to push himself into the championship’s top three.
The Mercedes A-class was built by Ciceley Motorsport in 2014, which means it is now among the oldest cars on the grid. However, work back at Ciceley’s base hasn’t stopped and Morgan thinks that the hatchback will take another step forward over the next 12 months.
“We have been through another programme of weight saving with the car,” he says. “By doing that, it means we can put ballast in parts of the chassis which will help the handling. Also, we have developed the chassis.
“I don’t think that the age of the car is an issue. Look at the Toyota Avensis that Speedworks ran last year – that is not a fresh car and it was one of the fastest cars out there in 2018. We have a testing programme and we have done some detailed simulation work to try and understand the setups more. We will try some radical things in testing and I think we can unlock some more pace from the car.”
Ciceley Motorsport itself is a family-run team, with Adam’s father Russell, a former rally driver, at the helm and Norman Burgess as commercial director, along with three other full-time staff.
The team has ambitions too. In 2016, it joined the Renault UK Clio Cup with a three-car operation, and then it expanded to four cars in 2017. But the Clio side of the operation has since been put on ice for the time being.
“We realised that the rewards we were getting from doing Clios were not as great as we would have wanted,” says Morgan. “We were putting a lot of work into it, but there was a lot of damage. We always managed to get the cars on the grid, but we were up against it a lot of the time.”
So while the Clios have been silenced, there was even more of a rumble around Ciceley at the end of the 2018 season when the expansion plan took the team to British GT, with a Mercedes-benz AMG-GT4 which Morgan shared with David Fairbrother. That is a programme which might yet continue in 2019, while Morgan himself has raced in the Dubai 24 Hours and run the GT4 car in the Gulf 12 Hours in Abu Dhabi.
“I will always look to do as much as I could in other areas,” says Morgan, who has also shone on his outings at Goodwood in the Members’ Meeting and in other high-profile historic events sharing Ric Wood’s spectacular Ford Capri. “But the main focus will be the BTCC.
“It is odd, because people always go on about the new wave of drivers who are taking over the BTCC, the younger guys like Ash Sutton and Tom Ingram. Well, you know, I am only 30! You have got the likes of Colin Turkington and Matt Neal there, who are vastly experienced, so it is good to have them there. It is nice that I have been able to establish myself in the championship and I feel that I am ready to take things to the next level in terms of results.” ■