TURKINGTON’S PATH TO BTCC GLORY
HOW THE BMW MAN TOOK A FOURTH TIN-TOP CROWN
After 30 races, nearly 550 laps and more than 1080 miles, the 2019 British Touring Car Championship e down to just two points, three ers and was settled barely three s from the final chequered flag e campaign at Brands Hatch. in Turkington powered his WSR to sixth in that final showdown in to recapture the lead he had held the seventh race of the season. He rogged the factory Honda of Dan mish, which had pirouetted into the el trap after a brake failure with just rners of the battle remaining. Turkington, it was a watershed s it put him level, in terms of titles with BTCC icon Andy Rouse. It was a season where Turkington took so h more pleasure from his victory he had done 12 months beforehand. time, he had been able to battle for and pole positions, rather than g more circumspect and totting up oints after each race weekend. rkington’s team-mate Andrew an had fought his own personal e to claw his way back into ention and ended level with mish, but claimed runners up on a win countback. e season was one of two halves Turkington and Jordan breezing and then getting pain in the neck ey looked over their shoulders at ampaging pack closing them down the second half of the contest. e big story of the season was the of the three BMWS, with Tom hant joining the champions in ne-up. The work that WSR put ead of the start of the season ady the 330i M Sport was epic. ally, there was a serious doubt that examples would be ready for a day, just a handful of days before pening rounds at Brands Hatch. t the brains trust in the team pulled ether, and it was pretty clear from rst laps with the rear-wheel-drive hat it had created a rocket ship. e dynamics of the 330i M Sport a serious upgrade on the previous ior, the 125i M Sport. It was much oxy and therefore had vastly rior aerodynamics. The handling n point, and the larger car suited ivers. e opening salvo was hugely essive: the German machine took from the first 15 wins, six of the 15 st laps available and more than half e first five pole positions. Before the s reconvened at Snetterton to begin econd half of the competition, ington and Jordan were 14 points of the chasing pack – despite the ordan had missed three rounds at ngton Park after a race-one crash im in hospital with concussion. spite that dominance, there were ple of curveballs put in the way e BMWS this year. Firstly, the resurfacing of Croft, the scene of the fourth round this term, meant that the traditional advantage of rear-wheeldrive cars at the North Yorkshire track was dented. Also, given the demise of Rockingham, there would be two visits to Thruxton. The team feared that the Hampshire track would not be one of its stronger venues, but Jordan nevertheless won twice there.
Those concerns were put well into the shade from the midpoint of the season. There had been a reduction in the turbo boost levels for the BMWS in an effort to rein them in (plus a boost for some of their rivals), but there was another crucial tweak. That was to the centre of gravity of the car, which was advantageous at the beginning of the year.
MN understands that the alteration, ironically, had been prompted by Laser Tools Racing deciding to switch Aiden Moffat’s machinery from a Mercedesbenz A-class to a rear-wheel-drive Infiniti Q50. When that happened, BMR Racing, which runs the rear-wheel-drive Subaru Levorgs, asked for clarification on the centre of gravity regulations.
The rulemakers looked again, and equalised the centre of gravity for all of the rear-driven cars, which took away some of the performance from both Subaru and BMW. BMR might well have shot itself in the foot, but shrapnel also hammered WSR too.
From then on, Jordan and
Turkington managed just a win apiece, and there would only be one other pole for the champion-elect.
That should have given the Honda brigade, and the Team Dynamics version of Cammish, the leg-up it needed, but it wasn’t able to capitalise fully.
This should have been the season where Dynamics reaped the rewards from all of the learning it had done with the FK8 during 2018. It had been a fourtime winner in that maiden season and was ready to lead the charge, but the brand new BMW proved difficult to rein in. Once the BMWS were slowed, Dynamics still had a phalanx of olderspec FK2 Hondas, plus the improving Toyota Corolla of Speedworks Motorsport, to contend with.
The Dynamics engineers found it hard to get the FK8 into its sweet spot in terms of handling, while the FK2 has a much larger operating window. That allowed the Amdtuning.com Hondas of Rory Butcher and Sam Tordoff to both claim wins, while
Josh Cook in BTC’S FK8 Honda, which had a data-sharing agreement with Dynamics, was also in the hunt.
As if to underline the point, there had been seven different winners in the opening 15 rounds. There were 11 in the final 15 – proving that the big points where harder to come by.
Cammish’s season had been a determined exercise in points collection – very much in the style of Turkington’s championship victory in 2018. There were some frustrations, and his paymasters can’t have been happy that he went through a period of the mid-season claiming that he was winning Class B (behind the BMWS).
Nevertheless, he shrunk his 65-point deficit to Turkington to just two by the time the final chequered flag fell. That gives a snapshot of the ability he has and how opportunistic he had been. He may have only led 15 laps of the 30-race programme, but that shows that the BTCC is won in a different way to a number of competitions.
Team-mate Matt Neal played a superb back-up role to Cammish
(even though he incurred the wrath of Turkington after a penultimate-race clash at Brands). Despite that, the 52-year-old went through the campaign without a win, which is something the BTCC landscape is unused to.
While the battle at the head of the standings was decided by a couple of points, the fight in the Independents Trophy was equally as tense even though the drivers in the eye of the storm had bigger fish to fry.
Both eventual winner Butcher and runner-up Cook went into the final round looking at the summit of the overall drivers’ crown. While Butcher beat Cook in the privateers division, Cook turned the tables in the overall chase and finished fourth.
Cook rode his luck in the FK8 Honda, which was a new acquisition for the
BTC Racing team. The squad moved into new premises at the start of the season and has fresh investment from team co-owner Steve Dudman, and the operation stepped up a gear. The datashare with Dynamics helped, but Cook preferred to go his own way on set-up and that reaped rewards on several occasions and that was what helped him to three victories. It was a much more torrid season for his team-mate Chris Smiley, who failed to find the consistency of the sister machine.
Butcher was in another team that was on the rise, Amdtuning.com, and it lifted him to an eventual fifth. It grabbed the ex-eurotech Racing Honda Civic FK2S at the end of 2018 and that was the springboard it needed to climb up the grid. Butcher was paired with Tordoff in a formidable driver line-up, and wins followed. The engineering strength was boosted by tin-top racer and computer simulations genius Mike Bushell, and Butcher was quick to credit the man who would go on to become his team-mate when Tordoff missed the final three rounds of the campaign.
If anyone would have offered Tom Ingram and Speedworks Motorsport sixth in the points at the beginning of the year, they would have taken it in a shot. This was a watershed season for the likeable Cheshire team. The Toyota Corolla was the team’s first ground-up BTCC build, and its first as a works team.
Throwing the set-up on from the previous model, the Avensis, and going from there was always going to be a journey and both driver and team promised that it would begin to understand the hatchback by halfway through. True to its promise, it did, and three wins in the latter half of the year helped Ingram to be the third most successful driver in terms of race victories in 2019. The car still has its difficulties, particularly when riding the kerbs, and that will be an area of focus over the closed-season.
There was also a new car for Jason Plato, who joined the Power Maxed Racing Vauxhall Astra squad alongside Rob Collard. Plato revelled in his return to front-wheel-drive and, although he admitted that there was set-up work to be done over the start of the year, he was back to somewhere near his old self after three tough years at BMR (although he was twice pinged for an out-of-position start). Despite that, he often bemoaned a lack of grunt from the bespoke Swindon powerplant. Refinements to the car’s cooling package for the latter half of the season made it a much more competitive proposition, and that was enough to put him back in the winner’s circle in the final round of the year at Brands Hatch.
The final meeting in Kent also provided Ash Sutton with some salvation to his season and elevated him to eighth in the final points. The 2017 champion started strongly but, too often, the Levorg was languishing in the lower portion of the speed trap figures. The team has had boost breaks in previous campaigns, but there were none coming in 2019 and that made life tough for Sutton and his team-mate Senna Proctor.
Motorbase Performance didn’t struggle for straightline speed with the Ford Focus, and Tom Chilton’s 10th place in the points was built on one win at Croft (although he was stripped of another for a robust overtake on Neal at Brands Hatch in race three). Teammate Ollie Jackson should have finished higher than his 19th, but too many incidents blunted his charge.
Other stand-out performers included Jake Hill. Although the season was a struggle for finance again, he wrung absolutely everything from the Trade Price Cars Racing Audi S3 and took his maiden win at Knockhill after being stripped of an on-the-road one at Oulton Park following contact.
Team Parker Racing’s Stephen Jelley was another winner. He inherited victory after Hill’s censure but it was a much more competitive year for the former single-seater man – although his late-season pace was blunted by the same rule tweaks which hampered the WSR team.
A driver who should have expected a win was the Ciceley Motorsport Mercedes man Adam Morgan, who was joined by rookie Dan Rowbottom. The A-class is long in the tooth and the squad’s Italian engineers seemed to be right out of ideas come the midpoint of the campaign and they parted ways from the squad. A fresh approach brought more speed out of the car over the final four meetings, but it was too little too late.■