CHILTON READY TO TAKE BIG BTCC CHANCE WITH BOTH HANDS
Matt James talks to one of the BTCC’S most experienced racers, who is eager to land a crown
When the wraps came off BTC Racing’s new British Touring Car Championship signing – quite literally – at Autosport International, it was a surprise. Tom Chilton had jumped from Motorbase Performance to a less experienced team and will go into 2020 as part of the ambitious squad’s three-car Honda Civic Type R FK8 line-up.
Chilton has only one objective in 2020. “It is the title or bust for me. That is what it is all about,” he declares.
He will get his hands on a newly-built FK8, and has been impressed with the engineering strength and ambition behind BTC. Chilton says: “I met with [ joint owner and businessman] Steve Dudman at Knockhill last year and he told me that he thought the team was now ready to move on to the next level and challenge for the title. When you find out about the team, you can see that is true and the passion of [ joint owner] Bert Taylor is so impressive.”
The 2020 season will be Chilton’s fourth since returning to these shores, and he is more determined than ever. “The engineers are all in place, the team is eager for success and I have even been on a weight-loss programme since the end of last year,” he says. “I have lost seven kilos and my target is 14. I want everything to be just right.”
The 34-year-old knows what it takes to put together a winning programme. Chilton has a long history in tin-top racing, stretching back to him being the then-youngest person to contest the BTCC when he joined Barwell Motorsport in a Vauxhall Astra Coupe in 2002 for his maiden campaign. That was the start of a 10-year stay in the category which provided 12 wins and the Independents Trophy at the wheel of an Arena-run Lpg-powered Ford Focus.
After that, the team switched to the World Touring Car Championship and Chilton took seven victories on the big stage. The highlight of his global adventure was the Independents
Trophy in 2017 in a Sebastien Loeb Racing-run Citroen C-elysee.
The seismic change in the
World Touring Car rules, when the championship adopted TCR regulations in 2018, meant the end of the road for Chilton and his travels.
“The TC1 cars that were used in the category up until the end of 2017 were the best touring cars I have ever driven,” explains Chilton. “It was an amazing championship with some great drivers and friends, and we went to some amazing places. Some of the places we raced at were about being brave, which I love: skimming the barriers with your wing mirrors at 140mph really made me come alive. I love the bits that might scare other drivers. I was in a debrief room with people like Sebastien Loeb, Rob
Huff and Yvan Muller and I could see where I was faster than them. It really pushed me, and I loved that. I needed a fresh challenge after having done the BTCC for so long, and it motivated me.
“I thought I had done everything I could in terms of learning how to drive a saloon car quickly. But then you sit in and learn from drivers like that. I switched my driving style and learned how to left-foot brake, which is something that I hadn’t done before. There were advances for me to make, things for me to improve on. It was a real chapter in my racing education.
“But, when the WTCC swapped to TCR machines I could see the writing on the wall. There are too many performance changes with ballast, balance of power and ride-height changes. Look at the
Lynk & Co team in WTCR in 2019: it has the very best in terms of drivers and engineers, and even that couldn’t win the drivers’ title. Something is not right when that happens, and I didn’t want to be part of that.”
In Chilton’s final season in the WTCC in 2017, he dovetailed his commitments with a return to the BTCC in the new Power Maxed Racing Vauxhall Astra, which meant he took nearly 50 race starts in that one year.
“When I knew TCR was coming, I wanted to go back to my bread and butter. [BTCC chief executive] Alan Gow put me in touch with Power Maxed, and that was it, I was back,” explains Chilton.
A podium finish at the maiden round flattered to deceive a little in the brand new programme, which left him 15th in the standings (and he had been forced to miss three rounds due to an operation).
For 2018, he jumped into the Motorbase Performance team in its Ford Focus machines. “It was a commercial decision,” explains Chilton. “It is a team that has been around the BTCC for a while and had a good founding, so I expected a lot. That first season was fantastic. We were on the pace and we went into the final round of the year with a chance of the overall title. But we came up just short, although six podiums and one win was a good return.”
That relationship became increasingly more frustrating in 2019, which Chilton puts down to a pre-season test programme that sent them off course. He says: “We tried lots of new things on the car, but we hadn’t back-to-backed them with the old car and we might have gone down a few blind alleys. The car was old and it showed its age, although when the track was wet, we were able to make up for any deficiencies.”
And it was that frustration which has led him to seek new pastures in 2020 with BTC Racing. Chilton will keep working with his engineer from the past six seasons, Nick Silvester, and he has already been impressed with the set-up.
“The workshop is as good as any factory team I have ever been to,” says Chilton. “And the desire in the team is huge.
The Honda has shown itself to be the only car out there that can be a match for the WSR BMWS, and so I simply had to get in one. My one will be the newest chassis on the grid, which is just what I wanted. So the BTC deal really represents everything I could have wanted.”
Chilton’s impact on the team, which will also run last year’s fourth-place finisher Josh Cook and Michael Crees in its expanded line-up, is not lost on team chief Taylor.
“Just look at the experience Tom has,” he explains. “We are buying into almost two decades of knowledge at the front of the BTCC grid, and we are going to be tapping into that. Tom has the desire to put it all together for a championship assault, and that is the same position that the team is in. This is going to be a beneficial relationship all round. We can hopefully give Tom the tools to fight for the overall title, and that is going to help the team move another step forward too.
It is a dream situation.”