“I have my sights on a fourth title”
The super-tall British Touring Car king tackles the MN readers’ questions
Bryan Adams began his 16-week stretch at number one in the UK singles chart with (Everything I Do) I Do it For You in mid-july 1991. On that same Sunday he topped the list, Matt Neal made his British Touring Car Championship debut. Much like Adams, it was the start of an epic run for Neal too which has yet to finish. There have been some speedbumps along the way, but he has been a fixture in the British Touring Car Championship. He has featured in every season since 2003.
He lifted £250,000 from BTCC organisers by becoming the first privateer in a modern era to win a round outright when he claimed victory at Donington Park in 1999. He has been a factory driver for four teams. He sparked a 15-year-old war with rival Jason Plato. He has overseen Honda’s reintroduction to the championship as a works team. He has taken over the reins of the family Team Dynamics operation and, more recently, has overseen the racing careers of his sons Henry and Will.
With all of that going on, it is a wonder the 6ft 6in driver found time to sit down and tackle the MN readers’ question, but we are grateful that he did.
Question: “Why did you choose to start your career in tin-tops? You did Ford Fiestas and Production Saloons before stepping up to the British Touring
Car Championship.”
Jack Crowther
Via email
Matt Neal: “I did have a passion for touring cars over Formula 1, although I have always had an interest in all forms of motorsport and I am a fan of Formula 1. But I always saw Formula 1 as just unachievable. It is too elitist. Touring cars was more for the man in the street. Sometimes we will sit in a British Touring Car Championship drivers’ briefing and someone new comes in and you hear them talk. I immediately think ‘oh, he’s too posh for here’! The touring car championship is more working class. Maybe not working class, but more honest, more real.
“I never thought I would race. I wanted to, desperately, but I never thought it would happen. Some kids now set out with a goal that they are going to be in this category or that category – they want to be in the BTCC by the time they are 12 years old, or something, and they make it. I never really had that.”
MN: Not even with the influence of your dad Steve, who had been a class winner in the British Touring Car Championship in the 1960s in his own right?
Matt Neal: “Yes, he took me to a couple of races, but he was out of the game by then. I got into motorbikes, I used to love that. I enjoyed motocross and I used to do that competitively. I didn’t do any karting or anything like that. I used to muck about on anything motorised out in the fields. I did motocross racing for four years, but my dad got me into cars, just to get me away from motorbikes.”
MN: Isn’t that because you had a habit of hurting yourself on motorbikes?
Matt Neal: “I knocked myself around a few times. Mind you, I am still doing that these days – injuring myself is something I am pretty good at!”
Question: “Earlier on in your life, was there any kind of motorsporting hero that you had, excluding you father?” Shelby Buchan
Via email
Matt Neal: “When I was younger, it was probably the big Formula 1 drivers of the time: Niki Lauda and James Hunt. I was always a Lauda fan for some reason, I don’t know why. I thought his style was cool. James Hunt never did it for me, but Lauda did – I guess I loved the Ferraris of that period and I liked the way he went about his motorsport.”
Did you ever imagine your career would stretch for so long?
Chris Norman
Via email
Matt Neal: “No. I have always said to any kids who come to me, or to their parents, for advice. I always say, firstly, to get a good education. They usually yawn, but it is important. And then they also need to have an established exit strategy. They look at me like I have gone mad. The education is important because it helps you with the exit strategy and you have something else to do. There are only a few of us who have managed to make a career out of national motorsport. We have managed to stay there long term, and you could probably count them on your fingers. My career could have ended numerous time, and if you do have a good education, it sets you up for that moment and also, it makes you a wiser more rounded person if you do end up driving for a professional team. It helps you talking to team bosses, engineers, sponsors, etc. It is about the business side too.”
MN: That is all well and good Matt, but you don’t seem to have an exit strategy yourself…you’ve gone on for ever...
Matt Neal: “I know, and that is what worries me! I have never given up, I always have worked in between all the race driving you have done. You get people like [2002 and 2004 British Touring Car champion] James Thompson – I remember speaking to him in the Super Touring days in the 1990s when they had cut the testing down. I rang him and he told me he was bored, because he used to do nothing apart from race. I would tell him that I was flat out, working really hard. I am not saying which way was right: sound like he might have had it spot on and not me. But I have always worked. In my career, I have always gone from a feast to a famine – although I think I have probably been on the famine side more than the feast side. But working and racing has given me a steady income, enough to pay the mortgage and send the kids to school and have a good career.
“I remember saying to [current BTCC rival and up-and-comer] Jake Hill the other day that tough experiences, the crap ones, in any sport teaches you a whole lot more than a good experience. So I always think that when I have been in bad cars – and I have been in some truly crap ones – it has made me a better, more rounded person. A driver and a person. There is a saying I like to use: a calm sea doesn’t make a great sailor.”
Question: “If you could race in one iconic [touring car] livery, what would it be?”
Harry Adams
Via Twitter
Matt Neal: “I always loved the Bastos
livery, and I was lucky enough to get to drive a car with that livery when I drove David Clark’s car at Goodwood. That is pretty cool and iconic. It would be lively to bring someone like Labatt’s back to touring cars too, because that one was pretty special too when it was on the
Ford Sierra Cosworths.”
Question: “Is the contempt between you and Jason Plato real? Or is it pantomime?”
Jake Sanderson
Via email
Matt Neal: “There have been points over the last 20 years where it has been more real than you would believe, honestly.
If I could have got to his house, I would have burnt it down! I would have paid good money for him not to be in the series in the following season. But now that has happened and his programme is on hold for 2020, I am actually quite sad about it. We were good friends before we fell out. The problem with Jason is that he reels me in and then he stabs me in the back. I used to take it really personally, but it is not personal against me. I react and I fight back, which I am not sure the others do. It is just Jason’s way, it is his way of giving it out. I have learned that over the years and we get on now and I will miss him not being in the championship. I quite like him being there, although I can’t believe I am saying that.”
MN: But the BTCC, certainly in the 2000s, was all about the battles between you two…
Matt Neal: “Racing with Jason was the only time I have actually pleaded for points on my licence. I remember at Snetterton one year [2006]. We all had up to 12 points allowed on our licence and then you got banned. We had found out that Jason was on nine points. In the race, I had hit Jason up the back coming into Coram because he had brake-checked me. I went though but, at the next corner, he just had me off. He retaliated. The had me in front of the officials and they were going to do me for my part in it. I said OK, but if you put points on my licence but they’d [the officials] always said that retaliation was a far worse thing to do. So put points on my licence, fine, but they should, but rights, do that to Jason too for his retaliation. They asked us to leave the bus can kept us waiting for about half an hour. They called us back in, and they asked us to shake and make up and calm down. I was begging for the points to be issued on our licences which would have given Jason a ban…”
Question: “What is the best swear word to use while crashing?”
William H
Via Twitter
Matt Neal: “It has to be ‘bollocks’, doesn’t it?”
Question: Did Matt ever make friends with Colin Mcrae after Knockhill in 1992 [where the pair collided during Mcrae’s guest outing for Prodrive]? Jamie Miller
Via Facebook
Matt Neal: “No, I struggled with Colin. I have fallen out with a lot of people over the years, the list is endless. Normally, with all of them, you make things up and are friends afterwards. It is like playground politics normally. But
Colin and I never really made things up, although I get on great with his brother Alister and always have done.”
MN: Did you come across each other much after that incident, because you moved in different circles really…
Matt Neal: “Not really – I just kept my distance and I don’t think he really gave a shit about me. I wasn’t really on his radar.”
Question: “What has been your favourite BTCC car ever?”
Ged Burnett
Via email
MN: And also, what is your favourite car to have driven of all time, because you have tackled quite a few disciplines?
Matt Neal: “People have asked me this. While I loved the BMW M3, I would have to say it is probably the last generation of Super Tourers in 1999 and 2000. They were pretty trick to drive, really good fun. You have to remember that they were properly on a knife edge with lots of aero and also they were on skinnier tyres.
They were two inches narrower than what we run now.”
MN: But when the cars were so well developed, didn’t the racing suffer a little bit?
Matt Neal: “It did. You would lose the downforce when you followed another car. But to drive and to get the most from them, they were exhilarating. But the racing is better now, but they were better cars to drive.”
MN: And your favourite car overall?
Matt Neal: “I have driven Australian
V8, but I didn’t get on with them. We just didn’t click, and I tried over a 10-year period to master them. It was tough to get my head around them. There is a lot to do with the spool rear differential. They are niche things to drive, and you either get it or you don’t. Myself, James Thompson, Fabrizio Giovanardi, a whole load of us didn’t really get it.
“Probably one of the cars that scared me the most, and when I got in it for the first time I was wondering what the heck I was doing, was the Lister Le Mans Sunbeam Tiger I drove at Goodwood. I wondered what on earth I was doing driving that, but after a while it became a bit of a drug. I got addicted to it, and after that first time, I looked forward to trying to tame the beast: although it was a horror story in the wet.
“Sometimes in motocross I would have a great race and think I had ridden the best I could and I was 11th. I would come away more chuffed than if I had a podium.
Some people say it is all about winning, but that is not the case for me. If I can come away satisfied with my performance, and feeling I have done the nest job you can, then that it what it is about and I got that feeling with the Lister.
“The best race I though I ever drove was at Bathurst in 1998, even though we didn’t win it [Neal was sharing Super Touring Nissan Primera with Steven Richards and came second]. It was how we achieved that result, how we worked together and how the route was to get there.”
MN: Well, that takes us on to another thing, because you have had to develop so many new cars in the British Touring Car
Championship, and that is something you have always said you have really enjoyed…
Matt Neal: “There is good and bad. Sometimes there is some soul-searching, but that is a part of the job I enjoy. The prospects of the British Touring Car Championship going hybrid in 2022 is really exciting. I was against it to start with because everyone was scared about the costs of it. But now, I am excited, because it brings a new element to it and the drivers will have to use there brains a bit more in terms of racecraft. The more you have to think about it and the less you just thrash about the better. One of the things that Jason Plato, Colin Turkington, myself and others have complained about in recent years in the British Touring Car Championship is that the tyres are too good. Any driver with any level of ability to go and thrash the tyres around and they would stand up to it. We were trying to convince supplier Dunlop to detune the tyres a bit so there is no strategy and it involves the drivers more. Of course, that might have led to more failures, which is something Dunlop wouldn’t have been too keen on. That’s not good for business, but the race management side would have been so much stronger.”
Question: “Which driver would you like to have had as a team-mate that you never did?”
Leo Barclay
Via email
Matt Neal: “Probably Steve Soper. I think he was the ultimate team player and he is a phenomenal driver and still is.
I have huge respect for him. He is probably the ultimate touring car driver of all time. I remember going to Hockenheim in about 1992 for the DTM, and every time homegrown hero Hans Stuck went into the old stadium section, the whole crowd went wild. Steve Soper was the only other driver who got the same reaction: they loved him over there, a real hero and he was a non-german.
“Once you get know him, he is a great bloke. When I was driving a BMW in the early 1990s, I went to Munnich to the BMW awards evening. I remember the boss of BMW standing up and describing his DTM drivers. He described Jo Winkelhock as ‘warning the hearts of the crowd’, and Roberto Ravaglia as the ‘thinking man’ and Johnny Cecotto as the ‘businessman’. When he got to Steve Soper, he was described as an ‘English terrier, who bites hard and to the bone and he doesn’t let go’. I thought that was as good a description of Steve as I have ever heard.”
MN: You always seem to have built up a very strong bond with the team-mates that you have had. Is that important to you? Dan Eaves, Gordon Shedden, and now Dan Cammish, You have always worked as a team within a team…
Matt Neal: “I like to think that, because when I raced in Europe in the early part of the 2000s, I didn’t really get on with Fabrizio Giovanardi. Then I was teammates with him at Vauxhall in 2008 and 2009 in the BTCC and we really hit it off: I still speak to him now regularly. I am not so precious as to think I will be the fastest all the time – and I always thought that was maybe Jason Plato’s weak point. In fact, it is not just Jason, but some drivers just can’t compute that someone else in the same car can be faster. I liken it to golf or snooker: we all have our good days and bad days. Why can you sometimes perform like an ace and just be slightly off it on other days? It happens.
“Sometimes in motor racing it just doesn’t click but you have to get on with the job. If team-mates are faster than me, I won’t let it eat away at me. I would just look at the data and try and learn and make myself better for next time I am in the car. I also think it is just about the journey of life. I remember [motorcycle champion] Carl Fogarty saying something: he said that he never enjoyed any of his race wins or any of his championships because as soon as he had won a race he was thinking about the next one. I could relate to that. I went through those periods. You wake up and you realise that you have to enjoy the journey too. You see some young drivers who really don’t get that even now. Otherwise, you get to the end and you look back and you think ‘what was that all about? Why have I done this?’” MN: With Gordon Shedden, it seemed that you almost helped him become the driver he is today…
Matt Neal: “I watched him grow. I enjoyed that. When he came to us, he wouldn’t have a drink for a week before each race. We soon kicked that out of him! He wouldn’t go to the gym either, so I knocked that out of him too. Now he is addicted to cycling and he works out. He has learned, and that will pay him back long term because you have to look after yourself. Gone are the days of the drivers like Ian Flux and Gerry Marshall [hard-drinking, hard-playing drivers]. You can’t do that anymore, that doesn’t exist.
“With Gordon, sometimes we would do the debriefs and I would hear what he was saying, and I would question his feedback and ask ‘are you sure you might not be thinking this, rather than what you’ve said?’. “Could this be the answer?’. We would have a debate about things. I was on my own for a lot in the 1990s [without a team-mate], and it is incredibly hard on your own. Steve Soper was very kind to me – I didn’t have him as a team-mate, but I could go to him and ask questions and he was always open. I was just craving information. So one thing I have tried to do with [current team-mate] Dan Cammish is be open. He has come from one-make formulas, pretty much, like Porsches and Formula Ford. In those, you can’t change a lot. Now he has come to a BTCC car where you can change so many things. He was almost completely lost but he is a very fast learned – almost as fast as he is on the track – and it has been rewarding to be able to help.”
Question: “Do you listen to music to motivate yourself before any of the races?”
Russell Scobie
Via email
Matt Neal: “No, I don’t. I know Fabrizio
Giovanardi used to though: he would walk around the paddock with his earphones on listening to Insomnia from Faithless. I just prefer to sit in silence and gather my thoughts. I will squirrel away in the office and get five or 10 minutes and just chill out and clear my mind.”
Question: “Would you make way for your sons [Henry and Will both race regularly in tin-tops] to race in the British Touring Car Championship?” Tinman photo
Via twitter
Question: “Do you see yourself following your dad as a team principal?”
Daniel Kerr
Via facebook
Matt Neal: “Yes to both. I am in a difficult situation bringing Henry and Will into the team though. One because it is incestuous to bring your own family in when you are under pressure from sponsors, backers and Honda and you have to deliver. But look at what getting into a good car did for the careers of drivers like James Thompson and Jason Plato. I had to fight my way through and I am lucky I made it and that goes for drivers like Jake Hill today. It has been a battle. It is, though, very tempting to put Henry in a car. When Gordon Shedden left the team, we came up with a shortlist of six drivers we wanted to replace him, and I put Henry’s name on the list. Honda, and the then managing director then Dave Hodges, is very astute and he said that he thought Henry needed more time, and I agreed with him. That’s fair enough. You have to try to be impartial about it.”
MN: What sort of a racing dad are you then? Are you hands-off?
Matt Neal: “I step back and be there for advice. I was more hands on to start with but as they kids grow up, they have to start making decisions for themselves because I am not going to be around forever – although I want to be around for a long while yet. They have to make their own pathway. I will try to direct them from the sidelines if I think they are going wrong, and I will give advice, but I will take a little bit of a back seat. I am not like my own dad though, he gets proper stressed.”
MN: So what about the team principal question: well, you are one anyway, aren’t you…?
Matt Neal: “It has been my life, and I have a fair bit of experience – both in and out of the officials’ bus…”
Question: “Do you have anything left to achieve in your career you want to achieve?”
Emma Facey
Via twitter
Matt Neal: “I want a fourth BTCC title, that would be cool, but maybe I am getting a bit old now. There is one thing: if I finish my career and I haven’t have raced at Le Mans, that will be a regret I suppose. It is a real bucket-list thing. I have had chances and there has either been a calendar clash or the budget to bring to the drive was just too much. But, if it doesn’t happen, I ain’t done too badly. I can’t really complain.”