The waves part for Turkington and BMW
The four-time champion was at his brilliant best in qualifying and the first two races. Then his rivals were at their unbrilliant worst in the finale
“There are no gifts here… Well, maybe the last corner was!” Colin Turkington had to qualify one of his well-used pearls of British Touring Car Championship wisdom following a frankly barmy, moonlit race into the dusk at Snetterton. From third in the standings, he leapt to the top of the heap going into the final round at Brands Hatch, thanks largely to an absolutely exquisite weekend performance aboard his West Surrey Racing-run BMW 330i M Sport.
Turkington was supreme through the experimental two-stage qualifying format and then the first two races, which he led all the way and gained fastest lap for good measure. That was 45 points out of 45. But then he would have to start the reversed-grid finale from 10th on the grid, with 60kg of success ballast on his BMW, and so far this season that had not been ideal Turkington territory, perhaps the area in which this cultured, measured and methodical competitor falls a little short compared to the ferocious terrier-like qualities of main title rival Ash Sutton. But at Snetterton, ‘cultured, measured and methodical’ worked…
“I could see there was a hefty battle [for third position] between Tom [Ingram] and Rory [Butcher],” he recounted. “I had excellent pace but I would have been happy with P5.” Fifth was, indeed, the position to which Turkington had risen, thanks to unseemly panel-bashing warfare involving Sutton, Dan Cammish, Josh Cook and interloping reversed-grid polesitter Chris Smiley. Then Ingram saw a chink of light inside Butcher’s Motorbase Performance Ford Focus as they entered the long right-hander at Coram, just a few hundred metres from the finish line.
The Speedworks Motorsport Toyota Corolla filled the gap, but Butcher moved across to give himself more of an arc for the final left-hander at Murrays. There was contact, and both cars squirmed before the Ford was spat across the wet grass, from where Butcher was powerless to prevent himself ploughing into the left-rear quarter of the Toyota as Ingram innocently accelerated out of the turn. It converted third and fourth for long-shot title contenders Butcher and Ingram to fifth and eighth. And, compounding this, it converted fifth and sixth for Turkington and Sutton to third and fourth.
In the BTCC, it’s not necessarily the victories that secure you the championship; it’s the races you don’t win.
Turkington, winner of one out of 30 races on his way to the
2018 crown, knows this as well as anybody, and everything fell into place for him in that final race as he picked his way through a Norfolk battlefield to an unexpected podium. And he’d done the winning earlier in the day. This was a weekend where the four-time champion more than atoned for the uncharacteristic error previous time out at Croft that sent his race day into a spiral, dropped him to third in the points table, and led to one WSR wag to joke that
he’d been beating himself up about it ever since.
Snetterton and the Brands finale were two events the BMW boys had been worried about ever since the amended BTCC calendar was published. Rear-wheel-drive competitors have trouble switching their tyres on in the best of conditions, and the cold weather would surely exacerbate this. As it transpired, track temperatures barely climbed into double figures all weekend, so even the front-driven machinery suffered – gratifyingly, Snetterton was a fiesta of front-wheel-drive oversteer, and qualifying times were over two seconds off the record set in 2019.
In the first stage of the new two-part qualifying format, the BMWS of Tom Oliphant and Turkington made it through to the top 10 shootout, sixth and seventh respectively. Then Turkington, after allowing Ingram and Jake Hill some glory at the top, unleashed an unbeatable effort on the final lap of the 10-minute coda to grab pole. “I was conscious to just do enough in Q1, and I got a pretty good opening run,” he explained. “But I wasn’t happy with the balance so I went for a second run, just to assess if we’d gone the right way [on mid-session set-up changes]. In Q2 the pressure was on – the majority of the time I spent getting tyre temperature, and the last lap I was fastest because that’s where you get the most temperature.”
Hill joined Turkington on the front row with the unballasted Amd-run MB Motorsport Honda Civic Type R. He felt there was perhaps a little bit of time lost in his tyre pressures, but acknowledged that “Colin put in a great lap”. Ingram went from top to third in the closing stages, praising Speedworks engineer Spencer Aldridge’s strategy “masterstroke” in fitting a new set of tyres for the end of Q1 so that his driver could get on it straight away in the shootout: if tyre life faded, at least temperatures would be coming up. But the temperatures on the Toyota, on 42kg of success ballast, didn’t
come up quite enough: “It was lock-ups, bouncing and oversteer.”
This trio would be the story of the opening race. Heavy overnight rain meant that, even on an autumnal sunlit morning, the track only began to dry out in the preceding Carrera Cup race. It was still damp off line at the beginning, and Turkington had to defend from Ingram, who leapfrogged Hill at the start as the Honda was on the more slippery side of the track. Eventually Turkington pulled away, while Hill committed a mid-race hit-and-run on Ingram into the Wilson hairpin. Ingram controlled the slide beautifully, and the gentlemanly Hill gave the position back rather than wait to be punished.
That result moved Ingram onto 54kg of ballast, and after another early challenge on Turkington – the BMW now up to 60kg – he found himself fending off a train of challengers, as the leader scarpered into the distance over the second half of race two. Hill made a poor start, so it was Butcher hooked to the rear of Ingram, the Ford giving the Toyota the occasional love tap under braking.
The complexion of the race changed when Jack Goff, pushing on as hard as ever in his venerable Team Hard Volkswagen CC, lost it at Riches and hit the barriers hard. The safety car was called, setting up a one-lap dash to the finish. But Mr Perfect nailed the restart in his BMW – he was 1.057 seconds ahead of Ingram at the start-finish line, prompting the Speedworks crew to make fun of their driver for being “asleep”. He woke up with a start when Butcher smacked into his rear at the hairpin, the impact sending both wide, and allowing an opportunistic Sutton to sneak his Laser Tools Racing Infiniti Q50 ahead of the Ford to take third. “This is a really difficult place to overtake,” said Butcher. “It was a great race but I’m really disappointed with that final lap. I’m sorry to
Tom – it was a misjudgement that cost me a position.”
As happens so often, Sutton had endured a nervous Saturday with the Infiniti, carrying the maximum 60kg ballast. “We were suffering with a lock-up issue in Turn 2 [the hairpin] and had to come in and put another set of tyres on,” he explained of a Q1 where he only secured a place in the top 10 late on. He went sixth in Q2, and that put him on the slippery side of the grid for the opening race. Laser Tools team-mate Aiden Moffat had qualified ninth, but a sticking throttle sent him into Oliphant at the first corner, and the BMW hit Sutton. While Sutton saved a massive wobble and went on to finish a wounded fifth after further contact with Butcher, Oliphant – whose BMW would be used as a midfield punchbag all day – and the Motorbase Ford of Ollie Jackson were the collateral damage, both rejoining off the slippery grass at the tail of the field.
Sutton’s third place in the sequel was a good return, even if he was now behind Turkington in the points. “Today I’ve just controlled
it a little bit,” he said, before adding of Butcher: “Keeping up with that Ford in a straight line is a bit of a joke.” Sutton spent much of the race pointing his finger forward to Butcher: “I felt like we were quicker than Ingram, but every time I got near him he defended and it was backing me into Cammish, but Rory wasn’t listening to that.”
For his part, Cammish was struggling on a weekend where the newer-spec FK8 Civic didn’t seem to perform as we’ve come to expect. Second in the points pre-snetterton, so carrying 54kg of ballast on Saturday and in race one, he was slow on the speed traps, but that wasn’t all: “We don’t seem to be great in corners either. We’re just a bit steady. Today we’re sixth for a reason.” It had been a nervous qualifying too. Cammish lost his best Q1 time to track limits, so squeaked through in 10th, before going fifth in the shootout:
“The lap was mega. It’s telling that I was the only FK8 in it.”
And that was how they all converged for the crazy race three. Cammish again: “It got absolutely scary out there. I’m just glad to come out of it in one piece.” Key to the warfare was the driving of Smiley, who enraged Sutton with the contact resulting from their battle for fourth, and was eventually fired off by Cammish. The Yorkshireman had his licence endorsed for that, but defended himself with the blunt assessment that “he scares the shit out of me”. Sutton fumed: “When a car’s alongside you, you can’t just drive them clean off the track. It was blindingly obvious what was going on, and I was on the receiving end.”
Up front was Jackson. Remember he was forced off at the start of race one? From 21st on the grid, he forced his way up to eighth in race two in what was arguably his best BTCC drive to date. That gave him third on the reversed grid and, after launching ahead of the slow-starting Smiley, he passed Adam Morgan’s Ciceley Motorsport Mercedes beautifully around the outside of Agostini. Morgan kept the pressure on, but the Mercedes was “a bit hairy” through Riches, preventing him from launching an attack into the hairpin. Jackson therefore scored an excellent second reversed-grid victory.
Behind was the rough stuff. Butcher had his licence endorsed for the incident with Ingram, the Sutton/smiley stuff will be reviewed at Brands, ditto Matt Neal dumping Oliphant down the field, while Moffat was penalised out of the top 10 for a move on Senna Proctor. Cook dragged a disintegrating BTC Racing Honda to seventh place after a first-lap assault on the ‘cousin’ Dynamics car of Cammish.
Sutton’s Infiniti, indeed, looked like something you see being trailered home from a short-oval slugfest, but he still dragged it to fourth position behind Turkington, who now leads Sutton by nine points. Cammish too is in contention, Ingram is a long shot, and Butcher has the tiniest of mathematical chances.
But how to stop Turkington? “Snetterton is where we’ve always gone well with the BMW – we’ve never been dominant here but we’ve always scored well,” he summarised. “But this has been the best weather for us we could ever have imagined. We were fortunate that it played to our strengths. When it’s going your way, it’s going your way.” And the distraught Ingram’s take on it? “As normal, the waves part and Colin Turkington drives through like Moses.”