Ford’s versatile rising BTCC star
It’s been a tough road to the top of the BTCC for Jake Hill. Now he’s a title contender, accomplished historic racer and in-demand coach. It’s a great life for this motorsport junkie
“The brutal truth of it is that I just love race cars. I think that shows with all the historic stuff that I drive. I drive so many cars and I just bloody love them all. It’s great. It doesn’t matter what I get in, it always puts a massive smile on my face. At the end of every year, I look back at the cars that are new to me that I’ve driven, and I just think,‘wow – I grew up watching those cars’.”
That’s Jake Hill, the 27-year-old who’s very much in the thick of the British Touring Car Championship title fight with the Ford Focus fielded by the Motorbase Performance/mb Motorsport liaison. But as the bubbly Kentishman has just detailed, that’s far from the only string to his bow. To describe Hill merely as a BTCC frontrunner is to credit Paul Mccartney with being a decent bass player.
Apart from the Ford, Hill has this year raced Chevron B26, Ford Mustang, Lotus Elan, whizzed a Group A Nissan Skyline up the hill at the Goodwood Festival of Speed, and started the test and development work on a Panoz LMP1 car. When Autosport catches up with him on the phone, he’s driving home from Snetterton after a day coaching a Ginetta GT5 Challenge team. Such is the itinerary of the Uk-based driver trying to make a living in the modern era.
“Being totally honest, I don’t earn anything out of British touring cars,” he admits. “Ultimately, in terms of how I earn my living out of motorsport, it’s the historic stuff and the driver coaching.”
Yet it’s the BTCC that has put him in a shop window to do that: “Touring cars is a big commercial business and it takes an awful lot of money to make that world go round, and we’re in a time when the manufacturers aren’t involved like they were. But it’s thanks to touring cars that I’ve done pretty much all the historic stuff.”
That’s all taken off in the past three years, where a tough decision was made by Hill in mid-2018 to put his BTCC career on hold. To flash back further, we need some context: Hill’s motorsport-mad family, while of average wealth by society standards, is at the destitute end of the racing spectrum. Father Simon networked and cajoled his way to a respectable driving career from the late 1980s to the new millennium, then turned his attentions to his son. From a stop-start karting career, via a lack-of-finance-punctuated Ginetta stint and a small handful of BTCC cameos, Hill Jr landed in touring cars full-time with Team Hard in 2016, thanks to nothing more than his searing speed, scrimping and saving and the faith of those around him. After flashes of form, it turned sour at the 2018
Croft round, by which time he’d lost faith in the ageing
Volkswagen CC he was driving.
“It was arguably my worst and toughest era of my racing career,” reflects Hill. “Me and dad had worked our nuts off to be where we are, especially dad. And so for me to turn round at Croft in 2018 and say that I’d rather never race again than have to do another race in that car, that is a very tough statement to take from dad’s perspective, because I was just hating it that much. I just wanted to stop, forget about it all, and just see what happened.”
Hill had enjoyed a BTCC one-off in 2015 with the Audi S3 of AMD Tuning, whose boss Shaun Hollamby was a mate of his dad’s since their late-1980s days as aspiring racers: “Shaun said, ‘Right, let’s try and do something for 2019’, and at that time Dan Kirby and Trade Price Cars got involved with Shaun, took over the Audis and there was a bit of a ray of light.” While TPC engaged AMD to run the Audis for 2019 and 2020, the AMD team proper was acquiring the ex-eurotech Fk2-spec Honda Civic Type Rs. Rory Butcher stayed on, joined by Sam Tordoff, to race the Civics; Hill was paired with ex-f1 racer Mark Blundell in the Audis.
Hill continues: “Honestly, it was the best fun year I’ve had racing in a long time. I absolutely loved it because I was in a really happy place, I was surrounded by good people, and I really enjoyed going racing again. And I think that showed, because my racecraft improved massively, my driving improved massively, and we ended up getting a couple of podiums and a win. And that kickstarted the rollercoaster that we’re on now.”
Sure enough, for 2020 Hill was ‘upgraded’ to the Civic, with
“I JUST LOVE RACE CARS. IT DOESN’T MATTER WHAT I GET IN, IT ALWAYS PUTS A SMILE ON MY FACE”
the AMD squad rebranded MB Motorsport as part of a commercial tie-up with Blundell, who had hung up his helmet. He claimed seventh in the championship, and last October Hollamby confirmed that Hill would remain an MB driver for 2021 – but at the same time he was negotiating to buy Motorbase in partnership with Pete Osborne, father of Hill’s 2020 team-mate Sam Osborne. That was accomplished, the AMD/MB staff effectively merged with Motorbase, and Hill and Motorbase encumbent Ollie Jackson were named as the 2021 MB drivers, with Osborne Jr and Andy Neate representing the sister Motorbase squad. Hollamby left the partnership before the start of the season, but Hill has led the combo and currently lies just 23 points adrift of championship leader Ash Sutton.
“It’s the first brand-new car I’ve had since 2010 Ginetta Juniors [when they upgraded to the G40]!” laughs Hill, who was given Motorbase’s new-build Focus as it expanded from three cars to four. “It was an incredible opportunity. Ultimately, I still owe a lot of thanks to Shaun and Pete Osborne.”
Hill acknowledges that his form, which carried him to the BTCC points lead after the Thruxton opener thanks to a hat-trick of
podium finishes, owes a lot to his engineer Craig Pawley, who has transferred with him from the Civic: “Craig was arguably the best engineer in the Civic FK2’S history, I’d suggest. All right, Dynamics had a lot to do with it to begin with, but what Craig did in the latter years with Eurotech and then obviously with myself in
2020, he really understood the car. And being a suspension technician at Red Bull F1, he understands suspension very well, and the biggest part of a BTCC car really is suspension and the geometry that goes into it.
“I really do feel like I have one of, if not the best, engineer on the grid, with a front-wheel-drive car at least, and what Craig has brought to the party is undeniably a massive reason why we’re as fast as we are. He’s done a fantastic job in adapting the Focus shell to what was effectively our set-up that we ended with on the Civic. There’s been a few tweaks – the engineers at Motorbase, specifically James Mundy who designed the car, they’ve gelled really well with Craig and accepted him into the engineering family, and hopefully vice versa. The team have great ideas, and Craig has listened to what worked last year with the car in Rory [who led the team in 2020] and Ollie’s hands, and we’ve ended up with a halfway house now set-up wise, a mixture of Honda and Ford. Every round we go to the car is just getting better and better from small tweaks that we’re learning.”
Remarkably, Hill’s only BTCC race win to date remains that
2019 triumph in the Audi, from a reversed-grid start at Knockhill. That’s in large part down to the increased 2021 levels of success ballast turning the championship into a softly-softly affair, and his pace in the Honda in 2020 and the Ford this term putting him into disadvantageous positions on the reversed grid. Noticeably, Hill has qualified the Ford very well this season compared to the others on heavy ballast.
“We made a big conscious effort in the winter that when we go testing we always carry 75 kilos because ultimately, if we do our job right, the car will always have weight in it after round one,” Hill recounts. “If you can make the car as fast as you can with that weight, then anything less is going to be a bonus. As you can see from the standings, we’re doing a fairly decent job of starting to manage it quite well. The thing that’s let us down – and to be honest we could be leading it, if not just behind Ash – is the two tyre problems: the puncture that stopped us getting on the podium or even winning race two at Brands; and the tyre delamination that we had due to set-up at Snetterton.
“One of our main objectives is, OK, we may not be on the podium at every round, and we may not even win a race, but really does that matter if you bring home that big shiny pot at the end of the year? That is my endgame: win the BTCC; win my first ever championship in anything; and get the job done. We’re just trying to be as consistent as we can, and bring the best car we can to every round, and not get caught up in the crap [shunts], and that’s hopefully what we’re managing to do.”
One bugbear to which Hill has alluded has been the Ford’s form on the soft-spec Goodyear. Before the latest fourth-generation Focus appeared in 2020, Motorbase struggled to switch the tyres on. The new car was a big step forward in responsiveness, but punctured even the mediums (with the softs never used in the Covid-influenced campaign). This year, the softs are used as the option tyre at Snetterton, Oulton Park and next month at Croft, and as the prime this weekend at Knockhill. “It’s a really good tyre [the soft], but the Focus doesn’t seem to enjoy it quite so much, and we’ve really had to work hard on it,” muses Hill. “Although the weather wasn’t perfect, the Oulton test [last month] came at a perfect time and we managed to get our heads around it a lot more – not perfect, but I think it’s good enough to get the job done, and every time we use it we gain more and more data.”
And then there are his outings in historics. It means a lot to Hill, who like his dad is a massive motorsport anorak (of there being a Scalextric model of his old Team Hard BTCC car, and the upcoming release of the MB Honda, he exclaims: “I was absolutely over the moon. I grew up playing Scalextric, my dad did, my uncle did, and so many of my mates’ dads did. When I was growing up it was,
‘Can you imagine having your own car?’ It’s a really cool thing to see your name on your British touring car in Hamley’s in London!).
“Ultimately, if and when my touring car career comes to an end, or I decide to divert, I really want to do the Le Mans 24 Hours,” he continues. “It’s pretty much any driver’s dream, I guess, but that’s a big aim for me. So to hear that John Danby Racing, the team that I do a lot of my historic stuff with, were getting hold of a Panoz… I first drove it at Donington and it was just out of this world. I’m testing it now probably once a month just to get it up to scratch, and every time you jump in it, it just makes you realise how lucky you are and how special a car it is that I’m getting the privilege to set up and hopefully race next year.
“And the Skyline stuff with Ric Wood… I’m a massive Skyline fan anyway [Hill drives an R32 on the road], my favourite motorsport is Japanese Touring Cars from the nineties, so to be able to drive the Calsonic and HKS Skyline, that is just ‘wow’. It was quite an honour, because after the Festival of Speed Ric had contact from HKS Japan, and they were interested in the car and who the driver was. The chance to go and race in Japan would mean an awful lot to me.”
Ironically, the historic world opened up thanks to Hill’s split with Team Hard: “Richard Wheeler, who was one of my original sponsors and is still a good friend, owns the Lotus Elan with which I won at the Silverstone Classic in 2018, and if it wasn’t for me leaving Team Hard and then driving for Richard at the Classic, let’s be honest, my historic career probably wouldn’t have kicked off.”
Apart from all that, you can find Hill hustling a humble 1983 Volkswagen Golf Mk2 on occasional Classic Sports Car Club weekends, the car owned by Racetruck boss Ian Knight, one of his backers. “It’s just such a great fun weekend of racing,” he enthuses.
But for now the biggest task is to continue to fight for that
BTCC crown for Motorbase and MB. The combination is rounding what was a rough-diamond Hill package, enforced by perennial lack of funding, into a complete contender, both on-track and off. Hill credits Blundell with helping “with so many other things surrounding the commercial world, with helping my sponsors out or giving us some really good advice, and just being in my eyes a really good team manager”.
Has he brought Hill into his management stable? “No… Not yet. But I’d like to think that it’s not off the cards.” And if that came to pass, the biggest task would likely be diary-management, such is his enthusiasm for anything on four wheels.
“WE MIGHT NOT EVEN WIN A RACE BUT DOES THAT MATTER IF YOU BRING HOME THAT BIG SHINY POT?”