Tin-top silly season ramps up
The British Touring Car Championship silly season was in full swing at last weekend’s 2022 season finale at Brands Hatch, with some of the title contenders involved in the grapevine gossip.
First, veteran Tom Chilton took himself off the market (see right). Then attentions turned to Jake Hill, who went on to finish third in the points at the end of his first season with the West Surrey Racing BMW squad. His car has been run under the MB Motorsport banner of manager Mark Blundell’s MB Partners, and talk that MB could go it alone if a deal to remain at WSR is not secured began to gain traction. The conjecture was that MB could take over Ciceley Motorsport’s two BMWS, with Adam Morgan – whose family owns Ciceley – moving to WSR… or even targeted to join the MB line-up.
WSR chief Dick Bennetts said he wants to keep Hill, “but it’s not Jake’s call; it’s MB’S call”. Morgan added: “As far as I’m concerned, I’m still Ciceley Motorsport all the way.” And Blundell described it as “just a straightforward business analysis study – nothing more than that. As we are today our focus is on WSR and MB Motorsport in the configuration we’ve been in this season.”
Independent of any silly-season chat, Hill said on Sunday: “I just hope that we can come back and do it all again next year. I would rather retire from touring car racing than drive anywhere else.”
Parallel to this was what BTCC runner-up Ash Sutton and his Motorbase team-mates will race in 2023. The plot to build a rear-wheel-drive version of the 4WD Audi A5 has hit the skids. NGTC rules state that a 4WD base car must run as RWD if the engine is longitudinal, but FWD if it is transverse – as with the A5. A vote among the teams to tweak this rule, introduced when Rob Austin’s RWD A4 appeared a decade ago, did not carry a sufficiently significant majority to pass.
Motorbase boss Pete Osborne played down talk that attentions had turned to a RWD Mercedes C-class. “We’re looking at every car, but there’s nothing at the moment,” he said. “We’re now looking at whether to park it and go with the Ford Focus again because of time constraints.”