How Mike Bushell bounced back
Clio champion didn’ t expect to be racing this year until landing team hard deal. by Stephen lickorish
He had just clinched a second Renault UK Clio Cup title in style. And by style read domination. No driver other than Mike Bushell ever looked like winning the title last season. He was better in qualifying. He was better in the races. He was better at consistency. And yet, despite all that, Bushell did not think he would be racing in 2018 – let alone in the British Touring Car Championship.
“As far as I was concerned when I finished Clios, that was my lot,” he says. “I honestly didn’t think I was going to be continuing racing this year. I’ve got a little girl on the way, I’d become a two-time British champion and thought ‘I’m quite content with that’ at the time. But three or four weeks later it starts to mull in your brain what you really want to be doing and you just can’t lose that buzz.
“I sampled a TCR car and shared the driving with Ash Sutton – it was good to go up against a guy who is the most rated driver in the country at the moment. It was good to compare against him and it brought my confidence back.”
He proved to be more than a match for Sutton on that day – and that did not go unnoticed. Just days later he had a deal in place to drive for Team Hard in the BTCC. Some turnaround from thinking he wouldn’t be racing.
“I think I had written it off in my own mind that I wasn’t going to come back because I thought I had missed the boat,” says the 28-year-old. “The most important thing to make it all happen is Tony [Gilham, team boss]. He’s been the single most enthusiastic man I’ve ever met – and that’s not just because of his pink attire! He lives motorsport, it’s his business and in the space of three weeks I learnt so much.”
Bushell is confident about the season ahead. Team Hard has recruited top engineer Geoff Kingston – who has most recently worked with 2017 Independents Trophy winner Tom Ingram – and he has set about a programme of updates to the team’s fleet of Volkswagen CCS. Bushell says the team has been flat-out over the winter working on the cars with testing beginning last week.
“Really all the pieces of the puzzle are coming together,” he says. “I’m really excited for it, the team have put so much time into it – they only had New Year’s Day off and the two days for Christmas.
“Everyone’s sort of holding their breath – a lot of people are watching. The car is already proven and with the input of a new fresh mind it’s interesting to see what’s possible.”
Bushell is certainly hoping a lot more is possible than the first time he graduated to the BTCC after winning a Clio title. Back in 2015 he moved into the series with the AMD squad in what proved to be an uncompetitive older-spec Ford Focus. It was a disappointing year, blighted by his massive crash in qualifying at Thruxton with Simon Belcher that left him with severe ligament damage and a hefty repair bill. He ended the year with a best result of only 10th.
But that was not his first experience of the series. He actually made his debut in a one-off appearance in a Chevrolet Cruze at Knockhill in 2013.
“That was when the seed was first sown,” Bushell says. “A drive came about through Andy Neate so that was great. Then obviously at that time I didn’t really think of myself as being a particularly good driver – I hadn’t won anything. After winning the Clios in 2014 the next step was to make the jump into British Touring Cars.
“Ultimately that [Thruxton] crash was a massive setback. In my naivety coming into a top level of motorsport [the approach] is to go gung-ho ‘I want to get a result’, ‘I want to get a top 10’. Yes, that’s part of the goal but it’s also a business and the business is to stay in it. In my naivety at the time I missed that opportunity and ultimately I thought ‘I need to go away and regroup’, which is why I dropped back to Clios.”
Moving back down the racing ladder was perhaps a bold move but it worked a treat for Bushell. It allowed him to focus on his weaker areas and get him in a position to reclaim a place on the BTCC grid – even if 2016 didn’t go to plan after crashing with eventual champion Ant WhortonEales in the finale.
Bushell felt it was important for him to return to winning after that difficult 2015 season.
“I had my confidence knocked because of that crash at Thruxton – that was the first time I had ever been hurt in a car so it does have a knockon effect to your own self-belief,” he says. “So coming back into Clios I wasn’t the dominant force. It was a case of I really had to knuckle down and improve and iron out the flaws. Ultimately I missed out on the Clios by the narrowest of margins [in 2016] but the way it ended was one of the biggest PR buzzes I’ve ever had because of crashing out of the finale and taking a bow to the crowd worked out brilliantly!
“That set me up for the next year. In modern single-make championships it was quite unheard of [to win so dominantly] and it’s a series filled with a grid of top names from other formulae so it was a monumental achievement for me – I think the only thing that will top that would be a win in touring cars.”
Bushell’s realistic enough not to expect that this season, but reckons a podium could be possible.
“I think the ultimate goal I have for this year would be to luck in to a podium on a reverse grid, that would be a monumental achievement,” he says. “It’s a realistic goal – I think coming back to it as a two-time Clio champion, with an already proven car and the input of Kingston – it’s now down to me.”
And having become only the second driver to take more than one title in the incredibly competitive Clio Cup, he has the credentials for his second spell in the BTCC to be far more successful than the first. All thoughts of not racing this year have certainly been banished from his mind. ■