HOW TURKINGTON OVERCAME HIS TOUGHEST TEST YET TO CLAIM THE BTCC
In a turbulent season for the northern irish man, a third title was his most pleasing yet.
British Touring Car champion Colin Turkington has broken records this year, but he has set one benchmark which is evidence of just how tough the season has been.
The 36-year-old took the title with the lowest average score across the 10 race meetings since the points system was altered for the 2012 season. He collected an average of 30.4 at each event.
Conversely, in that seven-year period, he also has the record for the most points scored on average by a champion (43.4) across the 10 meetings when he took his second crown in 2014.
“I think the 2018 performance and the statistics go to show just how far the championship has come in that time,” says the Portadown man. “In 2014, I won eight races and I was on the podium at every event we went to. In 2018, I won one race, although my podium strike rate was quite good with nine others. It is evidence of the strength in depth of the championship. The cups are being handed out to a lot more people.”
The championship has ramped up in its competitive level in the last five years at least, as the graphs on this page show. The qualifying spread is much less than it used to be, the average winning margins are down and, remarkably, more than half of the 30 rounds in 2018 were settled by one second or less. There were 17 different race winners this year.
That is something series bosses have noticed, and the upper level of ballast has been dropped from 75kg in 2018 down to 54kg for the forthcoming year.
“Four years ago, when the maximum ballast was 45kgs, I wouldn’t even have thought about it,” explains Turkington, who was saddled with 75kgs going into five meetings in 2018. “But 75kg was a real struggle. You knew you couldn’t race with that level of weight on the car. You were just managing the situation, driving around and hoping to pick up a couple of points just waiting until you could shed the ballast for the next race. It was not even fun to be in races like that.
“That is why I found this year so difficult. I wasn’t getting the rewards in terms of the race wins and that means you really have to adjust your mindset to how you approach the championship and how you approach each race weekend.
“People came up to me after it was all over and say ‘you’ve had a good year, you’ve won the title’, and I would think ‘did I have a good year? Did I really?’ I am not sure it really felt that way – mind you, if I think I have had a bad year and I am champion, how must the others feel?!”
But it was a good year, and Turkington survived the pressure cooker of the traditional final-round showdown. He and Speedworks Motorsport Toyota Avensis driver Tom Ingram went toe-to-toe at Brands Hatch and Turkington prevailed in the penultimate round – more as a result of Ingram failing to land a podium rather than anything the BMW 125i M Sport driver did. Turkington was knocked into the gravel and wasn’t able to register a single point.
There was some real emotion from Turkington in the parc ferme area afterwards, as he struggled to hold back the tears. That was a legacy of the relief at topping the battle he had to wage on track and some of the most turbulent times he had ever been through off it.
His mother Mavis, a regular in the British Touring Car Championship paddock since Colin (and brother Gary) came to race on the mainland in 1999, passed away before the rounds at Oulton Park after battling a long illness.
“The weekends at Thruxton and Oulton Park were the most difficult events of my life,” says Turkington candidly. “The situation was grave and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to race at Thruxton at all. I could have had to go at any minute. It was hard to cope with and I was living day by day.
“But, once you go to a race meeting, you are locked into it for two days. It is a distraction and you have to put things to one side and it gave us, as a family, something to smile about. After mum passed away, I won at Oulton Park just days later. You can’t choose when to win in the BTCC, but that one was special. Fate was on my side.
“My dad and brothers were there, as well as my family, but it was hard to drive into parc ferme afterwards. That is where the family were waiting to greet me, and it was tough turning up there and mum not being around. In a way, it was a year of firsts for reasons like that.”
And it ended up with the ultimate first, the championship trophy for a third time to add to that 2014 triumph and 2009.
The WSR BMW 125i M Sport was fitted with a new engine for the 2017 campaign and attracted factory backing. The hard yards were done at the start of that season getting to understand the new-spec rubber that Dunlop had introduced to the championship, but there weren’t very many more steps to be taken ahead of 2018.
“We had four days ahead of the season – and two of those were wet,” says Turkington. “We had a small step on the engine, but the job was to maximise everything we had. We needed to be the best prepared we could because we knew the fight would be harder than ever. We didn’t have the fastest car at
any point across the season, but it was how we played the game that got us to where we were at the end of September.”
Although the team boxed clever with the German hatchback, there were three weekends where Turkington had a particularly tough time, and one of those was at the second meeting of the year at Donington. Technical gremlins restricted him to just six points.
“Between the opening six races at Brands Hatch and Donington Park, I had effectively only done three of them,” he explains. “We’d had a problem in race two at Brands, and twice at Donington. It would have been very easy to get your head down at that stage, but the good thing about this championship is that is does give you the chances to play your way back into the picture. Given the factors of the ballast, reversed grids and tyres, you can come back, although it seemed like a long way. I was lucky it happened so early on in the season, and I knew I had the tracks which really suit me and the car – like Oulton Park and Croft – yet to come.”
That resilience of mind is something that Turkington says has been one of the major high points of his campaign. He is a driver who works extremely hard away from the circuit filing reports on the car to the team and assessing all aspects of his performance.
“At the end of every year, I sit down and analyse how I have driven and where I can improve,” says Turkington. “Each year, I can see I am getting a little bit better. I am not sure that is in terms of raw pace but the other areas, the areas you learn to control with more experience. I am getting better at managing the car over a race weekend and how to claw yourself back into it after a setback.”
And Turkington is keen to gain more race mileage in 2019, although his exact programme has yet to be determined. Given the level of success he has enjoyed in the British Touring Car Championship, and the profile it has given him since he returned in 2013, it would be hard to see him walking away, even if it did offer him the biggest challenge of his life in the past 12 months. ■