COLIN TURKINGTON
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW BTCC king on the secrets of staying at the top
Four-time British Touring Car Championship winner answers readers’ questions and tells Matt James he isn’t checking the record books
The enforced lockdown period torpedoed the plans of even the best-prepared British Touring Car Championship teams. For champion Colin Turkington, it means his quest to become a standard-bearer in the category has been put on ice.
The Northern Irishman, who has raced in the BTCC since 2002, was on course to aim for a hat-trick of crowns which would push him above Andy Rouse in terms of the outright most successful tin-top driver of all time.
But that has been put on hold until the BTCC’S planned return at the beginning of August. Turkington himself is keeping himself in shape, doing his homework (and helping with that of his two sons) and making sure he will be ready to climb back behind the wheel of his Wsr-run BMW 330i M Sport when the time comes.
In the meantime, he has also spared Motorsport News a few minutes to tackle the readers’ questions.
Here are his answers.
Question: “Drivers’helmets have special meanings to them. What is the story of Colin’s lid?” Stephen Cumming
Via Twitter
Colin Turkington: “It has had the same foundation of its design since 2009. My helmet has my initial on it on both sides. It has a green ‘C’on it, but it was orange in 2009 in deference to the sponsor at the time. The only significance of the green is to represent where I am from. There is a bit of a story about how it came to be, actually. It was designed by Mike Fairholme, and for anyone who knows crash helmets, he is a bit of a legend in that field. How I got to know him was that when I was racing karts with my brother Gary, for Christmas, we both replica crash helmets. I got a Nigel Mansell replica Indycar helmet: the one with K-mart on it – I still have it too, it is the dog’s bits. Gary got a Mika Hakkinen one, because he was a big fan of his.
When we looked on the back of them, it had Mike Fairholme’s name because he’d designed them. Much later on, I needed a paint job on my new helmet and I went to Mike Fairholme because he was the only guy I had ever heard of! It turns out he is the Holy Grail of design and painting. He has done people like David Coulthard and when you go to his paint shop it is like a sweet shop of all these famous designs. He has done mine ever since.
“Up until I joined the BTCC in 2002, I just had a white crash helmet. Then, for 2002, there was a guy who worked for WSR called Tubbs Wanigasekera and we put a design together. The only stand out feature was a ‘T’on the side and it had the Tom Kristensen-style flame over the top.”
Question: “Would you consider competing in any other championship or stick with British Touring Car Championship?”
@shaz_babes1
Via Twitter
MN: You have looked around in your career and you’ve raced – and won – in the World Touring Car Championship and you tackled the Scandinavian
Touring Car Championship too…
CT: “It has been predominantly BTCC. There are loads of championships I look at and admire – things like Australian Supercars and I also like watching Formula E. I keep an eye on WTCR too, but if you ask me and I had a choice of what I wanted to compete in this year or next or going forward, it would always be the BTCC. It is the one I grew up wanting to do. It works on many levels for me, and it works financially too because I can get sponsors to go and do it.
“I look at Australian Supercars and also know that it would be very difficult for me to go over there and do that and do it well because all of those guys are specialists in their field. When somebody from the outside comes to try and do the BTCC they find it tough, because we are all pretty much specialists in our field. It is a case of sticking to what you are good at. I do enjoy those other series, but I think for me to be happy on many levels, the BTCC is where I need to be.”
Question: “My nine-year-old son Danny would like to know what do you do in your spare time other than race in the British Touring Car Championship?” Lisa Kerry
Via Twitter
CT: “What would he like me to say!? That I play Fortnite on the computer? One thing Danny might like to know is that my two boys – Lewis and Adam – are a similar age to him. They are nine and 10. So we do a lot of things that Danny probably does too. We ride our bikes, we play football and we go to the park, things like that. We like doing stuff like that. Me personally, outside of the racing, all of my time is taken up with promotional activities with BMW, with my own sponsors and there is also a lot of time dedicated towards fitness. Also, there is preparation for the races.”
Question: “What’s your favourite food?” Graham Johnston
Via Twitter
MN: You and your wife Louise work very hard at making sure you get the right nutrition, don’t you? It is a very big part of your approach to racing.
CT: “It is. It is an area that I suppose I was probably forced down. Back in 2013 I contracted Bell’s palsy: one half of me certainly looked a bit odd. To cut a long story short, the way they treat that is to give you a course of antivirals and steroids. Everybody reacts differently to these things, but the steroids completely changed my gut. I used to just eat whatever I wanted and whatever was set down to me. I didn’t consider what I ate too much, but then I started to experience problems, so I had to start to look into nutrition. I adapted my diet and I had to try and get the best out of it for my sport. So what foods do I enjoy? Fish would be my favourite food, but not fish and chips.
I am a master at cooking fish on the barbecue. And within that, salmon would be my favourite. That and vegetables is what I enjoy too. For most people it is grim, but I like it.”
Question: “Is there anything you want to achieve in the British Touring Car Championship, or in racing in general, that you haven’t yet managed to do?” Wes Hooker
Via Twitter
MN: You are also on the cusp of beating Andy Rouse’s record of four titles, which
you equalled last year. But that is not something you talk about very often… CT: “I don’t speak about the Rouse record too much because for me it is about the feeling you get when you win. That selffulfilment when it is over and you are champion. You have put in a year of work and graft and you are number one in that year. So it is not the actual titles or the number of them that you have won that brings me the joy, it is the journey to get there. I don’t know if people will understand that. But I think I can easily explain it if you think about the Monday morning after the Brands Hatch final. On the Sunday, you are on the crest of a wave. You are at the peak, and your emotions are very high. You are so happy, and then the very next week you are on the decline. That feeling doesn’t last too long.”
MN: Wasn’t there one year recently that you were testing for the next season the very week that you’d won a title?
CT: “That is true: it was 2018, I think.
Last year, on the Monday after the title was won, I was on a plane to China to compete in the Chinese Touring Car Championship. The feeling you have in that one moment of being the champion, it doesn’t really carry you through life. You come to realise that it is actually the process that you enjoy the most. It is what brings me the most joy. I can’t say that
I am trying to get to number five to win the most number of titles, but of course I am trying to win this year. It is about the journey to get there: it is not about it being number five and having won more than anybody else.”
MN: So it is something you will look back on when you retire and consider all you have achieved in motorsport?
CT: “For sure, but I know that every year it is tougher. Even though I have won the title in the past two years, you keep having to consider how you can make yourself better. I am going to have to be, I know that.”
MN: Those championship showdown days at Brands Hatch are loved by everyone. The fans love them, the media love them, everyone does. But they seem to be getting harder for the drivers to simply get through the day…it takes an awful lot out of the competitors.
CT: “When I am 80 years old, 90 years old, or Colonel Tom Moore’s age and reflect on my life, those will be the days that stand out. They are incredible on so many levels and I think because of the preparations for them, and the emotions that you go through, the ups and downs, it makes it such an intense moment.
Win, lose or draw, you are put through the ringer. It is always a knife-edge scenario to see whether you come out on top or not.
They are amazing to be involved with, and even the ones that you don’t win, you take a lot from that. In fact, you probably take as much from the losses as you do from the wins. They are very important days, but they are incredible just to be involved with if you are going there as part of the showdown. The hype and focus is totally ramped up at Brands Hatch. You do feel like the eyes of everyone are on you and the rest of the world stops. Nothing else matters. It is a nice feeling for that day.” MN: You are pretty good at compartmentalising everything and not getting wrapped up in the highs and lows of things, but that day tests you to the limit. It must be impossible not to get swept along on an emotional roller coaster?
CT: “You have no option in that because the day will not go as you plan, you hope or as you imagine. Every year you look back on there is a curveball and you are sent on a different path than the one you want to be on. Immediately your emotions come into play and it is you against 29 others. It is not like you are in a boxing match and it is just one on one. There is so much out of our control and that is what makes it so difficult. The other drivers are there, there is the weather, the car set-up, tyres: so much to take into account. That is why when you do manage to win it, it is such an incredible feeling.”
Question: “How do you prepare yourself mentally for each race? Do you tend to visualise situations or try to clear your head?”
James Thornton
Via Twitter
CT: “You have to go to the event prepared. You have to go with a bank of knowledge in your subconscious so that when you have to make the quick decisions you have something to dip into in your mind immediately. You get to a situation when you know you have been there before and you recognise what could happen: you know whether to go inside or outside someone. You are making thousands of micro-decisions in the cockpit, but they are based on pre-event planning. Things like visualisation are very important.
You visualise what type of start you want to make, how you are going to do your qualifying lap, etc. You visualise the perfect way to do it and then you work towards that.”
MN: Preparing before each event, is that looking at data? Is it watching onboards? Do you look at the ITV4 coverage? How do you go about it?
CT: “It is a mixture of all that really. Before each race meeting, it is about refreshing yourself on the circuit and how best to drive that circuit. You have to look in the past and see what the best setup was for each venue. You are basically doing revision. By the end of any race weekend, you feel you are really in the groove, you know a track inside out and you’ve cracked it and the car’s good. So, in 12 months’time when you go back, you want to be starting from that point. You want to try to get back to that place when you return where everything is flowing.”
Question: “What’s it like adapting between rear-wheel drive and frontwheel drive as you so often have in your BTCC career?”
Thomas Harrison-lord
Via Twitter
CT: “My default is rear-wheel drive: I don’t have to think about driving a rearwheel-drive car to know how to extract the most out of it. That comes from my karting career, I guess. The more power you have, the more difficult it is. My early career was in Ford Fiestas, Metros and things like that. It is low power, so you have time to make corrections. When you put the throttle down, you aren’t getting too much power, there is no power understeer or torque steer.
But when you have a BTCC car that is 360bhp or 370bhp and turbo, that is when it becomes difficult. For me in a front-wheel-drive car, I just have to coach myself a little bit more. I have to be more disciplined. This goes back to the question before, but you have to do your preparation slightly differently towards that so that I will understand the things that I need to do to make me fast. Front-wheel-drive cars are just about managing the front axle. You just have to be disciplined but try to understand the principles.”
Question: “Would you like to see the return of night racing and pitstops in the British Touring Car Championship? Simon Palmer
Via Twitter
Ct:“pitstops, no, because I think that pitstops potentially break up a good battle on the track. In my experience it is very hard to come out of the pitstop situation as the winner. Nine times out of 10, you lose because maybe there has been an issue in the stop. We want to go racing and, for me, pitstops are more about endurance racing. We, in touring cars, are all about action and entertainment. Things can go wrong in the pits, but I think it is more fun seeing things go wrong actually on the track.
The fans would prefer to see a car going off the track because they are going too fast or they have been punted off rather than a wheelnut falling off.
“Night races? I don’t really know. I did the Ford Fiesta night race at Silverstone in 2001. For me, it didn’t bring a lot. I think if you are somewhere like Singapore, it is pretty cool, so I would certainly advocate an overseas round! Night races, I just think it is an added complication that is not needed. I don’t know if it brings an extra spectacle for drivers or fans. It would be cool to do Le Mans one time and experience driving at night, and the different phases of it going into darkness, but I don’t feel passionate about a night BTCC race. It has been done in the past, but it’s not something I crave.”
Question: Would he follow in Jason Plato’s footsteps and write a book about your career?
BTCC Addict
Via Twitter
CT: “I think when I have finished racing I would, if I feel that there’s an interesting enough story there. I feel that I would have a lot to say, but not about the racing so much and the teams and cars, etc. It would be more about my personal battle with racing, so to speak, and the demons that a driver faces, the psychological side. I don’t talk about it much now, so it would be something I would do when I have hung up the helmet. I think I would have a lot that people would be interested to hear about. It is all about the mental preparation and the regular tortures that you go through, the insecurities, and all that side of things. So potentially, yes.” ■