The 2011 BTCC season came to a close at the weekend, and the many and various champions were crowned – driver, independent driver, team, independent team, manufacturer/constructor. Comprehensive, no? No.

Paid drivers are commonplace in motorsport. But in the BTCC, many drivers don’t just bring sponsors, they are the sponsors. That’s why I think, as well as an Independents Trophy, the BTCC should have a Business Class.

The criterion is simple: if your company is on the car, then you are a business driver.

It excludes John George on a technicality – he’s nearly but not quite involved in Go Mobile. I’ll also ignore Dave Pinkney, who entered the first round but failed to start a race. Otherwise, hopefully I’ve got them all.

So how would the 2011 BTCC Business Class have looked? For simplicity, I’ll use points from the overall standings, rather than the separate points systems used for the Independents Trophy.

2011 BTCC Business Class Standings

1. Nick Foster – 47 points
   Chairman, Contour Electronics

   Your champion is Nick Foster. His outright podium finish in the third race at Croft, albeit from a reverse grid pole, secured his position as clearly the strongest of the business drivers.

   Scored a little under half the points of vastly more experienced team mate Rob Collard. Second placed of this year’s rookies, behind only Frank Wrathall.

2. Dave Newsham – 31 points
   Managing Director, Norscott Vending (parent company of coffeedrops.co.uk)

   Dave Newsham didn’t have the most straight-forward season, contesting the first couple of meetings in a Geoff Steel BMW, missing the third, then switching to a Special Tuning Seat Leon from the fourth round onwards. Despite that, he’s our runner-up, thanks mainly to a strong final round at Silverstone.

   Due to his swapping teams, it’s not easy to compare his performance, but his tally of 31 points looks respectable against the 76 of Tom Boardman, the other, more experienced, season-long Special Tuning driver.

3. Jeff Smith – 19 points
   Owner, Industrial Control Distributors

   Now we start to see some disparities. The other Pirtek car, driven by Andrew Jordan, amassed 143 points.

4. Andy Neate – 15 points
   Chief Technology Officer, Ceravision

   Tom Chilton was the other season-long driver of a brand new Team Aon Global Ford Focus, and he managed 135 points. Tom Onslow-Cole did the second half of the season with the team, and at Silverstone alone scored more points than Neate did all season. In fact, Onslow-Cole and Chilton both managed that at each of the final two rounds of the season.

5. Liam Griffin – 2 points
   Managing Director, Addison Lee

   Here we go: Matt Jackson in the other Airwaves Racing Ford Focus scored 191 points. Michael Caine contested two rounds, and James Thompson just the one, in a third car for the team; between them they equalled Liam Griffin’s season-long total of 2 points.

6. Tony Hughes – 0 points
   Managing Director, Hughes Safety Showers

   No points, but in his defence, he only entered five of the nine rounds, and that was in a brand new NGTC Toyota Avensis, which took time to come good even in the hands of Frank Wrathall.

What’s my point? Not that businessmen effectively buying drives in the BTCC is a bad thing in and of itself.

Rather that lumping them all together and generalising is not helpful: some of these drivers deserve to be in the BTCC, some of them not so much. I think it’s helpful to make that distinction.

Experience counts

Nick Foster spent about a decade rallying, then moved into circuit racing, which he had been dabbling in since 2006, before moving up to the BTCC this year. It would be hard to argue that he doesn’t belong in the championship, given his debut season performance.

Liam Griffin, on the other hand, has only been racing since 2008. He did well in two seasons of the VW Cup, but 20th in the 2010 Porsche Carrera Cup GB should maybe have suggested that he might not be ready for the BTCC. This season would seem to bear that out.

So it’s not that businessmen are stepping up to the BTCC, but that in the current climate, some of them are doing so before they’ve got the necessary experience for it. Not only that, but with top teams – hence some of the huge disparities above, when their team mates are front-running drivers.

In some cases it’s fine, in others it’s a bit of a waste, and in a few it verges on the ridiculous. But, as I said, that’s the current climate. On that note: at least we had nice full grids.

Photo Credit
Peter Stanton – Flickr – Some rights reserved