The BTCC made a bit of a thing recently of tickets for all this season’s meetings now being on sale.

That got me wondering about how much motorsport tickets vary in price. As is my wont at such times, research and a little visualisation followed. Not every venue has every event on sale yet – for example British F3 & GT meetings aren’t all available yet – so I’ve stuck to the main events: BTCC, British Superbikes, and international championships.

There’s a surprising conclusion, that I really wasn’t expecting: Silverstone is the UK’s bargain motorsport venue.

BTCC & BSB

There’s not a lot of variation in the big two domestic championships. All the MotorSport Vision venues – Brands Hatch, Cadwell Park, Oulton Park, Snetterton – are £25 a pop for race day general admission, as are Donington Park, Knockhill and Thruxton.

The only ones below that are Croft at £24, and Silverstone with an early bird price of £23.20. Do Silverstone’s haul of big international events create economies of scale that enable them to undercut the competition?

Rockingham is the only venue at over £25, though in fairness their £26 includes a grandstand seat as standard. Mainly because there’s virtually nowhere else to watch from.

International

Inevitably Formula Two is the cheapest international event, and again Silverstone comes out on top at £9 compared to £17 at Brands Hatch. You could argue that the Brands Hatch event is co-headlined by the International GT Open, and that Silverstone’s support line-up of Radicals and Minis is not comparable. But having been to F2 at Brands Hatch last year, I can assure you that it’s not worth the asking price, relative to other events.

Next up at £29 is DTM, which doesn’t really work on the Brands Hatch Indy circuit. Moving on, then.

The Superbike World Championship is another where Silverstone wins: £32 compared to £40 at Donington Park.

Silverstone is also the most expensive venue though – but then, hosting the two premier class championships, that’s not much of a surprise. There are still early bird discounts to be had on MotoGP, starting at £52, but no such luck with Formula 1, which is quite the leap up at £135 or more. Perhaps there’s something to the argument that F1 is subsidising everything else at Silverstone.

The festivities are over for another year, everyone’s back at work, it’s wet and windy, the news is unremittingly bleak – it’s easy to get down. So, in an effort to keep SAD at bay, here are some reasons to be blindly optimistic.

• It may be months until the new motorsport year gets into full flow, but until then there’s testing and, more importantly and immediately, the Dakar to keep us occupied. Unfortunately Australian broadcaster SBS seems to be finally using geolocation on its website, but with the likes of JMLatvalaFan around on YouTube, even that’s no reason to be down if you’ve not got Eurosport.
• It’s true that the first couple of Formula 1 races won’t be live on the BBC – but don’t dispair, non-Sky types! I for one look forward to having no temptation to get up ludicrously early. I like F1, but I also like a lie-in.
• I also like Ben Edwards, the BBC’s new F1 commentator. His excitable enthusiasm made ITV’s BTCC coverage what it is, and he’ll be a tough act to follow there. But I can’t wait to hear him getting excited about F1 on a regular basis.
• The new CRT entries in MotoGP may not bother the aliens for podium places, but they’ll add much needed bikes to the grid. And in the same way as the new F1 teams a couple of years ago, the battle to be the least bad of them will be something else to keep an eye on. They have to be welcomed.
• It’s not great in the WRC at the moment – just ask North One Sport or Kris Meeke. But it’s not all bad: we can look forward to Loeb versus Hirvonen at Citroen, Petter Solberg in a factory Ford, and Citroens for new faces Nasser Al-Attiyah and Thierry Neuville. We just need the commercial side sorting in the next fortnight, to avoid the Monte’s return to the WRC being less than the triumph it ought to be.
• With Evo regulations as standard this year, there’s every reason to hope that British Superbikes will be even more competitive than 2011. The entry list is filling up nicely, too.
• There’s never much known about the BTCC at this time of year, and 2012 is no different. But with most other grids broadly known quantities already, it’s nice to have a big reveal to look forward to – and that’s what the BTCC Media Day, a couple of weeks before the season starts, usually is.

Photo Credit
Houston Marsh – Flickr – Some rights reserved

Which nation is best at motorsport? Well, I thought I’d try to find out. To do so, I threw the final standings of an entirely arbitrary selection of world championships – Formula 1, WRC, WTCC, MotoGP and Superbike World Championship – at a spreadsheet, normalised the points to a total of 100 per championship, and totalled them up by nation. Then I made a pretty pie chart.

It’s impossible to make this fair, the most obvious issue being three car championships and only two bike. But given the extent to which Spain and Italy dominate on two-wheels, it doesn’t seem too unreasonable. Plus, this way, the UK comes out on top. Which is the most important thing.

The UK and Spain – second overall – are the only nations to score in every one of the five championships – albeit the UK not very well in WRC and MotoGP, and Spain in WRC and WTCC. They’re followed by Italy, overwhelmingly thanks to lots of riders doing quite well – without winning championships – in MotoGP and SBK. Though to be fair, no championships were brought back to the UK either.

France is fourth, thanks to a couple of championships – Yvan Muller in WTCC, Sebastien Loeb in WRC – and Loeb’s new favourite rival Sebastien Ogier. Almost all of fifth place Germany’s points came from F1, and two-thirds of those from Sebastian Vettel.

Outside the top five, we finally leave Europe, and find Australia, represented almost exclusively by Casey Stoner and Mark Webber. Finland, in seventh, inevitably gets all its points from the WRC, chiefly Mikko Hirvonen and Jari Matti-Latvala.

The USA in eighth is pretty much the MotoGP lads, since most American drivers tend to stay in America. Ninth is Norway, courtesy of Mads Ostberg and the Solbergs in WRC. Alain Menu’s WTCC third place near single-handedly takes tenth for Switzerland.

The whole table follows for your delectation:

(more…)

The FIA has issued a new Driver’s Guide to Safe Motor Sport. It’s a very serious document, of course, but it’s also got a bit of personality.

Cover star

I’m not sure that it’s a compliment to be chosen to adorn the cover of such a document. That dubious honour goes to Sergio Perez, whose qualifying crash in Monaco this year is presumably intended to illustrate the safety of the sport, rather than serve as a judgement on his driving.

Excerpts

On pre-event precautions: “It makes sense to remove false teeth.” Well, motorsport is not exclusively a young person’s game. Michael Schumacher, Pedro de la Rosa, almost all of the WTCC – I’m looking at you.

On helmets: “Don’t forget to peel the protective plastic wrap off a new visor (it happens, even in Formula 1!).” Oh, come on! You can’t tease like that and not deliver the goods! Go on, tell us. It was Mark Blundell, wasn’t it?

On safety harness belts: “Wear them as tight as possible (whilst still breathing).” No comment, it’s just a good line.

An appendix gives advice on what to eat and drink, including the suggestion to “include a few biscuits” in any pre-race meal. Maybe I was destined to be a racing driver after all.

The guide also also features quips on co-drivers, bowels and more. In addition to some actual safety advice. Good job, FIA!

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

It’s ten years since the first Rockingham 500, when the Northamptonshire circuit welcomed to this green and pleasant land the oval-stylings of North American open-wheel racing, in the form of CART.

To celebrate, the BTCC meeting at the weekend featured a demonstration run by an old Penske IndyCar, blasting around the oval. It was a lot of fun.

Unfortunately it’s also only nine years since the last Rockingham 500. There was a road race on the Brands Hatch Indy circuit in 2003, but since then: nothing.

The failure to tempt American oval racing to these shores on a permanent basis leaves Rockingham as something of a curiosity. The oval is still used – for Pick Up Truck Racing – but the overwhelming majority of racing is now on the road course.

The oval has its benefits though. It makes Rockingham a pretty unique spectating experience as BTCC circuits go: it’s completely flat, and from the grandstands which line half of the perimeter, you can see virtually the whole track.

Plus the paddock is always open, and you can even watch from the atop the pit garages. It’s great.

The problem is filling those grandstands. Their capacity is a huge 52,000, of which more than 40,000 were reportedly filled in 2008. This year? Only two of the five grandstands were open, and there was no issue getting a seat. I was last at Rockingham in 2007, and it was definitely busier then too.

So what’s the problem? Well, there’s nothing much wrong with the track: it played host to three eminently enjoyable touring car races. Its location can’t help though: Silverstone and Donington Park are both within 50 miles of the circuit, and easier to get to by road.

I love wandering around those more traditional circuits, but there’s a lot to be said for the sheer ease and accessibility of Rockingham too. It’s different, and it’s nice that it’s there to add a bit of variety to the UK’s motorsport landscape.

I just wish I’d known about those CART races ten years ago; Corby can’t have known what hit it.

Thanks to Dunlop Inside Racing for inviting me to Rockingham. You can still win tickets for Brands Hatch and Silverstone in their BTCC prize draw.

The news today was that Michael Caine will be driving a third Ford Focus for Airwaves Racing in the BTCC at Rockingham.

That’s Michael Caine, to be intentionally confused with that Michael Caine, for hilarious comic effect. Not here though.

Instead, let’s see how the Michael Caines compare. (That’s not to be confused with the chef Michael Caines, who coincidentally is working with Williams F1 this season.)

Let’s just have a table.

Film credits	0	154
Seasons in motorsport	18	0
Oscars	0	2
Autosport British Club Driver of the Year Awards	1	0
Batman films	0	3
Championships won in Caterhams	3	0

Quite similar, then.

Photo Credits
Not That Michael Caine: Motorbase Performance
That Michael Caine: Anthony Lockton – Flickr – Some rights reserved

After its traditionally hefty summer break, the BTCC is back this weekend.

Regulations

It’s not a massive surprise that there’s been yet another turbo boost reduction since the last meeting, in the never ending, thankless quest to equalise the performance of the turbo NGTC engines and the normally aspirated S2000 engines.

As a result, the volume of moaning from NGTC-engined entrants has increased. This understandable tweet from Matt Neal last week, for example:

“New boost reduction for turbo cars for #BTCC Snett. Chevy was on pole at Croft by 3/10ths & now we’re restricted further. Hilarious! »:-/”

Will the latest turbo reduction stop the normally aspirated folk – by which I mean Jason Plato – from moaning? We’ll see.

Size matters

Here’s something I find amusing. Most of the grid is made up of cars with a S2000 chassis and an NGTC engine. A lot of these chassis – including the championship leading Honda Civic – are too short to conform to the full NGTC regulations.

The Chevrolet Cruze, meanwhile, is one of the few to exceed the required 4.4m. So the car most vocally stuck in the past, is actually more capable than most of embracing the future.

Meanwhile, in Scandinavia…

The regulation wrangling in the BTCC is bad enough, but it has nothing on the situation in Scandinavia – as expertly covered by TouringCarTimes.

The Scandinavian Touring Car Championship has long talked about adopting NGTC regulations. It met opposition from some of the teams, who joined forces to form the TTA (Touring Car Team Association).

With NGTC regulations now set in stone for the STCC, the TTA have decided to form their own championship, based on the Solution F silhouette car.

It’s a right old mess. History – specifically North American open-wheel racing – suggests that it will probably end badly for everyone.

So, tedious though it can be to sit through the BTCC’s inexact equalisation process, at least it’s still one championship, and it seems in reasonable health.

Photo Credit
Tony Harrison, flickr – Some rights reserved

Ah, the wildcard entry. There’s little better than seeing a rider or driver on an unfamiliar grid, beating the regulars. Unless you’re one of the regulars, of course.

Formula 1

Formula 1 doesn’t do wildcards. It’s a shame, but I can’t see how it could work.

Ferrari – famously keen on the idea of running a three-car team – would probably enter a wildcard at every race. Probably the same driver, if they could get away with it.

Instead, one driver getting a chance in F1 means another losing out. Karun Chandhok is the lucky one this weekend in Germany, taking the place of Jarno Trulli at Team Lotus. No bad thing.

MotoGP

Maybe it’s because there’s not as much spare cash sloshing around the sport, but there are no such restrictions on wildcards in MotoGP. And they can provide some real highlights.

Troy Bayliss, for example, winning the final race of the 2006 season at Valencia, on a wildcard entry for Ducati, having already won the World Superbike title for them. That was in place of the injured Sete Gibernau though, so perhaps not the purest example of a wildcard.

There’s a proper wildcard entry for AMA rider Ben Bostrom this weekend at Laguna Seca. He’ll double the number of riders at LCR Honda, persumably as a bit of a kick up the arse for Toni Elias. It’ll be fascinating to see how he gets on.

Hopper

The man LCR Honda really wanted was apparently John Hopkins – who suddenly finds himself in demand this season, after a couple of troubled years.

His performance in British Superbikes has been one of the highlights of the year so far. To so quickly return to winning ways, on the unfamiliar and – shall we say – idiosyncratic, circuits of the British Isles is hugely impressive. Hands up who wouldn’t love to see him win the championship? If your hand’s up, shame on you.

He’s already been rewarded by Suzuki with one MotoGP race – standing in for an injured Alvaro Bautista at Jerez – and he’s got a wildcard entry on a second Suzuki at Brno next month. Not only that, but he – along with his BSB team-mate – has a wildcard entry for the World Superbike round at Silverstone.

You can’t blame him for passing on LCR Honda, and not risking his clearly very good relationship with Suzuki. Already I can’t wait to see what he’ll be doing next season.

Superbikes

He’s by no means the only superbike rider to get about.

Tom Sykes had a wildcard entry for the Brands Hatch GP round of British Superbikes last year, with the Kawasaki World Superbike team, and won two of the three races. He’s doing the same again this year.

And before he made his MotoGP debut proper in 2010, Ben Spies had a clutch of wildcard entries: three in 2008 for Suzuki, when he was riding for them in AMA; and one in 2009 for Yamaha, when he won the World Superbike title with them. He scored points in every one of them.

Four wheels

Unless I’m being an idiot – quite possible – wildcards on four wheels don’t tend to be quite so high profile.

There’s a bit of it in touring cars – Colin Turkington at the Donington Park round of the WTCC last weekend, for example. But that didn’t go terribly well.

Rallying too. Volkswagen, for example, preparing for the debut of the Polo R WRC in 2013, by running Skoda Fabia S2000s for various young drivers this season.

But most enticing is The $5,000,000 Challenge in IndyCar – which will see five non-regulars race at the finale in Las Vegas. The lure is a $5 million payout if they win the race. How great an idea is that? Very great.

If only Formula 1 had an appetite for that sort of thing…

The traditional lengthy BTCC summer break is an ideal time to have a look at where the points have gone so far.

Regulations

All the chatter so far this season has been around regulations, and the attempts to equalise the normally aspirated S2000 engines to the new turbo NGTC engines.

There are four combinations of regulations on the grid: NGTC; S2000 car, NGTC engine; S2000; BTC. How do they compare?

It’s not a secret that the pure NGTC cars have struggled so far, and failed to score a point. The only ageing BTC car has been Lea Wood at two meetings, and having scored any points at all is impressive.

More than half of the grid has been made up of the S2000/NGTC hybrid, and with nearly three-quarters of all the points scored, they have comfortably outperformed the other combinations. Which leaves the pure S2000 cars, whose share of the points isn’t far away from their share of the grid.

So has the NGTC engine been the deciding factor so far this season? No. Let’s look at the teams.

Teams

Most of the established teams have gone with the S2000/NGTC hybrid, so it’s no surprise that they have scored more than their fair share of the points.

It’s generally lower budget teams that have gone with the other regulations – with the notable exception of Silverline Chevrolet, responsible for an awful lot of the S2000 points.

So let’s compare the manufacturer, constructor and independent teams.

Manufacturer teams have scored twice their fair share of the points. I think that demonstrates the real answer.

Jason Plato can moan about the turbo engines as much as he likes – and with some justification. But at the end of the day, it’s not regulations that have created the greatest inequality – it’s money.