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Touring Cars – BTCC, WTCC
This tweet, during the opening round of the BTCC season at Brands Hatch a fortnight ago, got me thinking:
The BTCC continues this weekend at Donington Park, so I thought I’d answer the question we’re all asking: how does Jason Plato compare to Plato?
Quite similar, then. Credits
I don’t know about you, but if someone makes no effort with me, then I’m not inclined to make much effort with them. I think that’s where I am with the WTCC. I don’t want to seem petty. I was moderately excited about the glamorous-sounding World Touring Car Championship when it was resurrected in 2005, and enthusiastically went along to the race at Silverstone that year. I followed it reasonably closely on Eurosport when I had the channel, and thereafter made an effort to catch the highlights on ITV4. That changed last year, when the WTCC disappeared from free-to-air TV in the UK. That continues this year. But also this year, for the first time, there’s no race in the UK. Ever get the feeling you’re not loved? National vs InternationalPerhaps that’s part of the reason that, as new WTCC pitlane reporter Ben Constanduros intimated, the UK holds the BTCC in higher regard. It might not be objectively fair, but it’s obvious why: the cars are ostensibly identical, so the racing looks the same, but the BTCC is broadcast live on free-to-air TV and tours UK circuits. Is it a coincidence that Germany, home to the DTM, also has no WTCC race? The fact is, the WTCC doesn’t really care about the UK – or probably Germany for that matter. It’s far more interested in emerging markets – and if that’s what the championship’s stakeholders want, then fair enough. After all, it’s not the only series to desert the UK this year: the Silverstone round of the free-to-attend World Series by Renault clearly wasn’t doing enough for Renault’s UK sales figures. National to InternationalBut what’s vaguely surprising to me is that the WTCC seems to hold a significant appeal for British drivers. No less than four are moving across from the BTCC this year: Tom Chilton, James Nash, Alex MacDowall and the returning Tom Boardman. It’s perhaps not a given that Nash and MacDowall are moving entirely by choice. But Chilton’s Team Aon and Boardman’s Special Tuning Racing are moving and expanding respectively into the WTCC, so it’s clear that the world stage is where they want to be. That’s despite the WTCC being basically invisible in the UK compared to the BTCC. ShameWith so much British interest, I want to be more enthusiastic about the WTCC season ahead. It should be fascinating to see how they all get on; MacDowall is already making headlines in testing. But the WTCC makes it so damned difficult to be enthusiastic. Shame, that. Photo Credit 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 & BSBThere’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. InternationalInevitably 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.
Photo Credit 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:
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 starI’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. ExcerptsOn 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
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 countsNick 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
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.
Quite similar, then. Photo Credits
After its traditionally hefty summer break, the BTCC is back this weekend. RegulationsIt’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:
Will the latest turbo reduction stop the normally aspirated folk – by which I mean Jason Plato – from moaning? We’ll see. Size mattersHere’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 |
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