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The Jack Sears Trophy – it’s not rocket science

This year the BTCC has introduced something new in the Jack Sears Trophy for 2013. Named after the first ever champion of the BTCC back in 1958, who will ultimately present the trophy at the end of the season to the winner.

Who is eligible?
Anyone who is competing with a Super 2000 (S2000) specification car. S2000 are the FIA cars which introduced into the European (now World) Touring Car Championship in 2002, and adopted by the BTCC from 2004. Ultimately these are now being phased out for the Next Generation Touring Car (NGTC) specification cars. Although some (the BMW 320si, Chevrolet Cruze) were developed for the WTCC, the majority of S2000 cars in the BTCC were developed by the BTCC teams themselves, such as Triple Eight’s Vauxhall Vectra, Team Dynamics’ Honda Civic FN2 and Arena Motorsport’s Ford Focus ST.

Why is this being introduced?
Full NGTC specification cars began to be phased into the BTCC in 2011, and there was an assurance that performance parity would be maintained for at least two years from when that began. That time has now lapsed and so the adjustments (primarily to each cars’ turbo-boost levels) to ensure S2000 cars have as much of a chance to win races and championships as their NGTC counterparts will no longer apply. However, due to the expense of switching to new cars, and of course the abundance of both S2000 cars and drivers that wish to compete in the BTCC, the Jack Sears Trophy has been created in order to give anyone competing with an S2000 car a target, since overall and even independents’ class victories will become less attainable.

How will it be scored?
It’s not going to be scored like a typical championship. It’s not a replacement for the independents’ trophy either, which will continue to exist and be run exactly how it has been. The scoring system is remarkably simple – and if you remember the hoo-ha over Bernie Ecclestone’s medal system for awarding the F1 champion a few years ago, that’s basically how it’s going to work.

In each race, the highest finishing driver in an S2000-spec car will win a Jack Sears Trophy Cup. With 30 races in a season, there are 30 cups available. The driver at the end of the season with the most cups (or class wins if you prefer) will win the Jack Sears Trophy.

Why would they do something so different?
Ultimately, a third category will make things a little more confusing to the casual viewer, so making it another points-based championship, another race-within-a-race if you will in what is already a short, sharp, action packed event is certainly not wise. This way, the attention will simply be on who is the top classed S2000 driver.

Reflecting back on the BTCC’s own history, you can perhaps see the logic in awarding the trophy in this way. During the Super Touring era, the independent (then privateers’ class) had the minority number of cars when considering the number of manufacturer entries, which is similar to the grid size split and variation in performance we’ll see between NGTC and S2000 cars this year. During those races, the audiences attention was chiefly on the overall contenders, and this will be the case this year as well. There will however be at least some familiarity on the viewer’s part on who the winner of the Jack Sears Trophy class was in each race, and so it makes more sense to use this as a weighting for recognising the winner of the trophy, rather than using a points system. A good example of when a points system can produce a surprise result occured in 1998, when Matt Neal, then with the independent Team Dynamics team, had very noteworthy success in the championship with many top ten finishes, but the privateers trophy went to Tommy Rustad because Rustad was more focussed on independents’ trophy points.

Similarily, in 2008, when Mat Jackson finished second to works driver Fabrizio Giovanardi in the overall standings, but lost the independents’ trophy to West Surrey Racing’s Colin Turkington.

What if there’s a tie?
Then the usual procedure of a results countback applies. Obviously the number of wins would be identical, so the trophy would go to whoever had the most second place finishes in the S2000 class; if those are the same then the most thirds…and so on until a winner is found.

Is this a good thing?
Ultimately, an S2000 car is a very capable race car, and there are a lot of teams and mechanics who are already familiar with them and that don’t have the budget to make the switch to NGTC cars – most of which you have to have built new due to the demand, so adding more cars to the grid, even older second-hand S2000 cars, is always a plus. To give the drivers in that class something to aim for with the Jack Sears Trophy, rather than to just be a part of the show has already seen a good amount of interest in the class, and will see the grid numbers grow even more for this season. Also the unique way this trophy is scored could see some interesting behaviour. In effect, second place is almost worthless (well, unless there is a tie), so every driver’s objective will be to score that class victory in every race.

Rounds 7-9 of the British Touring Car Championship.