Back to before: Race 2 grids are back as they should be?

After just one year, fastest-lap derived grids for the second race of the day in the British Touring Car Championship has come to an end.

The practice, perhaps retrospectively being referred to as a trial seems to have split opinion.

I ran a quick, unscientific poll yesterday on some up-and-coming thing called Twitter, that everyone knows I hardly ever use, and the result was a perfectly split 50-50.

So it’s conclusive. 50% of people must be wrong somehow, just which 50% is the question.

The biggest benefit of the new-for-2015, gone-for-2016 system means you at least get mixed up grids for all three of the day’s races. Race two has always been in effect a continuation of race one’s result, except the “lucky” winner ends up with 75kg of ballast if they didn’t have it already and just carry on as they were.

The system also means you’ve got something else to focus on during the first race, effectively multi-tasking while following an old fashioned fastest-man starts first race, which has now somehow been spliced with a qualifying session at the same time. It was a great idea, as obviously those processional BTCC races needed spicing up somehow.

Oh wait a sec. No they didn’t. The BTCC’s one biggest merit is its ability to stake a claim as one of the closest and most action packed championships in the world, through a good mix of both accident and design. With closely matched cars featuring a standard spec-chassis, an engine equivalency formula to stop any of that runaway Formula 1 or WTCC Mercedes/Citroën behaviour from happening, a tyre formula which includes a set which seems especially designed to not last through one of the races, as well as wild swings of success ballast over and above the weight of a whole human being. After all this, something to distract the viewer from the racing wasn’t exactly needed, in my personal view, which I clearly share with 50% of all 54 people who completed my poll. Thank you to all of you.

OK, I might just be being selfish – as that qualifying format gave us scribbling away about the race at the track something else to deal with. The viewers could always switch off from the qualifying element of the race if they were finding it a distraction, but then if they’re doing that, what was the point of it in the first place?

Those against it could also say there was an unpopular element of “cheating”. Jason “Marmite” Plato was occassionally spotted sneaking his car into the pits at the start of the race, especially when the 75kg of success ballast had played its part in his race one grid position. It’s worth pointing out he certainly wasn’t the only driver to do this, but was certainly the one that got the most attention for it. You’ve got to love him after all, or hate him.

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However, in his (and the others) defence, he was just playing the system. Of course TOCA could introduce new rules to make this move an impossibility in the future. However, you already needed to have been classified in the race to have your lap time count for the race two grid, so adding a rule that said you must have started the race could help…but even then, the driver could just drop to the back at the start of the race instead, “build” a gap and go for a quick lap, so eventually you’d end up over-regulating it to the point where it’s almost impossible to work out the grid for race two in a timely manner.

So TOCA have done away with it, and also at the same time probably in the interests of fairness more than anything. You know, that “sport” thing.

If you combine all these issues, you have a similar problem to that which was seen in 2004, when the three race concept was first introduced.

Two-time champion James Thompson was notably vocal about the flaw that existed that year (as he packed his bags and left and then they changed it), when the race two grid was the reverse grid, and race three followed on using the race two result.

Thompson, then driving for Vauxhall, was battling against team-mate Yvan Muller in the then-dominant Triple Eight Vauxhall Astra for the title, but the pair had a season long threat from Jason “Reverse Grid” Plato, then driving for SEAT. SEAT’s Toledo had been developed for the ETCC, and was still fairly young in its development cycle and didn’t have the legs on Triple Eight’s sensational Astra Coupé. Plato realising this meant it was incredibly common to see him position himself near the back of the top ten in race one in order to have the best possible grid position for race two, which with a good result in that race would mean an equally strong grid spot for race three.

The whole process effectively devalued qualifying on pole position, as in effect you would score far more points across the weekend assuming a static set of races by starting near the back of the top ten instead.

The qualifying rules for this year’s BTCC almost reintroduced this flaw, with a trend being seen certainly later in the season when the championship story was nearing its completion, to see the race two fastest-lap manoeuvre happen all the more often, with drivers focussing on their race two and three results and sacrificing race one.

In the end, the race two grid format was perhaps one card up its sleeve more than the BTCC needed, with it already having thrilling races and plenty of other tricks to mix things up with the self-destructing soft tyres and hefty success ballast, which delivered another season of close racing, another down-to-the-wire title battle with ten different race winners from 30.