Turkington removed from independents’ championship

Colin Turkington will no longer be able to score points in the Yokohama Independents’ trophy, with his old BMW judged to be even more competitive than the TDI’s.

With the championship points system being changed ahead of the weekend almost putting the independents’ trophy out of reach, the eBay Motors/West Surrey Racing team, which has struggled to find sponsorship to run just these three races in the WTCC, has been judged to be too competitive with the four year old BMW 320si, and has been excluded from the independents’ category altogether.

Series Managaer Marcello Lotti explains the reasoning behind the decision:
“When I met the independent competitors last year in Macau, with the aim to establish the regulations for the 2010 Independents’ Trophy, it was decided to make the turbodiesel cars not eligible – because of their performances – and the race-by-race entries eligible, and also to maintain the extra point for each WTCC point.”

“Since then things happened that made those decisions inappropriate: the adoption of the Formula One point scale, the dispute over the ‘old’ and ‘new’ cars and the arrival of a race-by-race entered car that has even better performance than the turbodiesels. Therefore I took the decision to make these changes in order to preserve the spirit of both the Trophy and the Macau meeting, and also not to unbalance the competition among the full season competitors.”

This is Colin Turkington’s last planned appearance in the championship, with the team trying to arrange funding to compete at the final two races of the season in Japan & Macau, where double points were available in the independents’ trophy.

As a result of today’s decision, Turkington will be invisible to the independents’ category, and we only be classified in the overall championship where he is currently twelfth, just four points behind SEAT’s Jordi Gené.