Oulton Park ends short early season break for the BTCC

The Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship roars into Cheshire this weekend for Rounds 10-12 of the championship, with another unpredictable weekend in sight.

Matt Neal goes in with the championship lead after strong performances at the last few weekends at Donington Park and Thruxton, but the 2005-2006 champion isn’t focussing on that yet.

“I’ve been in this position somehow for the last couple of years, leading about this point in championship and it’s all gone wrong, so I’m not even thinking about the championship yet,” said Neal to TouringCarTimes.

Last year saw the first signs on track of Silverline Chevrolet driver Jason Plato’s building frustration with the turbo-assisted Arena Ford Focuses, with the 2010 champion admitting to pushing Tom Onslow-Cole out of the way to take the lead. The incident saw Plato collect an endorsement on his racing licence.

Those points will disappear from Plato’s licence next week, but the same can’t be said for Plato’s young team-mate Alex MacDowall, who now has to tread very carefully for the remainder of the season. The 20-year-old from Carlisle has now amassed nine points on his licence since the beginning of the year, and a maximum award of three points for any transgression will see the Chevrolet Cruze driver pick-up a three month ban.

The main focus of the weekend will be TOCA’s new changes to try to balance the performance of the teams which are running completely to the FIA Super 2000 regulations with normally aspirated 2.0 litre engines from this weekend.

Silverline Chevrolet, Tech-Speed Motorsport & Team ES Racing have all been permitted to drop 25kg from their base weight in order to bring them closer to the teams which are running S2000 cars with Next Generation Touring Car (NGTC) specificiation 2.0 litre turbocharged engines.

Tech-Speed racer Paul O’Neill is concerned the team might not be able to take full advantage of TOCA’s latest dispensation however.
“If we can get the weight out of the car that we are now allowed to take out, then that is going to help us move up a few places in qualifying and get into the top ten,” said O’Neill.

“Then we can focus on building on that in the races. The lower base weight is a start, but we found a few things on the car that we wanted to look at and the guys have worked hard to make some changes ahead of the weekend.”

Two-times champion Jason Plato is a little more optimistic than usual going into the weekend, with a car which will be 70kg lighter than championship leader Matt Neal’s Honda Civic.

Writing in his column at The Sun, the 43-year-old double champion said:
“The series organisers TOCA have acknowledged that the equalisation between normally-aspirated cars like my Silverline Racing Chevrolet Cruze and my turbo-powered rivals has not been right for the first three events, as they have changed the rules.”

“And bearing in mind we’ve been given a 25kg weight break to counteract the performance of the turbos, coupled with the fact I have no success ballast on my Chevy, it’s fair to say that provided I do a good enough job, I have a shout at pole position.”

The first three races of the season have seen some dominant performances from the Honda Racing Team, with all of the other turbo-powered cars playing catch-up to keep near Matt Neal and Gordon Shedden. All the turbo teams will be careful throughout practice, with the threat of a 0.05 bar boost reduction hanging over all of them as per a posted bulletin from TOCA.

Though looking at previous performances alone you’d be silly to not predict pole and at least a win from Honda, the new light-weight Chevrolets could well be right in the mix this weekend in qualifying, as well as the races.