The highs and lows of the 2013 BTCC
The festive season is upon us, the turkey is being plumped up – so what better time to reflect on another year of classic British Touring Car Championship action?
It will undoubtedly be a very merry Christmas for series supremo Alan Gow, who can afford himself a smile after masterminding yet another season which had the fans biting their nails until the very last race.
Gow says the legacy he is creating in the Next Generation Touring Car era will eventually be looked back upon as ‘the good old days’, and if every season is as good as 2013, it may be hard to argue with him.
Here, TouringCarTimes looks back on the top five highs and lows of the season.
HIGHS
1) Andrew Jordan – BTCC champion
It seems an obvious place to start, but Eurotech Racing’s Andrew Jordan was a very worthy maiden champion. Like the racehorse which times its run to the line perfectly, Jordan took the lead at a crucial point in the season, and there he stayed until the end. The 24-year-old has improved every year he has been in the BTCC, and raised his game to establish himself among the touring car elite in 2013. The DNF in the penultimate race created an incredibly tense finale, but Jordan came through with flying colours. The tears at the end represented the culmination of years of hard work with dad Mike, and nobody could begrudge them an extremely popular success. The sky is surely the limit now for the second member of the Jordan family to put a national British championship trophy on the mantelpiece.
2) Andrew Jordan v Jason Plato: A Silverstone classic
The master versus the coming man. Wily old fox Jason Plato, his MG weighed down by full success ballast, is caught by Andrew Jordan, his Honda Civic light and fast. What follows is the best battle in the best race of the season. Plato changes his lines and driving style radically to hold off Jordan, defending into Becketts on every lap. The pair are side-by-side for the best part of a whole lap, neither giving an inch. Plato eventually wins out in a fight with a great deal of mutual respect between the drivers. Both described it as great touring car racing afterwards, and you’d be hard pressed to disagree with them.
3) Sherman takes his first victory
The roar when Rob Austin crossed the line to take his maiden win at Rockingham could have taken the roof off the giant Rockingham grandstand – and there’s no doubt that many of the fans sitting in it helped make it happen. Austin engineers his own car and races on a shoestring, so the support of fans after his enormous Brands shunt helped keep him on the grid. It’s not difficult to see why the Aviator-shod Austin appeals to the fans, and that’s not just because he’s the sort of bloke you’d enjoy going for a pint with. He’s a mean driver as well, and took his win entirely on merit. Characters like Austin help make the BTCC what it is, and seeing him make it to the top was undoubtedly one of the stories of the year.
4) Turkington conquers Croft
Colin Turkington’s near-perfect weekend at Croft was a remarkable achievement in the new, under-developed West Surrey Racing BMW 125i – but it wasn’t really a surprise to his long-term supporters. The 2009 champion reminded BTCC fans what they had been missing in his first year of full-time racing since that memorable triumph. Pole position, two race wins and a second place was the best individual result any driver achieved on any single weekend, and Turkington went on to stage what seemed an unlikely title bid. The fact he fell away at the end was more down to other people driving into him, rather than any faults on his part. Team-mate Rob Collard, who showed Tom Onslow-Cole the way in 2012 and is no slouch himself, couldn’t get anywhere near him.
5) 500 v 400 v the champion
The second Donington Park race saw Jason Plato take his 400th touring car start, and Matt Neal his 500th. And it was an absolute ripper. Plato, Neal and champion Gordon Shedden fought a thrilling battle for several laps, often passing inches apart at 140mph down the Craner Curves. There were no nudges, no false moves and no funny business. It was good, hard touring car racing which had you on the edge of your seat at all times. Next time someone tells you all BTCC drivers do is crash into each other, show them this race.
Honourable mentions….a vastly improved Adam Morgan, who took his first podium in a season which married his undoubted speed with consistency and racecraft; Sam Tordoff, the impressive rookie who took one win and gave Jason Plato plenty to think about; Lea Wood, the dominant force in the Jack Sears Trophy, who undoubtedly deserves a shot in NGTC machinery in 2013, Jack Goff, who took a brilliant podium in the wet to finish his maiden season, and Jake Hill, who in two fleeting appearances showed an awful lot of speed and promise.
LOWS
1) Snetterton standards
TcT carried what, on reflection, may have been a premature piece praising driving standards in the BTCC before this round. What followed was cars being fired off left, right and centre, with Matt Neal going as far as labelling some of the driving as “moronic”. It felt like the first day back at school, and was rounded off by Neal’s team-mate Gordon Shedden firing Colin Turkington off in the final race to take the lead. It was a blemish on what was generally a very clean season, and gave BTCC-bashers plenty of ammunition to work with.
2) Soft tyres
This is not a criticism of Dunlop, nor the soft tyre concept hatched by Alan Gow in the close season. But more often than not, the soft tyre didn’t have the dramatic impact on the races that many people thought it might. In some cases – notably WSR at Croft – teams used it to great effect, but more often than not it was a footnote in the race report. This was probably due in no small part to most teams opting to run the tyre in the final race, meaning we didn’t see the variation in strategies we probably expected to. Perhaps a more aggressive compound, with greater performance and greater drop-off, could be introduced in 2014.
3) Don’t mention the boost
We did once, but we think we got away with it. The boost issue was far less of a talking point in 2013, but the BTCC paddock will be a far happier place when it isn’t an issue at all. Even Jason Plato – who some believe has benefited from the disparity in boost levels – told TcT he thinks everyone should have the same power. At its worst, the rules allow inferior cars to maintain position when they really shouldn’t be able to. Take Matt Neal’s onboard camera at Snetterton as a case in point, as he follows Jack Goff’s evil-handling Vauxhall Insignia through the corners, and watches it disappear down the straights. But in 2012, the Hondas looked like they were towing a caravan down the straights at Silverstone, so slow was their top speed. They won two of the three races this year, so something must have improved.
4) Musical chairs at Tony Gilham Racing
TcT ran a piece with Tony Gilham after the team’s Thruxton heroics, about how they had proved all the doubters wrong by building four cars, and achieving great things with them. The team’s ambition was, and is, admirable, but things started to unravel when both James Cole and Tom Onslow-Cole left the team in quick succession. From then on in, the onus was on drivers who could bring a budget on a race-by-race basis, and this constant swapping devalued the championship. Alan Gow clearly wasn’t impressed either, and TOCA’s new racing licence system will prevent a repeat of the situation in 2014.
5) Motorbase mired in the midfield
Motorbase Performance had spent six seasons running cars bought from other teams before they unveiled their own NGTC Focus ST halfway through 2012. Taking it to the top step of the podium before the year was out was one of the stories of the season, yet that promise was not delivered on in 2013. Instead, there were no wins and several troubled weekends, despite the stable of talent available to the team. They got their act together in some style in the second half of the year, but they would have been expecting to show that form at every round.
Disappointing shows…The Toyota pair of Dave Newsham and Frank Wrathall are excellent drivers, and both were in good car, but neither could get it together and match the Avensis of Adam Morgan; Andy Neate‘s plans for his IP Tech Chevrolet Cruze generated many column inches, but the car was delayed and delayed and then never really got going; Rob Collard had possibly his most disappointing season in the BTCC to date; and Jeff Smith was unable to take advantage of one of the best cars on the grid.
