TCR UK half-time report – “Where we expected to be”

As the inaugural TCR UK season reaches its halfway point, series promoter Jonathan Ashman remains confident for the future growth of the series.

Speaking to TouringCarTimes during the fourth meeting of the series at Castle Combe, Ashman said that TCR UK is “about where we expected to be,” for a first season.

Just 11 cars are entered at the Castle Combe meeting despite the entry briefly touching 14 for the previous round at Brands Hatch, but Ashman appears not to be worried. “It’s amusing how certain entries tell us they can’t do a particular meeting and then reappear at the next one – it would be nice to get them all at one meeting,” he said.

“What we are seeing is a great deal of interest for next year – a lot of potential entrants appear to have held off for year one to make sure that the series actually arrives and operates. Now it is here they are making their plans.”

This interest, Ashman adds, is being replicated by circuits wanting to host TCR rounds in 2019; “though it has to be said that the level of interest is in inverse proportion to the size of the circuit in terms of facilities to accommodate us.”

Ashman anticipates a 2019 calendar of similar size to the 2018 seven-round schedule – “It’s a case of finding a nice balance,” he says. He hopes to release the dates for the 2019 series earlier than was the case this year, and would also like to see a slightly later start date.

“The problem this year was that we were the ‘new kid on the block’ so we were at the back of the queue for the allocation of race dates. We would hope to move up the list a bit for 2019.”

Ashman adds that some fine-tuning of the sporting regulations will be necessary, but nothing very radical. “The problem is that you can’t just take the TCR International regulations and drop them onto a UK series, because the UK organises its races in a different way to everywhere else – for example in the UK there is a fixed race format,” he said.

“The way penalties are handled is also very different in the UK. Elsewhere if the race director sees something amiss he informs the stewards and they hand out the penalties. Here the race director hands out the penalties and the stewards act as the appeals process. It’s very strange but our regulations have to reflect that.”