Tamara Aller: “Long live touring car racing”

I started following the evolution of touring cars in the 1990s, with the old Spanish CET and the likes of Luis Pérez Sala and Adrián Campos racing around the streets of Alcañiz.

Later, as we installed satellite TV in our home, I discovered the BTCC and Australian Supercars, and that was a new level of amazing door-to-door racing.

When I lived in the UK I attended a few BTCC races. After returning to Spain, I decided to visit the WTCC in Valencia, and was taken aback by the level of the competition, as well as the easy-going attitude of drivers and team members, making it easy to connect with people.

In 2009 I started writing about the European and World championships, the first one in my country to do so, first with the S2000 cars and, from 2014, with the TC1 class.

That year I was recruited by TouringCarTimes to report about the DTM. It was a great honour as TcT was the reference media for touring car racing information and joining the site was a step ahead for me. I became a regular at the races and a permanent media pass holder until 2019, before the series as we knew it was scrapped with the veil of the Covid pandemic as an excuse.

I also continued visiting the WTCC and saw the inception of the TCR Series in 2015, a then new concept seeking to derive racing cars from production models and keeping the costs contained. As the TC1 class fell apart due to the high costs, even losing some key members from the “family”, the WTCR became the new world series, keeping most of the protagonists and the friendly atmosphere from the years before.

The electric ETCR came into play in late in 2020, but was a victim of the high development and racing costs, as well as a racing format that failed to convince fans, promoters and hardly the racing drivers themselves. It was still an interesting exercise highlighting the long way still to be made in terms of technology development in order to ever have an attractive electric racing series.

2021 and 2022 saw growing disagreements between the participating teams and promoter Discovery Events, with the latter dropping the promotion of both the WTCR and the ETCR series.

WSC Ltd took the gauntlet launching the TCR World Tour, based on the pyramid structure that is central to the TCR concept, where a car built under these regulations can be raced in any series, whether national or international. Further regulations ensure the longevity of the cars, and we can all remember Michele Imberti rocking the TCR Italy series a couple of years ago in a Hyundai i30 TCR edging 40.000 km on the clock.

Unfortunately, the customer racing based TCR category has suffered, with only four manufacturers still committed to the development of their models, but with little innovation. The uncertainty in the car industry, with changing policies twisting the manufacturers’ arms and lack of clarity about the technological future of mobility, has had a negative impact on the development of touring cars.

Electrification and/or hydrogen are on the back burner until there is more clarity about technology, costs and safety, and the manufacturers are wary of the “dirty” ICEs, the only cars currently racing on a regular basis. It’s a catch-22 situation with no clear end in sight, and which will only become unlocked as the policy makers, especially in the EU, revise the almost impossible to achieve emissions targets leading to phasing out ICE cars.

One of the aspects that I find fascinating about motor racing is how it’s a laboratory for manufacturers to try new things. In the over 36 years I’ve followed motorsports I have seen the phasing out of leaded fuels, the rising of the diesel as a valid alternative and the introduction of hybrid systems, allowing for lower consumption and better energy usage and efficiency.

In that sense, I believe that the key for the future of an ecological mobility, leading to a brighter landscape in touring car racing, is the development of the sustainable fuels, which we are seeing in many series for the first time this year. WSC Ltd has already announced that they will move to a 100% sustainable fuel for next season.

Could hydrogen or electrification be the long term future? Only when the technology is safe and a solution is found for wider environmental issues, such as battery recycling after the end of its working life.

But, as former Audi Sport chief Dr. Wolfgang Ulrich once said to me, it’s important for car makers to race with something that looks like what they are selling to the public, so touring car racing will have a continuity.

Let’s not allow the uncertain future ahead keep us from enjoying the great racing and battles we see every day in touring cars. Cheers to another 30 years!