BTCC boss Alan Gow has got his long-time wish for a more compact BTCC field, even if he’d have preferred it not to drop off over one winter. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, he argues. Time to look ahead to 2024 – and the future
MARCUS SIMMONS
BTCC
Of course the British Touring Car Championship has weathered storms over its existence. That’s inevitable, given it’s been going for 66 years. Think about some of the dire fields of the mid-1980s in Group A days; or the early 2000s when Octagon Motorsport took over the running of the series after buying out organising body TOCA, and the new BTC Touring era kicked off with eight cars on the grid at the 2001 opener. By comparison with that, what’s happened during the 2023-24 off-season has been more a passing shower than full-on thunder and lightning.
From the 27 cars that fought out the BTCC in 2023, nine were lost for 2024 in the forms of Team Hard (six) and One Motorsport (three). But, thanks to the emergence of new team Restart Racing, an extra entry at Speedworks Motorsport, plus the phoenix-like rising from the ashes of Hard after all with a recently announced duo, the field stands at 23 – with the possibility of one more. Whichever way you look at it, that’s hardly a crisis.
“For the last six years or so, I’ve said plenty of times on the record to people that ideally we should reduce it to around 24 cars for a number of very good reasons, although obviously I would have preferred it to be more gradual rather than to happen over one off-season,” reflects TOCA chief Alan Gow, who returned to the BTCC helm in 2003 after the ill-fated Octagon era. “But be that as it may, we’re going to be around about that number, and that’s the right number as far as I’m concerned. That goes for a lot of things – practicality reasons, all fitting in garages when you go to somewhere like Oulton Park and all that, but also it’s quality over quantity. That’s why Formula 1 don’t increase their grid to 30 cars. Even V8 Supercars – what do they have, 24 cars [he’s bang on]?”
Bumper grids are a double-edged sword. It may not have been touring cars, but the old Formula 3 European Championship is a good illustration. Back in 2015, the Max Verstappen effect exploded entries to around 35 cars, before it shrunk to 20-odd in 2016 and got killed off by the FIA at the end of 2018, by which time the regular grid
