Ahead of the new season, the Excelr8 Motorsport driver and tin-top veteran reflects on his career so far and what it means to compete at the pinnacle of UK racing
TOM CHILTON
I was never a small boy – I was Mr Round, I was huge, I was so big I couldn’t fit in a kart! Tillett, who made the seats, couldn’t make one big enough for me to fit in. So I started off drifting Ford Escort Mk2s at eight years old, and at that age we went with family friends to Brands Hatch to watch the British Touring Car Championship. I absolutely loved it. We sat with a picnic blanket to the side of Druids where you can see the cars coming down through Paddock Hill. I remember seeing someone punt someone off into the gravel and thinking, ‘This is brilliant – there’s always crashing, it’s always exciting to watch’. At that age you get nervous even thinking about driving a car like that – it’s fine going sideways in a field for a bit of a laugh, but I never thought I’d actually be racing in the best motorsport championship in the UK.
And here I am. I’ve been doing it for over two decades, effectively a third of the BTCC’s life. I’m part of the furniture. I’ve driven a lot of the cars, a lot of the different regulations. I love the BTCC. It’s so ridiculously close, and I feel that now, with the regulations, you’ve got to be on your A-game the whole time. You’ve got your youth pushing the old guys like me really hard.
This year, my third with Excelr8 Motorsport and their Hyundais, I’ve now got Barry Plowman engineering me, Matt Neal’s old engineer. We’re the oldest, most experienced pairing on the grid, against my team-mate Tom Ingram and his engineer Spencer Aldridge, who are one of the youngest. I feel that as a team now we’re so strong. It’s not just the cars – the whole package involved with the team, all the people who work on the PR and marketing, pushing every single avenue as hard as possible. If the sponsors are happy, we can make the cars faster and we’re happy.
I spent 2012 to 2016 out of the BTCC and in the world championship. I was not sure when they were originally changing the regulations to NGTC. The suspension was very strange – it got softer and softer, and it didn’t look like a race car to me. I knew when it started off some cars would be faster and some slower, and then they’ve got to get the balance of performance right, and I didn
