Race Saloons

The British Touring Car Championship is a touring car racing series held each year in the United Kingdom and Ireland. more...

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The Championship was established in 1958 as the British Saloon Car Championship and has run to various rules over the years – "production cars", then FIA Group 1 or 2 in the late 1960s and 1970s, and then Group A in the 1980s, when in 1987, the series was renamed as its current name. (A lower-key Group N series for production cars ran for most of the 1990s). The championship was initially run with a mix of classes, divided according to engine capacity, racing simultaneously. This often meant that a driver who chose the right class could win the overall championship without any chance of overall race wins, thereby devaluing the title for the spectators – for example, in the 1980s Chris Hodgetts won two overall titles in a small Toyota Corolla prepared by Hughes Of Beaconsfield, at that time a Mercedes-Benz/Toyota main dealer when most of the race wins were going to much larger cars; and while the Ford Sierra Cosworth RS500s were playing at the front of the field, Frank Sytner took a title in a Class B BMW M3 and John Cleland's first title was won in a small Class C Vauxhall Astra.

After the domination (and expense) of the Ford Sierra Cosworth in the late 1980s, the BTCC was the first to introduce a 2.0 L formula, in 1990, which later became the template for the Supertouring class that exploded throughout Europe. The BTCC continued to race with Supertouring until 2000 and has since adopted its own BTC Touring rules. However the S2000 rules will now be observed for the 2007 season for the overall championship.

Type of cars

Currently, the cars used are 2.0 L saloons, based on models from a variety of manufacturers, using both BTC Touring and Super 2000 regulations (the technical regulations used in the World Touring Car Championship). Cars built to the different regulations are made as equal as possible by the use of weight equivalency formulae. From 2007 BTCC-spec cars will be replaced by cars built to Super 2000 specification, but with a provision for independent teams to continue using their old cars. This move is intended to encourage more manufacturers back into the series, as the same car would be eligible for many national championships as well as the WTCC.

BTCC teams are a mixture of "works" teams from manufacturers (currently only Vauxhall and SEAT) and independent teams such as Team RAC, Team Dynamics, Synchro Motorsport and Team Eurotech. In 2005, Team Dynamics became the first independent outfit to win the BTCC drivers and team championships; Matt Neal won the overall and independent drivers contests in his Team Dynamics Honda Integra. He also claimed the extra achievement of finishing all 30 championship races that year. This ended Vauxhall's run of 4 victories in the championships for drivers, teams and manufacturers between 2001 and 2004. Team Dynamics also achieved the first overall independents race win in the 'Supertouring' era when Matt Neal won a round of the 1999 BTCC at Donington park, earning the team prize-money of £250,000.

Read more at Wikipedia.org