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    British Touring Car Racing: The crowd’s favourite - late 1960s to 1990
    British Touring Car Racing: The crowd’s favourite - late 1960s to 1990
    British Touring Car Racing: The crowd’s favourite - late 1960s to 1990
    Ebook109 pages54 minutes

    British Touring Car Racing: The crowd’s favourite - late 1960s to 1990

    By Peter Collins

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    About this ebook

    This book is a brief but affectionate, mainly pictorial panorama of twenty-odd years of the British Touring Car Championship, from the anarchical 1960s and early 1970s of flared wheelarches, lifting wheels and smoking tyres, through the Group 1 years when the rule-makers tried to make the cars look standard and as a result, slow them down. This had the classic effect on racecar builders, who were not worth their salt unless they could get around the restrictions. The eventual results were faster cars than before, which evolved into the tarmac-melting, fire-breathing turbo powered front-runners of the late 1980s. The story stops at the point where the rule-makers tried another clampdown as the final decade of the 20th century dawned.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherVeloce
    Release dateJan 28, 2015
    ISBN9781845848224
    British Touring Car Racing: The crowd’s favourite - late 1960s to 1990

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      Book preview

      British Touring Car Racing - Peter Collins

      Introduction and acknowledgements

      Time was when any self-respecting national race meeting in the UK would always schedule its large capacity saloon car race as the last event of the day. Whatever single-seater or sportscar race was billed as the feature, the public would always wait for the rumbustious excitement of the big tin-tops. They were the grand finale.

      A Mr Don Smith from Birmingham summarised the situation in a letter to Autosport in its June 18th 1965 issue by saying It is general ... to leave saloon car races to the end of the programme ... presumably to increase ice-lolly [sic!] revenue. I have often arrived at circuits at the crack of dawn and not raced until 5pm ... please spare a thought for saloon car racers before I go and buy an 1172 Formula car to ensure an earlier race.

      The problem for Mr Smith was that saloons were just too popular and Ford, for one, knew just how to exploit this. By the time I first enjoyed live motor racing, Ford’s ‘Total Performance’ marketing-generated image in the USA had crossed the Atlantic, and, by 1963, its biggest racing challenger, the massive Galaxie, was in the hands of Jack Sears in the British Saloon Car Championship. Its Cortinas were also taking the middle capacity classes by storm and this success soon percolated down to club level, with Falcons and Mustangs appearing alongside Anglias and Mini Cooper S cars. Note that at this time the events were always referred to as ‘saloon car racing’ at this level, while the national series was beginning to be described much more grandly as catering for touring cars. I have used the title British Touring Car Championship, or BTCC, throughout this book. Whatever you called it though, the spectator was guaranteed fun, excitement, thrills and spills.

      I can recall a certain amount of snobbery over all this. My racing spectator friend Roger (a motorsport fanatic 24 hours a day, who even scratch-built his own Scalextric-scale model racing cars), constantly belittled the tin-tops, to the ridiculous extent that he would refuse to watch them. As far as he was concerned, single-seaters were the only pure and proper type of racing car, and all the rest was window dressing.

      At a recent Goodwood Revival meeting, a well-respected motoring journalist remarked to me that, in fact, it was the St Mary’s Trophy for saloons that the public enjoyed the most, and the flagship TT event didn’t contain as much sheer entertainment and fun, which he claimed was what motorsport was all about. Certainly, the evolution of huge numbers of one-make championships, while boosting manufacturer images and giving their participants a lot of fun, have done little for the spectators, adding very little in value and often being boring in the extreme. And yes, if I am honest, saloon car racing can be boring as well, but at least there is a huge variety of entries to watch.

      Just before the end of the big-spending, highly-modified Group 2 era in the early ’70s, most of the battles took place lower down the order in the mid-field, where the racing was for class positions. However, this was something of a golden era, with ever-increasing bodywork flares and engine power fuelled by manufacturers such as Ford, GM and BMW with big budgets to spend. Just watching the spectacle of power, noise and speed of a Chevy Camaro, Ford RS Capri or BMW CSL circulating in company with a screaming 200bhp+ Ford Escort was enough to warm a freezing cold March afternoon at Brands Hatch. The drivers were daredevils at work, and their cars were far removed from the spectators’ humdrum everyday transportation.

      This is not a race-by-race review, nor even year-by-year, but is instead a purely nostalgic ramble through twenty-odd years of BTCC races, people, circuits and cars. This book could not have been completed without the help of the many Autosport magazine and Motoring News reports and reporters who were on the scene at the time. My profuse thanks to all of them.

      I make no apology for the abundance of Brands Hatch action, it was and still is, my local circuit. In the late sixties I had to cadge a lift from anyone who was prepared to help in order to get there. I did not own a car and, truth be told, I could not even drive by this time. Who remembers the green London Transport Country RT buses that used to appear at very irregular intervals between Swanley station and Brands circuit? You soon learnt not to rely on them.

      The 1967 ‘appetizer’ pictures were not taken on my first visit to Silverstone, I had already thrilled to the very wet 1966 Mini Prix for that, which was so-called because it was held on the same Saturday as the British Grand Prix at Brands. However, it was my first sight of racing on the fabled Silverstone GP circuit and I was utterly enthralled by the speed.

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