British Touring Car Championship team Restart Racing will switch to Hyundai customer cars for the 2025 season.
Restart joined the BTCC in 2024 with two Cupra Leons acquired from the dissolved Team Hard and has now entered “a multi-year collaboration” with Hyundai team Excelr8 Motorsport, whose i30 N Fastback carried Tom Ingram to the 2022 crown.
This follows hints during the 2023 and 2024 seasons that Excelr8 would be open to supplying customer machinery in addition to its four-car squad.
The cars for Restart, which is moving from its Essex base into the former Van Diemen factory in Snetterton, will be new-build machines powered by the same bespoke Swindon-prepared Hyundai engines used by Excelr8.
“Our commitment to the Hyundai is all about moving the team up the grid,” Restart commercial chief Pete Jones told Autosport. “And it’s a much more interesting proposition than the Cupra for potential partners.
“I want to drive the team forward with the best car available to us and the best drivers available to us. With the Hyundai, my main ambition now is to win the Independent teams’ title.”
Excelr8 team owner Justina Williams said: “Although this will be the first time we have provided BTCC machinery to another team, we are no strangers to building cars for customers in the Mini Challenge and this is another step in the continued growth of Excelr8 as we look to strengthen our position as one of the premier teams in British motorsport.
“The fact that Restart Racing has chosen the Hyundai as their weapon of choice is an indication of how far we have come in a relatively short period of time, and we look forward to working with them to make a success of this new collaboration over the coming seasons.”
Before becoming one of the ensemble to set-up the Restart BTCC team, Jones’s involvement in the series was as a commercial partner to Excelr8 via his security systems company.
“When I heard that they were open to supplying cars to another team, it obviously caught my attention,” Jones added.
“The Cupra served us well this year as we embarked on our first season in the BTCC, but we are an ambitious team that has a desire to establish ourselves on the grid and to progress up the order – in much the same way as Excelr8 themselves have done.”
With another of the collaborators behind Restart being one-time BTCC race winner Chris Smiley, the Northern Irishman is regarded as a shoo-in to return to the same model of car that he campaigned in its initial years of 2020 and 2021 with Excelr8.
Sources suggest that a leading contender for the other seat is Dan Lloyd, who won three BTCC races aboard an Excelr8 Hyundai in 2022 and has raced this season in the Porsche Carrera Cup GB.
“Dan’s a great driver and I’ve always wanted him in one of my cars,” was all a tight-lipped Jones would say about the conjecture.
Restart is understood to have released one of its Cupras to Un-Limited Motorsport, which is expanding to two cars for 2025.
