The series hasn't had the most dramatic of silly seasons - indeed, the top six drivers from 2022 all line up with the same teams and machinery in 2023 - but there are plenty of factors that could shake things up.
For the first time, Ash Sutton and Dan Cammish have had a full winter to work with the tech team within the Motorbase Ford line-up, ditto Jake Hill with the West Surrey Racing BMW squad.
The return of option tyres is bound to shake things up, and there have been tweaks to the regulations surrounding hybrid use.
We also have a new Toyota engine for Rory Butcher and his Speedworks cohorts to use, while One Motorsport (formerly BTC Racing) now has the Dynamics Hondas and their powerplants.
There's enough to give Tom Ingram a fair few worries as he looks to protect his status as champion with the Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai squad. Here's our pick of them.
1. Tweaks to the hybrid rules
It’s fair to say that not everyone in the British Touring Car Championship was ecstatic about the new hybrid system that arrived for 2022; some teams were still having problems with its reliability at the end of the season. But what cannot be denied is that restriction on hybrid usage for the series’ most successful drivers was a far more satisfactory method of performance-balancing than the success-ballast system it replaced. That’s been tweaked for 2023 in the wake of a season where racing was more processional.
The minimum speed for hybrid deployment has been cut from 120km/h to 115, but this goes up to 135km/h in increments for the top seven in the championship for qualifying and race one of each event, and for the top seven in races one and two for races two and three respectively. Hybrid usage in races has been cut, with no one allowed the boost for more than 50% of laps, while the qualifying rules have been fettled too.
Reigning champion Tom Ingram sits on a BTCC working group that recommends changes to the rules: “Last year it worked well if you were inside the top five. If you were battling with Jake [Hill], Ash [Sutton] and Colin [Turkington], it affected us, but after that pack it didn’t really do too much to the grid, because where one would use it the other would at the same time and you’d cancel each other out. So the idea is to try and create a bigger disparity between having it and not having it.
“It’s right to try and improve the racing. Although it was great last year, the racing wasn’t quite as good as we’ve seen it back in the days of weight, so we’re trying to almost simulate that weight penalty without just bolting in a church roof to the passenger seat. It’s a different way of looking at it.”
Ingram is buoyant entering his title-defence season with the Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N he raced to glory in 2022.
“It was a tough decision at the end of the year to go, ‘What do we do? Do we look to try and make what we’ve got even better? Or do we cut our losses and go, we’ve probably got another year with it?’” he says. “In the end we decided to try and keep going, keep finding bits and pieces that we can make better, because you can’t stand still in this championship. We went big, we’ve done a lot of development over the winter, and so far in testing it feels good.”
2. Return of the option tyres
One of the mysteries of the BTCC’s pre-season launch day at Brands Hatch last week was who’d lost the set of false teeth that were lying on the ground next to the West Surrey Racing trucks. Another mystery yet to be resolved is whether WSR’s BMWs will be able to get enough ‘bite’ into their tyres this year.
Option tyres, you see, are back for 2023, after they were shelved last season while teams got to grips with the extra weight of the hybrid kit. At seven of the 10 rounds, there will be two compounds of Goodyear to race upon; at Snetterton and Croft, all three must be used; at the high-speed and abrasive Thruxton, it’s hard rubber only.
The hard compound of Goodyear is set for its busiest season since 2019, and the BMW 330e M Sport – as the only rear-wheel-drive machine left in the BTCC – takes longer to switch on even the softer rubber.
“The focus has more been working with the option tyres,” says WSR’s four-time champion Colin Turkington of pre-season testing. “We haven’t run on the hard tyre, with the exception of Thruxton, for quite a few years, and we’ll be using it quite a bit. That’s something definitely where we could have improved looking back at 2019 – the hard tyre was a bit of a limitation.
“It’s very dependent on ambient and track conditions on the day, but we always try and address our weaknesses. We know we’re good on the soft tyre, but we’re all going to be on different strategies this year – I could be on the hard tyre against somebody on the soft, so it’s important to not lose too much ground in those circumstances.”
Turkington, of course, was beaten into third place in 2022 by new team-mate Jake Hill, who remains on board at WSR for this season. The Kentishman is raring to go after cracking on in the second half of last season following the mid-season Snetterton test.
“We mainly just found some stuff in the car that made me drive better,” he says. “I was pretty to grips with the car immediately I would say, but we finally just found a few things that we hadn’t had time to test, and I felt really comfortable after that. It just made me feel more at home. Now, six months on from the end of the season, we’re here and I understand it even more.”
3. Stand by for the ultimate Ford Focus…
Motorbase Performance chief Pete Osborne was hoping his NAPA-liveried team could develop a new rear-wheel-drive contender for 2023, but it wasn’t to be. Instead, the Kent squad has stuck with the Ford Focus ST. Three-time champion Ash Sutton and his sidekick engineer Antonio Carrozza arrived quite late in the winter of 2021-22, and the attentions of Carrozza and incumbent engineering chief James Mundy (who looks after Dan Cammish) were absorbed by the implementation of hybrid. Sutton worked miracles to take the title runner-up spot, and now the combo have had a whole off-season to work on the Focus.
“We’ve just been able to attack it a bit more,” reveals Sutton. “We knew straight away [early in 2022] there were bits we wanted to change, but fundamentally in the middle of the season it’s not possible. We were so late to the party there wasn’t enough time, and there was so much more going on with hybrid.
“So a year under our belt, we’re in a different place now. We’ve got a better car, we’re in a much better starting place. If you look at where we started last year and where we ended it, it was two completely different cars. Having that winter has allowed Tony [Carrozza] to work some magic along with the rest of Motorbase – we’ve got some good guys there and everyone’s knuckled down.
“Hopefully we can hit the ground running at every track rather than being a bit hit-and-miss. It was a combination of things. First time for me getting back in a front-wheel-drive car, first time for Tony to ever work with a front-wheel-drive car. Every time we turned up to a meeting we didn’t know what to expect, whereas you’ve got somebody like Tom [Ingram] – nine years he’s had of that learning process. It’s no different to if we’d rocked up in a rear-wheel-drive car – we would know where we want to be from the get-go.”
The return of option tyres is reckoned by BTCC cognoscenti – 1992 champion and latter-day ITV pundit Tim Harvey – to play into the hands of the quick-thinking Sutton and Carrozza.
“Yeah,” agrees Sutton. “They throw a lot of spanners into your path and it’s whoever picks out the right ones. For us, we’ve always been quite crafty when it comes down to that. The bigger deltas in hybrid are definitely different, and there’s a new track layout [Donington GP] involved. I think there’s a lot of good variables thrown in to spice things up.”
4. The experienced rookie in the pack
Of the BTCC rookies on the grid this season, there are three who will be closely watched, and all arguably have a shot at the Jack Sears Trophy sub-division for drivers who are yet to finish on an overall podium in the series.
Young Scot Ronan Pearson has taken what you’d regard as the standard step up from the Mini Challenge to drive an Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai; Englishman Mikey Doble is also moving up, from more unusual arenas as the reigning champion in both the Ginetta GT5 Challenge and BMW Compact Cup.
But Irishman Andrew Watson has the culture shock of stepping back from GTE – in which he’s twice been a starter at the Le Mans 24 Hours – and GT3 machinery to line up alongside Doble in the Power Maxed Racing Vauxhall Astra team.
“It’s been really fun,” says 28-year-old Watson. “I haven’t done an extensive pre-season test programme by any means, but we had a good day at Brands Hatch a couple of weeks ago. I really enjoyed it. The cars, when you get the heat in the tyres and it grips up, they’re really fun to drive. I really like the sequential shifting as well – back away from the paddleshift.
“The racing is the really exciting bit of touring cars. We have a lot of learning to do with the car, I have to learn the hybrid system, practise standing starts, which I haven’t done in about eight years! But already you can see the buzz and excitement around the paddock – we’re gearing up nicely.”
Alongside Watson and Doble is the seasoned Aron Taylor-Smith. A good benchmark?
“Yeah massively,” agrees Watson. “I have a lot of experience on paper, but in a front-wheel-drive tin-top I have none, so I’m treating it like my rookie year in any sort of top-level machine. Aron I must say has been brilliant. He’s driven a lot of cars and he knows what works and what doesn’t work, and he’s obviously won races before. Without him I’d be really conscious of where we are and where we’re going. I’m really enjoying it, but I haven’t got the whole package unlocked yet.”
