The nice guy of the British Touring Car Championship finished 1125th – in a truly outstanding two hours, 53 minutes and 51 seconds – in last Sunday’s London Marathon. So there’s bound to be at least one paddock wag jesting that this means that the number ‘1125’ will be pulled out in the reversed-grid draw.
Stephen Jelley, you see, has an astonishing knack of being the driver who lucks in for the final race of a BTCC Sunday – six times he has lined up on pole since he rejoined the West Surrey Racing BMW stable before the start of the 2021 season.
Like it or loathe it – and this writer is in two minds here – the contrivance of the reversed grid has a key part to play in the destiny of the title, particularly as we head to Brands Hatch this weekend with the championship top three near as dammit level in the points, and the fourth contender still very much in the mix.
Just to recap, it’s three-time and reigning champion Ash Sutton in front on 345 points, hotly pursued by new-kid-in-the-title-showdown Jake Hill on 340 and perennial nearly-man Tom Ingram on 338, with four-time holder of the crown Colin Turkington a little way back with 318. So that’s a 27-point spread with a maximum of 67 still on the table.
And if it goes down to the final race on the Brands GP circuit this Sunday – and you’d have to say this is more likely than not – then how are the respective team-mates going to influence things? And here I’m not talking about a premeditated takeout, more a tactical delay of a driver for a rival team, or letting your own stablemate make an unopposed pass.
Over at WSR, both Hill and Turkington have Jelley in their corner; in the Motorbase Ford camp, Sutton notably has Dan Cammish, who has already moved over for Sutton at each of the past two events; and in the Excelr8 Hyundai stable, both Dan Lloyd and Tom Chilton are capable of providing a fly in the ointment to help Ingram.
Of course, this is also entirely possible in races one and two. Cammish is most likely to be of assistance to Sutton here, as at Thruxton (race two) and Silverstone (race one), while Lloyd is also a winner this season of non-reversed-grid races. And Jelley can be rapid enough to plonk his BMW near the top in qualifying, especially with the success-penalty restrictions on hybrid usage carried on a sliding scale – this weekend that’s from championship leader Sutton (no hybrid allowed at all) to 10th-placed Jelley (13.5 seconds of the maximum 15s).
Of the others we’ve mentioned, Hill will be on 1.5s, Ingram on 3s and Turkington on 4.5s; of the quicker team-mates, it’s Cammish on 10.5s, Lloyd and Chilton on the full-whack 15s.
But back to reversed grids. What if we didn’t have them? Your columnist here likes to work out an ‘alternative’ championship ranking each year ignoring the final race of each round, just to see how the sometimes fluky nature of reversed grids has impacted the standings. It’s not a failsafe method of proving who’s the fastest – after all, a driver who has scored a healthy number of reversed-grid points to put himself into an advantageous championship position may find it less appealing to put everything on the line in races one and two of an event. And before this season’s introduction of hybrid, the success-ballast regulations skewed things massively, often forcing a driver to abandon all hope of top results in race one and two of a weekend, with the sole aim of working into the reversed-grid mix and capitalising at that point on low weight.
Sutton was a master of this in 2020 – without reversed-grid races, he would have placed fourth in the championship in the Infiniti Q50, 27 points adrift of ‘champion’ Turkington, who ‘beat’ Honda-equipped Cammish by three points and Toyota pilot Ingram by five. Yet no one could dispute that he was a fully deserving champion. In 2021, with the Infiniti refined, Sutton wins it by two points – but not from real-world runner-up Turkington; instead, it’s BTC Racing Honda pilot Josh Cook, with Ingram (now in the Hyundai) in third and Turkington fourth.
Turkington sat atop the points until his disastrous outing last time out at Silverstone – let’s hope a repeat of his hybrid woes from there doesn’t afflict any of the title contenders this weekend – and he remains the classy barometer of the BTCC
This year our non-reversed-grid ranking is a more accurate barometer, because the hybrid success penalties have had a less-severe impact than ballast did. Going into Brands, we have Ingram in front on 245 points, from Sutton on 242, Hill on 239 and Turkington on 217. So, other than Ingram leapfrogging from third to first with a very small points swing, it’s pretty representative of the overall picture.
But that also paints an interesting picture of the stunning job that Sutton and, to a slightly lesser extent, Ingram, have performed in races this year. The BTCC has its own Goodyear Wingfoot Award, where drivers are given points for qualifying position on the same scale as race points. In this classification, Sutton is a distant fourth, 44 points behind table-topper Hill, with third-placed Ingram 33 adrift. Only Turkington, 15 behind, can prevent his WSR team-mate from winning this.
The BMW boys, of course, will point to the early laps of races, where their rear-wheel-drive format causes them to struggle to switch on their tyres and therefore lose positions to the front-driven opposition. And, once a race has settled down, it’s much harder to make a pass for position. Even so, it adds further proof to the consensus that rarely has there been a finer racer in the BTCC than Sutton.
Does Sutton deserve to win the BTCC this weekend? Of course he does, but so also do the other three. Whatever the outcome, we will have a fully deserving champion, and any of them will provide a great story for the series.
Let’s discuss each of them in reverse order…
Colin Turkington – five-time BTCC champion. The Northern Irishman has been pegged on four each with Andy Rouse – who he admires greatly – since 2019. But two of Rouse’s titles came from points accumulation in lower classes, so wouldn’t it be great for his record to be broken?
Turkington sat atop the points until his disastrous outing last time out at Silverstone – let’s hope a repeat of his hybrid woes from there doesn’t afflict any of the title contenders this weekend – and he remains the classy barometer of the BTCC. Remember his stunning pole position at Snetterton with no hybrid usage allowed as the series leader? As well as that, he’s a true gentleman out of the car.
Can he overturn that deficit? It’ll be tough. If he was 27 points adrift of the leader but in second place in the points, it would definitely be doable, but as it is he has to not only be on stunning form at Brands, but also rely on setbacks to hit three different drivers.
Tom Ingram – no longer the nearly-man. His racecraft is superb and at Silverstone he bounced back from a difficult weekend at Thruxton to put himself right in the title mix. Furthermore, he’s done it with Excelr8 Motorsport, a team that has only been in the BTCC since 2019, and with the Hyundai i30 N – the squad’s first ‘own-build’ BTCC project that made its debut in 2020.
Ingram is talented off-track too. As a former protege of Jason Plato’s KX Akademy, he was inspired to market himself to maximise his profile and earning opportunities in an era where well-paid factory drives just aren’t realistic. You can see elements of Plato in him when things get tough – he can be outspoken and even a little grumpy at times. But who can argue that his general demeanour as a cheery, wholesome, dog-loving, biscuit-crunching Englishman wouldn’t make him a fine ambassador for the UK’s premier national championship?
Jake Hill – zero to hero. He came up through the Ginetta ranks with Ingram, but his financial struggles to gain a foothold in the BTCC are well documented. That he has found himself in a title-contending situation is thanks largely to a group of faithful supporters, most visibly his former AmD team boss Shaun Hollamby and MB Partners head honcho Mark Blundell.
Also like fellow yet-to-be-champion Ingram, Hill has firmly centred the focus of his career upon becoming a BTCC star, although in his case he is keen to try other things if the opportunity arises. For example, he’s passionate about Super GT.
Hill has matured a lot this year. There’s still a ‘cheeky chappy’ image, probably exacerbated by the fact that he’s a little fella, but you can see a more measured approach in his racecraft (qualifying speed was rarely in doubt). When he found himself dumped into the midfield at Silverstone a fortnight ago by contact with Gordon Shedden, surrounded by former team-mate Ollie Jackson and a swarming bunch of Team Hard Cupras and the like, the Hill of 2021 and before would have been sidelined with accident damage. That he channeled his anger to positive purposes and charged through to fourth was hugely impressive.
There are reasons to root for all four of this weekend’s title contenders. But, as we well know, it could all depend upon how Stephen Jelley gets on in race two…
Ash Sutton – history maker. If Sutton is crowned on Sunday, he will move level with Rouse and Turkington on four titles, and become the first to win the championship in both front and rear-wheel-drive machinery. He’s been stunning this year, and there are scarcely any more superlatives we can use about him.
There’s another reason why a Sutton title would be good for the BTCC, and that’s because it would be the first overall crown for Motorbase Performance. Founder Dave Bartrum sold up following the 2020 season, since when it’s been the cheery Pete Osborne in charge. The father of BTCC racer Sam, Osborne joked when he bought into Motorbase that his younger son Jamie (who’s racing on the support package in the Mini Challenge) had dubbed him ‘the BTCC’s Lawrence Stroll’, but he, along with the family, are passionate about their racing, to the extent that they also support Jack Mitchell in the Minis and Harri Reynolds in Ginetta Juniors among a group of ‘Motorbase Academy’ drivers.
It would be terrific to see Osborne’s (and before that Bartrum’s) investment into Motorbase, and his procuring of backers such as NAPA, rewarded with a title.
So there are reasons to root for all four of this weekend’s title contenders. But, as we well know, it could all depend upon how Stephen Jelley gets on in race two…
