The field was smaller compared to recent seasons, but the quality at the front of the British Touring Car Championship in 2024 was as high as fans have seen since the Super Touring days a quarter of a century ago.
The title fight boiled down to Jake Hill defeating Tom Ingram and Ash Sutton over the final weekend, but Colin Turkington, Dan Cammish and Josh Cook weren’t too far adrift, and 10 different drivers won races.
Selecting a top 10 is difficult when drivers are at the wheel of different machinery and the sporting regulations of hybrid/turbo power boost and tyres cloak performances, but here is Autosport's take...
10. Adam Morgan
It’s pretty much impossible to decide here between Adam Morgan and Dan Rowbottom – and with an honourable shoutout for Mikey Doble – so the West Surrey Racing BMW man gets the nod purely by dint of his final championship position.
Eighth position in the final standings represented the best result yet for the amiable Lancastrian since switching to the 330e M Sport, but ironically his two seasons at the mighty WSR have yielded no victories, yet he was a winner in both campaigns with the 3-Series when it was run by the family Ciceley Motorsport squad. It’s fair to say that this anomaly is a byproduct of the increased competitiveness at the front of the field.
Morgan was capable in 2024 of mixing it with the sister BMWs of Turkington and Hill on lap times through free practice and qualifying – albeit with the more generous hybrid allowance from his inferior championship position – and got close to champion Hill’s points tally in the Goodyear Wingfoot Award based on qualifying positions.
While he had an unfortunate propensity to be in the wrong place at the wrong time on Sundays, and some good results went begging, his team-mates are full of praise for the contribution of Morgan and veteran engineer Steve Farrell towards the overall team effort.
9. Tom Chilton
Chilton can be put in the same ‘impossible to split’ bracket as Morgan and Rowbottom, but the cheerful Surrey extrovert gets the verdict here because he brought home a race win.
That was no more than he deserved – Chilton may have been around for a long time but, in his third season with the Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai squad, he was genuinely towards the sharp end far more frequently than we have become accustomed to in recent seasons.
Excelr8’s new-for-2024 association with Team Dynamics brought that team’s guru technical chief Barry Plowman onto engineering duties for Chilton for the first time since the late 2000s. That excited him, but as the season started his Hyundai seemed to suffer from unexpected issues; ditto Ronan Pearson, although the car of Excelr8’s title contender Tom Ingram seemed exempt.
There were mysteries too. Chilton’s sole victory of 2024, at Croft, came in the reversed-grid race, but in Q1 he had set the fastest ever legal (ie no track limits) lap of the circuit in an NGTC car, only to fall at the Q2 hurdle. This wasn’t the only time he was mystified at the performance of a particular set of tyres, and it happened again at Silverstone. Chilton looked superb in free practice – he topped both sessions – only for a gamble to get through Q1 on medium rubber backfired spectacularly.
Miscues and plain old misfortune aside, Chilton showed that he is still a decent BTCC battler, and will no doubt continue to do so in 2025.
8. Aron Taylor-Smith
The Vauxhall Astras run by Power Maxed Racing are the oldest design on the grid, yet this West Midlands team continues to punch above its weight from down the unfashionable end of the pitlane – or sometimes even banished to the support paddock.
It’s a bane of an Autosport journalist’s life to find out reasons for retirement for our detailed magazine results tables, but this wasn’t the case at all in 2024 for Taylor-Smith: the effervescent Dubliner finished every single one of the 30 races in the points, something nobody else achieved.
The Astras were reliable, and quick too. Taylor-Smith was looking a decent pedaller in the BTCC when he went off on his GT odyssey. He returned in 2021 with Team Hard, but it wasn’t until linking up with PMR for 2023 that the old fire returned.
Over the second half of the season, Taylor-Smith was more regularly in among the mix at the front than out of it. He was robbed of a pole position at Silverstone thanks to a ride-height infringement, which nobody would claim was performance-enhancing, but other than that he qualified in the top six everywhere after the mid-season hiatus.
PMR, along with the two squads running Cupras, had been given a break after the second round at Brands when TOCA allowed a boost increase for the M-Sport-supplied customer engine – for installation reasons – so that it was on a par with the other powerplants on the grid.
There were a few incidents from which Taylor-Smith somehow emerged without race-ending damage, and that was crucial to putting the Independents title to bed against his promising team-mate, Jack Sears Trophy champion Mikey Doble. The two couldn’t be more different as characters, but an outbreak of hostility between them in the last race at Croft led to some strenuous efforts to smooth things over, and from then on each continued to impress.
7. Rob Huff
The 2012 World Touring Car champion finished behind Taylor-Smith and Morgan in the points, but moves above them in our ranking because of two absolutely sensational race wins that lit up the BTCC and showed the class of a driver who spent two decades on the global stage.
Huff’s full-time return to the series after 19 seasons away with the Speedworks Motorsport-run Toyota Gazoo Racing GB effort was one of the stories of the off-season, but it was far from plain sailing. All four drivers under the Speedworks umbrella were new to the team, there was substantial change on the engineering personnel, and the Corolla GR Sport, since its switch for 2023 to the bespoke Toyota engine supplied by Neil Brown Engineering – upon which refinement continued during the 2024 season – was still a work in progress. Then there was the procedural gaffe that led to Huff being barred from qualifying for the opening round at Donington.
The Toyotas did seem to have a few issues that ended or hampered races, none more notable than the extraordinary series of bumper detachments at the Brands Indy round in May, but it was the following event where Huff shot back into the BTCC firmament. On his home ground at Snetterton, he zapped the sister Corollas of Aiden Moffat and Josh Cook in a stunning performance on a drying track. Later in the year, at Knockhill, he used all his old racecraft tricks to fend off a questing Tom Ingram for another victory.
A mid-season test for Huff and Aiden Moffat did help in working on set-ups and Huff’s own acclimatisation to NGTC machinery after yonks in TCR cars. Typical, then, that much of the second half of the campaign was marred by the rain to which he had been unaccustomed while sunning himself on his globetrotting exploits.
6. Dan Cammish
A very close trio of Cammish, Turkington and Cook means someone has to end up losing out here. They could just as easily all be equal fourth in this ranking.
Cammish took only one race win in 2024, but in some ways this was a better season performance from the Berkshire-domiciled Yorkshireman than his three victories of 2023. For starters, the Alliance Racing-run Ford Focus ST was no longer the dominant force it had been; secondly, the peaks and troughs – and the troughs were very deep – had been eradicated.
After spending two seasons alongside Ash Sutton, a rejig at Alliance meant that the thoughtful, self-analytical Cammish was moved into the other garage with Sam Osborne. The motive here was transparent, and at least allowed a driver who nearly won the 2019 title to put some distance – even if was just a brick wall – between himself and the force of nature that is the four-time champion.
It seemed to work, because there was considerably less distance between them on the track. Through the spring and summer, Cammish was yet to win a race, but a string of consistent performances had put him onto the fringes of the title fight. Deservedly, he finally cracked it with a reversed-grid success on the Donington GP circuit.
Another season looms with the Focus before Alliance’s secret new weapon is wheeled out for 2026, but that shouldn’t harm Cammish’s upwards trajectory relative to Sutton. After all, in 2024 he scored 93 points more than he had in the previous season, when the car was regarded as unbeatable…
5. Josh Cook
While One Motorsport supremo Steve Dudman ummed and ahhed before pulling out of the BTCC for 2024 with what he described as ‘a planned pause’, that could have spelt curtains for the career of Cook, a driver who owed so much to Dudman’s faith. But Cook’s old pal Danny Buxton had already jumped ship from team principal at One to become director of racing at Speedworks, and it was clear that the red-headed West Countryman and his 2023 sidekick Aiden Moffat would be prime targets for the Cheshire squad.
Sure enough, Cook and the experienced Scot were confirmed in a twin-pronged LKQ Toyota line-up alongside Speedworks’ Toyota Gazoo Racing GB duo as the team expanded to four cars, which included acquiring some hardware from Team Hard.
Unfortunately, Cook’s pre and early season were hampered by teething problems on his new-build Corolla. His veteran engineer, the unrelated Mick Cook, explained: “Because we didn’t do a lot of testing initially, it took us a little while to learn what was different”.
“It’s a little bit different, but not massively [compared to their previous Honda Civics], the important thing is the people and the team, not the car you’ve got.”
Cook the driver did his usual thing of staying on the edge of the title battle until the final knockings – 63 points behind going into the Brands finale, with 67 on the table – but couldn’t quite hit the heights he had with the Hondas. He won two races, and neither was a reversed-grid success, but each owed much to inspired tyre strategy that put him on the softs when others were on harder rubber. From the fifth round at Oulton Park to the eve of the finale, his points tally was close as dammit to being the best of anyone’s.
But taking the season overall it didn’t quite work out for the Cook entourage in 2024, and don’t be surprised to see him in another make of hatchback in 2025.
4. Colin Turkington
He ended the season adrift of the ‘Big Three’, but for a spell early doors it looked as though Turkington would be right there, and a qualifying lap from the friendly Northern Irishman when all is right with the West Surrey Racing-run BMW remains something to behold.
He did that on a number of occasions in 2024. He may be into his fifth decade, but Turkington was the pole king this season, and topped qualifying on four occasions. He hasn’t done that since he was a 25-year-old whippersnapper in 2007.
“It’s always a confidence boost,” said a man who, with four BTCC titles under his belt, should have no need of such a thing. “I’m 42 now – it’s a little reminder that the one-lap pace is still there. Qualifying has been a strength through all the years.”
Similarly, Turkington’s five wins was his best tally for some time – since 2020, when he narrowly lost the title fight to Ash Sutton. And he should have exceeded that, because he turned team player at the end of the season, gifting a win to Jake Hill at the Brands Hatch finale to help his team-mate’s title bid.
At the earlier Brands meeting back in May, Turkington had looked unstoppable, taking pole and his first two wins of the season, as well as a brief championship lead. It was the following sequence of nine races over three weekends, during which he never finished in the top six, that really hammered his hopes. It was just one of those BTCC runs – he wasn’t quite on the pace at Thruxton, but a rare car problem struck at Oulton.
Take that spell out of the equation, and you realise that Ash Sutton is not the only driver in the current field who could become a five-time BTCC champion. There was a ‘freshening up’ of Team Turkington for 2024, with engineer Dan Millard returning to WSR to replace John Waterman, the man who continues to lead the technical team on the development of the 3-Series and who had looked after Turkington from 2020-23. But it was also Waterman’s work over the 2023-24 off-season that allowed this BTCC talisman to prove he’s still got it.
3. Ash Sutton
In 2023, the NAPA-liveried Ford Focus ST squadron topped qualifying an astonishing nine times out of 10. In 2024, the Alliance Racing operation only twice started a race with one of its cars on pole, and both of them were fluky reversed-grid draws.
It’s not so much that Sutton and co went backwards, more that other teams – most notably Excelr8 Motorsport with its Hyundais and West Surrey Racing with its BMWs – made a similar step forward over the winter of 2023-24 to the Fords’ from 2022-23. The theory is that the fourth-generation Focus ST, which first graced the BTCC in 2020, is running out of room for development improvements, and that its squat hatchback shape means that its aero properties are hampering it on the straights.
Added to this was talk that Swindon and Neil Brown Engineering, respective builders of the Hyundai and BMW engines, found the key to maximising the effective doubling in power from the hybrid/turbo boost surge for 2024, and that Ford supplier Mountune will be working on this over the coming winter.
So Sutton arguably had a car disadvantage in 2024, and who’s to say out of he, Ingram and Hill, who should be named the best driver of the season? Each of them can make valid arguments, but all we can go on is what we saw on track.
The four-time champion does reckon that late-season developments unlocked more performance from the eighth round at Donington onwards. But that’s difficult to quantify. Yes, Sutton was absolutely mighty in the wet conditions that predominated from this point on, but then again he always is! What was galling for him is that the first-lap shemozzle with Josh Cook and Tom Ingram at the Brands finale took away what he felt could have been a treble win. Plus, of course, the penalty at Silverstone after a mechanic was on the grid, vainly trying to fix Sutton’s radio, when he shouldn’t have been.
That provided the final big blow to the hopes of a driver who had done everything throughout the season to somehow stay fully in the mix, for much of it third in the standings but only just behind alternating points leaders Ingram and Hill.
2. Tom Ingram
No one expects to get a suntan in North Wales in March – or any other time of the year, come to think of it – but three days of glorious weather at an Anglesey test absolutely turned around the fortunes of an Excelr8 Motorsport team that had been somewhat beleaguered in 2023.
Ingram had won the 2022 title with the Hyundai i30 N Fastback, but the work carried out over the following winter, led by his trusty engineer Spencer Aldridge, could not be validated until some way into the following campaign because of the dismal pre-season climate. This time around, Ingram and team-mate Tom Chilton struck lucky.
At the Donington opener, the only qualifying session and first race where everyone is on equal hybrid allocation, Ingram was supreme. He’d already been optimistic since that Anglesey test, and here was validation that the Hyundai had taken a big step forward and was now the class act. What we didn’t know at the time was that the work carried out by West Surrey Racing on its BMWs had been similarly effective but, without the same climate luck as Excelr8 in pre-season testing, that team was still taking one step back to take two forwards over the opening two race weekends.
Even when the BMW came on song, the suspicion was that Ingram’s Hyundai was still marginally the best all-round package on the grid. There’s a lot of talk about its straight-line speed, and there’s no doubt that Swindon does a superb job on the engine, but the team points out the advantageous fastback shape of the car helps its aero qualities.
Of course, Ingram drove it beautifully. He has this unique, spectacular style of drifting a car into a slow corner at unbelievable speed and hitting a pinpoint apex, and his racecraft is superb. The big bugbear was an untimely repetition of uncompetitiveness in wet conditions. Ingram had been bewildered in qualifying at Snetterton in May, then the issue seemed to have been banished in subsequent races, but returned with a vengeance just when he needed it not to: in the title decider finale at Brands, some observers reckoning that when it's only mildly wet, the Hyundai simply takes too much out its front tyres.
Ingram chirruped afterwards that a post-season test back at Anglesey should hopefully smooth out this last chink in the Excelr8 Hyundai armoury. Ironic that this time they were praying for some wet weather.
1. Jake Hill
The sheer determination of Hill had, over the previous two seasons, sometimes counted against him. Back in his years with small teams and old cars, it had turned the diminutive Kentishman into something of a BTCC cult hero. Armed with a West Surrey Racing BMW since 2022, he simply didn’t need to try such feats, and a new approach was needed.
For 2024, Hill was a complete BTCC driver. He won more races than anyone else, and he was consistent too. It’s been a work in progress, with engineer Craig Porley fully immersed as part of Hill’s entourage since their AmD Honda days in 2020, and ever more involved at the WSR team.
“We just understand each other incredibly well and that bonds that relationship,” explained Hill. “It’s ultimate trust as well – we also understand the car a lot better, so I can come in if I’ve got a slight issue and we know that either it needs to be step one or step two, we’re not searching for a massive band of things. We’ve narrowed the window down of problem solving massively. If we’ve got an issue in FP1, FP2, typically it’s solved pretty quickly.”
Only on one weekend did the duo get lost – at the Brands Indy round in May. But the bounceback for Snetterton was immense, and from that double-winning weekend onwards Hill was fully involved in the title fight with Ingram and Sutton. On only two occasions did he fail to score points, and neither of them were incidents for which you could point the finger at him. Apart from that, a slight lock-up on the brakes at Oulton Park cost him a couple of positions – although arguably helped ultimately with his reversed-grid position – and there was a mistake on tyre strategy at Croft.
This is all minor stuff though. Hill is a great champion and it was fitting that he should win it in a dramatic wet finale at the Brands Hatch GP circuit by passing main rival Ingram on the track. Don’t mark this season down as a one-off.
