BTCC 2013 Season

vanpeebles said:
I tried watching WTCC but it's a different kettle of fish to the BTCC. It plays out more like the Porsche racing. I didn't care to like it.
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It never used to be that bad. Even when Seat and then Chevvy dominated it was still good proper racing. But recently its all gone a bit odd. No major manufacturer participation and odd rules that mean everyone is too scared to get close to each other.

Behind the WRC its the second world championship the FIA have fiddled with and broke.
 
Really enjoyed those last 3 races, and it all unfolded very nicely!

Well played to Andrew Jordan on winning.

But next year I think Turkington will take it (provided he keeps the seat). Had so much bad luck this year getting punted off!
 
Thought this might be the place to ask

Does anyone have any engine bay shots from he btcc cars,


Curious as to the induction set ups in particular
 
Shame Jordan managed to hold it together. I used to quite like him after having watched the teams development from his dad racing a Porsche in the British GTs but I started to change my opinion after one of the races at Snetterton this year (Think it was race 2) where he took out Shedden and Turkington in the same race before taking an undeserved win.

I'm not sure how he has escaped any comment or censure following his antics in race 2 today either. That 3 point turn in the middle of the track with a crippled car was seriously dangerous, looked like one of the BMWs narrowly avoiding collecting him whilst he was parked sideways across the track. It deserved some kind of penalty but Gow was never going to jeopardise his championship finale.
 
I think your being a bit selective in your views there.

Taking a dislike to someone for punting someone off in BTCC means you must not like the entire field. Especially when it looked like the main guy who might beat him would be Plato, the master of the "rubbings racing" excuse.

And as for driving across the track, you can understand why he wanted to get back to the pits, and even in just the first race I stayed to watch Turkington dragged his BMW across the track, the VW Passat guy made a poor effort at returning to the circuit, and Rob Austins Audi was hauled backwards across the track by the marshals. What Jordan did was hardly crime of the century.
 
Duke said:
Neal cries the most. Plato used to and now just gets on with it.
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They're both as bad as each other.

As Skeeter says, now Plato is winning he's happy. When he was in the Cruze he was infuriating. Every bloody session he was bleating about being crippled by having a normally aspirated engine. Well who's fault was it for not coming up with a turbo engine, Jason? Honda's? Presumably there wasn't anything stopping Chevrolet whacking an NGTC turbo engine in there over the winter's break, other than PR.

Same with Honda now. They've spent half of the season complaining that Gow has hobbled there engine, though to be fair, I think they've more grounds for complaint than Chevrolet had.

I struggle with some aspects of BTCC. Say you spend all winter trying to unlock as much speed from your car as possible, then come the season opener you're rewarded with strong results, only for the BTCC to turn around and say "sorry guys, but you're the fastest team, and we can't have that".

This has got to be the only championship which punishes teams for doing a good job.
 
The Chevvy/Turbo thing was utterly retarded. The team anounced at the begining of the season that they had the choice and they decided to go with an S2000 engine, and knew they would be down on power compared to the turbos.

Fair enough.

But then they spent the whole season moaning about how they were stuck with an S2000 engine and were down on power :confused:

Personally, I think they knew they could moan there way into getting the turbos turned down, so took that route to save the money on getting a turbo sorted.

this_is_gav said:
This has got to be the only championship which punishes teams for doing a good job.
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Hardly. Loads of series have a balance of power formula. If you turn up to an FIA GT event with a super fast car the FIA will bolt a bunch of weight in the boot. Indy and Nascar balance power too. Even F1 has let engines with a demonstrated disadvantage be tunred up. Its part of the rules, Honda know what they are doing.
 
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this_is_gav said:
I struggle with some aspects of BTCC. Say you spend all winter trying to unlock as much speed from your car as possible, then come the season opener you're rewarded with strong results, only for the BTCC to turn around and say "sorry guys, but you're the fastest team, and we can't have that".

This has got to be the only championship which punishes teams for doing a good job.
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There is meant to be parity, which is why they tweak the boost levels. It keeps the field close and gives us some great racing. The series has never been about massive developments like other formulas.
 
Skeeter said:
Hardly. Loads of series have a balance of power formula. If you turn up to an FIA GT event with a super fast car the FIA will bolt a bunch of weight in the boot. .
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There was rumblings at lemans that during testing some of the GT cars weren't posting representative laps getting the Astons 'balanced' by adding half the weight of the moon into the boot. Come race day those other cars were suddenly up to pace again and lapping nicely while the Astons had issues were the cars now had such great mass that they had their own gravity and were getting spectators stuck to the bodywork.
 
BTCC isn't supposed to be a development race, this is why they had standardised parts and engines. If everyone was free to do what they wanted, the two works teams would run away with it and you'd end up with a two tier championship again, which might not be a bad thing if it was still 1995 and you have 8 works teams, but with two works teams utterly dominating and the rest of the field fighting for scraps, you'll have everyone moaning about the dominance and the teams further down the pack will question their involvement.

The only problem I have at the moment is the boost situation, because whenever someone wins other than Turks/Shedden/Neal/Plato/Jordan, it's always put down to 'oh but they had more boost' even though the figures aren't published. I always thought the ballast was enough to slow drivers down, just have the engines at a standard power level.
 
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I don't think you will ever get parity while the definition of "touring" cars is so vague.
Back in the late 80s, early 90s, you had Sierra vs Cavalier vs M3.
Then in the mid 90s to early 00s, you had Mondeo vs Laguna vs Cavalier vs Alfa 155.
All of these were similar wheel-base similar style cars.
For the last few years you have had Vauxhall Astras, Honda Civics and Ford Focus, all of which are short wheel-base hot hatches vs Seat Toledo, Chevy Lacetti/Cruze, and MG6, all of which are long wheel-base saloon cars.

To me the short wheel-base cars are not "touring cars" (i.e. you wouldn't tour around the south of France comfortably in them), whereas the longer ones are.
Maybe they should rename the championship the British Production Car Championship :D
 
Is there a category defined as Touring in the UK car market?

The closest you get would be a BMW estate, meaning the Volvo 850 of uber win from the 90's would be the only BTCC car to be close to a 'touring' :D

Bottom line, the rules is the rules, teams race what they want within them. Plus Alan Gow wants the cars popular in the real world to be on the grid, and he's done that. Wether you like it or not, the UK car market is one dominated by hatchbacks.
 
Oddly enough the BTCC was originally called the British Saloon Car Championship, was renamed in the mid-80s.

Car market has changed a lot since the early years of supertouring. Company cars are much less common, so the higher segment repmobiles sell much less, plus cars generally have got larger. A current model small family hatchback is as big as a 90s Cavalier, nominally from the segment above.
 
They had all kinds racing years ago. I remember seeing an AE86 racing one time on the telly. Those where the days when the marshals arrived by a sherpa while cars thundered past.
 
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