It’s around 10am on Saturday 22 April at Donington Park. The first British Touring Car Championship free practice session of the season is nearing its end. The rhythm of rasping BTCC cars bombing downhill through the Craner Curves to the Old Hairpin is becoming almost hypnotic. Suddenly, a blue-and-yellow projectile comes into view, carrying what must be impossible speed into the right-hander at the bottom of the hill. There’s no way it can make it through…
It does. Comfortably. Ash Sutton and his newly massively developed Motorbase Performance-run Ford Focus ST end that session nearly half a second clear of the opposition. The progress of what is, let’s not forget, a front-wheel-drive machine carrying a base weight of 1340kg has been extraordinary. So too is the three-time champion behind the wheel. At this point, Autosport concludes that Sutton will, in 2023, claim his fourth BTCC crown before the teams even rock up at the Brands Hatch season finale in October, becoming the first man in series history to have won titles with front rear-wheel-drive weapons.
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Well, sometimes we can get things wrong! Owing partly to his ill-advised first-lap incidents at Oulton Park and Croft, Sutton has a ‘mere’ 42-point advantage over reigning (outgoing?) champion Tom Ingram heading to Silverstone for this weekend’s penultimate round. He needs to leave the Northamptonshire venue with a 67-point buffer and, with Ingram’s commendable penchant for harvesting strong results (“pointsy”, as the man himself would impishly proclaim), that’s unlikely, though not impossible.
Of course, Sutton didn’t claim pole that weekend at Donington; instead it was team-mate Dan Rowbottom, even if the bearded Midlander’s lap to top the second phase of qualifying wasn’t quite as rapid as Sutton’s Q1 standard. Next time out, in the wet at Brands Hatch, it was another Ford on pole in the hands of Dan Cammish. From the remaining six race weekends, Sutton has topped qualifying in five of them, the exception being Croft, where Cammish was superb.
So that’s eight poles out of eight for the Motorbase Fords. It’s led to calls in some quarters for the Focus to be slowed down – this is a performance-balancing formula, after all. Some within West Surrey Racing, whose lead drivers Jake Hill and Colin Turkington currently lie third and fourth in the points in their BMW 330e M Sports, point out that when they introduced the 3-Series in 2019, such was the early-season pace of Turkington and Andrew Jordan that they had the boost turned down. Surely, therefore, the same should happen with the Fords.
Yet it’s not as simple as that. The winter development of the Fords (and their Mountune-built engines) kept the cars carefully within the parameters set by the technical team of BTCC organiser TOCA. And if you look at the 2023 average ‘supertimes’, where each driver’s fastest lap of the weekend is calculated as a percentage of the overall quickest, it paints an interesting picture.
Sutton, naturally, is supreme, with an average of 100.021% over the eight weekends. Then we get Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai star Ingram on 100.397 and Hill on 100.398 – almost inseparable. Josh Cook is on 100.528 with his One Motorsport Honda Civic, with Turkington on 100.569. So we have four different models of car in the top five, and the only duplicate is… the BMW.
Source: Autosport