The 36-year-old Scot has made the decision after finishing 10th in the standings last year, his worst campaign since his maiden full BTCC season in 2018.
Butcher scored one race victory in 2023 with the Speedworks Motorsport-run Toyota Corolla squad to bring his total BTCC tally to 11 wins and has decided to return to his roots in sportscar racing this year by targeting the 24-hour races at the Nurburgring and Spa.
He returned to form at the end of last season by qualifying on the front row at the Brands Hatch Grand Prix Circuit finale, only for punctures to wreck his chances of a good result.
“I know that I can do better,” Butcher told Autosport.
“As much as the car was not a championship-winning car last year, if I was on my A-game I believe I could have finished top six in the championship.
“But sometimes, when your head is not in the right frame of mind, you tend to attract a lot of things like incidents and punctures.”
Speedworks switched for last season from the customer M-Sport-built TOCA engine to a bespoke Toyota powerplant produced by Neil Brown Engineering.
While that engine shares common architecture with the BMW used by multiple title-winning team West Surrey Racing, it is heavier than the TOCA unit and has to be mounted transversely in the Toyota rather than longitudinally in the BMW. The effect on weight distribution meant that Speedworks was playing catch-up on revising its set-ups through the early part of 2023, and Butcher went through a change of engineer.
Source: Autosport