Turkington: British Touring Car Championship 'more open than ever'

Turkington has switched from WSR to the fledgling Team BMR outfit for this season, swapping the ultra-successful BMW 125i M Sport for a Volkswagen CC alongside Jason Plato.

The Northern Irishman, who was second to his new team-mate in the series' official pre-season test at Donington Park, told AUTOSPORT that the coming campaign was impossible to predict.

"I'm not that brave," he said when asked to pick out the frontrunners this season. "Normally it's the same old faces, and I think it's going to be the same contenders as ever, but everybody has the potential to win now.

"You can't afford to write anybody off. That's the beauty of it: it's going to be harder than ever to win."

This season the amount of success ballast has been increased, as has the number of drivers it will be applied to.

Last year the top five in the championship started the weekend with additional weight on a sliding scale from 45kg, with the top five in races one and two then carrying that ballast in the following encounter.

Turkington thinks the 2015 ballast, starting at 75kg and now covering the top 10, will make it harder to sustain success throughout the weekend.

"I think this year is going to be more open than ever," he added. "It's such a shuffled pack.

"There's an extra element of difficultly to try and win the first two races of the day. It's definitely going to be trickier."

Sunday's Brands Hatch opener will feature 27 cars following the late withdrawal of Dan Welch with a broken foot, while Derek Palmer Jr will drive the sole Q50 during Infiniti's BTCC debut.

This week's issue of AUTOSPORT contains a 12-page preview of the 2015 BTCC season - including a full run through of the grid and 1992 champion Tim Harvey's take on the year's big talking points