Where did it all go wrong for Super Touring?

The seeds of Super Touring's own destruction were sown in its own success. The problems came, and came thick and fast, after it evolved into an international category.

When the FIA adopted the British two-litre formula ahead of the 1993 season, the rule-making process - or rather the way the regulations were interpreted - was thrown into the governing body's talking shops. A firm grip on the rulebook was lost in the smoke-filled rooms of Paris, and costs escalated.

Super Touring became just too expensive. The budgets in the final year that the British Touring Car Championship ran to its rules went through the roof. Triple Eight boss Ian Harrison admits his team spent £6.5 million running three Vauxhall Vectras in the BTCC in 2000, and it is generally reckoned that Prodrive's budget for the same number of cars hit £10m.

The cars had been phenomenally expensive to build. Harrison puts a figure of £400,000 on each Vectra in 2000. By way of comparison, an Astra Coupe for the BTC Touring formula that replaced Super Touring in Britain for 2001 cost just £85,000 to produce.

"It had gone berserk by the end," says Ricardo Divila, technical director with Nissan Motorsport Europe in the late '90s. "The bodyshells weren't built on the production line. We'd start off with the platform, build the cage and put the panels on around it. Something like 3200 man-hours were required just to produce the shell."

The cost of competing in Super Touring had been on an upward spiral from the beginning. Its growth around the world, and therefore its prestige, raised the stakes in a category in which more and more manufacturers were competing. Everyone wanted to win and everyone had a say in the way the regulations were interpreted.

"The FIA was under massive pressure from the manufacturers and was being lobbied all the time," explains Harrison. "They'd each get a little point through the Touring Car Commission, and everyone would have to follow suit. You'd have to spend half a million quid to gain half a tenth, and then do it 10 times, because otherwise you'd be half a second off the pace."

Jonathan Ashman, who had taken the presidency of the Touring Car Commission at the end of'91, recalls sitting in meetings wondering what was happening to the formula he had helped create.

"I remember things being allowed in the German championship [the STW] and those things having to be adopted across the board," he says. "In every meeting, it seemed like the regs were becoming freer and freer. As that happened, the costs went up."

The location of the engine within the engine bay was one area in which the manufacturers pushed the boundaries of the rules. The wording in the British two-litre regulations stated that it must retain its original orientation, but as early as '94, the TWR Volvo squad located its five-cylinder engine virtually flat against the cockpit bulkhead in the interests of improved weight distribution.

Later, the same engineer responsible for that, the late John McLoughlin, would lay the V6 in the factory-backed Schubel team's Ford Mondeo on its side and run the driveshafts through the V of the engine.

"Allowing that kind of thing was a mistake, as was not stopping Vauxhall from turning the cylinder head around through 180 degrees [to improve induction]," says long-time BTCC technical director Peter Riches. "Before long, we were having people cutting cylinder heads to pieces and rewelding them, and still being able to say it was the original component."

Aerodynamics were another area in which development costs dramatically increased from the early days. Alfa Romeo had moved the goalposts for '94 by bringing out the 155 TS Silverstone special edition, complete with a high rear wing and a trick front splitter. The FIA's reaction was to free up the aero for '95 and allow everyone a wing and a splitter. All the teams rushed for the windtunnel.

All sorts of things were allowed in Super Touring in the late '90s: Nissan used its four-wheel-drive Primera chassis so that it could have double-wishbone suspension all round; Audi was permitted to run an alternator running off the rear axle on its four-wheel-drive A4 quattro; and manufacturers came up with all sorts of devious means to create something approaching a flat underfloor.

Divila reckons the rules gave the engineers "pretty much carte blanche by the end", and Riches describes Super Touring as an "engineering masturbation exercise" in its final years. "We had lost control," he continues. "Things were allowed that should never have been allowed."

Even the man at the heart of the Super Touring rule-making process in the '90s admits that the FIA was at least partly to blame.

Gabriele Cadringher, the long-time boss of the governing body's manufacturers' commission, concedes that the processes were too democratic.

"The problem with the FIA is that there is too much democracy," he says. "Our problem was that we were governed by our own stability rules. Since I have been in America [initially working in Grand-Am], I understand how NASCAR does things to maintain firm control of costs."

Perennial BTCC boss Alan Gow is adamant that a firmer grip would have been kept on development, and therefore costs, had the two-litre formula stayed in Britain. Asked if it needed to be run as an autocracy, he replies, "Absolutely. Which is exactly what we are doing now. Since we dropped Super Touring at the end of 2000, that is how the BTCC has been run."

Super Touring series were falling like flies as the new millennium turned. The BTCC had just three manufacturers and 11 entries in 2000, and was forced to allow in Super Production cars to bolster grids and then relaunch with new rules for the next season.

The French, German and Italian series had already withered and died by then, although the category continued through 2000 and '01 with the new European Super Touring Championship run by Marcello Lotti, who would relaunch the European Touring Car Championship in '02 with the new Super 2000 rulebook.

Super Touring's life was at an end, but then nothing lasts forever.

"It was always going to evolve into something else," says Gow. "Every set of regulations has a finite life."

This feature also appears in AUTOSPORT magazine as part of our Super Touring special