Why a BTCC fantasy can't become reality

The Boxing Day meeting at Brands Hatch was a beacon of motorsport excitement between the 1950s and 1970s, and this writer even remembers watching it on one of our three television channels as a kid. So the prospect of the British motorsport season being extended in the wake of the coronavirus crisis got this now middle-aged mind into a tantalising whirl of anticipation.

'What if the British Touring Car Championship finale was held just after Christmas at Brands?' I wondered. Autosport's subsequent conversation with Motorsport UK chairman David Richards last week in the latest in our series of #thinkingforward interviews did little to quell such thoughts.

On the subject of running the mainstream sporting calendar (as opposed to the odd winter event) up to Christmas, Richards responded: "As the governing body we will be as accommodating as we possibly can. We will find ways of running events as safely and correctly, and with the right support from officials and safety crews, as possible. But our weather in the latter part of the year isn't quite the same as sunnier climes."

Yes, we responded, but it's often not very nice in July or August either.

"It might even be better in October [than the summer], who knows?" Richards smiled. "Let's keep our fingers crossed for a pleasant autumn that we can extend the racing programme into, and let's not forget about the other events that take place around that time. There's rallying going on, there's hillclimbs, there's sprints, there's other events that can go into that period of time quite easily."

So that was a tentative 'yes' to racing pushing back its normal end-of-season boundary from the man whose Prodrive team ran official efforts from BMW, Alfa Romeo, Honda and Ford during the BTCC's halcyon Super Touring era.

Time, then, to call series supremo Alan Gow. Remember, motorsport in the UK can't commence until July, meaning the postponement of the first five of the 10 BTCC events. As things stand, the opening round is the trip to Snetterton on 25-26 July.

That would mean a lot of action to cram in between then and the scheduled finale at Brands on 10-11 October - completing the season without an extension of some sort beyond that date would be almost impossible, especially bearing in mind what Gow told us in Autosport's BTCC preview issue in March: that the series' scheduling is very much dependent upon slots available with ITV, which broadcasts live coverage of the series and its supporting championships.

"If we go into November and the lateness of the day means we're going into dusk, we may need headlights. But would we put on a night race? No" Alan Gow

"It's very feasible going into November - that's very much on the cards," says Gow. "We're trying to put together various scenarios with ITV. You've got shorter days and you have to adjust the timetable, but that's not the end of the world. But ITV haven't got anything available in December. Anyway, it's so much colder than November, it's so much darker, so December is just a non-starter."

Damn, there goes my Boxing Day plan before I've even put it to him (unless the coronavirus fallout results in Christmas being moved forward by a month, of course). But even while I was hatching that, the thought had occurred that the BTCC's jammed timetable of main-act and support qualifying and racing may be a little tricky to cram into daylight hours once we're back to GMT in November, let alone December.

Is there a case for moving support-race qualifying to the pre-event Friday TOCA test days once we're into the gloom of November? Gow thinks not.

"We'd do it over two days," he says. "Cast your mind to Oulton Park - we don't start until midday on Sunday at Oulton Park [due to local noise restrictions], we do a six-hour day and we fit it in quite comfortably. So if you're going from 0930 to 1530 that's eminently doable."

Oulton doesn't have such restrictions on Saturdays, meaning the BTCC/TOCA go the full nine hours on that day, so we're not quite comparing like for like. But, of course, there's always the option of running into twilight on each day with the tin-tops.

Gow rules out a return to the night racing that was a common feature of the BTCC's visits to Snetterton and Silverstone (pictured below) in the late '90's and early noughties - that's not the slot in the ITV schedule the series occupies - but concedes that "if we go into November and the lateness of the day means we're going into dusk, we may need headlights".

"But would we put on a night race? No."

Whatever happens, the BTCC - which is understood to be releasing a revised calendar shortly - will be breaking new ground with the lateness of its season. It's never run later than 30 October (in 1966, when Jackie Oliver won a two-part aggregate race at Brands in a Ford Mustang, after Lotus Cortina man Jim Clark had won the opening heat).

BTCC cars have run outside of daylight-saving hours at Donington Park in the past: the latest in the year came in 1996, with the Tourist Trophy on 3 November. That was an experimental 80-lap endurance race, and was a thorough bore with a threadbare entry won by Alain Menu in the Williams-run Renault Laguna from Kelvin Burt's TWR Volvo.

You can be absolutely sure that 2020-spec BTCC action in November will be a hundredfold more entertaining than that, even if it's a pity we can't go festive and have a late-December finale.

But, now I've touched upon the subject of a Boxing Day Brands revival, there are plenty of other series that could fill the bill. Over to Jonathan Palmer and the good folks at MotorSport Vision...