Andy Rouse arrived 29 years before Colin Turkington in what we now know as the British Touring Car Championship. But this morning he's only beaten him to Silverstone by five minutes. The purpose? Autosport has invited the only two drivers to have won four BTCC titles to sit down for a chinwag. The British Racing Drivers' Club has kindly made its clubhouse available for us, and Rouse and Turkington are going to compare eras and...
Actually, there's a fair bit of star-struck stuff going on here. It turns out that Turkington was a schoolboy fan of Rouse and the 1990s Super Touring set. Yes, they've met before, but they've never spent an hour in each other's company. And it can only be an hour, because Turkington needs to hot-foot it to the MIRA proving ground to shake down his West Surrey Racing BMW 330i M Sport ahead of the coming weekend at Croft.
Omnipotent BTCC photographer Jakob Ebrey gets the photos done first, under a traditional overcast Silverstone sky, to the soundtrack of a GT track day that's going on. Turkington, being the professional he is, is in his BMW jacket; Rouse, a wiry, trim 72 years old, is in standard BRDC clubhouse jacket-and-jeans attire. "Has anyone got a spare Kaliber Ford jacket for Andy?" Autosport calls out. "Ha, I've still got one at home," Rouse replies.