Turkington meets Rouse: The BTCC's greatest in conversation

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.

Then it's into the warmth, to sit down and chat. Coincidentally, both got into the BTCC as the reigning champion in Ford's one-make saloon series: Turkington as 2001 Fiesta title winner; Rouse as the 1972 Escort Mexico king. At the time, Rouse was working for Broadspeed, the factory Ford touring car team run by Ralph Broad, and he landed a 1973 graduation to the big time, competing in the two-litre class with an Escort: "It had 12-inch-wide wheels on the back. It was a proper racer, that was. It was 300 horsepower. Very similar to the touring cars now in terms of horsepower."

"Did you run that car yourself at that stage, Andy?" asks Turkington. "That was Broadspeed," replies Rouse. "We developed the cars and I used to do all the test driving, and Ralph let me race. So that was quite a step up for me really, to be employed by Ford and then move on to British Leyland, or Leyland Cars, or Triumph or whatever it was called. So then I was a factory Leyland Cars driver in the Dolomite Sprint, and won the championship in 1975. I was workshop manager, test driver and racer. I did the whole thing."

The Dolomite appeared in 1974, when the championship switched from the lairy but expensive Group 2 cars to the more production-based Group 1. Again Rouse was in the two-litre class. What he doesn't mention - he's always been a modest man, not one given to blowing his own trumpet - is that he won the class title in his rookie season with the Escort and in 1974 with the Dolomite, before his first overall crown in 1975. To his four BTCC championship successes, we need to add five further class titles...

Rouse now tells the tale of that dramatic 1975 showdown on the Brands Hatch Grand Prix Circuit. He entered the race level on points with Stuart Graham, who had been winning in the top class in his mighty Chevrolet Camaro, and Win Percy, who'd been cleaning up in the 'baby' 1600cc division with his Toyota Celica: "I won the championship by half a bonnet! If we all won our classes in the final race then I would win the championship, so I couldn't afford not to win.

"But Brian Muir was quick that day, his Dolomite was going really well. Bill Shaw was running that car, and he got together with Ralph because they wanted Triumph to win the championship. They agreed that if Brian was in front he'd let me past before the line so I could win the championship for Triumph.

"We started off the race and Brian got ahead of me at the start. We raced 20 laps around the Grand Prix Circuit nose to tail. We came down to Clearways on the last lap, I was second, he was in front, and the yellow flags were out. The green flag wasn't until the start-finish line, which is also where the chequered flag was for the end of the race. So he eased up, let me come alongside, and I just beat him by half a bonnet."

That possibly trumps even Turkington's Brands GP showdown nail-biters: "They've all been!" he remarks. "Probably my first one [in 2009] was the most difficult because I'd never been down that road before, I'd never experienced all the extra pressures that come with the championship final on that scale.

"Obviously I'd won in Fiestas, but I was up against Jason Plato and Fabrizio Giovanardi, and both those guys were multiple champions. I was an emotional wreck that day. We went into the last race and it was about 10 points covering the three of us, but it was pretty much between me and Fabrizio, whoever would cross the line in front, that's who would win.

"Originally we sold race cars to Peter Brock, and Alan [Gow] worked for him. Peter used to do special uprated versions of Holden cars and Alan was his salesman then, and so Alan came over with Peter when they bought RS500s from us," Andy Rouse

"Fabrizio was driving for Vauxhall, and I had Matt Neal in front of me who was also driving for Vauxhall, and he was backing the pack up, backing me into Fabrizio who was two cars back - I could see him in the mirror. So it was a ticking timebomb really. But I managed to keep him behind me and come out on top. But obviously last season [2019] was just as, or probably more, dramatic. It went down to the penultimate lap. It was a three-way shootout again at Brands. You don't get any BTCC championship easy."

Turkington now harks back to his youth as a BTCC fan. "I started watching touring cars in about 1992," he tells Rouse. "I was 10 years old then, and my first memory of you was in the Mondeos with Paul Radisich in 1993. That's the year when I first started watching Andy, and because I was such a fan of the series I got the old tapes and then watched back to the end of the 1980s, so I saw the Ford Sierras."

Rouse, of course, was instrumental in the founding of TOCA, the framing of the regulations that would become known as Super Touring, and the recruitment of a young Australian called Alan Gow, who had previously been working for tin-top legend Peter Brock...

"TOCA started in my office in Coventry," recalls Rouse. "Alan Gow used to work for me."

"Really?" says Turkington.

"Yes, he was my car salesman."

"Really?! I didn't know that..."

"Originally we sold race cars to Peter Brock, and Alan worked for him. Peter used to do special uprated versions of Holden cars and Alan was his salesman then, and so Alan came over with Peter when they bought RS500s from us. I said to Alan at the time, 'If you ever want to come over here and get a job, come and see me,' and sure enough he did a couple of years later. This was at the time when we were developing a special version of the Sapphire Cosworth, and so he came along and set up the sales for that, and ran that for us, which was very successful. We did 80 cars.

"And so he was there ready and available really to take on this TOCA thing, which we started as the Touring Car Association, an association of all the teams. It wasn't a limited company or anything at that point, it was just all the teams getting together to try and run the championship properly, because the RACMSA weren't very clever in the way that they ran it! So it developed from there really.

"Originally it was Dave Cook [who ran the works Vauxhall team], Dave Richards [the Prodrive boss who was fielding BMWs], myself and Vic Lee [who also ran BMWs]. It was just a part-time job for Alan to start with. Eventually the licence became available from the MSA to run the championship, because they were in some kind of a difficult situation with Nicola Foulston [the Brands Hatch boss at the time]. She was trying to take over the championship. So we changed TOCA into a limited company and took over the rights to run the championship, and it went from strength to strength after that."

The two-litre rules were also devised: "Well, again that was done in my office between Dave Richards and Alan and myself. Our original proposal was a two-litre turbocharged formula, which is what you've got now. But BMW weren't keen on that because they didn't have a turbo car, so the compromise was that if BMW were going to be involved it would be a two-litre normally aspirated car with a six-speed gearbox, which suited them and suited everybody at the time. So that's how we got started with it."

One crucial link between Rouse and Turkington is what happened in 1995. Rouse had retired as a driver at the end of 1994, but carried on running the works Ford Mondeos through 1995, when he lost the deal to an upstart Formula 3 team called... West Surrey Racing and fronted by Dick Bennetts. Six years later, Turkington would visit WSR for the first time in his bid to kick-start his BTCC career, and his four titles have come with the team.

"All the people we'd worked with at Ford had moved on, and there were new people involved," says Rouse. "We'd run the team quite successfully, won two World Cups, and I think we had 36 podium finishes with the Mondeo. Dick Bennetts didn't do quite so well..."

"I'll remind him of that!" says Turkington. "I'd been doing the Fiesta championship with an eye to touring cars. At the same time my brother [Gary] was racing Formula Ford with Jonathan Lewis and Van Diemen. At the end of 2001 when I won the Fiestas, my dad spoke to Jonathan and said, 'What are we going to do with Colin? What's the next move for him?' He said, 'I know Dick Bennetts, let me have a word with Dick'. So he connected my family with Dick and we went to their workshop one Saturday afternoon, had a walk round, and we knew straight away that he was our sort of person - easy-going guy, and we could probably have a good relationship with him. My first year was with Team Atomic Kitten, which was the then-famous girl band..."

"Our original proposal for the two-litre [Super Touring] formula was rear-wheel drive with the turbo engine, which would have been really good. It worked out OK anyway with front-wheel drive, but it wasn't my thing really - I hated front-wheel drive," Andy Rouse

Turkington did a good enough job in 2002 in WSR's Atomic Kitten 'satellite' team of MG ZSs to be drafted into an expanded three-car MG works line-up for 2003 alongside Anthony Reid and Warren Hughes.

"I was fortunate actually to get that opportunity, because that was perfect for me - I couldn't take in enough information," he says. "I was like their understudy. Anthony was always somebody that I looked up to because he was one of the guys that I grew up watching in the mid to late 1990s. He was always very open in regard to helping me. He didn't see me coming in as the young gun and a threat trying to take his job. He was quite open to help me and I learned a lot from Anthony - good and bad!

"He was a very intuitive racer, and just how he went about his racing. At West Surrey, they go into a lot of detail and we're always known as having these legendary debriefs on the Saturday evening. Whether qualifying went good or bad, our debriefs... you would rarely make it for dinner because they would always run over. Everybody was keeping their own notes and records, so I was schooled to do everything very methodically and that was led by Dick."

Eventually, after a brief stint at the Triple Eight-run Vauxhall squad, Turkington would return 'home' to WSR for 2006, and for 2007 the team acquired Super 2000 BMW 320si machinery. He drove one to the title in 2009, and has since added three more crowns in NGTC-spec 125i M Sport (twice) and 330i M Sport.

Rouse, meanwhile, scored more title victories after the Dolomite in Alfa Romeo GTV6, Rover Vitesse and Ford Sierra XR4Ti. All eight of their combined championships have therefore come with rear-wheel-drive weaponry.

Both agree that this is how a racing car should be, and Turkington adds that the adaptation "was an easy switchover. I immediately felt at home in a rear-wheel drive. I was quite fortunate back home in Northern Ireland, because even as a kid I had an old car just to hoon about in. I had Ford Granada, Ford Sierra, all these type of things, all rear-wheel drive, so it's sort of where I honed my skills, so when I got into the rear-wheel-drive touring car in 2007 I felt at home."

"Our original proposal for the two-litre [Super Touring] formula was rear-wheel drive with the turbo engine, which would have been really good," says Rouse. "It worked out OK anyway with front-wheel drive, but it wasn't my thing really - I hated front-wheel drive."

So much so that he originally tried to develop the Ford Mondeo around the rear-driven format. Once the car made its race debut, it was in conventional front-driven format, and BTCC new boy Radisich used it to become one of the stars of the Super Touring era.

"Paul was really good in front-wheel-drive cars," approves Rouse. "He used to wear the brakes out like you wouldn't believe because he used to left-foot brake - he was one of the first touring car drivers to do that. That was where his advantage was really.

"Plus the Mondeo being a wide-track, long-wheelbase car compared to all the others, it was really good over kerbs - the suspension worked so you could short-cut them. Somewhere like Monza that's a big advantage, so we won the World Cup there. The Alfa guys couldn't believe that we'd beaten them!"

"How did the relationship with Paul Radisich come about, Andy?" asks Turkington.

"He was a friend of Alan Gow's really. He introduced him and we gave him a test, and he took to it really well. He was pretty special."

Turkington's questioning of Rouse again betrays his fascination with the Super Touring era. "One of my long-lasting memories is being in the grandstand over here, at the British Grand Prix," he smiles. "It was the year that Julian Bailey and Will Hoy..."

"...ran into each other!..." laughs Rouse.

...in the Toyotas. I came with the family for the grand prix, and the grand prix finished and then touring cars was the last race of the day, and... the crowd loved it. You know, it trumped the grand prix easily."

"I've got myself into the dream seat with BMW. I was watching the BMWs in the 1990s - Steve Soper and Jo Winkelhock and all these guys - so to have almost taken over the baton from them, I feel very privileged," Colin Turkington

"It always did."

"I will never forget that, witnessing the two Toyotas coming together."

Autosport interjects: you must have thought that was hilarious Andy, seeing as you'd switched from Toyota to Ford for that year...

"...and having done it before, yeah [Rouse is referring to Brands Hatch in 1992, when he and Hoy took each off at Westfield bend in the previous Great Toyota BTCC Disaster]! It was funny."

"I've got myself into the dream seat with BMW," says Turkington. "I was watching the BMWs in the 1990s - Steve Soper and Jo Winkelhock and all these guys - so to have almost taken over the baton from them, I feel very privileged. And just to have a career in motorsport, I'm thankful for that."

Similarly, Rouse appreciates the BTCC of today: "Well, it's an excellent championship, isn't it? The proof is that they've got 30 cars on the grid these days, which was very difficult going back, so that's a sign of success, that the cost of doing the championship against the television coverage all works.

"It's a top championship, very competitive, the cars all look good, and it's got good television. All credit to Alan Gow, he's invented it, hasn't he really? He started off organising the championship way back, lost it for a while and then brought it back again, so Alan should take the credit for the success of it over the years."

And so should Rouse, as well as his fellow Super Touring godfathers Cook, Richards and Lee. Since Super Touring, we've had BTC Touring, through Super 2000 and now NGTC, and the BTCC remains a one-class, two-litre concept. Rouse is justifiably proud that he played a part in getting the ball rolling, but qualifies this by saying "it was an obvious thing to do.

We managed to invent Super Touring and it's just moved on from there, evolved in different ways. I'm not sure about weight handicapping [success ballast]. I wouldn't have liked to have raced in the weight handicapping era, because it just makes fine engineering a waste of time really, because whatever you do to make your car better it turns into a lump of lead."

"Yeah..." Turkington responds.

"So that must be really frustrating I should think..."

"It's difficult to manage..."

"...but that's been part of your skill hasn't it, in getting the best out of the regulations?"

"This year the maximum weight handicap is 60kg, but in previous years, from 2018 back, for quite a few years the maximum ballast was 75kg, which is a massive amount to sit alongside you."

"It's like having a passenger, isn't it?"

"Yeah, you had to become good at just getting the car home with that sort of weight in the car. Sometimes you felt you weren't even in the race, because there were cars around you that could be up to 100kg lighter, because the rear-wheel-drive cars already run heavier anyway.

"I feel really proud that I've been able to have a career so long. People always ask me what's the future, what am I hoping to do, but I find I just can't look too far ahead," Colin Turkington

"That was difficult, but your job as a driver is to manage that to the best of your ability and try and make a better job of managing the weight than the guy alongside you, or your rival. You've got to accept, 'OK, this is going to be a tough race, I'm going to be slow, but I'll have the weight out in the next race,' so you're having to first of all manage your expectations..."

"...I'd have found that difficult!"

For Rouse to refer to 'part of your skill' is a lovely feather from the old master of the BTCC planted in the cap of the current top dog. Respect runs both ways, and it seems that Rouse is just as happy that Turkington has inherited his former man-to-beat mantle as Turkington is content to chew the cud with one of his boyhood heroes.

"I feel really proud that I've been able to have a career so long," says Turkington. "People always ask me what's the future, what am I hoping to do, but I find I just can't look too far ahead. The championship is so competitive and it demands so much energy mentally that I just focus on one year at a time, and just try and keep the career going as long as I can, because I know when it's over I'll look back on it and pine for it. There are some days, some weekends, when the going is really tough, and the politics, and you just think, aaagghh, this is too much."

"Do I need all this!" laughs Rouse.

"Yeah, do I need all this! But I think it's become my biggest purpose in life, it's my daily focus, so I'll hopefully keep going as long as I can. Andy told me he retired at 46, so that gives me another eight years!"

"That's not bad!"

Yes Colin, but to truly emulate Andy, your mission is to set up and run the works team for which you drive for those eight years... Both laugh at the suggestion. "I'm not sure Dick Bennetts is willing to step aside yet," beams Turkington. "He has the expertise there, I don't. I can only drive, I can't do what Andy did and engineer as well."

And with that, Turkington has to be off to MIRA. As he slips that BMW jacket back on, and continues chatting to Rouse, they discover a shared history in autograss, which they both used as their first steps in car competition. Turkington's ever-attentive wife Louise, without whom you feel he'd struggle to get anywhere on time, tells Rouse he must come and visit them. So there you go: Autosport has set the ball rolling on a new friendship.

And somewhere in the UK, there's a young kid who's been sitting in the grandstands at pre-COVID BTCC events, and who will one day become a multiple touring car champion, and who will be invited for a joint interview with a long-retired Colin Turkington and look up to him with as much respect as Turkington does Andy Rouse.