The Villeneuve-esque 'engineer's dream' who lit up BTCC 2020

The Gilles Villeneuve of the British Touring Car Championship took home the ultimate prize in 2020 after a sensational display throughout this oddest of seasons, his otherworldly natural talent, car control and racecraft allied to an insatiable appetite for overtaking. And he did so at the wheel of a completely redesigned and re-engineered car that had a total dry-weather mileage still only in double figures when the action kicked off.

Ash Sutton, Laser Tools Racing, BMR Engineering and the Infiniti Q50 pulled off a smash-and-grab heist from under the noses of the acknowledged BTCC standard setters: four-time champion Colin Turkington, West Surrey Racing and the BMW 330i M Sport. It appeared to be a season-long performance of fizzing opportunism and audacity - far removed from the softly-softly Turkington/WSR approach - but in reality you have to delve much further back even than the coronavirus-extended 2019-20 off-season to discover the roots of what transpired.

Sutton, of course, had been the (literally) blue-eyed boy of his manager Warren Scott's BMR Subaru team, winning the championship at the second attempt - and in only his fifth season of car racing - in 2017. But the Levorg was progressively handicapped out of consistent competitiveness by BTCC organiser TOCA.

Meanwhile, Laser Tools boss Bob Moffat had gone it alone with his own team to run the Mercedes A-Class of son Aiden when their relationship with Merc-builder Ciceley Motorsport began to deteriorate, and had acquired the ill-fated Support Our Paras Infiniti Q50 project of 2015 for use as a bit of trackday fun. Federico Turrata, the COO of Italian engineering consultancy Hexathron Racing Systems, was working for the LTR squad on Moffat's car, and identified the Infiniti as an ideal BTCC weapon.

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In mid-season 2019 came the news that Moffat would switch from the Mercedes to the Infiniti, and the Scot completed the season with the car, which had the current-spec standard RML subframe bolted in to replace the GPRM kit around which it had originally been designed. Sutton gave the car a test at Snetterton to help out, and that was a curtain raiser to BMR retiring its Subarus, and Sutton and his BMR crew moving under the LTR banner for 2020.

Key to this BMR crew is Anglo-Italian Antonio Carrozza, who had entered the BTCC paddock in the mid-2010s as a university graduate in his first job as a design engineer for the series' gearbox supplier Xtrac. After two and a half years working on track support at Xtrac, he joined BMR in 2017, where he was performance engineer to Sutton in his first title-winning season. The following year he carried out the same role across the whole team, and in 2019 he race-engineered Sutton in his final season with the Subaru. Now Carrozza was charged with a redevelopment of the Q50 to prepare for 2020, and this effectively happened in the image of the Levorg.

"I took over the design in late October last year, and it was nice to have that car [the one Moffat had raced in late 2019] to evaluate," he says. "At least we had a baseline for everything, but there were more Subaru-based features on the Infiniti this year - there was no carryover. We took all of Ash's crew from last year and worked on winter development. We went to the windtunnel, did chassis mock-ups and it went to Willie Poole Motorsport [the BTCC chassis specialist].

"The Infiniti was built with four years of understanding of a rear-wheel-drive car with the Subaru. We'd gone down so many engineering routes with that car with the powertrain package being relatively weak on the Subaru, and that pushes down on chassis development. All the development we did on the Infiniti in the windtunnel, on chassis stiffness and on centre of gravity, it was proving better in every area than the Subaru. So we knew it'd be better, but not specifically how much better."

But with Sutton, it doesn't seem to matter where he qualifies - or where he's bumped down to during the inevitable incidents that are part and parcel of the BTCC. Look at his opening-day recovery at Donington - spun down to last in race one after inadvertent contact from Turkington to reversed-grid winner

The Infiniti arrived at Silverstone's March BTCC media day in the small hours of the morning, and Sutton managed very few laps. Then there was the July Snetterton tyre test, and the car only got in around 15 laps before rain spoiled the rest of the two days.

"In all fairness that wet testing really helps the driver direction with where we're going on set-up," says Carrozza. From its original outing at Silverstone with a 'Subaru' set-up, by the opening round at Donington Park "we were in a completely different ballpark, and the car didn't move very far all year from where we were there".

And Sutton did the rest. Qualifying was a weak point for the Infiniti - three times Sutton started the opening race of a weekend outside the top 10 - and many point to the form of team-mate Moffat, who remained engineered by Turrata, as evidence of the 2020 champion's heroism behind the wheel. Moffat, they say, was performing very similarly to how he did in the Mercedes, and a delve into the stats bears this out: his median average qualifying position across the nine rounds in 2020 was 15 in the Infiniti; and for his last nine outings in the Mercedes across 2018-19 it was 16, and that was with a bigger field. Single-lap pace is therefore the focus of development across the winter of 2020-21.

"We need to work on making it easier to drive," admits Carrozza. "Ash is driving at 105% and that's where track limits [something Sutton fell foul of on numerous occasions] come in. We just have to make his operating window as big as possible."

But with a driver like Sutton, it doesn't seem to matter where he qualifies - or where he's bumped down to during the inevitable incidents that are part and parcel of the BTCC. Look at his opening-day recovery at Donington - spun down to last in race one after inadvertent contact from Turkington; fifth by the end of race two; reversed-grid winner.

At Brands GP, where the BMR/LTR crew struggled to get the Infiniti to work in the heat, he scythed from 10th to second in the reversed-grid race within two laps. At Oulton Park, he went from eighth to victory in the wet second race.

At Silverstone, he was 26th in race two thanks to a puncture from nerfing Rory Butcher, before storming from the back of the grid to second on the road (third after a penalty due to going off-track to pass Tom Oliphant).

At Croft, he was bumped down to 14th by Butcher's contact on the opening lap, charged back to fourth, got a puncture in race two during an attempted aggressive pass on Jake Hill, and then shot from 20th to fifth in the finale.

Sutton, indeed, made a staggering 122 overtakes during the 2020 season - albeit that does include some places made up away from starts, and a handful where a car in front briefly went off track.

"He doesn't need to know about the car in front or behind," points out Carrozza. "It's important that I give him the information about the cars he can't necessarily see. 'Where's Colin? How hard do I need to push?' At Croft, Colin was in the barrier but you know what Ash is like... He knew where Dan Cammish was too, he knew where Tom Ingram was [both very much in the title hunt]. The championship was looking fantastic at that point [until the collision with Hill]."

Following that, the championship very much swung back into Turkington's favour at Snetterton, where two wins and a third put him seemingly in control heading into the Brands finale. But the gloomy November wet weather really hit the BMW for six, and the Northern Irishman was powerless to prevent the title going Sutton's way. Still, WSR boss Dick Bennetts identifies Thruxton (where an electrical failure scuppered Turkington in race one) and Croft (a rare Turkington gaffe in race two) as the costliest weekends.

"If you have a problem in race one, that hurts your weekend and unfortunately that electrical problem at Thruxton put us on the back foot," he says. "And then his indiscretion at Croft, which put him among the numpties in race three [and another incident]."

The BMWs were also hurt by TOCA meddling with starting boost, designed to even out the performance of rear and front-wheel-drive cars. From the fifth round at Thruxton, the boost reduction off the startline and up to 125km/h was almost doubled from the previous figure. Two events later, at Croft, this was reined back slightly to 110km/h, but WSR was still unimpressed.

"We carry that reduction a long way," argues Bennetts. "Once you're down on speed you're down on speed, and the front-wheel-drives are passing us. All I can look back to is the start-finish line at Croft, which is after the tightest hairpin on the calendar, and the front-wheel-drives are quicker than us across the line. But all I get told is, 'Dick, you won'. But you win by good drivers, relationships, engineering and teamwork. So we're probably better off finishing second in the drivers' championship!"

"Sometimes he doesn't know what it's doing, but he'll take you to that portion of data because he's got a photographic memory of what's happening on each lap" Antonio Carrozza

The RWD Infiniti, powered by the customer, Swindon-built, spec TOCA engine, appeared to be less affected than the Neil Brown-tuned BMW motors, and Bennetts believes that this has its roots in a performance-balancing measure aimed solely at the 330i M Sport in early 2019: "They reduced our boost last year when we were dominating, and the Infiniti wasn't running then."

It didn't quite work out for Turkington - although BMW claimed the manufacturers' title and WSR the teams' crown, with the vastly improved Oliphant very much key to this - but Bennetts believes his star driver is still operating at his peak.

"He's 110% committed," he says approvingly. "He's determined, a very clean driver who doesn't push people off, and the reports he writes... I'm just reading the one he's done from Brands now. We just didn't give him the car he needed there."

Cammish, Ingram and Butcher very much played their parts in the title fight too. Cammish, in his third BTCC season at the wheel of the Team Dynamics-run Honda Civic Type R, and Ingram, giving the solo Speedworks Motorsport-tended Toyota Corolla its second campaign, were almost flawless, and for each it was ill-timed mechanical gremlins that scuppered their chances.

Given their front-wheel-drive machinery, it's very difficult to separate the quality of their performances from those of Sutton and Turkington in their RWD cars. We had a very closely matched top four this year. Butcher, returning to his old pals at Motorbase Performance, was very strong too in the team's new fourth-generation Ford Focus, which at last gave the squad a weapon that would switch on its tyres (too much so in the heat of the Scot's puncture-strewn August Brands), but he is the first to admit that he made a couple too many errors.

The darty, rollerskate qualities of the front-wheel-drive Honda and Toyota in particular were in stark contrast to the bouncing, soft Infiniti, and Sutton sometimes looked as though he was auditioning to be a 1970s American TV cop-show stunt driver. It was fabulous to watch and, again, it dates back to his Subaru days and Carrozza's early-days BMR work with Levorg designer Carl Faux, who then went off to Australian Supercars.

"One of my first jobs with Carl was to take the car to a four-post and seven-post rig, and work out chassis stiffness and vibration frequency," he says. "I worked with Carl on an XL tool to develop dampers and suspension geometry. The soft set-up is "a philosophy I've always kept because it gives the driver a wider operating window. We need to do all the work with the front axle - it's very soft but very reactive through chicanes."

And then there's Sutton the development driver. Don't forget his first title came with a Subaru that Turkington and Jason Plato had already raced, so there was plenty of good data. This time, it was down to him.

"Ash's feedback is phenomenal," points out Carrozza. "He can pick out the features of the car and what it's doing. Sometimes he doesn't know what it's doing, but he'll take you to that portion of data because he's got a photographic memory of what's happening on each lap.

"He's a bit of an engineer's dream really - you spend more time working on the car than him. If the car is not working to his liking he will adapt his driving style and get the most out of it. You don't necessarily have to make the car perfect for his driving style. That's his strong point: adaptability."

And that's why he's the exciting, Villeneuve-esque, champion of the BTCC.