What's wrong with the BTCC?

The British Touring Car Championship is widely regarded as the premier series in the UK. It comfortably has the highest attendance and TV viewing figures of any domestic four-wheeled motorsport in Britain. And yet...

The racing of late has not been very good. Unusually tame contests have only tended to be interspersed by clashes and crashes rather than proper wheel-to-wheel racing. Knockhill last weekend was perhaps the worst yet, with cars rarely changing position without swapping paint. Or rather, punching a hole in each other.

Part of the problem is the stewarding. Two former champions voiced the same concern to me in Scotland: punishments for bad driving need to be tougher (and consistent), not just to clean up the series, but also to send the right messages to all those watching.

Let's not forget the Ginetta Junior Championship, aimed at helping potential stars of the future, appears on the same bill. And I doubt they're the only young drivers watching.

At Snetterton earlier this month, Matt Neal hit Jason Plato sideways at the high-speed Coram right-hander. Plato retaliated by taking them both off at Murrays and getting the place back.

Both moves were worthy of censure (for different reasons). But the two rivals each lost two places and they finished in the order they were before either clash, so there was no obvious place swap to make and they got off with a reprimand.

Neal and Plato hit each other at Snetterton but escaped serious punishment © LAT

Other drivers, some of whom are less capable than Plato and Neal at choosing where to touch someone (or controlling their cars when contact occurs), have been punished, but this tends to be done only in terms of fines and licence endorsements.

One of the former champions suggested that putting the odd driver 'on the bench', so that they miss a race, would sharpen things up...

Of course, there is a level of entertainment produced by these sorts of shenanigans that many fans enjoy, but that doesn't mean it's good racing.

As a current frontrunner said at the weekend, "this is supposed to be the best championship in Britain," which should surely include the best driving.

In fairness, it's not just the drivers or stewards who are to blame. The technical regulations, specifically those using lap times to adjust turbo boost levels, contribute too.

I've never been quite clear what the official aim of the equalisation is. Is it to equalise engines, or engines and chassis, or engines, chassis, teams and drivers?

The current system is lap time based, which of course lumps together all factors, including the drivers.

If you take the view that the top names in the various cars - Neal, Gordon Shedden and Andrew Jordan in the Honda Civic, Plato in the MG6, Ford's Mat Jackson and Rob Collard in the BMW - are all pretty close in ability, then equalising all their cars shouldn't cause a huge problem. All you're really doing is ensuring that no-one gets too dominant and the title race remains close.

Not for the purist, but it makes sense for the entertainment.

But beyond that, it does create two issues. The first is the way the various cars end up delivering their similar lap time. A good chassis, like the Civic, can do good times with little power, so stays at base level on the boost. A car with a not-so-good chassis, such as the S2000 Focus, needs more boost to achieve the same time.

Aron Smith and Gordon Shedden were in the thick of the action at Knockhill © LAT

You see the problem? If, for whatever reason, a car like the Honda finds itself behind a higher-boosted machine, how is it supposed to overtake? Such discrepancy has existed throughout the sport's history, particularly in GTs and sportscars, but in this case it is being artificially created rather than being the result of intrinsic differences between the cars.

Series boss Alan Gow rightly points out that there is a limit to the extra boost allowed above each engine's base - 0.125 bar - so truly slow car-driver combinations won't keep getting extra boost until they win.

But at Knockhill it was obvious how much quicker Aron Smith's Motorbase Focus was than Plato's MG and Shedden's Civic when the road went straight ('Sheds' was 5mph down despite having a tow, which is a bigger deficit than Plato's normally aspirated Chevrolet Cruze had to the top turbos last season, but Honda did admit to boost issues too).

And what happened? Smith and Plato ended up clashing because the MG kept having to defend against the Ford's power, and Shedden punted Smith out of third on the final lap: there was no other way by.

The other issue is that, when you don't have a top name in a given model, that car gets more boost than it should.

It's probably fair to say that Smith, who is currently a good driver rather than a top one, would not have had as much boost at Knockhill if Jackson had still been in the S2000 Focus at Snetterton, where he probably would have recorded quicker lap times. The Focus would therefore have looked better at Snetterton and would have arrived in Scotland with less boost.

Or, to put it in a more extreme way: if I were to replace Plato and Andy Neate at MG for a round, that would give them maximum boost for the following event because my times would make the car look like a load of rubbish.

BTCC crowds are massive, but could the events be better? © LAT

Unless you have one driver doing times in all the cars - which is how the FIA does its GT3 equalisation - the variation in driving talent will remain a factor and those with no top-notch team-mate will receive an artificially fast car.

In such a context, it is also very difficult to know who is doing a genuinely good job. On any given weekend, is a driver doing well because of his own efforts, the team being on top of the car, or because at this round that car has more boost than it did before?

One respected team manager, whose view is not atypical, said: "It's creating a problem. It's falsifying some of it. Some people are going faster than they should be."

I'd be tempted to just set the boost levels (the racing was arguably better at the start of the year before the rolling boost changes kicked in) and let everyone get on with it, but maybe I'm looking at it from the wrong point of view. It's a long time since touring cars could be considered a 'pure' motorsport event and yet people do love it.

Gow could also well argue that having more people at the front, irrespective of why, is a good thing for the spectators. Plus, it encourages those drivers who aren't the most talented because it gives them a chance.

If you take the view that fans just want to see a close race with the odd crash and don't care why someone is near the front, then it's all fine.

But I'd like to give the fans more credit than that, and the competitors need to feel they are in a series befitting its status. The BTCC should be better than that. Surely that must be possible...