Genesis: how Super Touring came to life

It is arguably the most important British export in motorsport history. What started as the 'two-litre touring car formula', conceived to breathe new life into the British Touring Car Championship, spread around the globe as Class 2 and then Super Touring.

Yet the significance of the category goes beyond its successes through the 1990s. It remodelled the motorsport landscape.

Super Touring democratised production-based motorsport by bulldozing the barriers to participation for the manufacturers, not just in touring car racing but also rallying and eventually even sportscars.

The expensive and often-controversial homologation special, once de rigueur for success on the racetrack or the rally stage, has disappeared, and the world has Super Touring to thank for that.

The ideas at the heart of Super Touring were transferred to rallying and became the World Rally Car formula. Super 2000 was effectively 'Son of Super Touring' and, over in sportscar racing, the ultra-successful GT3 category followed the same thought process.

The two-litre formula was born out of frustrations with a BTCC that was dominated by the Ford Sierra Cosworth RS500 at the front, yet potentially won by a car scrapping it out down the order in one of the lesser classes within the Group A category. And this was at a time when the series was reaching a wider audience thanks to TV coverage.

"The championship was unpromotable," says Jonathan Ashman, under whose remit the BTCC fell in his capacity as RAC MSA marketing director. "It was also all about the RS500; no one else wanted to compete, and I knew the reasons why.

"I'd spent the previous four years as sales director at Toyota in the UK and I always had guys from the motorsport side asking me for a budget for racing or rallying. When I asked what car they wanted to use, they always said the Celica or the Supra. That was no use to me, because I could sell every one of those I could get [from Japan]. I told them that if they could race or rally one of our mid-range four-door saloons, I could find a budget."

At the same time, the teams competing in the series could see the writing on the wall. Their quest to come up with an alternative was driven by self interest.

"We knew the RS500's homologation was due to run out and the prospect was for one or two Nissan Skylines running around at the front," recalls BTCC stalwart Andy Rouse. "The car was expensive and not very recognisable to people watching on TV. We knew we needed something else."

David Richards at Prodrive, which had moved onto the race circuits for the first time in 1988 and then ran a proper multi-car BMW-backed campaign in 1989, understood the frustrations of his paymasters. The M3 was competing in Class B and wasn't winning races. And that meant it wasn't playing a starring part on TV.

"I could tell BMW was getting frustrated," explains Richards. "The new rules were driven by commercial imperatives: our business at Prodrive is selling motorsport programmes to manufacturers."

The idea was to replace Group A with something much more inclusive so more manufacturers could come and play. They would be encouraged to do so by the chance of racing the model they most likely sold the most - the four-door family saloon, or repmobile. The engine would be of two litre capacity, because just about everyone had one of those.

It was a simple idea, but who came up with it isn't clear. Given its subsequent success, it should come as no surprise that there's a queue of people ready to put their hand up and say, 'It was me'.

Richards claims the credit for Prodrive. "We sat down at Prodrive - Ian Parry, Dave Lapworth [respectively co-founder and technical boss] and myself - and thought about what kind of rules we wanted so we didn't have to persuade a manufacturer to make an irrelevant and expensive homologation special," he says. "We got our ideas validated by Andy [Rouse] and then presented them to the MSA."

Rouse begs to differ. "The idea originated on my desk," he says. "I identified that just about every manufacturer had a two-litre engine that could be used for racing. I actually wanted a two-litre turbo, to replicate the same power and speeds of the RS500."

Ashman suggests the credit should go to him. He talks of a meeting when he gathered a group of senior sales and marketing executives together and thrashed out the concept that became the two-litre formula.

"We had an extraordinary number of people turn up," he recalls. "We said, 'Let's write a set of rules whereby everyone can use their bog-standard saloon.' I remember going home that evening with a copy of What Car? and coming up with the 4.2-metre minimum length."

Some of those involved have attempted to dismiss Ashman's part, but the man charged with turning concept into rulebook suggests that the future president of the FIA Touring Car Commission played a central role.

"I think credit should go to Ashman," says Gerard Sauer, an engineer and journalist who co-ordinated the BTCC in 1989. "He was highly influential in the whole process, because he was an ace politician."

The seeds of the internationalisation of the formula were sown as early as 1989. Sauer was commissioned by the RAC to undertake a viability study that involved visiting manufacturers around Europe.

"What swung it was the promise of a lot of manufacturer sporting departments to come in," he explains. "There was a lot of enthusiasm for the idea if the cars represented what they were selling in the biggest numbers."

The two-litre formula came into effect for the 1990 season, with factory BMW and Vauxhall teams and a smattering of privateers existing alongside the old Group A RS500s. After this transition year, the category exploded into life. Toyota and Nissan joined the party in 1991, and Mazda and Peugeot followed suit the following year.

Ashman had by then taken up his role at the FIA, which adopted the two-litre rules. The governing body gave it the name Class 2 for 1993, because Class 1 was awarded to the new 2.5-litre high-tech DTM category, but the lack of a catchy name proved no hindrance.

Even before it was rechristened Super Touring for 1995, the formula had a foothold on every continent bar one. And the set was completed the following year when the two-litre repmobiles had their own series in, of all places, North America..

This feature also appears in this week's issue of AUTOSPORT magazine, on sale from August 15, as part of our Super Touring special