A year in the life of a new BTCC team

It was one of the biggest eruptions of joy from the British Touring Car Championship season. When Jake Hill plucked out ball number ‘6’ from his reversed-grid draw at Silverstone in late September, he installed Chris Smiley and his Restart Racing Cupra Leon on pole position for the final race of the day. The crew from the little Essex squad cheered wildly. And so they might, because 12 months earlier they hadn’t even pressed the green light on their project.

Restart’s two-car entry to the BTCC with Smiley and Scott Sumpton looked set to make the team the first to join the series since Excelr8 Motorsport back in 2019, although as things transpired it would end up sharing that honour with single-car Unlimited Motorsport, like Restart running the ex-Team Hard Cupra model.

It was the realisation of a dream that Smiley and engineer Ben Taylor, who had worked together with Taylor’s father Bert at BTC Racing, had harboured since they exited the series at the end of 2021 when the Northern Irish racer’s two-year stint with Excelr8 came to a close. They regrouped in 2022 in TCR UK under the banner of Restart, won the title with Honda’s trusty Civic Type R FK7, then had a trickier 2023 developing the new FL5 model.

The final member of the triumvirate required to make the BTCC commitment was commercial chief Pete Jones, the logos of whose Third Millennium security systems company are prominent on the Cupra. As an out-and-out racing enthusiast, Jones had been a backer of Excelr8 in the BTCC and struck up a friendship with Smiley and Taylor Jr during their 2020-21 stint at the team.

“It got to Easter in 2022 and I didn’t know what was going on,” relates Jones. “Ben’s dad Bert put something cryptic out on social media, and the only way I could find out what the hell was going on was to ring Charlie [Smiley’s father].

“He said, ‘I’ve just come back from Milan with a Honda TCR, we’re out racing next week, are you coming?’ I took my son along and he got embedded in the team, and he’s obviously moved on to different things.”

New to the BTCC in 2024, the Restart Racing squad had a rollercoaster maiden year

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Indeed, Nathan Jones (not to be confused with the 1971 Supremes hit – insipidly covered by Bananarama in the 1980s – of the same name), worked as data engineer for Restart and is now Pirelli’s tyre technician for the Williams Formula 1 team. Things progressed in a BTCC direction towards the end of the 2023 season.

“I was looking for a club race for Nathan to do, so I went to Silverstone in September to see the Mini Challenge Clubsport because we’ve got a Cooper for him and he drives that regularly with Chris,” continues Jones.

“I walked into the cafe at Silverstone and Pete Osborne [owner of the Alliance-run NAPA squad] was sitting there with an empty chair at the table, so I thought I’d invite myself to lunch. We started having a conversation, that didn’t lead to anything, but it opened our minds to actually coming back to BTCC and eventually, we made it happen.”

"We had to get the ball rolling quite quick so we could make the testing deadline for end of February, early March" Ben Taylor

Osborne at the time was keen to supply Focus STs to a new BTCC team. “We even went and had a look,” adds Jones, “and we went down to Team Hard and the demise of them created an opportunity for us to get a lower-cost entry to the championship, and that’s what we did. That was literally a year ago, just before the final BTCC round of 2023.”

“I was sort of pushed away [from the BTCC], and it left a bad taste in my mouth,” recalls Smiley. “We’ve done this for long enough to know if we’re being treated fairly or unfairly. For us to come back and do it again, I felt like we needed to do it ourselves. We’ve always worked hard at it, and it always felt that whenever we were getting somewhere, someone would grab it and snatched it off us.

“My dad ran British Superbike teams, and we’ve always tried to do things to the best of our ability. The way we felt at the end of 2021, we just wanted to go racing, and the best option that we had was to go TCR. It was good for us all, because it gave Ben a chance of running his own team.”

The team took possession of two of Hard’s new-for-2023 Cupras, one of which has been raced by Bobby Thompson for the first half of the season and Michael Crees in the second, the other by Dan Lloyd.

Smiley regales Simmons with the story of how Restart came about

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“It must have been a fortnight after the last race,” reckons Taylor. “We collected the one car and some other bits and bobs that Tony [Gilham, Hard boss] had there that we needed to run it, and then a few weeks later we got the other car. That part of it all came together quite sharp.”

As happens quite frequently, the move of an incumbent engineer seemed to come hand in hand with the transfer of the BTCC’s TBL entrants’ licences. In this case, ex-Team Dynamics man Tom Hunt, who had worked with Lloyd in 2023 at Hard, came on board.

“By the time we’d done all that it was like end of November, and we were looking to do a load of development that had been started via Tom and Team Hard that we wanted to proceed with,” says Taylor. “So we had to get the ball rolling quite quick so we could make the testing deadline for end of February, early March.

“Tom did the winter upgrade stuff and it was good because the ball was already rolling; we just finished the process. The first TOCA test we were probably not really prepared enough for, because of the amount of work we’d done on the cars, but by the time we rolled up to media day we were in a nice place.”

Jones was working away on the non-technical stuff: “I got to see [at Excelr8] what goes on in the paddock and how the commercial side works – that’s my contribution to this project, to put that extra layer on top of the trackside operation. You have to have hospitality, you have to have great partners, and this year has really been about getting the team bootstrapped in BTCC because you can’t sell it if you’re not here.

“I wanted the challenge. I wasn’t surprised by anything because I’d watched teams for five years before doing this. The ability to consume money was slightly more than I expected. It doesn’t matter how much money you’ve got, you can always spend more.

“My objective was to hit Donington next year in far better shape than we were at the start of this season, and I think that’s mission accomplished. We’ve got an effective team that all works.

“You always need more money, so me and Chris and his dad Charlie are constantly on the phone talking to potential partners. Every now and then you click a good one and that builds the sustainability in the team, the resilience to be able to go racing. At the end of the day we just want to go racing and compete.”

Pete Jones (left) and Ben Taylor (right) have been key figures along with Smiley in the genesis of Restart Racing

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How does the bang-for-buck of the BTCC’s NGTC machinery compare to TCR?

“It’s very hard to compare it because the TCR cars do 14 races and this is 30 over 10 weekends,” points out Smiley. “If you ran a TCR car to the level that these cars are being run at, with the same amount of tyres and race weekends, there’d be very little difference in the price.”

One key difference is that TCR is customer racing where competitors get technical support from their manufacturer, whereas you’re on your own in the BTCC – notwithstanding the assistance from suppliers of the control parts.

“Yeah for sure,” sighs Taylor. “It’s been a massive engineering challenge running these, because we had previous BTCC data pre-hybrid, but since hybrid was introduced [for 2022] we had none. So it’s taken us a long time, longer than we expected, to really get on top of that. But we are there now and the car’s in a really good place.”

"Silly little things, not necessarily anybody’s fault, have cost us. There’s more weekends where we should have been in that position to get the reversed grid for race three" Chris Smiley

Smiley, who is frequently bullish, asserts that apart from the sixth place at Silverstone that preceded the reversed-grid pole, “there’s other weekends where we’ve had silly little things go wrong that have cost us proper results. I was lying seventh at Snetterton when the passenger door opened; at Donington we had a faulty hybrid battery when I was in the top 10; a similar thing at Croft.

“Just silly little things, not necessarily anybody’s fault, but have cost us. There’s more weekends where we should have been in that position to get the reversed grid for race three, and that’s where we are at the minute.”

One figure who has assisted Restart in its first steps in the BTCC is three-time champion Matt Neal, Hunt’s former boss at Dynamics.

“Matt’s been a great help to me on the driving side,” enthuses Smiley. “It’s not that I don’t know what to do, it’s just that Matt gets you there quicker on a race weekend. He just sees four or five things that you’re doing in free practice, and you go into qualifying with a clear mind of what you need to do.”

Restart Racing and the single-car Unlimited Motorsport squad both run ex-Team HARD Cupras

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And Smiley waxes lyrical about Taylor, who took on engineering duties when their pre-season tie-up with veteran Geoff Kingston “just didn’t align. Ben has engineered me for the last seven years and he’s picked up the role and done a great job. And Ben day-to-day manages looking after the cars and the reprep.

“Without him doing the job he has done this year, it wouldn’t have been possible to do it. There’s very few people who could have taken on that project of getting those cars when he did and turn them around so we have working cars.”

The next project is a move, which Taylor hopes happens at the end of this month, into the old Van Diemen factory in Norfolk, just across the road from Snetterton – and which is still owned by the Firman family. But don’t start thinking that we might see Dave Coyne or Paulo Carcasci joining the team, even if the amiable Sumpton is moving on after a tough rookie season…

While Jones – who is philanthropically helping some tin-top youngsters on their road towards the BTCC – has been a personal backer to Ronan Pearson, it appears that this former Excelr8 driver is moving elsewhere. Meanwhile, Nic Hamilton has been spotted in the Restart hospitality. Then there’s Lloyd, an ex-team-mate of Smiley who is also pals with Taylor and Jones.

“Two drivers of a similar standard makes a big difference,” offers Smiley cryptically. “And you can infer something from that…” grins Jones.

If the number one target for a new BTCC team is to get established – and, after all, look at what Excelr8 has achieved since its tough fledgling steps in 2019 – then Restart has clearly succeeded. But, at a time when series boss Alan Gow is seeking to boost his grid to 24 from the depleted 20 of this season, would the boys recommend it to others thinking of following suit?

“If you want to make sure that you’ve got something on your mind every day, and some form of hassle every day, and something going wrong, join the BTCC, and make sure you’ve got plenty of money in the tank to keep going that way!” laughs Smiley, before Taylor replies, “But it is the place to be in British motorsport, isn’t it?” Smiley: “And we enjoy it and we live for it.”

Jones: “I always go back to Jim Clark being on the trophy. That’s what makes it special, that history.”

Restart Racing has big hopes for the 2025 season which follows hybrid units being ditched

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