How Hamilton's BTCC fairytale stole the Snetterton show

The biggest cheer in living memory from a crowd surrounding a British Touring Car Championship podium drowned out the series’ Master of Ceremonies Alan Hyde. For once, the paddock was united. Because the bloke doing his best to make his way up the steps is one of the most popular figures in the BTCC.

Dare we say that he’s even as popular as Hyde himself?

Nicolas Hamilton, for the first time, had won Jack Sears Trophy honours. This is presented at the end of each BTCC Sunday to the driver who has scored the most points across the day in the sub-division for those who have never stood more than once on the outright podium. There are six in it this season, and Hamilton and his Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai i30 N Fastback’s accumulation of two seconds and a fourth gave him the verdict over rookie Lewis Selby, who had notched up the same total of 47 points.

Apart from the roar from the well-wishers, the fondness with which Hamilton is regarded was clear as Goodyear’s Mickey Butler – the usual BTCC race three trophy-giver – handed over the silverware and kissed the recipient on the head. When it was time for the overall top three finishers - Gordon Shedden, Ashley Sutton and Tom Ingram - to uncork their champagne, they coordinated it through a countdown and then, in unison, sprayed Hamilton with their fizz.

To them, and everyone in the BTCC, Hamilton’s position as the younger brother of a seven-time Formula 1 world champion is irrelevant. They don’t see that. Instead, their view is of a disabled guy who, year after year, tries his absolute best to compete. Only this year does he have what you might term a competitive car. He’s not very far up the field, but he’s genuinely beating some able-bodied rivals on level terms – and not just at Snetterton. It’s a perfect illustration of what determination can do.

“What more do you want?” said an emotional Sutton. “Seeing Nic standing on the podium was awesome. Forget about my results and everything – that’s a tremendous effort for Nic. Where he’s come from, what he’s achieved, awesome. It broke me, Gordon and Tom there – we all ended up in tears. He thoroughly deserves it. I wouldn’t want to drive how his car is. In any car that he’s driven, I’ve stuck my head in and seen the set-up… Huge credit to him.”

Hamilton’s ambition was to get to stand once on a BTCC podium. Now he’s done it, but, as he reflected: “I’m not going to, but I could happily hang my boots, gloves and helmet up after this weekend, knowing that I have achieved the dream of a little boy who was told he would never walk.

“I’ve been quicker here this weekend than ever before and I’m so proud of how I have driven. I’ve always said that I wanted to win a trophy, but I didn’t want to just be gifted it, and this weekend I feel like I earned it and deserved it.”

Nicolas Hamilton was the feel-good story of the recent Snetterton weekend

Photo by: JEP

Shedden pulls off a miracle

Poor old Shedden was overshadowed by the zeal around Hamilton. Wins don’t come along very often for the 47-year-old three-time champion, who made his BTCC comeback last season with the Speedworks Motorsport-run Toyota Corolla GR Sport stable. That year, he notched up victory number 53 when he capitalised on reversed-grid pole position at Oulton Park. At Snetterton, he did the same to make it 54.

This time, it was a defensive masterclass in the wake of a continuous assault from Sutton’s Alliance Racing Ford Focus Titanium. The Toyota has a serious straight-line deficit. “It’s horrific, just horrific,” offered a drained Shedden. “But we’re just dealing with what we can. It’s really, really difficult, but I managed to get my head down a little bit and get to Turn 1 [Riches] first, and that gave us half a chance. But Jeez – I think it’s quite clear to see from some of the onboards what’s going on out there.

“To be fair I had a real tough one at Oulton last year to win, for different reasons. The Fords in particular have been lightning this weekend. You look at the way Ash started and came through so quickly to win race two. So when I’ve seen him I was like, ‘Uh oh, this is not going to be a lot of fun.’ But I was, ‘I ain’t moving over, I’m just getting on with it and trying to do the best I can.’ So yeah, amazing.”

"I don’t think he knew whether he was clear or not, and didn’t want to turn in. So I’m on the boost again coming through Turn 1, trying to make sure I stayed alongside. It was all quite lively” Gordon Shedden

The first big move came on the eighth lap of 12 into the Wilson hairpin, but Shedden clung on around the outside and threw the Toyota down the inside of the Ford at the following Turn 3 left-hander. Sutton got onto his TOCA Turbo Boost at the end of that lap – as the winner of race two, he was entitled to just one lap of deployment to the eight of Shedden – and used the momentum to try to lob it around the outside at Riches.

“He was so far almost ahead that I could see the red light [to indicate Sutton was out of TTB] on the car,” chuckled Shedden, “but I don’t think he knew whether he was clear or not, and didn’t want to turn in. So I’m on the boost again coming through Turn 1, trying to make sure I stayed alongside. It was all quite lively!”

Interestingly, that makes it two race weekends on the trot where there has been a race win for Speedworks’ brace of Laser Tools Racing with MB Motorsport Toyotas, following Aron Taylor-Smith’s triumph at Brands Hatch. This team is presented as separate from the Speedworks Corolla Racing duo of Josh Cook and Max Buxton – the LTR cars even run in the Independents’ class – and the two ensembles run out of side-by-side garages.

MB head honcho Mark Blundell has sequestered his long-time cohort Gary Paffett on team management duties. Even a guy who has won two DTM titles against touring car legends of the calibre of Mattias Ekstrom, Tom Kristensen and Rene Rast was impressed by Shedden’s effort. When asked whether it was one of the great tin-top defensive drives, he replied: “It was. Amazing progress this weekend.”

It all started with the choice to get the pain of medium tyres out of the way in race one, and the biggest single factor in that was Shedden’s demotion from the sixth row of the grid to the eighth for the qualifying race due to laptimes taken away for track-limits offences.

Shedden took his 54th BTCC race win

Photo by: JEP

“That just put us a bit down the field and we found it a bit hard to race with the car – in the pack it wasn’t the fastest thing out there,” explained Paffett. “In clearer air it was better. We had good progress in race two to get up to seventh, so the car obviously came alive. With reversed-grid pole, it’s obviously a nice position to be in because the cars behind have less boost, and you’ve got a little bit of comfort, but then you’ve got the really quick guys coming through at the end.”

On a weekend where Cook – with the same equipment – struggled to race the Corolla in the pack, the outlier was Shedden’s progress from 13th to seventh in race two, without which it would have been impossible to stand atop the podium at the end of the day.

“I think it’s just a combination of having the right tyre on compared to other people, and just trying to get the car to a point where it just comes off the corners well, so you can kind of minimise the deficit we have here,” continued Paffett.

“Especially with the hot weather – that certainly hasn’t helped the performance. In clear air it’s good, it’s just about trying to use the performance that’s in the car to try and get close enough in the right places. And Gordon’s a great racer – he certainly made the most of it.”

Let’s get rid of VAR!

Sorry, it’s time for a bit of a rant. As any Premier League matchgoer will know, VAR has ruined celebration – or despair – of the ebbs and flows of your favourite team in real time. Unfortunately, the BTCC turned into a bit of a ‘VAR-fest’ at Snetterton.

While I understand penalties for track-limits offences (well, some of them), bad driving (well, not all of those either) or overboosting (that’s a bit techy for me), some of the penalties being applied have gone too far. It’s a motorsport thing really, rather than BTCC-specific, but the joyless pedantry of rules application needs to be reined in.

By the time Ingram lost his third place in the final race at Snetterton, most of the sunbaked crowd were on their way home. A track-limits penalty had been applied, dropping him to eighth. Ingram’s fury was not over the penalty itself, but that he claimed he had not been issued with the standard final warning.

You might think he’s bang to rights here, but surely a key attribute of any accomplished sportsman is taking advantage of any leeway left by the rules. If you’re allowed to go over track limits x number of times, do that – especially when you’re on a charge from last on the grid to third. If Ingram and his camp are right about the lack of a final warning, that penalty was unfair.

Penalty discussions dominated the Snetterton fallout

Photo by: JEP

Sutton’s five-second penalty in race two for crossing the white line track border while executing a double-pass on Ricky Collard and Daryl De Leon was another tricky one. Two wheels were over the line at the point where a patch of grass separates the track from the pitlane entry, before the line moves snugly up against the pitwall. Luckily for Sutton, he got his advantage over Collard out to the requisite 5s – but only in the final sector of the last lap. That post-race penalty would otherwise have cost him a win.

“Coming up the main straight, my reference is the pitwall, because that’s the limit of the track,” explained Sutton. “But actually if you look at the white line, it’s not up against the pitwall. Daryl left a car width’s gap, I pulled across into it using the reference of the pitwall, but I did drop two wheels over the white line. Despite it being 50 yards further up, the white line then was against the pitwall. It was just one of those…”

Clearly, Sutton was able to brush it off and move on, because the penalty had no effect. But he did warn that consistency must be applied: “It’s a feature of Oulton Park as well, and Silverstone Woodcote, so if they’re going to be hot on it, then people need to be aware of that.”

Well, why not just let it go?

And then there was Tom Chilton’s penalty for an out-of-position start from pole in the qualifying race. This was different to his Excelr8 Hyundai team-mate Ingram’s identical punishment at the Donington opening round. There, Ingram was too far forward. It was absolutely fair to penalise. At Snetterton, Chilton was just slightly too far… to the left.

Really? Come on…

Because the pole position grid hatching butts up against the startline, Chilton reckoned he was unable to pick out the correct marks in the sea of painted white. Engineers have been allowed on the pitwall since that Donington opener to guide their drivers to the correct spot.

But, of course, their perspective is side-on, so there was no way that poor old Barry Plowman could know that his man was too far across. “I knew I’d get a penalty before I’d even started,” groaned Chilton.

Did he really gain an advantage? No. Scrap that rule too.

Penalties went too far last weekend

Photo by: JEP