How extreme engine steps for Speedworks at Donington Park paid off

First, an apology… As little as three rounds ago, this post-race-weekend column of reflection on the British Touring Car Championship featured the Speedworks Motorsport-run Toyota Gazoo Racing UK team, following three-time champion Gordon Shedden’s feelgood story of a win at Oulton Park.

And now we’re going to do it again. Speedworks, you see, was the subject of much of the intrigue at Donington Park. It brought back one of the stars of the championship, and took the very rare step of running two completely different engine types across its four Toyota Corolla GR Sports.

Josh Cook, a race winner with Speedworks in 2024, was back in the driving seat for the first time since the mid-season withdrawal of One Motorsport, although he had been present at the intervening Croft and Knockhill rounds in a mentoring role to touring car newboy Max Buxton.

While Cook and Buxton would use the familiar Neil Brown Engineering-built Toyota engines that have nestled under the bonnets of the Corollas since 2023, three-time champion Gordon Shedden and fellow veteran Aron Taylor-Smith were powered by the TOCA customer unit – the first time this had been fitted to one of the team’s cars since the end of the 2022 campaign.

It did seem to be a drastic measure, but, with Shedden the team’s highest-placed driver in the championship in a lowly 13th, it was perhaps understandable.

“It’s fairly clear to see that we’re not where we want to be, arriving in a position to put it on pole and to win races,” explained team principal Christian Dick. “And our job is to make sure that we leave no stone unturned in terms of trying to find out where that missing performance is.

“There’s lots of things going on – that [the engine] is just one element of where we’re looking for differences, what we can learn, and see where we can find more performance ready for the end of the season.”

Shedden and Taylor-Smith were powered by the TOCA customer unit at Donington Park

Photo by: JEP

While Buxton is still adjusting to life in a very different environment to the Fiesta ST150 he raced successfully up until mid-season, the presence of Cook in one of the NBE-powered cars at least allows Speedworks to compare as directly as possible against the M-Sport-built TOCA engines in the cars of Shedden and Taylor-Smith.

And when it was put to Dick that it might even allow an illustration of which engines may need to be turned up or down by the BTCC’s TOCA technical team, there was a wry smile: “We’ve just got to do what we can inwardly, and push as hard as we can to make sure we’re where we want to be. We can’t control what other people have got and what they’re doing.”

While Taylor-Smith has plenty of experience of the TOCA engine, most recently from his Power Maxed Racing Vauxhall seasons, this was a new path for Shedden, whose BTCC success had hitherto come entirely in Team Dynamics-run Hondas – powered by NBE-built engines.

"When I jumped in the one James has been driving, everything needed to be modified – plenty of stuff to do. Then you’ve got all of the other aspects that have changed since last year – the weight of the car, a lot of things. It’s been a really manic week but good to be back" Josh Cook

“I got a bit of comms on Friday [the week before Donington] to say, ‘Your car’s en route to M-Sport’,” related Shedden. “‘Oh right, OK!’ It’s a bit of a voyage into the unknown this weekend. To be fair, the collaboration to get it in the car, to get an engine installed in three days over a Bank Holiday weekend… The guys at M-Sport have done a lot.”

With only the shakedown at the Toyota test track near Derby under his belt, Shedden was still learning the engine. “It’s different,” he explained. “It’s within the realms of how close the championship rules are, but it just delivers in a slightly different way. Now we need to optimise me with this engine and its characteristics, because every engine I’ve driven in this championship has been from NBE. For Aron, it’s a little bit more what he’s had for the past two or three years. But the fact that we’re even here and it’s running is a bonus.”

Cook, meanwhile, knew the TOCA engine from his Honda experience, and of course is familiar with the Toyota – but that was before the winter weight-shedding exercise via the removal of the hybrid system. To add to the difficulties, his 2024 car, newly built for that campaign, is now in the hands of Shedden. This time, the lanky West Countryman had to be shoehorned into a car originally raced by Tom Ingram in 2019 and, latterly, the shorter James Dorlin over the first seven rounds of this season.

Cook returned to BTCC action after being sidelined by One Motorsport's withdrawal - but required modifications and a squeeze to fit in the car

Photo by: JEP

“It’s been pretty rushed, last minute,” sighed Cook. “I got the call on Monday [five days before the race weekend], and there’s been a lot of work to make things happen. Even just the basic one that I didn’t fit in the car, because the one I drove last year, I had to go to where the cages were built and it was built around me.

“When I jumped in the one James has been driving, everything needed to be modified – plenty of stuff to do. Then you’ve got all of the other aspects that have changed since last year – the weight of the car, a lot of things. It’s been a really manic week but good to be back on the grid. I’m not fighting for any championship, so it’s nice to be able to come in and all the pressure is off, and we can sort of take the opportunity to make some decisions that we wouldn’t have done otherwise in terms of set-up, and explore things a little bit and do some learning.”

Dorlin was also on hand. The Yorkshireman has looked a proper talent in his rookie BTCC season, twice making the Q3 top-six pole position shootout: in the wet at Thruxton and in the dry at Oulton Park. He’s impressed a lot of people, and is a nice young fella to boot.

“This year it’s been very up and down in terms of results,” admitted Dorlin. “But when we’ve had the chance to show what we can do, I feel that I’ve done that. I’ve been in Q3, and where we are now [as a team] I feel that’s quite a good result. In my first season I’ve held my own and shown what I can do.

“But we’ve been getting a run of issues, and as a team we felt it was better to step back and put in place what we need to do for next year. I’m here to try and win, and a few things needed to change to give us that chance next season. Frustrating to not be in the car, but at the same time sometimes you’ve got to step back to move forwards.”

It’s a remarkably philosophical and mature attitude from the 26-year-old, whose CV includes runner-up in the 2018 Renault Clio Cup, a dominant Porsche Sprint Challenge GB title in that series’ inaugural season in 2020, and success in GT3.

“Everything I’ve done in my career up to now, at some point I’ve won, and I want to do that here,” he asserted. “I’ve not scratched that itch and had a win yet. We’re here for the long run with Toyota and Speedworks.”

Shedden grabbed the best result for Speedworks with third place in race two - but all data is good data across its four cars

Photo by: JEP

Dorlin watched a weekend where the headline results were Shedden’s third place in race two (he kept it on the island when the flood came, promoting him from seventh), and Taylor-Smith’s fourth in the finale (on the hard tyres, after an excellent drive). They were the two cars with the M-Sport TOCA engine. But in the NBE corner, a boost issue hampered Cook in qualifying, and a wastegate problem meant he couldn’t maximise his third place on the reversed grid. None of the quartet had made it out of their Q1 split but, as Shedden quipped: “That was the group of death, with five Hyundais!” And all four Toyotas were in it too…

“Neither of them seem terrible, do they?” reflected Dick of the two engines’ performance, as the sun lowered in the Donington paddock on Sunday evening. “There’s a lot of work to happen now back at base in terms of going through the data and trying to understand exactly what we do, and of course my gut feeling is we need a lot more information than we’ve got from one event to be able to decide any direction.” Expect the same strategy, therefore, next time out at Silverstone, “unless something really shouts out at us in the data in the next couple of days”.

Speedworks, then, is a team not afraid to take extreme measures in order to get to the root of its relative lack of competitiveness. Who knows what it will do to inspire more post-weekend BTCC reflection?

The team will crunch the data to decide which engine - or engines - to run at Silverstone

Photo by: JEP