The loyal racer deserving of his place at the BTCC's top table

Oh, for the days when a driver could make it on talent alone. Oh, for the days when the grid wasn’t populated by drivers who were there because of the funding they bring.

For starters, the British Touring Car Championship has rarely been such a meritocracy, apart from the factory teams operating during the peak 1990s Super Touring era. Secondly, there is a driver who fits into both those categories, and it’s his mission to prove that the first outweighs the second.

Dan Rowbottom is now entering his sixth campaign in the BTCC, his third with the Alliance Racing-run NAPA Ford Focus ST squad. And the perception among many armchair enthusiasts – or camping-chair-dwelling trackside spectators – that he has arrived solely due to his ‘lottery win’ with Cataclean is arguably unfair.

As a kid in karting, Rowbottom went toe to toe – and occasionally beat – some highly regarded youngsters, one of whom went on to win the Le Mans 24 Hours two years ago as a long-time member of the Ferrari World Endurance Championship team.

“When we started motor racing as a small family, we had an LDV van and a caravan,” reflects Rowbottom, who has spent his winter regaining peak fitness following highly risky, post-season open-heart surgery to rectify an ailment he has suffered since birth. “As that, we won a British championship in Cadets when it was very competitive. There were names like Adam Christodoulou and James Calado, who were my peers all the way through karting. Between the three of us, it was one of us who would win a British championship for about seven or eight years.”

Calado, of course, was an early recruit to the Racing Steps Foundation, the organisation funded by philanthropic oil magnate Graham Sharp in a bid to fund deserving drivers to the stage where they could turn professional. Key to the RSF was the late Martin Hines, aka ‘Mr Karting’, who identified the young talents and steered them towards consideration for the scheme.

“Where we went wrong as a family is we stayed very loyal,” continues Rowbottom. “Martin asked my dad I think about three times to put me in with the Young Guns [Hines’s team], at no cost as well. And all three times he asked, we’d just done a deal with another kart manufacturer. The first one was with Birel when they came into the Cadet market, and then a couple of years on it was with another manufacturer.

Rowbottom endured a tough start to his racing career when money was tight

Photo by: JEP

“I’d have been about 14, and Martin came along and said to me and my dad, ‘I’m only going to ask you one more time, come and join the Young Guns programme’, and we’d just done a deal with Maranello and we said, ‘No we’re OK thank you’, and he never asked again. Of course, what we didn’t foresee was that Young Guns would transform into Racing Steps, and we could have been a part of that programme, which would have massively changed my trajectory.

“I always wanted to do single-seaters, as we all did. Karting in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we were all being bred, we all believed we were going to be Formula 1 drivers. There were great championships, we were doing really high intensity media stuff from the age of like 10, and it was being backed by McLaren and Mercedes. It was a fantastic platform.”

As a teenager, Rowbottom moved into the BTCC-supporting SEAT Cupra Cup, “but everything we did was on a shoestring. And then we had the big ’08 recession, and SEAT Sport pulled out of motor racing, which ended my career really. What annoys me now when people say ‘he’s only there because of the money’ is that from the age of 18 to 27 I literally lived broke. I had no money because I spent all of my time trying to find the money. My wife, who was my girlfriend then, supported me financially – she would do the shopping and pay the rent. We moved into a converted garage at my parents – they only live in a bloody bungalow so the converted garage was almost as big as the house! I was driving round in £500 road cars, and just ran them until they broke.

"We’d done it on a variety of different-coloured plastic cards across mine and my dad’s wallets, and we were 70-80 grand in credit card debt. I was like, ‘I can’t keep doing this, this is stupid’, so we pulled out" Dan Rowbottom

“It was like that until I found Cataclean if I’m honest. Cataclean only started on a very small level of investment, and I proved the platform to them, and they’re now one of the biggest spenders in UK motorsport whether that’s driver sponsorship or strategic sponsorship. Without sounding really cocky, I did that with them, and people now berate and belittle me for having that support.”

The Cataclean sponsorship arrived during his three-year spell in the Renault UK Clio Cup in 2016-18. Rowbottom had backing for 2016 from a rival company, before “we got to the halfway point of 2016, and they hadn’t paid me any money. We’d done it on a variety of different-coloured plastic cards across mine and my dad’s wallets, and we were 70-80 grand in credit card debt. I was like, ‘I can’t keep doing this, this is stupid’, so we pulled out. At the Autosport Show in 2016 we’d launched our Clio Cup car and on the Friday a couple of gentlemen from Cataclean approached me. The guy I was speaking to was Ross [Baigent], the owner of the company, and he slipped me his business card.”

Cataclean was in a dispute with Rowbottom’s sponsor and, after he’d pulled out, he plucked up the courage to pick up the phone to Baigent. “Basically Ross said ‘we’ll pay the debt off,’” recalls Rowbottom. “And I said, ‘No, I don’t want you to pay the debt off, I didn’t do my due diligence, that’s down to me. What I really need is a title sponsor for 2017. I’m hooked again, I want to go racing; I’ve had a terrible season in Clios but we’ve done it on such a small budget we’ve not even had enough money for brakes for qualifying. I want a title sponsor.’ And he shook my hand and that’s what we did. And here we are going into our eighth season together. It’s amazing.”

With Cataclean on board from 2017, Rowbottom's form also lifted

Photo by: JEP

The cynics would not have been converted by Rowbottom’s rookie BTCC season in a Ciceley Motorsport Mercedes in 2019. He then skipped 2020, when no spectators were allowed on site due to COVID protocols, before making his return in 2021: this time in a Team Dynamics Honda alongside Gordon Shedden.

“That was probably the best shot I had in modern times at showing how good I am, and I think, certainly for the first half of the season, I did,” he asserts. “You’ve got to bear in mind that when I did that deal I thought I was racing with Dan Cammish, and then it changed to Gordon which, to be honest, was a massive kick in the balls because I knew how good he is in a front-wheel-drive touring car, and he’s the Team Dynamics lovechild. That isn’t a discredit to Team Dynamics, but I was literally like, ‘Bloody hell, this is going to be hard now.’

“So for me to get the first pole of 2021 [at Brands Hatch] for the team, that was massive. To get the first win of the season [Oulton Park], that was also me. So I think at that time people started to go, ‘Hang on a minute, he’s actually alright this guy.’ And I do believe that if I’d had a little bit more touring car experience… I don’t think we could have won it that year, I made too many mistakes, but if some of the mistakes I made had been a little bit less complicated we would have definitely arrived at Brands [for the final round] with a mathematical chance of winning. That would have been a good enough achievement for me that year.”

The 2022 season was disappointing for both Shedden and Rowbottom. Dynamics built new Civics to coincide with the arrival of hybrid. These were passed on to One Motorsport for 2023 after Dynamics pulled out and, at the wheel of the ex-‘Rowbo’ car, Josh Cook failed to win a race. “We struggled with the budget, with losing Honda, and Yuasa left when I joined as well,” explains Rowbottom. “The hybrid put so much additional cost to the team, and we ran on very limited resources in 2022.”

Parallel with this was the illness of Dynamics founder Steve Neal, who passed away in 2023: “Steve was getting more poorly as I was there, and I think his whole charisma was the lifeblood of that team. The way he ran it was, ‘I don’t give a stuff, we’ve got to win.’ When I first met Steve, he literally looked at me and he was like, ‘You’d better be f***ing good. I don’t want anyone s*** in my cars!’ When he became less involved in the team because of his illness, I think that was a massive blow for them.”

For 2023, Rowbottom arrived at Alliance, then still trading under the old Motorbase name. It’s often forgotten that for round one at Donington Park, with everybody equal and no hybrid-use success penalties in place, he outpaced his team-mates – the talismanic Ash Sutton, Cammish and Sam Osborne – to take the first pole position of the season. You don’t do that if you’re just there because of the money.

“Then we just sort of lost our way a little bit and I wasn’t comfortable with a few areas, which we carried into 2024,” he admits. “The problem is with BTCC, our fans are very supportive, but they jump around very quickly as well. So the minute you don’t perform, they forget that you were once good. There’s no two ways about it, we’ve had three very average seasons [2022-24]. I think people say, ‘Oh Rowbottom, he’s there because of the money – nice guy but he’s not going to challenge for the championship.’ That’s something that I’ve got to put right because I can win the championship, I know I can.

Rowbottom more than held his own against the likes of Sutton and Cammish at Alliance Racing

Photo by: Alliance Racing

“It’s difficult because we’re racing with some very good drivers, incredibly talented people. Someone like Ash for example, and Ash comes with Tony [Carrozza, his engineer], and as a unit they are flipping unbelievable. And that plays with your head, you know? Dan Cammish struggled with it – he had a good year last year, and he really did make some steps forward. I had an engineer change to Paul Ridgway [for the mid-season Oulton round] – we get on
really well, there’s a level of respect there and I trust his judgement, so I think we’re in a good place.

“It’s difficult psychologically to know that people think you’re there because you’re buying your way in. And yes ultimately, I’ve got the sponsorship behind me, but believe you me, I deserve to be in the car whether I’ve got any money or not. I believe that, but the fact that I’ve got the money makes it easier. But I will say, if I am lucky enough to lift that title, I won’t be bringing the money I’m bringing now. At that point, the value point needs to change: people need to see Dan Rowbottom before they see the money.”

If he’s sounding feisty, then Rowbottom has good reason for that. He’s 36 now, a father of two. His four-year-old daughter wants to start karting this year; his baby arrived at the same time as the surgery.

"If an opportunity came to go and race a V8 Supercar tomorrow, but the contract said you can’t have Cataclean branding on, I’d turn it down" Dan Rowbottom

“I knew it wasn’t going to be pretty because open-heart surgery is a really aggressive operation for the body,” he says. “They do it day in day out, but my particular operation typically isn’t done on people of my age, so they didn’t really know what the outcome was going to be or how bad it was going to be when they got in there. They’ve sorted everything out and it’s fine now, but the point is you see different things. I was only down in ICU for a day because I recovered quite quickly, but just being in that place I thought, ‘Yeah, f*** this, I need to do what I set out to achieve for me, because one day I am going to be back here, and I don’t want to get here and have not done what I wanted to do.’

“Ultimately British Touring Cars is probably one of the hardest championships in the world because for one, no one’s allowed to get that big a leg up – and that’s a good thing, I’m not against that. And for two, it’s such a changing dynamic all the time, that unless you are 125% invested in it you miss the little details. And to be fair I think it’s taken Jake [Hill, 2024 champion] a long time to focus on those little details, and you could see the performance last year when he did. Ash from a young age twigged it, realised it, and then he found Tony, which just enhanced that – they’re detail people. ‘Tingram’ and ‘Spenny’ [2022 champ Tom Ingram and his engineer Spencer Aldridge] have it. I rate Josh [Cook] as one of the best drivers on the grid in terms of talent – he is absolutely incredible but he just needs to hook it up. And Colin [Turkington] was probably the best detail man that there’s ever been.

“So I think I owe it to myself to put the time and the effort into looking at all those little details so that… If I can’t win this championship because I’m not good enough, I’m more than happy with that, because we started this journey in a Sherpa van with a caravan on the back of it. All this criticism… you don’t realise what my parents gave up, so that I could get to that British Touring Car grid. They literally stopped their lives for 30 years so I could do it. Just to get there was massive; to win it would be incredible.

Rowbottom is aware of the talent he faces off against in pursuit of his BTCC title dream

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

“I decided I wanted to win the British Touring Car Championship when I was 15. Through Champions of the Future [the karting series of the time] me, Adam Christodoulou and Callum Macleod did a touring car test in a VLR Peugeot 307 at Bruntingthorpe. From that day I wanted to win it and it’s been a long old journey – that was 20 years ago. This is where I can get a little bit arrogant: because I have got great support from people like Cataclean, I’m in a very privileged position that I can do it and I want to repay them.”

And has he made it work… He’s had no formal business education; it’s been pure learning on the hoof. Yet Rowbottom now sits on the board of Cataclean as a non-executive director. His arrival at Alliance has meant a tie-up between Cataclean, NAPA and, ultimately, a foot in the door to BTCC title sponsor Kwik Fit – although Rowbottom stresses this was all through the established tender process. It’s something to which he feels he has perhaps diverted his attention away from competition on race weekends, when there are relationships to foster in the paddock. But now? “I’ve had a massive operation, I value different things I think now more than I did maybe six months ago, so I’m going to make it happen for myself, not for anyone else. I am very much focused on being a racing driver, which sounds bizarre but that’s probably the first time I’ve been like that since I was karting.”

Yet the fundamental Rowbottom remains. The guy who turned down Hines due to his loyalty – and, perhaps, the opportunity to go with Racing Steps into Formula Renault UK, onto F3 and then, who knows? Maybe now the man dubbed the ‘amiable bearded Midlander’ would be plying his trade as a factory endurance racer…

“If an opportunity came to go and race a V8 Supercar tomorrow, but the contract said you can’t have Cataclean branding on, I’d turn it down,” he insists. “Because I wouldn’t have been in the position to receive that offer without them. Sometimes in life, you have to be able to lie straight in bed, don’t you? Loyalty for me is everything.”

What can Rowbottom produce in 2025?

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images