The Ford BTCC superteam combining two reigning TOCA champions

What are your eyes going to be on during this weekend’s opening British Touring Car Championship event at Donington Park? If you’re a techy anorak, it’ll be the performance of the cars with hybrid power. If you’re an anything-else anorak, it’s surely the progress of three-time and reigning champion Ash Sutton plus returning almost-champion Dan Cammish, united in a new Motorbase Performance Ford Focus superteam running under the banner of NAPA Racing.

Motorbase chief Pete Osborne, who assumed full ownership of the squad in early 2021, has pulled out all the stops here. His son Sam and two-time race winner Ollie Jackson continue in two of the cars, but another pair of brand-new Focuses has been built up for the incoming stars. And there’s one of those funny little small-world, closed-circle stories that are so prevalent in motorsport going on here too.

Motorbase technical chief James Mundy, who led the design project on the fourth-generation Focus ST introduced in 2020, formerly ran the Jamun Racing Formula Ford squad with which Sutton starred in 2014, and which Cammish trounced with 24 wins from 24 in 2013 (“I still haven’t got over that!” Mundy grins).

Sutton himself has brought the nucleus of the BMR Racing operation that was largely responsible for his title successes in the Laser Tools Racing Infiniti Q50 in 2020 and 2021. While Mundy is engineering his old nemesis Cammish, Sutton continues with Anglo-Italian engineer Antonio Carrozza (the duo have become inseparable as a working partnership), Brenton Yule as number-one mechanic, and Tom Powell as data engineer. Yule and Powell have been taken on as Motorbase employees; Carrozza is working as a freelance contractor, but admits he has time for little else.

This little BMR axis within Motorbase represents a winding-down of the BTCC interests of Sutton’s long-time mentor/manager and BMR founder Warren Scott. When it became clear that a split with Laser Tools was on the cards, Scott attempted to get a team of Jaguar XE NGTC cars up and running, with Cammish even mooted here as a team-mate to Sutton.

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“It would have been a really interesting project and I was looking forward to it,” admits Carrozza, who for the first time would have led the design on a tin-top challenger. “But this [Motorbase and the Ford] is a different challenge. This is good.”

Sutton has left the LTR Infiniti set-up that yielded his last two BTCC titles

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

“I spoke to Pete through the middle of the year, so that door was always open,” recaps Sutton. “We had a lot of offers come in from a few other teams as well. We were potentially moving away from Laser Tools Racing, but where I was going was a bit unknown at that point. I wasn’t ever sat there going, ‘Ahh, I’m not going to have a drive’.

“It was just a case of you’ve got to make it work commercially, be in what I’d class as a good car, and have a good team around you. You’ve got to make all three things work, and we sat there at one point with four or five offers, working out which one fitted me best, and it was here with Motorbase and NAPA.”

And it means Sutton has, for the first time since late 2014, branched out from Scott: “Warren owned the team, and it led into him having that role essentially of managing and helping me. But we agreed that it had sort of come to an end at the back end of last year – not go our separate ways, but time to kind of do things by myself, and that’s when we realised there’s a lot more opportunities out there. That’s when I took the reins and made my own choice if that makes sense. There’s no bad feeling; he’s burnt out from it all and I need to go down my own path.”

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Cammish, meanwhile, was unavoidably jettisoned by Team Dynamics over the 2020-21 off-season, halfway through a two-year deal, when Honda UK pulled its backing and the team found itself having to realign its commercial relationships. He remains friends with team boss Matt Neal and the squad.

"So far I would say me and Ash, you can’t split us really. We’re both getting to the same result in different ways" Dan Cammish

“Matt tried to help me out even when I wasn’t in the team,” says Cammish. “He looked at opportunities for me in World Touring Cars and things like that, but I knew that really the chances of me going back there were very slim.”

The Yorkshireman therefore made a brave step back to the Porsche Carrera Cup GB, a series he’d already won twice, despite a last-minute window of opportunity back in the BTCC when he stood in at Honda squad BTC Racing for the opening round.

“I had the chance to turn away from it [Porsches] at the last minute and go back to touring car racing,” he relates, “and I chose not to – that was quite a big leap of faith because I could have been quite badly beaten at the end of the day. I think they all thought I would be!

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“To come away as a three-time champion, no one else has ever done that in Carrera Cup history, and to sign it off as the guy to beat in a Porsche over the last few years… I’m really proud of that achievement, and it’s propelled me back into touring cars in a fantastic place, so I wouldn’t change a thing.”

Cammish returns to the BTCC full-time after losing his Team Dynamics seat at the end of 2020

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Thanks to Motorbase and NAPA, Cammish is effectively on the same deal as he was at Dynamics: “I don’t pay to drive, and I don’t get paid to drive, but my personal sponsors help me make a living. That is modern British Touring Cars. We’ve swapped the manufacturer days, but there’s still some good sponsors that help us do the job. NAPA is an incredible sponsor to have on board.”

Sutton, too, relied on Scott and personal backers for funding, and is on board at the Kent squad without having to find any contribution.

“So far I would say me and Ash, you can’t split us really,” reports Cammish of pre-season testing. “We’re both getting to the same result in different ways. I’ve always enjoyed the qualifying aspect, and maybe if I’ve got one string to my bow it might be that I get a little bit more out of it in qualifying, but you can’t underestimate how good Ash is as a racing driver – he always comes forward. So we’re coming at it from two kind of different ways, but I think we’ll meet in the middle and teach each other a little bit.”

Motorbase has certainly prepared well for the new hybrid era.

“I think we benefited from being one of the first teams that had hybrid kits available,” points out Carrozza. “When I arrived in the team in early December, there was already a kit of parts at the factory, so you’re already starting to look at installation. There’s quite a lot of extra components to fit in what’s already a very compact engine bay, especially on a front-wheel-drive car.”

The team then began testing in early March at Brands Hatch with the hybrid kit on board – if not operational. Cammish was at the wheel then, before Sutton got his turn a week later. Then, as soon as the batteries were released by Cosworth, the Fords were the first on track at Snetterton along with Dynamics and the Ciceley Motorsport BMW squad.

Of those Brands tests, Carrozza says: “We did a couple of tests with all the hybrid weight in, a lot of the hybrid packaging and plumbing, cooling pack and everything, that was all in but there was no battery to power it. So we did lots of testing with everything simulated.”

Motorbase has done plenty of testing to get used to the new hybrid kits

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

“If you lifted the bonnet it and looked in, the electric motor was there, all the cooling pack, but there was no battery,” adds Mundy. “Before we even hit the track we did two days at Ford’s ETL [environmental test laboratory], and quite a bit of running at Dunton test track, so we were pretty well prepared.” Here, Carrozza also took a turn at the wheel.

The effective merging of the minds of two teams (Motorbase and BMR) has meant Carrozza has played a heavy role in the development of the Focus over the winter.

“The nicest thing for me is that you’ve got Tony who’s come in with what I would class as a lot of knowledge, and the best thing about it is Motorbase have given him complete freedom: throw what you’ve got at us and we’ll assess it,” smiles Sutton. “A few things have been redesigned, especially towards the front end of the car but even inside the car – just the way we do things and the way the cars are built.”

"One of the nice things now is the car weight’s not changing between sessions. We can just dial the car in and when the chassis’s good, the chassis’s good – it just stays at that base weight" Antonio Carrozza

Mundy adds: “Tony’s had a big influence - the cooling pack’s completely different, and the hybrid installation itself has not been too difficult.”

Intriguingly, the old front/rear-wheel-drive equalisation argument has played its part too here. Sutton and Carrozza, of course, have jumped over the fence from the ‘proper’ axle doing the work. Even Sutton’s rookie BTCC season in 2016, in the Triple Eight MG, was with a front-driven car that had its roots in Super 2000 and used the old GPRM subframe rather than the contemporary RML equipment.

Effectively, the hybrid kit and battery means 70kg has been added to the base weight of the cars, but it’s not the same deal as carrying the old high success ballast levels of 75kg and 66kg. The lead for the ballast was boxed in the most advantageous position possible, whereas with the hybrid, points out Mundy, there’s a higher centre of gravity and “the polar moment of inertia’s changed for the front-wheel-drive cars”. Just front-wheel-drive cars?

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“In theory the centre of gravity height of the hybrid installation has been equalised between front and rear-wheel drive, to get rid of that argument,” expands Carrozza. “At the very first meeting, everyone said, ‘The motor is high up and forwards on the front-wheel-drive car; it’s in the bellhousing on the rear-wheel-drive car and as low as it can possibly go’.

Engineer Mundy says Motorbase has benefitted from merging of minds with LTR personnel moving across

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

“They’ve equalised battery heights basically between the front and rear-wheel drive. From a height point of view there’s no advantage to the rear-wheel-drive car, but from a longitudinal position in the car there is a significant advantage from where their system’s packaged.”

So here’s the front/rear-wheel-drive BTCC spat to come then! But every cloud has a silver lining.

“One of the nice things now is the car weight’s not changing between sessions,” offers Carrozza. “When you’re running success ballast, between every single session you’re changing car weight – unless you’re winning every race or not scoring any points – and it’s quite hard to dial the car in between the success ballasts. We can just dial the car in and when the chassis’s good, the chassis’s good – it just stays at that base weight.”

And how good is that chassis? Good enough for Sutton to top last week’s Thruxton test, looking as though he was absolutely on it, in full-on Ashattack mode. Compared to the front-wheel-drive cars, including TCR, that he’s steered before, Sutton reckons: “This for sure is a little bit more of an animal and a beast when it comes to hanging onto it. If anything it was a good shock to the system.

“You hear the horrible, ‘Oh we’ve got understeer, tyres this, tyres that, deg’, and I’m actually going, ‘Flipping hell, I’m hanging onto the thing here’. The car’s good, we’ve got a good balance, we’ve been playing around with it in testing to get a feel for changes and how the cars react to that, so ultimate pace we’re not 100% sure of where it lies, but just working with it and building that knowledge.”

Cammish has an excellent front-wheel-drive NGTC reference in the form of the Civic Type R FK8.

“If you look at them side by side, it feels how it looks,” he states. “The Civic, it’s got that hunkered-down-low, quite long feel to it, so it’s got quite good high-speed stability. The Focus is a little bit taller, a little bit shorter, so a little bit more eager to turn but looser with it, and that’s exactly how it comes across so far. It’s quite twitchy, whereas the Civic was always quite planted.”

Sutton describes the Focus as an "animal", while Cammish says it has been twitchy to drive on the limit

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

One frequent observation about the current-spec Focus is its strong performance in the speed traps. This encourages speculation that the Mountune-built EcoBoost engines (Jackson’s family owns the company) are performing extremely well. They are, but firmly within the parameters of what BTCC organiser TOCA allows without making any parity adjustments.

Others say the Ford has strong aero, and Mundy has another observation: “You’ve got to come out of the corner, which is the real limiting factor. On a big saloon the drag is all the same, so it’s more about corner exit and traction than aerodynamics or engine power.”

“I can bring in an interesting side to that,” chips in Carrozza. “We had the Levorg [in which Sutton won the 2017 title], which is a big old heavy estate; an Infiniti that was a nice sleek saloon; and then the Motorbase car which is a hatchback. And actually if you put them all in a windtunnel, then broadly the parasitic drag – the stuff that you can’t change – there isn’t that much difference between them. There’s small changes, but when you’re talking lap time for that drag it’s very little.

"If I can achieve [a title in front and rear-wheel-drive cars], not only have I stamped my name in the history books to be the first to do it, but it just shows that I can jump in any car and do the job" Ash Sutton

“TOCA are looking so closely at our installed powers, and I think they have done a really good job the last few years to equalise it. Someone will always say, ‘Oh look at that thing in the speed traps’, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. Mid-corner speed and exit speed are not the same thing, and it depends how you want to put your lap time together.”

One other strong suit of the current Focus is that, far removed from previous iterations of the car, it is good at switching on its tyres. Too much so at first, witness Rory Butcher’s puncture-strewn disaster on the car’s second week of competition in hot sunshine at the Brands GP circuit in the summer of 2020. But compensations have been made.

Even so, last year, lead driver Jake Hill particularly found that he struggled to keep the soft Goodyear alive, but it appears that this compound will not be used in 2022 (although at the time of writing TOCA is yet to reveal the sporting regulations on tyres). Another potential little snag taken away. “The car does switch the tyres on, which suits us on the medium compound,” says Mundy.

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What can we expect, then? Definitely a title challenge, with potentially both Sutton and Cammish in the mix come October. For the series returnee it’s a case of out of the frying pan and into the fire – he’s gone from taking on young trio Harry King plus Lorcan Hanafin and Kiern Jewiss in the Porsches to lining up alongside the current BTCC gold standard.

Cammish isn't fazed by going up against Sutton

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

“Yeah, I don’t make life easy for myself!” jokes Cammish. “Having Ash is fantastic. He brings a wealth of experience, he’s really fast, he’s arguably the best touring car driver of the past few years along with Colin [Turkington].

“From my side I’m in such a good place, because if the wind had blown in a different direction I’d have a championship too in my second season [2019], and I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think I could hold my own. Ash is viewed in such a good light, if I’m anything like close to where he is, or if I can beat him, if I dare to dream, that puts me in pretty good territory as well. I’m in a good place with that, it’s a fantastic challenge and I think we’ll push each other forward.”

And Sutton? He wants to make history. He’s one away from joining Turkington and Andy Rouse on a record four BTCC titles apiece, but both these tin-top standard-setters have won all of their crowns in rear-wheel-drive machinery. To win three in RWD cars and then another in FWD – well, nobody’s ever even done one of each in the championship’s 64-year history…

“It’d be fantastic,” he ponders. “If I can achieve that, not only have I stamped my name in the history books to be the first to do it, but it just shows that I can jump in any car and do the job.” As if anyone had any doubt about that.

Many expect Sutton and Cammish to be the combination to beat, with a potential fourth title on the line for the former

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images