The gritty making of a tin-top prodigy

Ash Sutton will be beginning only his third season as a British Touring Car Championship racer as the defending champion. The last man to do that was Fabrizio Giovanardi in 2009 but, by that stage, the Italian was already a European, British, Italian and Spanish tin-top title winner.

Previous to that, the last returning champion who had minimal experience was Jo Winkelhock, who came back to the UK to defend the number one on his Schnitzer BMW after the experienced German clinched the honours in his maiden BTCC season in 1993.

It puts Sutton, still only 24, in some mighty company. He will stick with the Team BMR Subaru Levorg operation and will line-up alongside double champion Jason Plato.

"It is going to be a lot harder this year: there will be challenges coming from every angle," explains Sutton. "As well as the top runners from last year, there is a new Honda coming from Team Dynamics and there is the new HMS Racing Alfa Romeo Giulietta of Rob Austin too. Nothing stays the same in terms of the competitive order. But we will be giving it everything. Winning the championship last year wasn't the end of a journey, it was the start of my top-flight BTCC career."

Sutton's path to the top has been about recovery and grabbing the chances when they come along. He isn't one for hanging around, and that is perhaps a legacy of a road car accident in 2011 that nearly derailed his racing ambitions completely.

He had begun his career in the cost-effective Formula Vee single-seater series as a way of learning the tracks without a huge financial outlay, before a handful of outings in a Ford Fiesta ST in 2011. A road car crash that year left him with kidney complications and that put him out of the cockpit for more than two seasons. When Sutton returned in Formula Ford in 2014, he knew he had to make up for the time away by putting his progression on fast forward.

"I remember sitting with the doctors and surgeons, and they told me that I might never race again," he says. "That focused my mind a bit. They weren't sure if my organs would be able to withstand the forces that you experience when you race. There was a real chance it was all over.

"In early 2014, I went to a kart track and did a race, which I won. A few weeks later, I went for a check-up and everything was fine. That was a massive relief."

A lot of his early kart racing had been done on a limited budget, and that was another building block in making sure that he got the most from every situation.

"Sometimes, we didn't have the funds to test," he explains. "I would turn up at a race meeting with no time to learn, and in those situations, you have to take things on board very quickly. I realised how to get to the limit quickly and that is something I have always been able to do."

While Sutton was recuperating from his road crash, he was reading about the exploits of former karting rivals and watching them make their way in the sport. That added another element of urgency to his career trajectory when he returned to the wheel.

He has lived up to his mantra - just look at the evidence. When Sutton was plucked from that part-season in Formula Ford in 2014 by Team BMR boss Warren Scott to join his new academy scheme, he was placed in the BTCC supporting Renault UK Clio Cup.

"I was working at the Rye House kart track, and Warren used to pop in. He was just getting into the karting business himself and I was the guy on the front desk," recalls Sutton. "At the time he was the big touring car driver and I was just me. We knew each other, but not that well.

"Then, at Rockingham, I remember being in the Formula Ford paddock and Warren turned up on his golf buggy: he'd come over from the BTCC paddock, and he told me he wanted a word. That's when my world changed."

The Clio Cup is a series that takes plenty of drivers more than a season to win. Sutton came, saw and conquered before graduating straight to the BTCC with the BMR-owned Triple Eight Racing team driving an MG6 GT.

"There are areas I can improve. I'm fine racing against others, but not so strong against the clock. I can drag a lap time out of the car when I have to, but qualifying is a weaker area for me"

At the start of that campaign, Sutton had his sights firmly on the Jack Sears Trophy for rookies. "But why shouldn't I be able to win a race or two overall we well?" he asked at the time.

When he crossed the line first at a sodden Croft in June 2016 to break his BTCC victory duck, he had achieved what he had said he would.

Looking back, that rapid rise and his optimistic targets are something Sutton sees as a pure view of what he can achieve, rather than a bullish overstating of his abilities.

"That is how I am when I set goals for the year ahead: I will never set myself a target that I don't think I can realistically achieve," he explains. "It is not arrogance: it is an honest assessment of what I think I can do."

That self-belief carried over into 2017, when he was invited onto the Team BMR top table with a factory-backed Subaru drive.

The driver explains: "Starting the year, I was thinking 'why can't I go for the championship?'. Obviously, I made life quite hard for myself after the opening meeting at Brands Hatch."

Two finishes outside the points and a retirement, including a number of off-track incidents that meant he accrued two strikes, meant he left the Kent venue already 48 points away from Honda's table-topper Gordon Shedden.

"It went from being a hard task to being almost a vertical climb. But I believed in myself," says Sutton.

Despite that belief, it came down to a last-race shootout with the WSR BMW 125i M Sport of two-time champion Colin Turkington.

But Sutton did enough, as Turkington limped out of the race with crippled suspension following contact with Mat Jackson's Motorbase Performance Ford Focus. Sutton had become the second youngest BTCC champion after John Fitzpatrick, and wrote his name on the list of the championship's greats including Giovanardi and Winkelhock.

"I have never felt intimidated, right from the opening race in the BTCC," says Sutton. "I feel like I belong. You need to establish yourself in the BTCC, and the best way of doing that is just by getting stuck in there and getting your elbows out. I don't mind how many championships other people have got - they have been doing it for longer than me, after all."

There are very few flaws in Sutton's driving: he is the consummate racer and there are rarely mistakes (despite an early season blip when he was getting to grips with the estate-shaped Levorg). There were no spins and his ability to overtake led ITV4 pundit and former racer Paul O'Neill to christen Sutton the 'Max Verstappen of British Touring Cars'.

"I honestly don't know where [the ability] comes from," says Sutton. "I work hard. I am able to adapt to situations quickly, I suppose, and I like to look at things from all angles. I am not suggesting that others don't do that, but it has been one of the things I pride myself on. I will look at all situations from all angles and work out what needs to be done.

"If you look back at 2017, there are areas I can improve on. My qualifying, for example. I'm fine racing against others, but not so strong against the clock. I had one pole last year. I can drag a lap time out of the car when I have to, but qualifying is a weaker area for me.

"Look at Donington Park [when he was stripped of pole for an engine overboost]. I went from the back of the grid [32nd] and was still able to claim two podiums in the weekend's three races. That shows that there's nothing wrong with my racecraft, and those are the situations I enjoy the most."

And enjoy 2017 is something that Sutton did. He is optimistic about his chances of success in 2018. While he isn't making solid predictions for the campaign ahead, he will no doubt have the belief that he can become a back-to-back title winner. When Sutton believes he can do something on track, he rarely misses the target.