The making of the BTCC's newest superstar

Judder-judder-judder. The left-rear suspension of this BMW M2 Competition, a passenger wagon made available for the day by the British Racing Drivers’ Club, literally has nothing more to give. British Touring Car Championship mega-talent Ash Sutton is at the wheel, beaming and laughing amid armfuls of opposite lock.

The addition of a middle-aged Autosport man (85kg-plus at last weigh-in) alongside him means he’s carrying even more ballast than the regulation maximum 75kg success weight he usually has aboard his Laser Tools Racing Infiniti Q50, and even rear-wheel-drive sorcerer Sutton can’t override the basic laws of physics and road-car design. We wave goodbye to any chance of ever seeing the inside of Silverstone’s Luffield turn again, and that left-rear only grips up again once we’re in a straight line and heading down towards Woodcote.

We’re inches from the rear bumper of an identical M2, driven by Ben Tuck, the amiable ‘expat’ who’s been making a very good name for himself this season in GT3 BMW machinery on the Nurburgring Nordschleife. The lads are having a ball, their passengers too. It’s a proper hoonathon.

Half an hour or so before this, Sutton is in relaxed form amid warm autumn sunshine as he chats with us at a wooden table outside the Silverstone paddock cafe. So absorbed is he in his work to win another BTCC title that he can be tough to pin down in the paddock. And so busy is he during the week on his new-but-booming Puresims simulator business that he can be tough to pin down on the phone too. But today is different. The BRDC SuperStars programme has made him available to a select few media; there’s no pressure, no set-up to chase, no sim rig to build, no rush, no distractions.

It’s incredible to think that he’s still only 27, in just his sixth year of BTCC competition, yet in a few days’ time likely to become crowned champion of the UK’s most prestigious championship for a third time. Even more remarkable to put that in the context of what Sutton and his family faced a decade ago…

Sutton had begun car racing in the clubbie environs of Formula Vee at the age of 16: “We actually realised it was cheaper than karting at the time; it was a good way to learn the tracks and get our eye in.” After a financially foiled bid to move onto the BTCC support package in 2011 in the Renault Clio Cup, the family set their sights lower and bought a car for the Ford Fiesta championship. Two rounds into the season, Sutton – the proud new owner of a full driving licence – climbed into his little Citroen road car, with one of his mates coming along for the ride.

“I was 17, just a normal teenager on the roads…” he reflects. “Got caught out to be fair; I thought I knew the road better than I did. I was driving obviously at the speed limit – near the top end of it of course! But I thought I was on a different part of the road than I was, came across a T-junction and had a big accident. I punctured kidneys and things like that, which put a complete grinding halt on anything. I was told that I couldn’t race, the doctor said that I’d be stupid trying to get myself back in a race car or even a kart – my kidneys wouldn’t be able to take it.

Ashley Sutton, Laser Tools Racing Infiniti Q50

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

“When I had the accident I was actually fine straight after. The issues started to occur a couple of weeks after – passing blood and things like that – and that was a bit of a wake-up call to how you should respect the roads. But still, laying in a hospital bed being told you’re not actually able to race, that was where it hit home. That had ruined everything I wanted to achieve. I took the brunt of the impact – it was driver-side [his friend was fine]. Definitely not my proudest moment!

“We went through the horrible stage of recovery process. The kidney is one of the organs that can self-heal, so they said, ‘Right, we’ll keep doing monthly check-ups’. That went on for nine to 12 months, and then they realised it was just deteriorating. I had to have an operation to take away the bad part of the kidney and reconfigure it, if that makes sense, and start that whole process again. It was a good couple of years before I could think of getting back in a car or a kart.”

Sutton’s comeback came in British Formula Ford in 2014, where he was spotted by BTCC racer and BMR Racing supremo Warren Scott and persuaded to switch back to tin-tops in the Clio Cup for 2015. Scott has managed and guided Sutton’s career ever since. There’s a common school of thought that things happen for a reason. Put it to Sutton that, had the accident not delayed his racing career so that he might not have come onto Scott’s radar at that crucial juncture, and he becomes animated.

“I very much agree with you: things do happen for a reason. What we also found out was my kidneys weren’t quite formed properly when I was born, which we never knew about, and the incident highlighted that. That could have affected me later in life. I got back into racing, and my first proper year back in 2014 I bumped into Warren, and without what he’s done for me, and where he’s put me and the journey we’ve had together, I wouldn’t be sat here now with two BTCC championships to my name, a Clio championship to my name.

“The deal that Warren put in place was two years in Clios, try and win that, and then we would look at the touring car thing, but that came around a year sooner…”

“There was obviously this stigma around the Subaru. We disagreed with it; you’re always going to have this in any form of racing. But yeah, we tried to do it again in 2018, but from Knockhill onwards I felt like we were just on the back foot," Ash Sutton

Sutton had caused a problem by winning the Clio crown as a rookie. There was no point hanging around in the little French hatchbacks, and there was no place in BMR’s Subaru BTCC line-up, but Scott had a Plan B for 2016. “It kind of happened a little bit quicker than probably he wanted, and it was partly my fault!” laughs Sutton. “There were talks of trying to get me in a Subaru, but we all discussed it probably wasn’t the right thing for my first year in British Touring Cars. He was going through negotiations with Ian Harrison at Triple Eight [to buy the team], and it would seem just a perfect fit to put me in that as a learning year, get my eye in, and get my head around it.”

Triple Eight founder Harrison stayed on to run the squad of MG6s, where Sutton was partnered by second-year BTCC racer Josh Cook. The two have been firm friends ever since. Sutton took a stunning pole second time out at Donington, repeated it later in the year at Silverstone, and scored his maiden BTCC win at Croft. But he needed calming down. The same thing happened shortly into the following season, 2017, by which time Sutton was at the wheel of a BMR Subaru alongside his teenage idol Jason Plato. This time, it was BMR’s then-technical chief Carl Faux who had to sit the fiery youngster down.

Ash Sutton (GBR) Team BMR Subaru Levorg

Photo by: Motorsport Images

“Carl was someone that I didn’t really know too much about,” recalls Sutton. “I had my engineer Dan Millard, and it became very apparent to me what Carl’s potential was. And suddenly my respect, from being the new kid, that I gained for him was massive, so when he pulled me aside and said, ‘Right, you need to sort your shit out’, it kind of sunk in and that’s what changed me.

“Looking back, there’s a key element of me where Ian Harrison had a big part as well in 2016. He had to really sit me down as well and go, ‘Right, we need to restructure how you approach things’, and that’s what changed the back half of my 2016. And I needed that chat again in a different manner with Carl. Once we got that under our belt and we got over our gremlins with the Subaru at the start of the year, it was completely different.

“It was never expected that we were going to be where we ended up, but it was very clear from the get-go that he wanted to win that championship and he believed in me, which gave me the confidence I needed. For Carl to sit there at round four and tell me we’re going to win that championship, bearing in mind I was alongside Jason, he put that on my lap and said, ‘Right, that’s yours for the taking – we’ve got to work for this, you can still do it’. Despite where we were in the standings, that just gave me self-belief. That was a core moment.”

The rest is history. Sutton did indeed take that title, before Faux headed off to Australia to work as an engineer for the Walkinshaw Andretti United Supercars team. In March 2018, the newly crowned BTCC champion went down under for a test in WAU’s Holden Commodore at Winton. Scott tried to get him into the team for 2019, but the collapse of a sponsor put paid to that. Sutton, therefore, was left to battle in the BTCC, where series organiser TOCA imposed some handicaps on the Subaru to mitigate what was argued to be an advantageous boxer-engine format.

“They’re doing a job,” sighs Sutton philosophically. “There was obviously this stigma around the Subaru. We disagreed with it; you’re always going to have this in any form of racing. But yeah, we tried to do it again in 2018, but from Knockhill onwards I felt like we were just on the back foot. 2019 was a hard year mentally for me – you’re doing everything you can and no results were being delivered.”

Scott was fed up with the uphill battle, so for 2020 he effectively merged BMR with the Laser Tools Racing squad of Aiden Moffat’s father Bob. Now Sutton had his hands on a new weapon: the Infiniti Q50 that the Scottish operation had revived in the summer of 2019. Antonio Carrozza, who had replaced the departing Millard as Sutton’s engineer for 2019, carried out a redesign on the Japanese machine, and his BMR colleagues would run Sutton while the LTR staff remained with Moffat.

Despite virtually no pre-season testing, owing to the COVID crisis, Sutton emerged on top of a fierce title fight with BMW star Colin Turkington. With more development on the Infiniti for 2021, a third crown looks likely this weekend. Key to this is the relationship between Sutton and Carrozza. There are numerous intriguing stories swirling regarding Sutton’s BTCC programme in 2022, but there’s one thing he’s sure of: “We’ve both agreed that we wouldn’t want to work with anyone else. Tony wants to always work with me; I want to always work with him. He fills me with confidence, and he likes the way I approach things and my feedback. We click. He’s not just my engineer at the end of the day; I look at him as a friend, like my brother to some extent.”

Ashley Sutton, Laser Tools Racing Infiniti Q50

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Part of this is Sutton’s interest in the mechanical side of the sport. His father’s business is in construction and carpentry, and the practical genes were handed down. You’ll often spot him in the garage, debriefing there with Carrozza and the mechanics rather than in an office in the truck. “I think that stems from my karting,” he explains. “It was very much dad-and-lad racing. I didn’t have any mechanics or big teams behind me, so I got mechanically involved in my karting career, and that just always rolled over. I’ve always had a big interest in cars. My dad had old classics that we’d pull apart and rebuild together. When it comes to building a new car, I just love to be in the nitty gritty of it.”

Including the Infiniti? “Yeah, and even listening in on when they were building the Subarus and watching that build process. That just really excites me, watching it go from just a road car to a race car and seeing that process and what goes on behind the scenes.

“I just like being around the cars, with my number one and two mechanics, tyre guys, because we’re a team at the end of the day, and if you isolate yourself away you don’t get these bonds and the relationships. I can sit there and some information I will pass straight to Tony, and we’ll be talking about the balance of the car and how we can adapt it. But in terms of if there’s an alignment slightly out, or the brake pedal didn’t feel quite right and needed bleeding, I would bypass Tony straight away and tell my number one. That’s because we all have that trust in each other. I like having that involvement within the team that I can feed that information direct rather than through people.”

To that searing speed and extraordinary car control, then, you can add a tactical guile reminiscent of Turkington at his best. Sutton is the complete package. It’s easy to wonder whether such a talent can remain within these shores when he’s still only 27

If that sounds down-to-earth, so is his attitude towards racing. Sutton is firmly in the hard-but-fair camp, and doesn’t seem to get as upset as many of his peers when it comes to the pushing and shoving that’s part and parcel of the BTCC. Put this to him and he smiles, but admits that he can get mad…

“A couple of times, in the heat of the moment, you’re on the radio and you’re screaming and shouting down the radio, and poor old Tony probably takes the brunt of that,” he says. “But touring cars have been known for that for years. It’s a TV show, and realistically if you just have a little bit of door-to-door contact that’s fine. If you’ve lost a handful of places, like mine and Jason’s incident at Snetterton [in 2019], that revved me up, that rubbed my back up the wrong way. There was one with Jake Hill in the Subaru, where I got taken out because of an incident with him. Those incidents really sort of nark me, shall we say.”

And there have been spins caused by rear contact from Turkington in the first race of two successive seasons: “The Donington one from 2020 I was on the limiter. I was going, ‘That Colin Turkington’s taken me out!’ OK, that one was a bit of a concertina effect, but the Thruxton one at the start of this year… To be fair I actually was quite calm about that one, because I didn’t know the full story. I was pretty much three quarters of the way around the corner and still got hit, so I didn’t know if someone was out of control.

“I don’t mind the door-to-door squeezing each other. As long as there’s always a car width left, that’s absolutely fine by me, but when people drive you off the track and you lose places, that’s when it starts peeing me off. I’ve always been known as a hard racer, I’d like to think I’m fair, I’d like to think I’ve calmed down a little bit as the years go by and think about it a little bit more.”

Ashley Sutton, Laser Tools Racing Infiniti Q50 and Colin Turkington, Team BMW BMW 330i M Sport

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

That’s been allied with a more risk-averse approach in 2021. “Yeah, 100%,” Sutton agrees. “I think the key element of why I am the way I am… When you’re bouncing championships down between me and Colin all the time, there was a part of me where I needed sometimes to take the risk to get the leg up and try and get a few more points above Colin, whereas now we’ve had a good run of points. When you enter a weekend leading the points, you then just have to really go for damage-limitation [to prepare] for race three. It’s purely based on where your rivals are.”

Sutton illustrates this with the second Thruxton event of 2021, where his Infiniti sat behind the fourth-placed Toyota of Rory Butcher in race one. “If Tom [Ingram] was in front of me, and Rory was the one that was breaking us up and he was in between, I probably would have approached that slightly differently,” he points out. “But the fact that Tom and Colin were behind me in race one, I didn’t need to take those risks. I was already outscoring them, it was most likely I was going to outscore them in the next race as well, and it allowed me then to bite the bullet for race three.”

To that searing speed and extraordinary car control, then, you can add a tactical guile reminiscent of Turkington at his best. Sutton is the complete package. It’s easy to wonder whether such a talent can remain within these shores when he’s still only 27… It’s not widely known that mentor Scott made another attempt to get his charge into the Aussie scene for 2021, but that was probably not going to be the ideal time bearing in mind the nation’s strict handling of the COVID crisis. “I just want to be able to go and see if they’re really that hard to get your teeth dug into,” he states. “It’s become quite common that a Brit’s struggled to dial themselves in fully out there, so I’d like to be the one who conquers that.” He also had a development programme on Volkswagen’s TCR project, before the marque withdrew from the worldwide tin-top category.

But fear not, folks. The BTCC is where Sutton will be in 2022, in all likelihood as a three-time champion. It’s where he dreamed of being since an epiphanic moment at the age of 13. “I can remember when I’d first won a British championship in karting in 2007, and there [at the presentation] was Lewis Hamilton, just off the back of his very successful year [his debut F1 season], and there was Jason Plato, again off the back of his [where he’d narrowly lost out on the BTCC title].

"I was like, ‘I’ve got two iconic people here in my eyes, and unfortunately as much as I look up to Lewis, and what he’s achieved is fantastic, I want to go down that touring car thing’. I was more excited about hanging around with someone like Jason and Matt Neal and people like that than being in an F1 car. It was an odd feeling. I think that’s because of how I drive and my style of racing. I like being door to door with someone – not necessarily take people out, but elbows-out, rough-and-tough racing.”

Half a lifetime later, we’re over to the Silverstone garage to climb aboard that M2. The BRDC calls him a SuperStar. Yet to those of us who get their kicks from marvelling at talent, he’s an all-time touring car great who already deserves to be spoken of in the same breath as Alain Menu, Laurent Aiello, Rickard Rydell, Steve Soper, Andy Rouse… and, indeed, Jason Plato.

Ashley Sutton, Laser Tools Racing Infiniti Q50

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images