The nearly man of Super Touring

Will Hoy, Tim Harvey, Joachim Winkelhock, Gabriele Tarquini, John Cleland, Frank Biela, Alain Menu, Rickard Rydell, Laurent Aiello… Anthony Reid.

If you thought we were listing the title winners from the British Touring Car Championship’s halcyon Super Touring era, that last name will have thrown you. But actually, it’s a rollcall of the top points scorers from each season.

Reid, you see, fell foul of the dropped scores ruling that gifted a second title to Menu in 2000. Not only that, but in his case he could only count his best 19 results from the 24 races, rather than the regulation 20…

“What happened was, at Croft I finished third in one of the races, and they discovered that my ECU had a problem – I think it had got damaged,” relates Reid 25 years later of the season in which he went head to head with Prodrive Ford Mondeo team-mates Menu and Rydell for the crown.

“The codes didn’t match the TOCA codes, so I had to drop third place, but I couldn’t use that as a dropped score because of a technical infringement. In hindsight I should have just gone home earlier and not raced, and I would have been able to use that as a dropped score, which would have made the difference…”

Reid lost that crown by two points to Menu, whose four non-finishes neatly took care of his dropped scores. The 10 he lost that day in North Yorkshire would have swung things in his favour by eight.

The Scot can justifiably regard himself as the lost champion from the Super Touring era, which continues to be celebrated – most notably at the Super Touring Power extravaganza at Brands Hatch. Reid will be one of the star guests at the third edition, which takes place on 28-29 June.

He has, of course, rekindled memories at this event in 2023 and 2024 by racing the Nissan Primera, the model in which he shot to BTCC prominence in 1997 and 1998, when he was runner-up for the first time, narrowly defeated by Rydell and Volvo.

Reid with 2024 BTCC champion Jake Hill at Super Touring Power

Photo by: JEP

But Reid’s Super Touring history goes back further. He had already dovetailed his 1993 Japanese Formula 3 programme (he stayed on in that series after beating Jacques Villeneuve, Rydell and Tom Kristensen to the 1992 crown) with a campaign in Japan’s final season of Group A with a BMW M3.

He was then signed up by HKS for Japan’s inaugural Super Touring championship in 1994 with the Opel Vectra. That took him into the orbit of RML, which was running the same cars under Vauxhall Cavalier badging in the BTCC.

John Cleland won the 1995 crown in the UK, while Reid’s seven wins across 1994-95 in Japan ran in parallel with a BTCC testing programme. RML chief Ray Mallock attributed much of his team’s success to Reid’s input – to the irritation of Cleland.

“It’s not difficult to wind up John!” chuckles Reid. “The top teams had their test drivers during that period.”

“What really raised the profile of British Touring Cars at the time was the PlayStation game. It brought a whole new wave of interest from the younger spectators” Anthony Reid

Then he digresses: “As time goes by the memories become richer, and you begin to realise what a special period it was, because of the involvement of major car manufacturers, the way it was promoted on BBC Grandstand, and Murray Walker, Steve Rider presenting.

“What really raised the profile of British Touring Cars at the time was the PlayStation game. It brought a whole new wave of interest from the younger spectators.”

But before Reid headed to the BTCC, there was a season in the German Super Touring Cup in 1996, after signing a two-year deal with Nissan Motorsports Europe.

“I raced in a couple of the World Cup races, at Donington and Paul Ricard, during that period [1994-95],” he explains. “I came to the attention of the Japanese manufacturers, and I was racing in the Spanish Touring Car Championship when I was approached by Alec Poole, so we got talking and thrashed out a deal.”

Reid battles Rydell in front of packed crowds in 1998

Photo by: JEP

The ebullient Poole led NME’s Super Touring programme and was putting the building blocks in place for Nissan’s late-1990s prominence in the category. “It was NME based in Didcot, headed up by [Kazuo] Hioki-san with Alec underneath,” remembers Reid, “but you had some great engineers like Ricardo Divila, Bob Neville, Derek Gardner part-time.

“The great thing for me regarding the Nissan is that car had my DNA in it – it really suited my driving style, and it was one of my favourite periods of my career. When Ray Mallock came in, I strongly recommended RML to Nissan, that they should chat and try and get a deal done. I had the good fortune to drive for some of the top teams in the country.”

That was for 1997, when Mallock jumped ship from Vauxhall, seduced by Nissan allowing him the two Scottish talents he wanted: Reid and David Leslie.

This was the second year of Reid’s initial deal with Nissan, but the first had been at BMS Scuderia Italia, the ex-F1 team running him alongside Sascha Maassen and Ivan Capelli.

“It was a great experience to race in Germany, but the tracks were not great – airfield circuits like Zweibrucken and Wunstorf – but to race at Hockenheim and the Nurburgring, and we had a really strong results at the Salzburgring [in Austria, two thirds]…

“Working with an Italian team was interesting. They’d bring two chefs to the circuit – during testing we’d quite often have a lengthy lunch and miss the first part of the afternoon session!”

Early-season reliability problems in 1997 did not prevent Reid showing his speed, and a clash with champion-to-be Menu’s Renault at Brands Hatch resulted in BHP, the company that produced the Grandstand highlights, often choosing the #23 Nissan for installation of its onboard camera…

“Alain turned in quite late for Clearways and I dived in quite late, but I tagged his rear end,” he laughs. “And of course, then there was the parc ferme where he was slagging me off, and he didn’t know I was standing directly behind him!”

Reid’s relationship with Leslie (right), his favourite team-mate, was an important part of his success

Photo by: JEP

A first UK win in touring cars since 1993 for Nissan was recorded by Reid in heat one for the end-of-season Tourist Trophy non-championship event at Donington Park. But in heat two, for which the field started in reverse order of qualifying times, he was taken out.

“I always jokingly over a beer or two with John Cleland say, ‘You cost me 25,000 quid’, because that was the prize if you could win the final,” says Reid. “I was coming through the field and John did the classic coming down the Craner Curves.

“He waited until I was just going past him and flicked the steering wheel, which clipped the back of my car and spun me round, flat-spotted my tyres. Between David and myself, we agreed to split the prize money if either one of us won it.”

That was the precursor to Reid’s title fight against Rydell in 1998. And, as in 2000, he has hard-luck stories to explain the eventual 15-point deficit to the Swede, whose Volvo S40 was run by Tom Walkinshaw’s TWR operation.

“It looks like Mansell hit me off the circuit, but he didn’t. My car started aquaplaning and it just spun round and I went off the track” Anthony Reid

“You can always say ifs and buts, but thinking back on it, I was racing against Rickard at Thruxton [on the opening weekend] and he’d just got into the lead, and within two laps I couldn’t see where I was going.

“I think it was the old trick, of overfilling the engine with oil, and the breather pipe was out the back of the car. It was like something out of a frigging James Bond film!” Reid’s podium disappeared – he was 13th after pitting for the oil to be cleared from his windscreen.

And then there was Donington Park in mid-June, famous for the ‘Mansell race’ won by Cleland, less remembered for Reid finally taking his maiden BTCC win in the earlier sprint. “The car was flying, and the mistake I made was during the second race,” he recalls.

“Because I was leading again, I was given the option to pit first [this was during the era of mandatory tyre changes in feature races]. It had started raining but ever so lightly, so I made the mistake of choosing intermediate tyres. Everyone else went onto wets as the rain became heavier, and it looks like Mansell hit me off the circuit, but he didn’t. My car started aquaplaning and it just spun round and I went off the track.”

Building year in 1996 in German series at BMS Scuderia Italia alongside Ivan Capelli and Sascha Maassen

Photo by: McKlein Publishing

And let’s throw in the infamous Brands race, where a bump-and-run by Reid on Rydell at Druids resulted in the stewards reversing the result, and a highly amusing parc ferme outbreak of aggression by the usually mild-mannered Volvo man on his Nissan counterpart.

“I call that the zenith of Super Touring, that weekend,” Reid asserts. “So much had taken place. They entered Tiff Needell in a third works Nissan for a Top Gear feature, and there was Nigel in the Ford.

“Tiff and Nigel had a bit of a set to in the paddock, and then you add in the intensity of the battle for the championship between Rickard and myself, and the shenanigans on the track…”

By then, Reid was bound for Ford, with a two-year deal for 1999-2000. “A lot of people were surprised,” he admits. “But the thing is, when the Blue Oval makes you an offer you can’t refuse it, and of course you’re a long time retired in the motor racing business.

“I’m still racing of course [Reid is in his 50th consecutive year of racing], but I don’t really get paid these days. And I had a young family, and thought, ‘This’ll set me up’. I knew that Nissan was going to pull out at the end of the following year, so I was thinking I guess of the financial situation.

“But I also believed I could shoot for the championship in the second year, and Prodrive – another great team.” He did but, as great as the Mondeo was, Reid acknowledges that “the rear end was a bit too edgy for me. It was a quicker car, but it didn’t quite suit my style of driving like the Nissan had.”

Thanks to assaults from Gabriele Tarquini and Vincent Radermecker over that incredibly dramatic final weekend at Silverstone, the Super Touring era bowed out with Reid not quite a champion but, 25 years on, one of the heroes of the time.

“Super Touring was like an arms race, but I feel very fortunate to have had the best of it – both Nissan and Ford towards the end of that period. It was a fantastic experience.”

This article is one of many in the new monthly issue of Autosport magazine. For more premium content, take a look at the August 2025 issue and subscribe today.

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Photo by: JEP