The series where drivers are deliberately passing up the chance of a podium

“I was going around thinking, ‘Why am I second? Don’t I want to be fourth?’ Anyone watching that aspires to be on this grid, hopefully the rules will have changed by the time you get here. We shouldn’t be having to think that.”

That was Dan Cammish, live on ITV, talking to Louise Goodman on the British Touring Car Championship coverage of last weekend’s Croft round, directly after finishing runner-up in race one. And his words proved prophetic.

You see, the BTCC tweaked its sporting regulations for 2025, so that only the top three from race one would be forced to run the hardest available tyre remaining from their allocation for race two, rather than the top 10 of 2024. Given the soft and hard compounds Goodyear has nominated for four of the past five events, that has led to bizarre games of snakes-and-ladders over racedays thanks to the huge offset in performance – plus a great deal of car damage at Croft.

Back to Cammish. At Snetterton he qualified on pole, won race one, then finished 19th in the sequel. At Oulton Park he qualified third, was second in race one, and 10th in race two – while Ash Sutton, his team-mate in the Alliance Racing-run NAPA Ford Focus ST squad, craftily gave up third place on the final lap of the opener. Croft? Qualified second, second again in race one, 10th again in race two.

At Snetterton, ‘DanCam’ theorised to this writer that strategic moves at future rounds would be on the cards, and he was absolutely right. At the end of the day at Croft, he mused: “It puts me in a really awkward position, because three weekends now I’ve kind of led the team in the early part of the weekend, only to then be totally handcuffed later in the day by the tyre rule, and I end up scoring less points than people I should have scored more points than. It can’t be right. When you’re out there actively thinking, ‘I need to give up this podium position to have any chance of a good day’, it’s mental. I don’t know how we got ourselves in this mess.”

Team-mate Dan Rowbottom, meanwhile, deliberately sat back behind third-placed Senna Proctor in the opener, in the knowledge that fourth place would give him the option of soft tyres again for the next one. He then translated that into victory. “It’s a bit shit, isn’t it, this year with people not wanting to finish on the podium?” he propounded. “It’s ruining it a little bit. I’m sure it’ll get revised.”

Both were speaking in the aftermath of the race three crashfest, in which Charles Rainford’s determination to hang onto a lofty position in his West Surrey Racing BMW on hard tyres triggered a hefty crash for Cammish into Rainford’s own team-mate Daryl DeLeon, eliminating both as well as Chris Smiley’s Restart Racing Hyundai. Rowbottom was also caught up, costing him a lap to repairs in the pits.

Rainford's stout defence on hard tyres (plus passenger cone) led to plenty of drama in race three

Photo by: JEP

Cammish, whose crash was triggered by contact from Rainford into the complex, initially began a negative critique of the BMW rookie’s driving before U-turning with “don’t say all of that. Say I’m disappointed in how these rules are playing out".

Rowbottom, who has become one of the most outspoken folk in the paddock, fumed: “Dan put a really good move round the outside of Charles, and he fired Dan off, then left a really big gap for me. I drove into the gap and he just drove into my wheel and broke the clevis in the wishbone. He's ruined about nine people’s races.”

But there’s another side to every story. Rainford was a self-confessed shrinking violet in combat on his BTCC debut at Donington Park, after his years in the gentlemanly Porsche Carrera Cup GB. But since then he’s rolled up his sleeves and become something of a smiling assassin.

“Even though I’m on the hard tyre, I want to try and stay there if I can,” he reasoned. “Obviously I was never going to quite be able to manage it, and unfortunately my race unravelled a bit from there.

To everyone’s relief, the scourge of the hard-soft tyre rule has now gone for the rest of the season, with each of the final four race weekends featuring Goodyears that are just one compound step apart. Time to tweak that rule again for 2026, TOCA

“It could be a racing incident, it could be my fault. If I’m honest, it was just so busy at that point, and from contact I’d already had a mirror rolled in, so I couldn’t see him [Cammish]. It’s tricky. I was then lucky that I got hit onto the grass, which avoided the rejoin [of Cammish, which wiped out DeLeon and Smiley]. So I got fortunate out of it because of that.

“Once Dan and I got into each other a little bit, that’s put Dan [off to the] right and someone’s hit me in the rear. It’s put me hard onto the grass and then all of a sudden I’ve seen these cars coming across.”

It’s worth pointing out that no action was taken against Rainford, but the fact that we are talking about him and DeLeon being in the mix brings us nicely onto the improved form of the WSR BMWs. That meant that the absence of an unwell Jake Hill was particularly unfortunate – although Aiden Moffat played a starring role with his brusque defence of the lead from a rampaging Sutton and Tom Ingram in the final race.

Aiden Moffat starred for WSR in the closing encounter at Croft

Photo by: JEP

The 330i M Sport received a 15kg weight break in the build-up to Croft, albeit Rainford pointed out that such was the timing of the bulletin that “I’m running pretty much what I did at the last round, because we didn’t have the time”.

Both Rainford and DeLeon looked good in qualifying in the top 10, just 0.3s off pacesetter Ingram in Q2, and arguably the podium DeLeon netted in race two could have gone to Rainford had not a nudge from Proctor sent the lightning-starting BMW into a collision with Tom Chilton that delayed both on the first lap of the opener.

A test at Snetterton at the end of June has definitely helped, Rainford opining that “every other team has worked hard as well, but we’ve definitely closed the gap a little bit”.

DeLeon, who has won a lot of friends as a nice young fella and unobtrusive racer, was “very happy. It’s nice to bring some silverware back on my 20th birthday weekend! I’ve just got to say thank you to the team really for the hard work".

It even looked as though DeLeon might have it in him to go after Chilton’s second place in race two. But he entered the Croft weekend with a best result since his Brands Hatch win in May of ninth at Thruxton… Caution was the watchword for the Anglo-Filipino and engineer Jenner Collins.

“I felt I had the pace to keep going, but you’ve got to be smart with your decision-making,” he pointed out. “My engineer said ‘be smart’, and I said, ‘Do you know what? You’re right.’ The last thing I wanted to do was pop a rear tyre.”

The WSR quartet now has Knockhill to look forward to, with the BMW traditionally strong at the Scottish venue, thanks in part to the rear-wheel-drive traction on the uphill climb from the hairpin.

“I really want that feeling from Brands,” DeLeon said. And Hill? He’s keenly anticipating a track where he has always shone very brightly – and, thanks to his absence from Croft, he’s seventh in the championship so, fitness allowing, he will go into qualifying with 13 of the maximum 15 seconds TOCA Turbo Boost allocation.

It's been a struggle of late for the team, but don’t rule out a WSR driver on the top of the podium north of the border.

And, to everyone’s relief, the scourge of the hard-soft tyre rule has now gone for the rest of the season, with each of the final four race weekends featuring Goodyears that are just one compound step apart. Time to tweak that rule again for 2026, TOCA.

Tyre controversy is expected to simmer down for the remaining 2025 rounds

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images