The weekend the BTCC said goodbye to its showman character

Ah, those halcyon Super Touring days of the British Touring Car Championship. No, not the top drivers and teams who were fighting it out, but the endless copy generated by drivers apparently falling out with each other.

Scarcely a race weekend went by without John Cleland’s clipped Scottish tones acerbically tearing a strip off one of the series’ expensive foreign imports (Alain Menu was famously described by the double champion as “an overpaid Swiss clot”). Mechanics tore away mangled bumpers, wheelarches and ancillaries while, at the back of the garage, journalists scribbled down the latest first-hand outpourings of anger.

But they didn’t hate each other, because they’d all meet up in between races for a round of golf… 

While no one wants to see reckless driving, there has been a marked lack of tension of late between the principal protagonists – the kind of thing that brings eyeballs onto a series. And that’s why the BTCC is going to miss Ricky Collard who, as he left the paddock at Croft last weekend, had apparently driven his final race for the Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai team.

Of course, Collard being Collard, he couldn’t set off from North Yorkshire without first paying a visit to the TOCA bus for a disciplinary – which in this case resulted in Dan Cammish being issued with a reprimand (his second of the day). Their first-corner collision had led to a chain reaction resulting in the elimination from contention of not only themselves, but also Ash Sutton, Aron Taylor-Smith and Lewis Selby, and a delay for Dan Rowbottom.

During the remainder of the race, Collard stood on the grass by the inner marshals’ post playing to the crowd. And, once back in the paddock, he was in feisty form. 

Showman Ricky Collard is set to skip the final two rounds over a lack of funding

Photo by: JEP

“The guy is just a…” he began to rant of Cammish before being waylaid by a well-wisher, and then resumed: “In my opinion, the guy gets beaten by his team-mate [Sutton] every single year. That must feel bad.”

Ouch!

“He braked far too late, hit the kerb, he’s flown in the air and just driven straight into the side of me,” Collard added, “and created a massive crash that caused seven cars or whatever to go off. It’s just dumb.”

Channelling the spirit of Cleland there…

Of course, there’s always context – in this case a swerve from Collard towards Cammish in the run-up to the first corner. The Alliance Racing Ford man, currently runner-up in the championship, was also involved during the previous race in a clash that resulted in the elimination of Tom Ingram – hence his earlier reprimand.

The diminutive Hampshireman was on his apparent 2026 swansong while his father Rob was taking the lead of the British GT Championship by winning in his Lamborghini at Donington Park

The thing with Cammish is that you’d never describe him as dirty or even reckless – it’s simply not in the psyche of someone who you’d say is one of the purest racers out there. It’s just that he sometimes has this unfortunate propensity to wander into a battlefield and then… things just happen to him.

“He’s just bloody turned hard right into me in a straight line, 50 metres before the braking zone,” was his version of the incident. “I’m not sure if there’s tyre damage from that, but he’s then packed me up across the kerb. I’m not really sure what he thinks I could have done.” Cammish wanted to continue, but then came an urgent call to the TOCA bus…

As things stand, he won’t have Collard to worry about for either of the final two rounds, at Silverstone and the Brands Hatch GP circuit. The diminutive Hampshireman was on his apparent 2026 swansong while his father Rob was taking the lead of the British GT Championship by winning in his Lamborghini at Donington Park, and Collard Jr’s budget hasn’t stacked up for quite some time. 

Collard departs while sat fourth in the championship with seven podiums

Photo by: JEP

Japanese Osamu Kawashima, with little pedigree to suggest that he will do anything in the BTCC, will be filling Collard’s seat – although first he will have to keep his nose clean in free practice at Silverstone, and his predecessor will be standing by just in case…

You’re never quite sure what Collard wants from his career. He loves the BTCC, after growing up watching his dad racing there for so many seasons, but quit the series at the end of 2023 and, the following year, won the British GT title as part of a father-and-son line-up. His deal for a BTCC return in 2026 was at the very last minute, but he’s done a superb job. Fourth in the championship, after two seasons out, is impressive.

It’s always good to have a guy who is emotional – Collard describes himself as a heart-on-sleeve racer, and his crusade against track-limits penalties has been highly entertaining. Of course, he’s an arch offender, but there’s usually a grain of truth in what he’s saying. As he pointed out of his penalty in race two at Croft: “Every which way I’d go there were cars going off around me, I had to avoid them, and that totted up the track limits.”

Wouldn’t you rather that than an ‘it’s the same for everyone I suppose’ or ‘it is what it is’? If this is the end – for now – the fella will leave a sizable hole.

Collard, of course, is not the only third-generation racer (grandad Mick, or ‘Duffy’, was a hot rod hero) to star in this season’s BTCC. Mikey Doble, son of 1990s Formula 2000 (nee Formula Forward) champion Mike, and grandson of superkart ace Mick, took his second win of the season at Croft in his Power Maxed Racing Audi A3 Saloon.

That was a welcome turnaround for Doble, who had seen his lead in the Independents standings eroded thanks to an unwelcome series of electrical failures at Donington, and in the qualifying race at Croft. A new engine was installed on Saturday evening, and Sunday’s strategy was plotted. That included running the hard tyres in race two. Here, Doble finished 10th and – luckily for him – visiting 2002 and 2004 BTCC champion James Thompson pulled out the number ‘10’ for the reversed grid. 

There was a different winner in each race at Croft

Photo by: JEP

Eyes were on Tom Chilton in his Excelr8 Hyundai, and the Speedworks Toyota of Gordon Shedden, recovering from being shoved out of a high position in the qualifying race by Daryl De Leon, since they were, like Doble, on the soft tyres.

Doble’s team-mate Aiden Moffat – on hard rubber – valiantly attempted to play rear gunner, until Chilton served him a proper old tin-top bump-and-run and he and Shedden scampered through. But they couldn’t catch Doble.

“After the devastation of yesterday we needed that,” said Doble, who had started the day 21st on the grid. “I said to myself at the beginning of the year that I’ve got to be a multiple race winner. I got one at round one of the championship and I thought, ‘Well maybe this task isn’t going to be so difficult’, but then I managed to wait until round eight to get my second one. Hopefully that’s opened the floodgates for more over the last two rounds.

Heading to Silverstone, Doble is in that lovely position of being eighth in the championship – and, therefore, the best-placed of those not subject to any TOCA Turbo Boost restrictions on a circuit where this has a massive effect

“It never is straightforward, especially when you’ve only won two BTCC races. Hopefully they should become easier as time goes on. I’ve been struggling with the starts lately – which I did, but I managed to hold the lead down into Turn 1 and from there I just had to get my head down and put qualifying laps in.”

The BTCC’s next stop at Silverstone is, of course, where Doble provided the shock of the 2023 season – as a series rookie, he planted PMR’s elderly Vauxhall Astra on pole position, the only driver not from the Alliance (then Motorbase) Ford team to top qualifying all season.

“I want to be fighting for more race wins, I want to be up in that top six in the championship, and Silverstone is one of my favourite tracks,” he continued. “We’ve always had good pace there. This car should fly round there. I’m really looking forward to it.”

Heading to Silverstone, Doble is in that lovely position of being eighth in the championship – and, therefore, the best-placed of those not subject to any TOCA Turbo Boost restrictions on a circuit where this has a massive effect. If your local betting shop offers stakes on the BTCC, put money on him repeating that 2023 pole.

It’s just a shame that Collard won’t be one of the drivers behind Doble on the grid. 

Sutton will head to Silverstone with a 115-point championship lead

Photo by: JEP