Toyota engine gives Speedworks ‘control over destiny’ in 2023 BTCC season

The Cheshire team has expanded to three Toyota Corolla GR Sports for 2023, with 10-time race winner Rory Butcher and Ricky Collard joined by Ciceley Motorsport BMW refugee George Gamble.

Speedworks had used the TOCA customer engine since its arrival in the BTCC in 2011, but pressed the green light on a bespoke powerplant from the Toyota range last September, with BMW and Honda supplier Neil Brown Engineering handling the programme.

This has been made possible by the investment of long-time team supporter John Gilbert, who competed in endurance events including the Dubai 24 Hours at the wheel of Aston Martin GT4 machinery with the squad several years ago and became a director of Speedworks in January of this year.

“It’s not just John’s investment, we’re at a point where we need control over our own destiny,” Dick told Autosport while being interviewed for a feature to run in the magazine and website (see below).

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“With three cars it makes more sense to have your own engine programme – it means that it’s going to be quicker before you’ve made sense out of the investment over a number of years.”

Dick, who along with wife Amy remains one of three shareholders in Speedworks, added that the team had been evaluating its own engine project since the era when it was running 2022 champion Tom Ingram.

“For a number of years we’ve looked at the possibilities,” he said. “It’s not just that we’ve gone, ‘OK, we’re only going to do the TOCA engine.’

“I would probably say for the last five years we’ve evaluated not just the cost side, whether it makes sense, but whether we’re going to gain what we need to out of it.

Rory Butcher, George Gamble, Ricky Collard, Speedworks Motorsport Toyota

Photo by: Speedworks Motorsport

“We knew early on last year that we wanted to go to three cars, and that’s a real key part of making financial sense out of the investment, so there’s a number of things going on in terms of research and development to make sure that the programme was going to be the right thing, to make sure the funding was going to fall into place.

“We were trying to put all the pieces that we could into place before we had to press the button.”

Speedworks’ move, along with One Motorsport’s switch to the ex-Team Dynamics NBE-tuned Honda powerplants, means that current TOCA engine supplier M-Sport is down to just two teams in the 2023 BTCC: Power Maxed Racing and Team Hard.

But Dick paid tribute to M-Sport and its predecessor Swindon, which produced the TOCA engines up to and including the 2021 season.

“I’ll always stop short of talking down the TOCA engine because it’s been fantastic for us,” he said. “We without a doubt would not have been able to get on the BTCC grid without that package.

“The upfront cost of doing your own engine programme is so big, and it’s very easy to spend that money in the wrong way – it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be better or guarantee success.

“The TOCA engine has been absolutely pivotal in our move to the championship; we’ve had really good working relationships with both the TOCA engine providers.

“It’s not an easy task to provide a competitive engine for this championship, and that’s when you’re doing it for one team let alone a number of teams. So any company coming into that new will have some issues, they’ll have some areas that they know they need to improve on, and undoubtedly the good motorsport companies that have provided those engines will [do so].

“It’s little bits of detail. If we want to take a risk in terms of how close we run to the actual boost limit or temperatures and suchlike, that’s up to us – we’re not told by our engine company. We’ll [now] be advised by our engine company, but we can override that if we want to.”