What next for record-breaking BTCC champion Sutton?

Where does Ash Sutton go from here? On Sunday he wrapped up his record-breaking fifth British Touring Car Championship title, breaking the three-way tie with Colin Turkington and Andy Rouse on which he had been stuck since 2023. He’s still only 32, and has made clear that he would like to add to his occasional appearances in the world of international GT racing. His deal with the Alliance Racing-run NAPA Ford team expires after this season’s final round at Brands Hatch. And the speculation, therefore, has mounted. After all, what more can he achieve in the BTCC?

Because he has no deal in place for 2027, Sutton has been careful in public not to hang his colours too firmly to the mast. But the indications are that those colours will remain blue-and-yellow for a period of time to come. It’s simply a matter of time. He’s happy where he is, and if he left the BTCC it may only be three years until Tom Ingram equals his total of five crowns. Besides, there’s another goal to pursue…

“The first thing is whether I’m back or not, but if we are then yeah, we want to keep going on at the rate we are,” he remarked to assembled media at the end of his title-winning day at Silverstone. “But it’s not confirmed. The end of the contract is this year, so if we are [carrying on] we’ll sit down and work out what we want to go and achieve. For sure the big 97 wins of Jason [Plato] will be the target, but you need a fair few years in this championship to do that.”

Sutton is now on 56 victories, so that’s 41 still to go. Even at the rate of his season-record-equalling 12 wins from 2023, he’d need four seasons to get to Plato’s tally. And things in the BTCC have a nasty (for those who have just won the title) habit of turning on their head from year to year; no one has won two championships on the bounce since Sutton himself, in 2020 and 2021.

Much of that is down to the teams’ relative rates of development over the winter. Sutton’s previous crown came after his engineer Antonio Carrozza led a complete rework of the old hatchback Ford Focus ST over the winter of 2022-23. The saloon ‘Titanium’ version for 2026 is built on the hatch’s old chassis, and Carrozza believes there is still scope for a step forward next season – even if it’s not necessarily a large one.

“The end of that year [2023] I said to Pete [Osborne, Alliance team owner], ‘I don’t think we’re going to get another championship out of this car, we’re going to need to do something like a saloon,’” recalls Carrozza, standing with Sutton in their media chat. “To prove that the theory was right is really nice. The car rolled out of the truck for the first test and it was good.

Sutton has been unstoppable in 2026, but will he keep going in the BTCC in 2027?

Photo by: JEP

“The marginal gains become smaller and harder to find, so it takes more and more time, more and more investment to find those little bits. We took a lot of low hanging fruit from 2022 to 2023. That has all gone, so it’s slim pickings now but there’s still more to come.”

“We have ultimately got the same car – we essentially remodelled it externally, which has given us the straight-line performance that we were looking for,” chipped in Sutton. “But we’ve still got the same toolset that we’ve been using since ’23 in terms of tuning it, getting it in the window. Yes it’s a new car, but it’s very much the old car as well. We hit the ground running and we’ve come to every track this year knowing what were the tweaks needed to make it work. Especially with the hard tyre and things like that – we’ve got the little tricks we do to bring the car alive.”

That last sentence hints at one of the keys to Sutton’s success. The performance on each race weekend’s disadvantageous tyre compound has frequently been sensational, highlighted by his astonishing win at Croft in early September on the hard Goodyear against 19 soft-shod rivals. Everyone thought Tom Ingram’s drive to fourth at Oulton Park last year in the same circumstances was a masterclass; it was, but Sutton trumped it – with the proviso, as the man himself pointed out, that it was the laborious efforts of the field to overcome the similarly hard-tyred Ingram and Josh Cook that left him home free by the time they’d broken through.

Bad news for those who like to see the BTCC shaken up – don’t be surprised to see Sutton attacking titles six, seven or even more

How the rest of the grid forms up for 2027 is open to debate, with some interesting chat floating around lately. But – and bad news for those who like to see the BTCC shaken up – don’t be surprised to see Sutton attacking titles six, seven or even more in the years to come.

Two veteran team managers deserving of recognition

Elsewhere in the BTCC paddock, there were some feelgood stories surrounding two well-regarded veteran team managers.

Marvin Humphries has been Excelr8 Motorsport’s TM since the team’s BTCC entry in 2019, on hand as a stabilising influence for Ingram’s marches to title glory in 2022 and 2025. And after some feverish stat checking and cross-referencing, it had been discovered that this hugely popular chap would be working his 750th BTCC race in the half-points Saturday event – on the eve of his 75th birthday.

He’s certainly not one to blow his own trumpet, but there are always plenty of others around who are happy to do exactly that (we’re looking at you, Paul O’Neill!). A spurious reason was found to summon Humphries and wife Sandra to the Excelr8 hospitality after the action had finished on Saturday, and they were presented with cake and artwork sporting imagery dating right back to the first racecar he worked on: Tony Dron’s giantkilling Broadspeed Triumph Dolomite Sprint of 1977.

Marvin Humphries, pictured with wife Sandra in 2022, celebrated 750 BTCC races at Silverstone

Photo by: JEP

After a spells in Formula 1 and world sportscars/IMSA, Humphries returned to the BTCC at the helm of Tech-Speed from 1990 to ’92, then more or less for good from 2001 when O’Neill joined the Super Production class.

“It didn’t make me feel any better – just older!” remarked Humphries of the presentation.

When told of this, Ingram chortled: “Marv is the world’s happiest miserable man! You underestimate actually how many 750 really is, because we have a lot of races now but for a long period of time there weren’t that many in a season.

“Marv’s been an absolute pivotal part of my success and our success as a team. He really is one of a kind. For Marv to have done 750 and be as enthusiastic and passionate as he is I think is really, really impressive. It was nice to see Marvin get the weekend of his 750th finished off with a win [which Ingram achieved in the final race].”

Over at the CPRL Mercedes team, meanwhile, Malcolm Swetnam was back on TM duties after quitting the squad pre-season following its first tests as Plato Racing.

Ex-Formula Ford 2000 and Metro Challenge racer Swetnam’s BTCC career goes right back to Group A days of the 1980s with Prodrive BMWs and the Trakstar Sierras, and he was part of the Alliance Racing crew snaffled by Dan Rowbottom for the building of the new team over the winter.

The team’s entry into administration, ousting of team principal Jason Plato and renaming as CPRL dominated the headlines in August. CPRL is still in administration, underwritten until the end of the season by main sponsor Cataclean, with which Rowbottom has long been associated.

Malcolm Swetnam was back in the CPRL fold this weekend

Photo by: JEP

“Malcolm’s been brought back by a third party, not myself,” explained ‘Rowbo’. “I’m really happy. The administration felt that we started the year with a much larger management team and then we ended up managing it really thin, which was very hard for everybody involved. And the administration felt it necessary to grow that side of the team, and who better than Malcolm Swetnam? He helped build the project initially, and it was the right thing to do.”

Naturally, Plato has been absent from the paddock since the fallout, but went on social media on Sunday to applaud Sutton as the ‘GOAT’ of the BTCC. He’ll be counting the days until his record of 97 victories is eclipsed.

Just the 41 wins to go to catch Plato's all-time BTCC record for Sutton

Photo by: JEP