Why a 2019 BTCC tail-ender is now a serious contender

"We didn't know what to expect and I thought we looked really good, like we were good at what we did, that we knew what we were doing. With how the team performed, we deserved to get better results. I was so proud it brought a tear to my eye."

The words belong to Justina Williams, whose team in 2019 became the newest addition to the British Touring Car Championship grid. Now the squad she owns, Excelr8 Motorsport, has traded in the venerable MG6 machinery with which it began its BTCC adventure and become a producer of its own weapon: the Hyundai i30 Fastback N.

In doing so, the East Anglian team brings a new car maker to the BTCC, it has significantly bolstered its arsenal in terms of management and technical expertise, and has attracted two drivers who already have a race win apiece to their credit: Chris Smiley and Senna Proctor. Clearly this is an ambitious set-up.

The decision to go with the Hyundai was, let's say, a long-sighted marketing view in case the South Korean manufacturer takes an interest in the BTCC. Excelr8's background is in the Mini Challenge, and its tie-up with Mini has been beneficial to both sides, but plans to build a BTCC version of the Clubman estate were foiled because it wasn't quite long enough to fit the regulations.

It's probably fair to view the 2019 MG campaign as a stopgap, facilitated when series loyalist AmD Tuning took over the brace of Eurotech Racing Honda Civic Type Rs plus Eurotech's entrant's licences, and passed its own licences and MG hardware to Excelr8.

With two BTCC rookies behind the wheel in the forms of Rob Smith and Sam Osborne, it was always going to be an uphill struggle, and each driver brought home a best result of 14th. Now, with a couple of established pedallers on board, Williams believes interest can be piqued from Hyundai.

"There's no better platform than touring cars to sell your wares," she asserts. "Everybody needs to sell cars in the UK, and if we can be on board with them, with exciting racing, a fantastic-looking car, it will encourage people to buy cars. If we could work with them as we did with Mini, that would be fantastic."

The recruitment at Excelr8 has included gold-star BTCC engineer Kevin Berry, who rose to become technical director at long-time series dominator Triple Eight, and has had stints at West Surrey Racing designing the BMW 1 Series and new-for-2019 3 Series, engineering Colin Turkington to titles, as well as a spell in between working on the Volkswagen CC and Subaru Levorg at Team BMR.

Berry's primary season programme in 2020, as it was last year, is in the World Touring Car Cup with the Lynk & Co squad, where he is engineering Yann Ehrlacher, but he will run Proctor in non-clashing BTCC rounds and also played a part in the development of the new Hyundai.

"It's a little bit short in wheelbase maybe, but the low drag is a positive. That's its biggest strength, so potentially it's got quite a good straightline advantage" Kevin Berry

"I wouldn't say I'm responsible for the design of the car," says Berry. "I gave them some input on a consultancy level over the winter and earlier this year.

"The way the teams build the cars these days, with a programme like the BMW we had a team of up to four people working in CAD doing all the detailed design from scratch and it's all manufactured from CAD.

"What smaller teams [such as Excelr8] do now is take a shell to the shell builder [Willie Poole Motorsport, which has many BTCC teams as clients], who will put the rollcage in and work out how to do the shell themselves, and a guy who mocks up the bodywork. There's not much actual physical design from scratch."

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Danny King, who remains at Excelr8 to engineer Smiley, adds: "Kevin had influence on the structural side and where we were going to put the extra weight to get it to the weight limit, and Ollie [Shepherd, long-time Excelr8 team principal] project-managed the whole thing and had some influence on design things.

"It was kind of a team effort - if it was more design-led it would be Kevin, if it was simple design stuff I would do that, and Ollie would bring the whole thing together at the end."

Berry adds that the i30 Fastback "car shape suits the regulations in a way. It's a little bit short in wheelbase maybe, but the low drag is a positive. That's its biggest strength, so potentially it's got quite a good straightline advantage."

The cars were ready in time for a maiden test at Snetterton in March, with Williams astonished at her team's attention to detail.

"They've done an incredible job," she enthuses. "They didn't want to paint around the fixings, so they went from building it, stripping the interior to paint it, to building it up again in a few weeks. They've been working 24-seven. That's real commitment."

"You know that all the NGTC cars are supposedly the same, but all I can say is it's really nice to have one with a brand-new shell that's definitely bang on the weight limit, because that wasn't the case with the MG for sure!" adds King, whose extensive single-seater background means that the only front-wheel-drive car he has race-engineered to date is the outgoing old warhorse with the octagonal badge. His first BTCC season was at AmD with Rory Butcher in 2018, before he joined the Excelr8 ranks last term.

"Rory managed to wrestle some fantastic race results out of it, but we really used to struggle to qualify," says King. "We just couldn't switch the thing on in qualifying, but if it started to rain we were absolutely there. Then last year with Excelr8 it was a learning year for them, but I think they functioned so much better as a team than people would necessarily appreciate.

"The structure in the garage, the team briefing in the morning, the way we look in the pitlane was I thought exemplary. From that point of view Ollie had done a fantastic job to get the team into a position where we were learning all those things. I was at pains to tell them that even though the results weren't coming, the way they were functioning as a team was fantastic. When you're not getting the results, to stay as closely knit as we did indicates how good the team is."

Shepherd has stood down from Excelr8 since the early spring tests to take a break from the sport, but leaves the operation in the capable hands of inveterate team manager Marvin Humphries, who has worked with Berry at Triple Eight and WSR as well as running his own Tech-Speed squad, while the team also has up-and-coming engineering talent in the form of its homegrown-from-Minis Daniel Bishop.

"Marvin is absolutely fundamental," says King (below). "His experience within the paddock is invaluable. And also his wife Sandra does all the logistics - we've got a team manager and a team mum! They come as a package, it's really nice."

Regarding the driver line-up, Excelr8 was never going to be in a position to attract any heavy hitters just now, but Proctor and Smiley have both shown they can mix it at the front and, crucially, have experience of what a good BTCC car should feel like, with Proctor switching from the BMR Subaru line-up and Smiley from the BTC Racing Honda squad.

"Sam and Rob last year were just inexperienced," says King. "It was difficult for them to gauge how out of control they should feel, because if you're too much out of control you go over the other side of the kerb and you're not as quick, and if you're not out of control enough you haven't reached the summit.

"Not only have we got a new car to learn about, but we've really got to deliver now, we've got two proper drivers" Danny King

"But where we're finding so much benefit with Senna and Chris is that they know exactly how a car should feel and direct you to exactly what you need to do. That's how you develop, because they've got that big portfolio of experience that they can draw from."

"It's quite a big step up for them in terms of driver line-up and from that they'll move their engineering ability along to support that and hopefully develop both sides together," adds Berry.

"It's really good they came to us," says Williams. "Hopefully they'll stick with the team as we move forward. To have that kind of class in our cars is amazing."

King, certainly, is enthusiastic that the team can fight with its new Hyundai machinery and driver line-up: "When I heard that we were going to get Senna I thought that's brilliant, because we've broken the market and we've got an up-and-coming driver who I really rate.

"I was then quite surprised and a little bit nervous to hear that we'd got Chris because I've got a huge amount of respect for him. My year with Rory Butcher, we spent most of the year trying to get past Chris.

"It put us in the situation where not only have we got a new car to learn about, but we've really got to deliver now, we've got two proper drivers. But the more you think about it, that's why we do motorsport. Chris reminds me of Jaime Alguersuari, the guy that I ran in Formula E, because he's intense, he's on the phone quite a lot, we talk a lot about the car and his feedback's fantastic.

"The other thing where he's like Jaime is he really hits you hard on the arm when he's making a point, so I'm going to have to remember to put some sort of padding on, because he'll give me another wallop when he's thought of something really important!

"He's a really intense individual. When you look at some of his onboard, there might as well be teeth marks in the steering wheel when he gets out because he is properly committed. His feedback has been invaluable to us to be able to develop the car."

Berry, perhaps inevitably for such a grizzled BTCC veteran, is more circumspect. "I tend to be a pessimist," he says, instantly identifying himself with 99% of the UK's motorsport engineering brains.

"I think they've got the ability to get in the top 10, but with the level of the team and the drivers it would be unrealistic to expect them to be regularly in the top five because that's so hard to do. They should be able to compete at a decent level and look for some top-end spots when the opportunities arise."

But even that would be a great step forward for this ambitious new contender in the BTCC. Look out for more tears from Williams should there be such a breakthrough.