Why a BTCC fantasy can't become reality

By:

Marcus Simmons

Apr 24, 2020, 3:08 PM

The BTCC looks pretty much certain to race beyond October this year due to its late start. But there won't be any action in December - it's too dark and there's no telly

Subscribe to PLUS Sign in

The Boxing Day meeting at Brands Hatch was a beacon of motorsport excitement between the 1950s and 1970s, and this writer even remembers watching it on one of our three television channels as a kid. So the prospect of the British motorsport season being extended in the wake of the coronavirus crisis got this now middle-aged mind into a tantalising whirl of anticipation.

'What if the British Touring Car Championship finale was held just after Christmas at Brands?' I wondered. Autosport's subsequent conversation with Motorsport UK chairman David Richards last week in the latest in our series of #thinkingforward interviews did little to quell such thoughts.

comments

Marcus Simmons

Twitter

Marcus Simmons is the Deputy Editor of Autosport magazine. As a child he was a regular on the chalk banks of Thruxton – hence his unhealthy obsession with 1970s Formula 2 and F3 – before he became an MSA timekeeper at the age of 17. At 19, his reporting debut for Motoring News arguably overshadowed Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ goal as the sporting moment of June 1986, and he joined the staff in 1990 after graduating from his degree course in Plymouth. A parallel Formula First career – which was as incident-packed as his childhood exploits in show-jumping and hunter trials – finished when he wrote off his car and put himself in hospital in 1991.

Marcus moved to Autosport in the summer of 1996. Since then he has had two stints as a freelancer and a brief spell as editor of Motor Sport magazine, during which the revered green cover was revived, before he rejoined Autosport in 2008. He lives in Teddington with his wife (who, gratifyingly, grew up within earshot of Castle Combe), daughter, stepson, dog, cat and guitars, and additionally has an adult daughter and stepson.