The giantkilling 'dad and lad' operation taking on the BTCC's best

“Straight away these cars from West Surrey Racing are right, and the build quality is astounding. To the nth degree, every little detail is mega, and it’s so nice to be back in modern machinery, completely up to date with everybody else. It’s mega to drive.”

Those words belong to Adam Morgan, the low-profile, usually there-or-thereabouts guy of the British Touring Car Championship, battling it out with the Mercedes A-Class built and run by his family Ciceley Motorsport team. Three times he has finished seventh in the championship. In five of the Merc’s seven seasons he was a race winner.

Now? The A-Classes have been pensioned off to the Touring Car Trophy, and Morgan has his hands on a BMW 330i M Sport, the model taken to 2019 title glory and the 2020 runner-up spot by WSR superstar Colin Turkington. And, for the first time, he has a seasoned and proven race winner in the sister car: Tom Chilton, the, erm, high-profile, usually there-or-thereabouts guy of the BTCC.

It’s time for Ciceley to step forward, but who are this band of brothers from up north? Norm Burgess, the team’s hugely enthusiastic commercial director, is proud that it’s populated almost entirely by Lancastrians, many of whom are graduates from National Centre for Motorsport Engineering courses at the University of Bolton run by Mark Busfield, who was team manager at RML during the squad’s Super Touring glory years with Nissan.

Steve Farrell, the team’s veteran Australian engineer who first worked with Morgan in the Chinese Touring Car Championship, jokes: “It is completely unique! I say to the guys that I felt less foreign when I was in China than when I go up north. But they are an incredible team.”

Burgess adds: “We go racing because we love it. Even if it’s Oulton [Ciceley’s local circuit], we roll up on the Wednesday night with cans of drink and fish and chips. We are always the first team there, and we genuinely get butterflies about what the weekend is going to bring.”

Adam Morgan, Croft BTCC 2020

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

The boss is Morgan’s father Russell, a noted rally driver who turned to the circuits in the 1990s in Caterham racing. Young Adam was enthused about the sport and raced karts from age seven to 16, before stopping to concentrate on his GCSEs and play rugby.

Then, rather than step into Formula Ford or Renault like the rest of his karting generation, “I went into a baby blue Mk1 Ford Escort Mexico. My dad was still rallying with Martin Kenyon, who is our chief mechanic now and was his navigator, and Martin’s son Chris became my navigator, so we had a real father-son thing. Absolutely loved it. It’s such a nice atmosphere and good fun.”

"That nearly killed him, building our own car! We thought, ‘Let’s bring Mercedes to the championship and try and get some manufacturer support.' Probably just 1% of Lewis Hamilton’s salary would have funded us for the year…" Adam Morgan

Morgan Jr later had a test in a Ginetta G50, “and ended up not too bad and it was, ‘Bloody hell, you’re actually all right at this’”. Two years in Ginettas culminated in the 2011 GT Supercup title, the first year of the G55s, and for which the prize was a budget to contest the 2012 BTCC. The beauty was that, after a 2010 season running with Frank Wrathall’s Dynojet team, the Morgans had gone it alone for 2011, establishing the team as an offshoot of the family’s Ciceley Commercials Mercedes dealership. And Morgan beat serious opposition.

“It was just dad, lad and a few mates from home,” he says. “We were taking on Carl Breeze, who’d been in Ginettas for years, Nathan Freke – because of the prize a lot of people came back to the championship to try to win it. Somehow we went out and won it. To this day it’s still my all-time fondest memory.”

Morgan describes his rookie BTCC season, in a Speedworks Motorsport Toyota Avensis, as “a baptism of fire. My confidence was through the roof but I was probably very naive. It was tough, a little bit disheartening at times, and we were struggling with DNFs.

“We came away from that year and scratched our heads for a bit and said, ‘Right, let’s have one more go at it by ourselves. We’ll buy a Toyota [the ex-Wrathall Dynojet car] and have a crack at it.’ We started Ciceley Motorsport again, run from my dad’s shed, and I scored more points in the first five races than I did all year in 2012. I learned so much in terms of BTCC racecraft.”

Adam Morgan, Ciceley Toyota BTCC 2013

Photo by: Motorsport Images

Then came the decision to build the Mercedes, with technical leadership from long-time BTCC and World Touring Car Championship team boss/engineer Paul Ridgway.

“My dad will never do that again – that nearly killed him, building our own car!” grimaces Morgan. “We thought, ‘Let’s bring Mercedes to the championship and try and get some manufacturer support. We know all the contacts and stuff to get people involved.’ But unfortunately it never came to fruition.

“The contact got passed to Germany, and at that point Mercedes was just F1 and DTM, and that’s where the money went, but probably just 1% of Lewis Hamilton’s salary would have funded us for the year…

“It was a monumental task. We had no CAD or anything like that. We had all the teething problems and learning how it all works, but I got my first win, was quite a regular podium visitor and I loved it.”

Into the second half of the 2010s, Ciceley teamed up with Italian engineering consultancy Hexathron Racing Systems, with the Laser Tools Racing Mercedes of Aiden Moffat run alongside. LTR then went it alone in 2019 and, on the advice of Hexathron, dropped the Mercedes mid-season in favour of the Infiniti Q50. Hexathron continued with Ciceley too, but the tie-up was nearing its end.

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“I don’t really know what happened,” says Morgan. “The relationship didn’t break down. They were blaming aero and other stuff, but there were similar-shaped cars on the grid that were still performing and we weren’t. Halfway through the year my dad was getting to the point where he said, ‘I want to win, I don’t want to fill the numbers’, and we brought Steve in for Thruxton, and we went out and we had two podiums that first round. The old girl could still do it and still bring results.”

Adam Morgan, BTCC Snetterton 2020

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

“I’d done Chinese touring cars for three years, and worked with Adam there,” adds Farrell, who has pedigree in Formula 1 and the World Rally Championship. “There’s not many people to speak to there, so we chatted and went out to McDonald’s a lot together. He said, ‘Do you fancy coming to help out?’, and it’s gone from there.

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“Adam’s confidence and the morale in the team were deteriorating. But by virtue of closing one door and opening another with a fresh face, there was a new start. We had a really cracking weekend at Thruxton – that was almost nothing to do with me! – and from there it was a root-and-branch through everything: how the mechanics are doing things; set-ups; and I started a simulator programme with Adam. Everybody said the Mercedes was too old – probably, but there was nothing fundamental to write it off.”

Then things moved on in 2020. Of the front-wheel-drive opposition, the Honda Civic FK8 and Toyota Corolla were in their second season, and the fourth-generation Ford Focus ST was quick out of the box. Morgan scored a reversed-grid win at Oulton, but results were getting harder to come by.

"You wouldn’t make a racing car by choice a front-wheel-drive car, would you? The BMW is a more conventional racing car" Steve Farrell

“These newer cars like the Fords had all been CAD-designed, so much work had gone into them, and our little Mercedes was built in a little shed at home,” says Morgan. “It was not demoralising – I like to be the underdog and surprise people every now and then, but it was getting a bit, ‘That was the perfect lap, the car felt great, you’re four tenths off’, and I was trying my hardest but not getting anywhere. My dad then made the very bold decision to say, ‘Right, let’s look to the future’.”

“I was thinking, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know where the other tenths are going to come from’,” relates Farrell. “Russell was quite taken with the idea of getting some BMWs, much as it took some persuading of WSR to do it. You wouldn’t make a racing car by choice a front-wheel-drive car, would you? The BMW is a more conventional racing car.”

Morgan has experience of rear-wheel drive from his rallying and Ginetta days, as well as Ciceley’s trips to endurance races in Bahrain and Dubai with Mercedes GT4 machinery; Chilton, too, has raced RWD in LMP1 outings. But for neither is their rear-drive experience strictly relevant.

“When we first got it, I was a little bit anxious,” admits Morgan. “Then very soon I had a lot of confidence in the car. We went to Knockhill, and I thought that was going to be one of the tracks where it was going to be a struggle, but by lap six I was taking Duffus Dip at full speed.

Adam Morgan, Ciceley BMW Donington test

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

“A lot of people say it takes time to adapt. I don’t think it does. I’d say there’s little elements of rear-wheel drive that take time, like warming your tyres, and in particular one we found is the braking. I’m so used to having front-wheel drive, where so much weight is transferred to the front, and in this you don’t have as much weight transfer and locking fronts, so that’s something we’re having to adapt to. But when it’s up to full speed and everything’s hot, I feel absolutely fine and comfortable, and happy to push as hard as I can.”

And the BMW could put Morgan and Chilton in the limelight. They’re chalk and cheese as characters. While Morgan is quiet and unassuming, he describes Chilton as “a really positive guy. I really like him, because he never gets out of the car and kicks his helmet or anything like that, he’s just happy all the time, which is so nice. I get on with him really well.”

The Morgans are so humble and modest that, if he didn’t look the spit of his son, you might assume that team principal Russell was the truckie, as he’s usually to be spotted carrying stuff to and fro. But, says Burgess, “he’s responsible for everything relating to performance, and I’m everything else”. And that includes the talking and the commercial deals that have allowed the team to flourish.

Former main backer Mac Tools is still on board, but automotive products firm Tetrosyl is now the title sponsor, in 2020 via its Carlube product and for 2021 with Car Gods. Amusingly, the knock-on is that Morgan and Chilton now have ‘Race God’ emblazoned on back of their racesuits. It’s easier to imagine perma-tanned extrovert Chilton embracing that than Morgan… (Burgess laughs that he had to persuade a reluctant Morgan to cite ‘racing driver’ as his occupation when he and his girlfriend went last summer to register the birth of their first baby.)

“For one reason or another, we’ve always had a title sponsor,” points out Burgess. “Last year [in the COVID crisis], loads of teams had dramas [because they were unable to welcome guests at races]. But Tetrosyl stood by us, paid us exactly what they said they would, and pledged an extra year so that it’s three years instead of two. It has helped us plan, and we could never have gone down the BMW route and taken that step forward without them.”

And, without those BMWs, it’s highly doubtful that Chilton would have joined. At last Morgan has a barometer.

“In the Merc I’ve always been more experienced than the guy who’s sat in the other car,” says Morgan. “Had we put Shedden or Plato in the car, would they have gone four tenths faster than me? It’s something we’ll never know. But in the last three years in touring cars I’ve raced against Tom, we’ve always been very equally matched.

Adam Morgan, Ciceley Motorsport BMW 330i M Sport

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

“Tom has raced in some of the biggest teams and best teams in motorsport, and comes with this huge fountain of knowledge. His detail of set-up and everything is mega, and it has really helped bring the rear-wheel-drive BMW for us on faster.”

Can that lead to a title attack? Potentially, but the Ciceley crew aren’t getting carried away.

"I’m now in a championship-winning car, I’ve got a brilliant engineer in Steve, there is no reason we can’t do it. I’ve set some goals to be very near the front come the end of the year" Adam Morgan

“We’ve got to keep our expectations realistic,” asserts Morgan. “It’s our first year with the BMW, we are up against some very big teams. We’re still a family-run team against WSR who’ve been racing for 40 years.

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“But deep down I’m thinking I’m now in a championship-winning car, I’ve got a brilliant engineer in Steve, there is no reason we can’t do it. I’ve set some goals to be very near the front come the end of the year.”

“We know everyone else has got at least a year of understanding of their cars at each circuit,” reflects Farrell. “I’m always thinking, ‘2022 there’ll be no excuses, then we’ll crack on’. But Ciceley have absolutely bought into the new era that they can do better. They’re brilliant, and it’s a fantastic atmosphere in the team. I have my dream that we can really do something.”

Adam Morgan, BTCC Oulton Park 2020

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images