Why Thompson deserves to be ranked among the BTCC greats

Twenty-one thousandths of a second. That’s the margin by which, in 2004, James Thompson became a two-time title winner in the British Touring Car Championship during what has become an overlooked era in the series’ history. 

The BTC Touring rules that followed the halcyon big-budget days of Super Touring are guilty of nothing more than being not as epic as what came before. Like New Order evolving out of the ashes of Joy Division, early 2000s BTCC featured many – if not quite all – of the key players from the previous decade, and did produce some fantastic stuff.

Take that 2004 title decider. On its own, third place in the final race at Donington Park would not suffice for Thompson should Yvan Muller, his team-mate in the Triple Eight-run Vauxhall Astra Coupe squad, take the victory. But it would if he also secured the bonus point for fastest lap.

“I remember dropping back a little bit because I was third from the start, and tried to put in a couple of really good quick laps and then just basically hope that was good enough,” Thompson reflects today. “Once I got fastest lap I just basically stayed there until the end.”

Just ahead of Thompson, Muller was facing an attack from his arch-nemesis Jason Plato at the wheel of the lead SEAT Toledo – Super 2000 machinery had also been admitted to the BTCC for 2004. And it was Plato who, the lap after Thompson set his quick time, shaved his own best to just 0.021s adrift.

Once the race moved into its middle stages, tyre dropoff would militate against any further improvement and Thompson was safe. Ahead of him, Muller and Plato continued their battle: a series of nerfs from the Englishman; fist-shaking from the Frenchman. “It was quite a good show to be fair – they put on a good spectacle!” chuckles the man who had the best view in the house.

And so, still aged just 30 and now with a second crown to add to his 2002 glory, Thompson headed off for 2005 to the welcoming embrace of Alfa Romeo to line up in a World Touring Car Championship squad that included Gabriele Tarquini, who had taken the youngster under his wing when they partnered each other at Honda during the BTCC’s Super Touring purple patch.

In fact, of the top seven in that 2004 BTCC, only four of them – Muller, Plato, Matt Neal and a youthful Colin Turkington – would remain on the grid the following year, with Rob Huff joining ‘Thommo’ in the WTCC and Anthony Reid a victim, like Turkington in 2025, of West Surrey Racing’s commercial situation.

First championship for Thompson was in 2002 after another Muller fight

Photo by: Malcolm Griffiths/Getty Images

That’s a great crop of drivers, and Thompson is entirely justified when he points out that, of his intra-team battle with Muller: “Don’t forget we’re talking about the most successful touring car driver… ever. When you look back now, it was nice to be fighting with him and be as competitive as we were, and winning two out of the three seasons [2002-04] was very rewarding.”

That’s not something he envisaged when, at the end of 2000, Thompson found himself out of a drive. Honda took only Tarquini of its established stars into the European Touring Car Championship, which continued for one more year with Super Touring in 2001, while the Abt Audi team with which Thompson had contested selected DTM rounds did not keep him on either.

Thompson was highly sceptical of BTC Touring, but an opportunity arose to join Triple Eight’s satellite team, for which newcomer Phil Bennett had sourced backing from internet bank – still dial-up in those days! – Egg.

“You had to sort of sit back, a bit like a Cadillac, and wait for everything to go on, and it really didn’t suit me at all. To be honest that whole year was a struggle” James Thompson

Back in the days when he led the Williams Renault BTCC team, Triple Eight boss Ian Harrison had tried to sign Thompson for the 1997 season – “We got very close to doing it; unfortunately it just didn’t happen” – for the seat that eventually went to rookie Plato. Now ‘H’ and fellow T8 founder Roland Dane had another chance to recruit him, with Muller and Plato driving the works Vauxhalls.

“They said, ‘Well, we’re running four cars this year and if you want there’ll be a car there for you with Egg Sport, obviously not the official team’,” he recalls. “That was fantastic as it transpired, to have the opportunity to do that first year when things were reasonably thin on the ground. The end of that Super Touring era was a bit of a transitional phase. The main thing was to keep involved.”

Bar a largely wet test at Magny-Cours, Thompson had very little time in the car before the season kicked off – hence his third place in a championship dramatically won by Plato over Muller.

“It’s never easy just to walk in when they [Plato and Muller] have done weeks of testing and developed the car, and that’s the way it transpired through the year,” he continues. “When you’re not familiar with the car you go searching for things that you would have found through the winter. You can’t really do that on race weekends successfully over the year.”

It all came right in 2002 for Thompson, who had been promoted into the works line-up after the bitter political infighting that resulted in the departure of Plato. But his battle with Muller wasn’t decided simply by on-track combat; the five-point penalties for engine changes – a rule thankfully discarded by Alan Gow when he returned to helm the BTCC – provided another variable.

Title score with Muller ended up 2-1 in Thompson’s favour

Photo by: Malcolm Griffiths/Getty Images

Thompson entered the finale at Donington five points clear, but was level with Muller by the time they lined up for the first race: “Every time I got a decent lead I’d lose an engine. Going into the last round at Donington I was five points in front and then I lost an engine, and all of a sudden we’re equal on points again. Bearing in mind you’re fighting Yvan, that’s difficult. Don’t get me wrong – he had some bad luck as well.”

A slow start to the first race meant Thompson had to grow devil horns – he was usually one of the cleanest racers in the BTCC – to muscle his way past Muller and Neal for victory.

In the second and final race, he dropped back from Muller at the start, knowing all he had to do was sit behind, and finally the Alsatian came a cropper with Paul O’Neill, who had stepped into the Egg Vauxhall team for 2002 and is still great pals with Thompson to this day.

“There’s no point giving anyone any opportunity to nudge you off, is there?” he reasons. “It was my first championship, and so you just do it the easiest way possible.”

Muller was on top in 2003, when the series switched from BF Goodrich tyres to Dunlop. BFG parent company Michelin had supplied the rubber with which Thompson had become so familiar in his Super Touring years, so its products would naturally be similar. Over the 2002-03 winter, Thompson focused on chassis development work, while Muller worked on maximising the tyres.

“No disrespect to Dunlop – they were just a very, very different tyre to drive,” says Thompson. “The big issue for me was I lost a lot of positivity from the car, especially the front end, so it was very docile to drive. It wasn’t a nervous car – you couldn’t take it by the scruff of the neck and really drive.

“You had to sort of sit back, a bit like a Cadillac, and wait for everything to go on, and it really didn’t suit me at all. To be honest that whole year was a struggle. Yvan was significantly better than me if you look over the course of the year. It was always a bit of an uphill battle, but he did a great job and he deserved to win it.”

Even so, Thompson still claimed six out of 10 pole positions: “I think I was the quickest driver over one lap, on average over the course of the years, except probably 2001, which was a bit of a struggle for me if I’m honest. But in reality they [the poles] were like stolen moments, and I struggled generally with the race.

Thompson scrambled Egg deal late in the day for the 2001 season

Photo by: JEP

“Yvan was so much better at looking after those tyres than I was. I could get one lap out of it, but I couldn’t really make it last. And it wasn’t until the winter testing for the following year when we managed to change the car significantly to deal with that tyre and help with my style of driving.

“Johnny Morton who was my engineer and the designer as well, he realised that I was struggling. We changed a lot of things on the front end of the car. I was never as comfortable with it as I was with the Goodrich, but it gave me what I needed.

“Coming from the Super Touring cars, which were super-nervous to drive, on a knife-edge all the time, and having driven like that for all those years, I needed a car which was like that.

“I was always relatively clean and I was only penalised once in my career for a driving infringement. You can pretty much think your way past a lot of people. Just good, hard, fair racing I guess” James Thompson

“It was like driving on slick tyres in the damp – you’re constantly fighting the car and the speed comes with it because the car’s generally very neutral, and the minute you have a docile car it starts understeering and you generally can’t make it do anything, and that for me is a real problem. Everything was great through the winter, and it translated into results.”

And that led to another Donington showdown with Muller. An uncharacteristic Thompson punt on Neal at the Old Hairpin on the first lap of the opener lifted him into the lead, only for Plato to shoulder his way past at Redgate, Muller also chiselling an opening.

When Plato hip-checked Muller on the Craner Curves, the Astra bounced down the grass and then shot across Thompson’s bows at the Old Hairpin in what was almost a Vauxhall calamity. Muller’s runner-up position in the reversed-grid race – newly introduced for 2004 – then closed the gap again, and you know the rest…

Thompson, speaking from his Ibiza home, laughs when the Neal incident, for which he received a licence endorsement, is mentioned – “I can’t remember it to be honest. I’ll take your word for it!” – but adds: “I was always relatively clean and I was only penalised once in my career for a driving infringement. You can pretty much think your way past a lot of people. Just good, hard, fair racing I guess.

“There were villains and all sorts back then. It was a good season. You didn’t know which way it was going to go – that was the beauty of it.” 

Muller leads Plato and Thompson in final 2004 race, but couldn’t stop his team-mate being crowned

Photo by: J Bloxham/Getty Images