Why the BTCC's ballast increase couldn't stop champion Sutton

Qualifying for the opening round of the season is the single most significant session of the British Touring Car Championship year. Why? Because it’s the first of only two competitive outings in which no one is carrying any success ballast. The second is the opening race, but here random incidents can skew the formbook.

Back in May at Thruxton, the field faced a damp track and it was a case of getting the slicks on at the right time as the surface dried out, so perhaps the significance of such an occasion was diluted. That’s what 28 of the 29 drivers and their teams would have preferred to think. But really, the fact that it was Ash Sutton who emerged on top proved to be an accurate barometer to the season ahead.

And yes, there was a random incident in the first race, Sutton’s Infiniti Q50 turned around by a pinched-in Colin Turkington as he headed through the Complex on the opening lap. But the form on that weekend set the tone for the year.

Not only did Sutton recover from that to storm through to finish 10th (ninth once Turkington had been penalised behind him), but he then went on another mission in race two, after being forced to pit under a safety car for a quick fix to an engine electronics glitch. He ended that one ninth, lined up third on the reversed grid as the rain returned, and took his first victory of the season.

A few weeks later, Sutton hit another setback in qualifying for round two at Snetterton, when a failing engine left him 15th on the grid. But once again he was in stunning form on race day, and used the softer option tyres to take his second victory of the year in race two. By the end of the weekend he was at the top of the points, a position he would only concede for a couple of hours (following race two of the third round at Brands Hatch) through the remainder of 2021.

From then on, Sutton and the BMR Racing crew that had redesigned the Laser Tools Racing Infiniti prior to the 2020 season played an almost perfect game of winning a BTCC title. Key to this was the almost telepathic relationship the 27-year-old enjoys with his engineer, lead BMR technical man Antonio Carrozza.

Standout performance at Thruxton recovering from race one spin marked Sutton out as an obvious title challenger once again

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

With the sporting regulations rewritten for 2021 so that maximum success ballast was increased from 60kg to 75kg, Sutton and Carrozza’s focus had changed a little from the previous campaign. However good the Infiniti is with the weight, no longer was it feasible to qualify at or near the front when you were the championship leader.

We therefore saw patient, restrained Sutton this year, in regular radio communication with Carrozza, rather than the all-out warrior of battles before. Get a banker lap in during qualifying, then explore the limits to try to pinch a couple more places on the grid, then focus on a good result in race one, avoiding unnecessary confrontation, keeping an eye on where your main title rivals are (usually that was Tom Ingram, but bearing in mind he was mostly carrying 66kg ballast on his front-wheel-drive Hyundai, he would normally be a distant speck in the Infiniti’s mirrors).

Drop down to ballast somewhere in the twenties or thirties for race two, and do your stuff then, again keeping it clean. Indeed, three of Sutton’s five wins in 2021 came in the second race of a weekend. Then see how the luck of the draw shakes out, and strike again in the reversed-grid race, albeit this time probably with more ballast than you had in race two.

Sutton blitzed the race two points – 144 over the season compared to 117 for Ingram, 113 for Cook, Turkington on 102 and Hill with 97

Nevertheless, what Sutton could do with the full 75kg of ballast was hugely impressive. Apart from that weight-free Thruxton qualifying at the start of the season, his best Saturday effort was sixth (at Knockhill and at the Brands GP finale, where incredibly he was quickest in the sector comprising Hawthorn, Westfield and Sheene Curve), but he was never outside the top 10.

He never once stood on the podium after an opening race, yet finished in the top 10 at all where he carried 75kg bar Oulton Park, where he went off avoiding a first-lap incident. He fell just nine points short of having the second highest tally from race ones – that was Turkington (with Josh Cook the clear leader), whose average ballast on his West Surrey Racing-run BMW 330i M Sport for the first race of the day was 23kg below that of Sutton.

Contrast that with the best efforts on the next step down of ballast: 66kg. Only three times did anyone on that weight qualify in the top 10 – Ingram at Brands Indy and Knockhill; Turkington at Brands GP.

Then look at the race two stats, where the ballast was more evenly distributed on average over the course of the season. Of the leading five title contenders, Cook carried an average of 40kg, Turkington 34.5kg, Jake Hill 31kg, Sutton 25.5kg and Ingram 25kg. Yet Sutton blitzed the race two points – 144 over the season compared to 117 for Ingram, 113 for Cook, Turkington on 102 and Hill with 97.

Sutton often had to be patient and bide his time, picking up points and waiting for the ballast to come off for the later races

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

“I think the key bit there is all of our testing is done with full success ballast,” explains Sutton. “You hear rumours, ‘Oh they’ve got 30kg in, we’ve got 35kg’, but we generally have 75kg in that car at all times, because I don’t want to be testing with less weight.

“Ultimately the cars will always get faster with the weight out. So if we can make that car faster with full weight, every time we turn up to a meeting and we’ve got full weight in we know where the car’s at and what we need to do with it. So when you have a bad race and you take that weight out for the next race, the car comes alive and you charge through the field.

“If you look back at Silverstone from last year, we went from stone cold last to second [on the road] and people said, ‘That shouldn’t have happened’, but the car was just obscenely fast. We were on the same tyre as everyone else, but we had the car hooked up because we’d been carrying the weight. So take the weight out, it just got faster. The car does come alive when we take the weight out, and it’s all because we’ve got the car so well dialled in with the weight.”

Sutton’s only failure to score points over the 30 races came in the final race on a day at Oulton Park where the field seemed to take their brains out and the event descended into a crashfest. He’d recovered to 14th following an off – and pitstop to remove grass from the radiator – avoiding a Turkington spin, and improved to eighth in the second race. That put him on the front row alongside poleman Senna Proctor for the finale and, with the option tyre available to him, it seemed a win was guaranteed.

If we’re going to be uncharitable, we can say that the blame for the first-turn clip with Proctor lies with Sutton – he hadn’t quite cleared the Honda as he went around the outside. That caused the Infiniti to spin, but he was still mid-pack as he headed down to Cascades, where more contact fired him out of the race.

But as if by magic, the initial spin had sent Sutton’s main championship rival at the time, Ingram, onto the grass in avoidance, and now the Hyundai needed a pitstop to remove foliage.

“That’s the thing,” says Sutton of a charmed day on which he actually extended his lead by two points. “Race one, taken out, both me and Colin were off across the grass; race two we had a good little charge, but ultimately you look at that weekend as a whole and none of them [his rivals] scored big points. It was crazy for me to come into it leading and leave leading – I’d scored such a small amount of points. It was an odd weekend, that one.”

Despite his tangle with Proctor, Sutton still extended his points lead at Oulton Park

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

The next two race weekends each provided a Sutton win, and this is where he began to look almost invincible on his way to a third title. Turkington arrived at Knockhill down in ninth in the standings, but began to rebuild his season with an excellent win in the first race. He led nearly all the way in the second too, only for a small slip at the chicane on the final lap to allow Sutton past.

At Thruxton, the Infiniti was a solid fifth on maximum ballast in race one, before hunting down Cook in the second encounter for victory. From here, it was a case of playing the percentages until, with the title secured after race two at the final round, he put in an exhibition performance to win the last race of the season as darkness fell upon the Brands GP circuit.

The majority of Ingram's wins involved audacious overtaking moves, but where he fell down was with the success ballast: 66kg (which he carried in six of the 10 quali sessions) was too much for his FWD car

Ingram, second in the points for so long, dropped behind Turkington before the Brands finale, and ended the weekend another place down the order in fourth after being leapfrogged by Cook. Ingram’s move, along with engineer Spencer Aldridge, to Excelr8 Motorsport provided a massive boost for the Sussex team and he was a star of the season in the Hyundai i30 N. The majority of his wins involved audacious overtaking moves, but where he fell down was with the success ballast: 66kg (which he carried in six of the 10 quali sessions) was too much for his FWD car.

Cook took advantage thanks to a sensational final weekend at Brands in his BTC Racing Honda Civic Type R. This year, he added to his reputation as one of the absolute front-wheel-drive top-liners. Take out those random reversed-grid races, and Cook would finish second in the standings to Sutton – just two points adrift… The car was well-engineered too, but finger trouble or mechanical problems wrecked his chances at least three times.

Hill, too, entered the final weekend as a title contender following MB Motorsport’s excellent first season as part of the Motorbase Ford Focus set-up. Much of the former AmD-run team’s crew, including Hill’s engineer Craig Porley, transferred across the Medway from Essex to Kent, and it was a great season for this true up-and-coming star of the BTCC. For much of the season the Ford carried success weight extremely well, but once he got up to second in the points – and the usual Ingram level of 66kg – the struggles began.

The BTCC’s top quintet were of incredible calibre this year, and it was unfortunate that anyone had to finish fifth. That unwanted accolade went to Hill, but in reality they all put in campaigns that would have put them in the top three in most other seasons.

Only one, however, put in a performance that deserved a spot at the pinnacle. And, in hindsight, such superiority was evident right from qualifying at Thruxton in May.

Ashley Sutton, Laser Tools Racing Infiniti Q50

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Turkington's hard-fought silver

Colin Turkington only just scraped home in second place in the championship this season to repeat his 2020 position, and there were a couple of errors from the four-time title winner, but dig deeper and it’s apparent that he is still at the peak of his form.

West Surrey Racing entered its third season with the BMW 330i M Sport, and since that car made its debut in 2019 there is no doubt that the level of competitiveness in the BTCC has increased massively: that year, one second bracketed the top 10 qualifiers at Donington; this season, it was 26…

WSR is a proper purist’s team. First, it goes racing with rear-wheel-drive machinery, which any racing fan will tell you is the correct driven axle; second, while the majority of teams fit the customer TOCA engine, WSR has used the B48 BMW powerplant, tuned by Neil Brown Engineering, since 2017.

The problem with that is, when 18 of the 29 cars on the grid use TOCA’s spec Swindon-built unit, it’s simply logical that the series’ technical directorship will look benignly upon those customers when it comes to performance tweaks, because without them the BTCC would be far weaker.

The 330i had its power revised a short way into its maiden season in 2019, slightly later in the year all the other cars had their power tweaked, then starting boost was restricted for rear-driven cars in 2020. Now throw in the increase in competition…

“There have been some rumours that we seemed to lose a bit of ground,” says WSR boss Dick Bennetts of the season just past. “Whether we lost ground or others gained it is debatable – but we didn’t appear to lose ground on our data.

“When we’re out front we can run well, but when we start further back we find it difficult to pass others. We can get through the corners as quick as anyone, and the BMW’s chassis handles very well, therefore we can only assume that we must be losing down the straights. The Donington incident [where Turkington spun] he was wringing the neck of that car. And at Knockhill [a slight off-track moment on the final lap] he was just under pressure, trying to win with 75 kilos.”

Turkington is “still very much top-class”, insists Bennetts: “It’s very rare he makes mistakes, and look at how many mistakes other drivers have made.”

Turkington had a tough scrap to recover to second in the points

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images