Subscribe

Sign up for free

  • Get quick access to your favorite articles

  • Manage alerts on breaking news and favorite drivers

  • Make your voice heard with article commenting.

Autosport Plus

Discover premium content
Subscribe
Special feature

Autosport Top 50 of 2023: #36 Ash Sutton

1st in British Touring Car Championship

Top 50 2023 dotcom36

Top 50 Drivers of 2023

Autosport's team of expert journalists got together to try to assess who were the top 50 drivers of 2023. Here are the results.

Sutton had what the stats books will tell you was a record-equalling season in the British Touring Car Championship. But what was more important to him was the manner of his fourth crown, and the fact that he became the first to win it in both front and rear-wheel-drive machinery.

PLUS: How a BTCC Alliance swept the field away in 2023

His quartet of titles emulates Andy Rouse and Colin Turkington; his 12 wins from 30 races matches Alain Menu’s 12 from 24 in 1997. But the Swiss did that in an era of no success penalties, no reversed grids, no performance-balancing, no artificiality. No wonder Menu reckons Sutton would have made the grade as a top-line Super Touring star.

Read Also:

The behind-the-scenes work that unlocked Sutton’s FWD potential

Ash Sutton makes no bones that key to his success is his relationship with his engineer, Antonio Carrozza. When they arrived from Team BMR/Laser Tools at Motorbase Performance in 2022 to start work with the Ford Focus ST, Sutton hadn’t raced a front-wheel-drive NGTC car since his rookie BTCC season in 2016; Carrozza had never engineered a FWD machine – at all.

On top of that, the focus (ahem) was on implementing hybrid and all the changes that entailed. By October 2023, Sutton was a champion (again) with the renamed Alliance Racing.

Sutton has now won the BTCC title with front-wheel drive and rear-wheel drive machinery, becoming the first to do so

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Sutton has now won the BTCC title with front-wheel drive and rear-wheel drive machinery, becoming the first to do so

“I think there were two elements to the winter in 2021, early 2022,” recalls Carrozza. “I was coming into a team where there was a lot of front-wheel-drive expertise. I didn’t know what that car needed, so I couldn’t sit there and redesign it and say, ‘This is what it needs to have.’ It was basically packaging the hybrid and making sure that everything was functional, which it was.

“I then spent the first half of the year with Ash trying to make the front-wheel-drive car do all of the things that the rear-wheel-drive car did, and we had a development route that didn’t work. Summer break happened, and we had a chance to have a reset and a proper rethink.

"All of that learning from the second half of last year fuelled a 'right, here’s my to-do list, here’s the things that are design-based, things that I can’t do at a circuit, these are the next steps" Antonio Carrozza

“If you split last year into first half and second half of the season you can see that they’re two different animals almost – we hadn’t won a race before the summer break. But then all of that learning from the second half of last year fuelled a ‘right, here’s my to-do list, here’s the things that are design-based, things that I can’t do at a circuit, these are the next steps.’

Top 10: Ranking the best BTCC drivers of 2023

“There was a total time gain that we thought we could get, and we walked away from a two-day test at Brands Hatch having set a lap that was well under the record, thinking, ‘Ooh I’m not sure, maybe it was just the day, maybe something was going on track-wise that was different to when everyone else has been there.’ The first chance you get to actually see it is qualifying at round one and… that was a nice weekend!”

And the rest is history.

 
A top-down rethink of the Ford Focus package over winter set Sutton on the path to the 2023 BTCC title

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

A top-down rethink of the Ford Focus package over winter set Sutton on the path to the 2023 BTCC title

Be part of the Autosport community

Join the conversation
Previous article Autosport Top 50 of 2023: #35 Jules Gounon
Next article Autosport Top 50 of 2023: #37 Elfyn Evans

Top Comments

Sign up for free

  • Get quick access to your favorite articles

  • Manage alerts on breaking news and favorite drivers

  • Make your voice heard with article commenting.

Autosport Plus

Discover premium content
Subscribe