Autosport Top 50 of 2023: #36 Ash Sutton

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.

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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.

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.

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.’

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“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.