BTCC champion Hill sets target for new GT career

Max Verstappen isn’t the only name familiar to British motorsport fans that is making a debut in this weekend’s Nurburgring 24 Hours. For this is the next installment of Jake Hill’s burgeoning GT career, as he will share Lionspeed GP’s Porsche 911 with Patrick Kolb, Kyle Tilley and Max Hofer in the Pro-Am category of the top SP9 class.

It comes after making a full-time transition into endurance racing for 2026 following 12 years in the British Touring Car Championship - the 2024 title being his highlight - though it’s been a “pretty rough start”.

Hill has dovetailed duties in the Nurburgring Endurance Series and 24H Series and for the latter, he has already completed 12-hour rounds at Mugello and Spa - but finished neither.

In Mugello, a lower suspension failure forced his Era Motorsport Ferrari to retire, before the 32-year-old didn’t even have the chance to drive the 296 at round two following a crash for team-mate Dwight Merrimann at Blanchimont.

“I definitely don’t like that part of it,” Hill told Autosport of endurance competition not being single-driver racing like the BTCC. “That is genuinely the only bit that I dislike coming from sprint racing to endurance racing.

“It's not that I have to share the car, I've got no issues with that, it's just when things are taken out of your control and you haven't been able to do what you want to do, for sure it's annoying - of course it is.”

Jake Hill

Photo by: Getty Images

That tough luck continued into the opening session of the Nordschleife weekend, as unpredictable weather arrived just in time for his scheduled stint, so the team opted not to risk anything. Particularly when it was effectively practice.

But the Kent-native still had his usual beaming smile, not allowing the bad results to force that friendly personality out of him, as Hill is relishing this new chapter.

Even when he attended last weekend’s BTCC round at Brands Hatch, he was already batting away questions about a potential return, so he’s in endurance competition for the long haul; Hill even claimed the Nurburgring 24h is “the biggest race” of his career.

But he doesn’t just want to stop here, having even bigger targets in his sight: “I really wanted to get the championship done in the UK and then it was a case of, I just, I've always had this itch to do sports cars and do the big races.

“I'm desperate to get to Le Mans, that's my ultimate goal is to get to Le Mans. But doing this and Spa 24 as well, which we're lined up to do [24-28 June], we're slowly ticking off some of the biggest races in the world and that's good.

“Then to be honest, just see how my career goes in GTs and if there's an opportunity to ever return to touring cars at a later date, then, hey, maybe we'll do that. But for now, I want to just keep enjoying myself doing this.”

Le Mans

Photo by: Shameem Fahath

He isn’t the only BTCC star to have made the transition into GT this year either, as four-time series champion Colin Turkington is driving West Surrey Racing’s BMW M4 in British GT4.

The general assumption would perhaps have been for Hill to make a similar transition into the UK’s top GT category, but he didn’t move to sportscars to continue doing a “British championship”. It is all about challenging himself in a new environment on the European continent with trips to Paul Ricard (12-hour race) and Barcelona (24-hour race) also still to come.

“I'm a nobody here,” he said. “I was someone relatively big in a small pond and now I'm absolutely no one in a massive pond.

“So it's a strange concept to get used to, to rock up here and no one knows who you are, no one knows what you've done, no one knows what you're capable of. So it's a bit of a reset because you're always having to prove yourself again.

“Whereas, obviously, in the UK, people know who I am, people know what I can do, know what I've accomplished and it's a different mindset. So it is hard to establish yourself in a completely different part of the world, it really is, but just get down and dirty with the engineers, make sure they know how good you are and the driving will hopefully speak for itself.”