Why “F1 with a roof” turned out to be such a missed opportunity

We can only speculate on the heights that the International Touring Car Championship would have reached without the double bodyblow that stopped Class 1 tin-top racing in its tracks 30 years ago.

When two of its three manufacturers announced prior to the penultimate European round of 1996 at Mugello that they would jump ship at the year’s end, the writing was on the wall for a series that enjoyed a higher profile and had a better pound-for-pound grid than any category barring Formula 1.

Super Touring is rightly regarded as a golden era. But the ITC, which started out in 1995 as a mini-series for DTM rounds held outside Germany before both were combined under the same name for 1996, should have been a global standard-bearer for touring cars that Super Touring manufacturers could aspire to join.

Had Alfa Romeo and Opel afforded it a little more time before getting itchy feet, ostensibly due to a lack of return on investment in TV viewership, it may well have done. Opel’s 1996 champion Manuel Reuter believes Super Touring would have naturally assumed a position as “the way to ITC”.

“I’m really proud and happy that I was involved in this era,” reflects the two-time Le Mans 24 Hours winner. “It’s a shame that we could not continue on this path.”

There was no shortage of things to like. The substantial technical freedom and unlimited scope for development afforded by the ITC means Reuter is entirely justified in likening its breed of monsters to “F1 with a roof”.

1996 title-winner Reuter describes ITC machinery as “F1 with a roof”

Photo by: Reinhard Klein / McKlein

Powered by high-revving V6 engines that produced 500bhp, the cars were seriously quick. The fastest ITC race lap at Silverstone in 1996, a 1m49.649s, was nearly nine seconds quicker than at the previous month’s British Touring Car Championship round.

A driving cast that combined Group C heroes with tin-top champions, F1 alumni and talented prospects in a hurry to progress meant there was quality everywhere you looked. And its varied calendar, featuring established grand prix tracks and quirky venues including Helsinki’s street circuit and the Diepholz airfield, meant the ITC could never be accused of being dull.

It had all the makings of a world championship that promoter Bernie Ecclestone could use to appease circuits whose wallets couldn’t stretch to hosting F1. But not everyone was enamoured with the concept.

“It was a great wish of Alfa and Opel particularly to make the next step into international motorsport,” observes former Mercedes-AMG motorsport boss Norbert Haug. “I was never a great fan of that. That should be reserved for prototype racing or F1. It just was too expensive and I doubted whether, with these international races, it had a chance to survive.” Haug would be proved right.

The final battle

The spectacle was helped by a healthy dose of unpredictability, as different circuits played to the strengths of each manufacturer. Weight parity agreed in 1995 between the rear-wheel-drive Mercedes, which stormed to both the DTM and ITC titles with Bernd Schneider, and four-wheel-drive offerings from Alfa and Opel was one factor, but doesn’t fully explain why the field closed up in 1996.

The Italian marque winning the most races that year (10 to Opel’s nine, while Mercedes managed seven), after a tough 1995 lacking both reliability and performance, was also down to saving weight, finding more grunt and sharpening its aero package.

Nannini’s title challenge was bolstered by his team-leader status at Alfa Romeo

Photo by: LAT Images via Getty Images

But despite Alessandro Nannini, the lead driver in the factory Martini Alfa Corse set-up, taking four consecutive victories across the September Nurburgring and Magny-Cours meetings (he also had a clean sweep at Estoril in May), it came too late to challenge Reuter and Schneider in the final reckoning. Joest Racing’s Reuter led for much of a season in which he racked up 15 consecutive points finishes, and claimed the title with the visit to Suzuka still to come, but that doesn’t reflect quite how close it was.

Schneider (in the works HWA-run D2 C-Class) rallied strongly after a difficult start, the nadir failing to score in either race after qualifying 19th at Estoril. After taking his first victories at Diepholz in July, he wrested the points lead away from Reuter by the end of September at Mugello.

There, Reuter was getting to grips with a new car that struggled with inherent oversteer after his primary chassis burned to the ground following an engine fire at Magny-Cours. His preference for the test hack – “balance-wise it was for me clearly the better one” – fell on deaf ears because it was overweight.

But momentum swung back the way of Russelsheim’s team leader just as quickly. Gearbox and ABS issues cost Schneider crucial points in Europe’s ITC farewell at Hockenheim, where Reuter claimed race two. He also had the upper hand in the Interlagos rain, as Schneider was fitted with slicks in a call Haug laments as “too brave”.

Reuter duly ended a weekend that began with his Calibra falling from the forklift unloading it from the plane with a title that would prove a solid reward for Opel’s own winter of upheaval. Efforts to simplify a platform that suffered from being overly complicated in 1995 coincided with a new engine developed by Cosworth, improved reliability of the six-speed transmission, and Wolfgang Peter Flohr replacing Walter Treser as Opel’s motorsport boss.

“Flohr was a different league,” remarks Reuter, who characterises the executive as “really strict”. But that authority didn’t guarantee the cooperation of his team-mates. Where Alfa threw its weight overtly behind Nannini, who needed Nicola Larini and Giancarlo Fisichella to move aside on the final lap at Magny-Cours then play rear-gunner in race two, Klaus Ludwig refused to yield victory to Reuter in October at Hockenheim.

Mercedes racing boss Haug shares moment of levity with Opel team kingpin Reinhold Joest

Photo by: Reinhard Klein / McKlein

Reuter contends that Ludwig defied a “clear order, not only from Flohr, as well as from top management” issued pre-race to support Opel’s best championship hope. That only added to his overt jubilation following race two; upon taking the flag, Reuter climbed from his car and embraced engineer Edward Turner on the pitstraight.

An act of “spontaneous emotion, no thinking behind it” that would cost him $10,000 was money well spent according to Reuter: “It was such a big relief in Hockenheim to win this last race in front of this crowd. I still get goosebumps when I think about it.”

It should be noted that Reuter’s rare mechanical woes didn’t cost him big points – Hans Stuck lost a win at the Nurburgring that Reuter duly inherited to a hydraulic fire, while Ludwig was denied the chance of doubling up at Silverstone with electrical gremlins – but he was able to continue scoring consistently despite running at or close to 50kg of ballast for much of the campaign. When there were points to be banked, Reuter banked them.

End of the road

With more time to build the audience, ITC could potentially have enjoyed the viewing figures that Alfa and Opel were unwilling to wait for. But it was clear to Haug that change was needed and its shortfalls would not be automatically resolved.

“To generate great spectatorship was a problem,” he opines. “That was possible for us at Brands Hatch or Donington, but not Silverstone. And in Italy, it’s just not possible to create a huge crowd that followed touring car racing. That was a problem in the concept.”

It wasn’t the only one, a point evidenced by the failure to land a fourth manufacturer after several rounds of talks came to naught. “Between negotiating and signing is a different thing, it’s like following a race car and overtaking it,” chuckles Haug.

The complexity that came from tech freedom became a double-edged sword

Photo by: Reinhard Klein / McKlein

The overriding issue was costs; while Haug insists that Mercedes was “very strict in our budgets, we could have continued for ages”, the perception that Opel and Alfa were committing unsustainable sums of money was offputting to prospective newcomers.

“The key problem was that the new manufacturers did not dare to enter because it was very, very sophisticated,” he maintains. “The bar was very high. You needed to jump. And secondly, the costs of Alfa and Opel were too high. That’s why it died.”

It was ironic that Alfa achieved its competitive peak just before its decision to pull the plug was confirmed. Haug reckons the decision to leave had been made as early as April. The German executive had enjoyed an “excellent” relationship with his opposite number at Alfa, Giorgio Pianta, a former rallying man known to Haug from his time as a journalist.

This was only strengthened during 1993, when Alfa Romeo and Mercedes were the sole manufacturers in the DTM prior to Opel’s arrival for 1994.

But despite beginning talks to reduce budgets by 40% for 1998, Alfa would not change course. Nor would Opel’s concerns be allayed. By the time the bombshell landed at Mugello, it was too late to save the ITC. The three-year contract signed by all three manufacturers in 1995 to safeguard its future was “in practical terms worth nothing”, sighs Haug. “We could have sued them, but you will not do that.”

The ITC’s legacy was perhaps unintended. Had it continued, we might never have seen the national DTM revived in 2000 with Mercedes a key player, nor Audi domination at Le Mans. Joest had earned back-to-back Le Mans victories as a Porsche privateer in 1996-97, but it is by no means certain that it would have had the capacity or inclination to add another factory programme to its workload or ditch a thriving ITC to start afresh with Audi, lesser still that both could have been successfully combined.

As is the case when attempting to weigh up how successful the ITC could have been, we will never truly know.

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