Super Touring: The tin-top rules that changed the game forever

The ‘Made in Britain’ Super Touring car regulations heralded one of the greatest eras of tin-top racing at home – and aboard. Let’s not forget that the category spread all around the globe. But what started out humbly known as the British Touring Car Championship’s ‘two-litre formula’ was more important than that. Much more important. It set the tone for just about everything that has followed in the world of production-based motorsport. That’s in touring cars, rallying and even GT racing.

The arrival of a new breed of machinery in the BTCC in 1990 rang the death knell for the homologation special. The rulebook and those that swam in its wake, the likes of World Rally Car, Super 2000, BTC-Touring through to the Next Generation Touring Car regulations in force in the BTCC today, TCR and even GT3, democratised motorsport.

The barriers were torn down or the bar lowered, either idiom will do. No longer would a manufacturer have to build a hot version of something from its road car range by the thousand and then an even hotter version by the hundred to be competitive. No more Ford Sierra Cosworth RS whatever on the circuits; no more Lancia Delta Integrale evolution this or that on the stages.

Everyone could come and play under the Super Touring and World Rally Car regulations. And they pretty much did. Manufacturer participation in the BTCC peaked at 10 marques in 1994 and was still knocking on the door of double digits through the glory years of the category. The rules that came into force in the World Rally Championship in 1997 built on the same principles, and on their arrival heralded what many regard as the greatest era for the series. Ten manufacturers built cars to the rules over a halcyon period for rallying that stretched deep into the 2000s.

The contagious ideas behind the two-litre touring car regulations were hit upon at a time when Ford’s RS500 was sweeping all before it in the BTCC and elsewhere – at least at the front of the grid. The British series, which had replaced the word ‘Saloon’ with ‘Touring’ in its title for 1987, had two problems. The RS500 was dominating at the front, but a driver of one of the Blue Oval’s finest wasn’t crowned champion. The BTCC was a multi-class affair and the title winner for the most part came from the ranks of cars not doing the overall winning.

In 1989, when the two-litre rules were hit upon, John Cleland, who would go on to become one of the first wave of Super Touring heroes, took the 1989 title driving a works Vauxhall Astra GTE 16V in Class C. Andy Rouse and Robb Gravett did most of the winning outright in their RS500s, yet ended up third and fourth in the points.

The domination of the fire-breathing RS500 kept any competition away

Photo by: LAT Images via Getty Images

No wonder the man under whose remit the BTCC fell at the RAC MSA, the predecessor of today’s Motor Sport UK, reckons “the championship was unpromotable”. Those words belong to Jonathan Ashman, who had become marketing manager at the governing body. He and a key group of team owners, who would go on to form the TOCA organisation that took over the championship for 1991, recognised that the BTCC had an opportunity that came with a slot on primetime TV. A highlights package was shown on the BBC’s Grandstand Saturday afternoon magazine show the week after every race, with Formula 1 commentary legend Murray Walker, no less, voicing the races.

Ashman, who would go on to become president of the FIA Touring Car Commission, had previously worked for Toyota GB. He understood that the Group A regulations in force in the BTCC demanding 5000 base models with the option to push the boat out further with a 500-off evolution – hence the moniker of the ultimate Sierra – would always favour the marque with the best homologation special. And at that time it was Ford’s fire-breathing legend, the evo RS500 version of the Cossie.

“It was all about the RS500; no one else wanted to compete, and I knew the reasons why,” recalls Ashman. “I’d spent the previous four years as sales director at Toyota in the UK, and I always had guys from the motorsport side asking me for a budget for racing or rallying. When I asked what car they wanted to use, they always said the Celica or the Supra.

"The World Rally Car was born because Japanese manufacturers like Subaru and Mitsubishi could sell thousands of four-wheel-drive cars, but the European car makers for whatever reason struggled to reach that sort of number. The only exception was Audi, which at that time wasn’t interested in rallying" Gabriele Cadringher

“That was of no use to me because I could sell every one of those I could get,” says Ashman of a time when quotas limited Japanese imports into the UK. “I told them that if they could race or rally our mid-range four-door saloons, I could find a budget.”

That was the premise of Super Touring: to allow, or rather make, everyone race their bread-and-butter repmobiles, the cars they sold in volume. It was a move, says Prodrive boss David Richards, driven by “commercial imperatives” at a time when concerns were raised by BMW that it wasn’t winning races outright with the M3s he was running for the British importer.

Richards, Prodrive co-founder Ian Parry and technical director David Lapworth, along with Ashman and Rouse, are among the claimants to the crown of father of Super Touring, and therefore grandfather of all the formulas that have followed down the same path. “The idea originated on my desk,” reckons touring great Rouse. “I identified that just about every manufacturer had a two-litre engine that could be used for racing. I actually wanted a two-litre turbo to replicate the same speeds and power of the RS500.”

New rules meant BTCC became a single class in 1991; a fudge allowed BMW M3 to remain

Photo by: Sutton Images via Getty Images

The truth is that it was almost certainly a collaborative affair. Ashman remembers calling a meeting in 1989 to discuss the way forward. “We had an extraordinary number of people turn up,” he recalls. “We said, ‘Let’s write a set of rules whereby everyone can use their bog standard saloon’. I remember going home that evening with a copy of What Car? and coming up with the 4.2-metre minimum length.”

The first two-litre machinery arrived in the BTCC in 1990 in a transitional year before the full swap over to the new rules in 1991. The RS500s still did the winning, running in Class A, while the cars that represented the future – and gave a nod to the past – raced in Class B. There were works cars from Vauxhall, with the Cavalier developed by Dave Cook Racing Services, and BMW with M3s run by Prodrive: the rules on the silhouette of the car had been fudged to allow in one of the greatest homologation specials of all time. The Bimmer, with its throaty in-line four downsized to two litres, made up the bulk of the class with privateer entries. Toyota and Nissan joined the party for the following year as factory participants. The growth would continue: Peugeot and Mazda entered the fray in 1992, Ford and Renault in 1993. Alfa Romeo and Volvo made it a nice round 10 car makers in 1994.

Rallying had a similar, though not identical, problem with the Group A rules to touring car racing. And the World Rally Car was the solution.

“The World Rally Car was born because Japanese manufacturers like Subaru and Mitsubishi could sell thousands of four-wheel-drive cars, but the European car makers for whatever reason struggled to reach that sort of number,” says Gabriele Cadringher, the long-time boss of the FIA’s technical department and head of its Manufacturers’ Commission in the 1990s. “The only exception was Audi, which at that time wasn’t interested in rallying.

“The European manufacturers were looking to pull out of the WRC. We had to find a way to allow them to adapt a front-wheel-drive car to run a four-wheel-drive transmission. And I think it was quite successful.”

Alfa joined the touring car boom - but the 155 briefly put a spanner in the works

Photo by: LAT Images via Getty Images

The key players in the new formula were Cadringher, Jacques Berger, one of his key subalterns and ultimate replacement, and Prodrive, both Richards and Lapworth. Prodrive was winning WRC rallies with Subaru as the ideas for the new rules were coming together, but was very much in the pro camp.

“We could have played to the strengths of Subaru, but our number-one priority at Prodrive has always been that the sport should be strong and commercially viable,” asserts Richards. “If the basics are right, there is something to build on. We are always confident that when the rules are right, we will do well because we are technically good at our job.”

The rules, which Sergio Limone at Alfa Romeo played a key role in draughting, certainly proved up to the job. Existing WRC participants Subaru and Ford built cars to the new rules, as did Toyota after returning to the WRC following its one-year ban from the championship for running illegal air restrictors. They took on Mitsubishi, which continued running to the Group A rules with its new Lancer Evo IV. SEAT joined over the course of 1998, and then Peugeot and Skoda made it seven marques by year three in 1999.

“It’s clear that we would never have entered the top class without the new rules. It was not possible for a company like SEAT to build 5000 units of a suitable model with four-wheel drive" Jaime Puig

Toyota left after 1999, SEAT after 2000, but the arrival of first Hyundai and then Citroen kept the total of manufacturers around about the half-dozen mark. Compare that to the WRC today…

For SEAT, the World Rally Car rules were manna from heaven. Without them it would never have made the step up from the 2-Litre World Rally Cup, which it had won in 1996 with its Ibiza Kit Car. The Kit Car suffix referenced the freedoms introduced in the junior category, often known as Formula 2, that pointed the way to the World Rally Car rules.

“It’s clear that we would never have entered the top class without the new rules,” says long-time SEAT Sport boss Jaime Puig. “It was not possible for a company like SEAT to build 5000 units of a suitable model with four-wheel drive. We didn’t have the right platform within the Volkswagen group, and we didn’t have the motorsport heritage of a company like Lancia or Mitsubishi to sell a car like that in those kind of quantities. But the new regulations were written so that manufacturers that didn’t have the best standard platform could go to rallying.”

The birth of GT3 in 2006 epitomised the 'come one, come all' approach

The GT3 category introduced for 2006 – and still going strong nearly 20 years on – may not look to have any similarities with Super Touring and World Rally Car. Not when the cars have always come in different shapes and sizes, engines behind the driver (and in Porsche’s case beyond the rear axle, too) and up front. There isn’t the same homogeneity that was at the heart of those categories. Think back to the early days of GT3, and the Morgan Super Sport GT3 based on the Aero 8 racing against the Ferraris, Aston Martins and Chevrolet Corvettes.

Yet GT3 epitomises the same principles of inclusivity as Super Touring et al, the ‘everyone can come and play’ mentality. BMW joined the category in 2010 with a Z4 powered by a V8, though you couldn’t find an eight-pot version of the car in your local dealership. Bentley could win races with the Continental, a grand cruiser more than a Gran Turismo. And when Mercedes replaced the V8-powered SLS with the car dubbed the AMG on the road and its turbo engine proved unsuitable for racing, it simply carried over the normally aspirated unit from its predecessor.

GT3, more so in its earliest days than under what are known as the 2022 rules in force today, was more about building a car to a lap-time target than a set of rules. And then there was the Balance of Performance to level up such a diverse array of machinery.

The arrival of a new Toyota or Lexus in 2027, seemingly a racer for the road as suggested by the GR GT3 Concept name given to its initial reveal in 2022, and perhaps something similar from Mercedes might yet derail the success of GT3. Just as a return of the homologation special almost did for Super Touring. The bewinged specials that arrived in 1994, Alfa Romeo’s TS 155 Silverstone and the Audi 80 Competition quattro, caused a snafu just as the FIA was getting involved in a category it had dubbed Class 2. (Class 1 touring cars were the high-tech rocket ships racing in the DTM.)

Alfa and Audi built – or at least were supposed to have built – 2500 of their specials, and BMW and Renault followed suit with the 318iS-A and the Laguna Airflow. They threatened to turn the category on its head. Remember the factory Alfa Corse team that had been sent to the BTCC driving out of the gates at Oulton Park? The rear wing, now devoid of the packing pieces to raise it into clear air, had been lowered from round three at Snetterton, but now the adjustable front splitter was under scrutiny. The pop-rivets needed to hold it in its outer-most position were deemed to fall under the same ‘add-on’ rules that the FIA had given national sporting associations to ban offending parts as they wished.

Common sense prevailed. The manufacturers agreed to free up aerodynamics for 1995, the year that the category became known as Super Touring. Now an aero kit could be homologated for each car irrespective of what it came with for the road: the appendages, front and rear, had to fit within virtual boxes. The same principles on the aero were put in place for the World Rally Car rules two years later.

There were other issues at the heart of Super Touring – it would eventually price itself out of existence. “The problem was all the FIA working groups worked on majority rule,” recalls long-time BTCC technical director Peter Riches. “If a manufacturer said it wanted to make this or that widget out of gold and enough of the other manufacturers agreed, then it could be made of gold.”

So Super Touring wasn’t perfect. Not by any means. But it changed the way the automotive industry goes racing with its road-going machinery. And there has been no going back as yet.

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