Why Porsche wouldn't give up on Britain

Rockingham, September 2013. After creeping into double figures at most of the year's rounds, just six cars take to the track for Porsche Carrera Cup of Great Britain practice. Another joins later for a final field of just seven cars. It's the nadir of a dreadful campaign. There's a new car coming for 2014, but will it really make a difference?

Brands Hatch, March 2014. Thirteen new-look, Type-991 Carrera Cup cars contest the opening round of the championship. Pre-season predictions of 20-car grids are far from realised. The series flirts with single-figure entries at a couple of rounds, then ends with a season-high of 14. Dan Cammish wins on his debut in the guest car. Talk of a revived 2015 season starts to filter through the paddock.

Sceptics had heard such chatter before. You couldn't have been associated with the Carrera Cup over the preceding two seasons and take the positive talk with anything other than a massive pinch of salt.

But when post-season testing started, a few names started to creep out of the woodwork. Cammish wanted to do a full season. Dino Zamparelli was linked with a move from GP3. Several drivers started to register an interest with the championship.

Twelve months previously, that would have been unthinkable. Some scoffed at the notion that the Carrera Cup would even remain on the British Touring Car Championship support bill, so poor were the numbers. Why did Porsche GB not just cut its losses and run?

Those who held such fears were massively underestimating the value of Porsche to the TOCA package, the value of a British championship to Porsche - and the value of motorsport to the marque.

Rockingham 2013 was the series' nadir © LAT

"Porsche has never given up, especially when it's to do with race cars," says Carrera Cup GB motorsport manager James MacNaughton.

"Racing is absolutely our heritage and it's important. Great Britain is a massive market for Porsche - it's the fifth-largest in the world for the company.

"It's very important that we have a strong championship as well. There's no money coming to us directly from Germany, but there's a lot of pressure from Germany to create a great championship and we're relishing the challenge."

Despite such a heritage, expecting grids to increase before the new car came in would have been naive, at best. While there are plenty of places to race the Type 997 car - such as the GT Cup - the bottom line is few people would invest in a car that is about to go about of fashion.

The new car didn't prove to be the silver bullet the series needed, but MacNaughton suggests a negative perception of the car when it was introduced to the Porsche Supercup and a couple of national series in 2013 did not help.

"I think it [the take-up of the new car in 2014] was disappointing for everybody, but there were loads of reasons why," he insists. "You can't pin a big grid on one thing or half a dozen things and you can't pin the small grids on one thing. It's a culmination of lots of things. No one and nothing is at fault - it's just the way it goes and it took a really huge amount of effort by the team last year before I arrived."

The calendar now includes a Spa round on the WEC bill © LAT

That recovery was aided when the new 911 came on stream globally last year. Those original fears - primarily concerning reliability and running costs - were dispelled, paving the way for the renaissance currently occurring.

That's a very broad overview of the process, because there are two initiatives for this season that have been at the core of the Carrera Cup GB's revival. The first is the introduction of the new rookie class for 17-to-24-year-olds, with a £50,000 prize for the winner. The second is a cost-cutting drive, via a reduced calendar and resource restrictions.

"It [the rookie class] looks like the single biggest thing because it's a lot of money," agrees MacNaughton. "But there are five or six who are eligible for that. It's not massive when you consider we've got 20 more drivers committed to a season than we had.

"So it's not the be-all and end-all. It is a big part of it and you know those five or six people are up at the front, so it's attracted some pretty big names. And some of the people who have been talking to us seriously about next year - there were some pretty cool people who are really keen."

One of the drivers it did attract is GP3 podium finisher Zamparelli. The obvious appeal of a manufacturer-backed championship was not lost on the Anglo-Italian.

"I thoroughly enjoyed my time in GP3 and moving up the single-seater ladder. Formula 1 was my fix and focus but I have no qualms about switching over," he explains. "You do a year in single-seaters, and where do you go? There was no continuity. Even when you do a good job, it still doesn't guarantee anything.

"We decided to take a different route. It's one we've done with positivity. There have been no regrets, we just decided it's time to move on. The ultimate goal is to make a living out of it, make a career out of sportscar racing."

But if it is not the Rookie Class that has made the big difference, what about cutting costs?

Zamparelli stepped off the F1 ladder to join the Porsche field © LAT

"Well a set of tyres is £1300," MacNaughton points out. "You could do two sets a day at testing. So there was a new regulation put in place for this year which basically said that you could only have two new sets of slick tyres, per race weekend, after the first race weekend [where teams had three per car].

"And obviously there are running costs, so if you can restrict the amount of time they can test, the frequency of engine and gearbox repairs is reduced.

"Testing's unrestricted for everybody up until the beginning of the season. Once the season starts the Pro drivers are allowed four days unless they're new to the series, i.e. they've never raced with the Carrera Cup before, and then they're allowed five days. Pro-Am 2 runners are completely unrestricted."

A reduced calendar - there are seven rounds this year, compared with nine in 2014, with a support race at the Spa World Endurance Championship round tagged on to six TOCA meetings - has also helped reduce those costs.

"Every race series has its ups and its downs," points out BTCC series director Alan Gow, "but Porsche show their great commitment by making sure their ups overshadow their downs by a very considerable margin - exactly as we have seen this year."

The upshot of such commitment was a 2015 entry of 30 cars, making it comfortably the biggest grid in the TOCA paddock. Then you just need to look at the calibre of driver just trying to get into the top 10 - Cammish, reigning champion Josh Webster, Zamparelli, double champion Michael Meadows, rising GT ace Tom Sharp, Formula Renault 3.5 racer Nicholas Latifi, British Formula Ford champion Jayde Kruger... The entry is not just high in quantity, but packed with quality.

"Looking back on it, it was the best thing I ever did," says 2004 champion Richard Westbrook, whose pre-season wish for an influx of talented drivers seeking a sportscar career has come true in some style. The Briton, flying the flag for Chevrolet in the US and BMW in selected endurance events in Europe, acknowledges the significance a vibrant Carrera Cup can have for aspiring races.

Westbrook credits the Carrera Cup as vital to his career © LAT

"I was able to win something heavily backed by a manufacturer and that manufacturer took me into sportscar racing," he adds. "The Carrera Cup did so much for my career and I'll always be eternally grateful because that really was a springboard for me."

Aspiring pros are one thing, but there's been an influx of gentlemen drivers too, aided possibly by the slight dip in British GT's top class this season and the recent rise in profile in the national-level GT Cup, which over the past two years has grown significantly and formed a strong breeding ground for aspiring gents (and is the series from which several graduated into the Carrera Cup this year).

"It's not about the monetary value because most people here are flying in with their helicopters," says MacNaughton. "It's something for the guys who aren't going to win the championship and who aren't going to get that big prize at the end of the year - they're still going to have that experience all the way through.

"That's one of the things from my time at Goodwood [he was secretary of the Goodwood Road Racing Club]: I'm used to creating really special experiences for people and that's something that we will really work hard on doing in the future."

Success often breeds succeeds. So, the big question: is a 30-car entry sustainable? MacNaughton suggests it doesn't need to be.

"We're at the higher levels of what we want," he explains. "We'd be happy with mid-20s as well. We want good drivers who are here for the year, running good-looking cars, with decent brands on them.

"We've just got to make sure that we keep the momentum going and don't sort of sit back and go, 'Wow, we're doing well, let's have a drink boys.' We can't rest on our laurels - we have to keep working hard and that hard work always pays off.

"We're all working very hard to make sure this success continues for a long, long time. Even if only 50 per cent of the things you do creates a positive effect, then you've got a lot more positives, haven't you?"