Quote:
Originally posted by TimD
I kept coming back to these sentences, because they kept ringing bells with me. Is it not perhaps arguable that Super Touring, much as a large number of touring car fans lament it, was something of a side-track?
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Tim- I've just been trying to work out how best to add to the debate in this thread, having participated in the earlier one, and I think you've just said exactly what I was thinking.....
From your comments about the 80s, I'm guessing that like me you first saw the BTCC around that time, and I do think that gives us a slightly different perspective to younger fans who first discovered the series during the Super Touring years-
The current state of the BTCC, with a mix of top-class professionals, semi-pros and amateurs does bear a definite resemblance to what I remember from the 80s, and I'd argue that the peak of SuperTouring in the mid-90s was very much an exception to the rule, which came about due to a fairly unique set of circumstances, in that manufacturers threw huge support behind national touring car series, and the BTCC in particular, possibly because of the lack of alternative avenues for them to participate in outside F1 or rallying
If you think back to the early 90s, the ETCC had been gone for several years, and sportscar racing had prety much collapsed, so national touring car series became the chosen battleground for the manufacturers, bringing with them the big budgets and highly-paid top professional drivers, the kind of guys who a few years before would have been plying their trade in the ETC or World Sportscar series.
This raised the stakes so much that the semi-pro/amateur drivers were driven out of the series, and when the manufacturer teams- who are only there because it fits their marketing plans- began to leave, then the grids- and in some countries the actual series- collapsed.
The rebuilding of the BTCC which began in 2001 seems to be producing at presnet something more like the BTCC we first saw in the 80s with that mixture of drivers, but who knows where it's going to evolve to?
Probably it won't ever reach the heights that mid-90s Super Touring did,(and that may be no bad thing)those circumstances were possibly unique, but what it really needs to do is become suffuciently robust to survive current economic circumstances- personally, my big worry is that at present we don't have parity of regulations with the ETCC- to me it's no coincidence that the two biggest periods of growth in touring cars that I remember were in periods when a single set of regs was widely used
I don't think that what we've got at present has to be percieved as second-class compared to what we've had in the past- several people have commented on the presence of 'wealthy amateurs' in the series: an important factor about them is that very often they will support the series as long as they can find the budget to do so, unlike factory teams who are off as soon as their marketing strategy takes them in another direction- OK, you certainly don't want a grid full of slow amateurs out for a Sunday drive, but I've no problem with a there being a reasonable number of them out there, so long as they're sufficiently competent to be safe and not cause problems for the fast guys....