Q and A with Alan Gow

October 12th, 2011

Provided by the BTCC press office

Q: Coming into the final round of the season, five drivers in four different makes of car racing for four different teams can all win the championship. The top three are covered by just five points. What does this say about the championship?

Alan Gow: It simply underlines how bloody tough this championship is! The BTCC very rarely fails to deliver a closely fought season; in fact every championship for the last 10 years has been decided at the last event.

But this year has taken it to a whole new level. Certainly in at least the last 20 years we’ve never had the top three covered by just five points going into the final round. It’s going to be a cracker!

Q: The 2011 grid has featured a mixture of front and rear-wheel-drive normally aspirated S2000-spec cars, S2000 cars using NGTC-spec turbo engines and the new fully-blown NGTC cars. How difficult has it been to achieve parity in what has been a transitional year and, for those of us on the outside, how have you arrived at certain conclusions (eg. reduction in turbo boost levels, additional weight for turbocharged cars)?

AG: I’m really proud of the job we [TOCA] have done in delivering the performance equivalency through the season – quite obviously if we hadn’t got it right, would the championship be this close?! It’s important to remember that we actually know exactly what every car and driver is doing every second of every lap. Nobody else on this planet has access to the huge amount of data which we download and compare from every car, every time they run. So it’s not guesswork.

Although I must admit it’s been slightly amusing sometimes hearing, throughout the year, the ‘conspiracy theorists’ and ‘armchair-experts’ (from some of the media and fans alike) who seem to know more about equalising the cars than we do. Thank heavens we don’t operate at their level of ‘expertise’.

At the beginning of the season we said we would equalise the performance between the top two types of cars, which this year proved to be the Honda and the Chevrolet. And of course different circuits and different track conditions suit different cars, different drivers and different set-ups. As well, the cars have continually been developing throughout the year – which is why we said, right from the outset, that we would make frequent tweaks throughout the season.

Every team and driver has their own “coulda, woulda, shoulda” stories, when some of their race results have been affected by other issues. That’s precisely why one has to look at it over the season, not just one race or one race-meeting or in isolation of all other factors.

But the numbers don’t lie; after 27 races, totalling 489 laps around nine different circuits there’s a mere five points difference between the top two types of car – so if that’s not performance parity then I’m damned if I know what is!

Q: There looks set to be a proliferation of NGTC-spec cars for 2012. Four teams have already fielded them in 2011 and now the factory Honda Racing Team plus leading privateers Triple 8 Race Engineering and Eurotech Racing have announced they will take this route for 2012. Others are also making serious noises about switching to this new breed of car for next season – surely vindicating TOCA’s decision to take the BTCC in this direction?

AG: There’s a lot more than ‘serious noises’ coming from other teams. But I would guess that around half the grid next year will be NGTC cars – and that’s not only impressive validation of the new regulations but also a ringing endorsement of the BTCC itself and the commitment teams are making to the championship.

Just look at our grid numbers, our TV audiences and our spectator numbers – all of them are reaching fantastic new highs. We must be doing something right.