JOHN CLELAND ‘ THERE WAS NO WAY A FORMULA 1 CHAMPION WAS GOING TO BEAT ME’
In the heady days of the British Touring Car Championship in the late 1980s and 1990s there was an influx of overseas talent, but one man waved the flag for these shores. John Cleland.
He was Vauxhall’s man through and through, and his motorsport voyage took him to two championships in 1989 and 1995, and it also took him to the other side of the world to tackle Bathurst.
He is probably best remembered, though, for losing the 1992 championship to Tim Harvey in a highly dramatic showdown at Silverstone, which provided blockbuster TV and pushed the BTCC into the spotlight of international motorsport.
Our readers have asked the questions: Motorsport News simply pressed the record button, sat back and listened to one of motorsport’s greatest storytellers.
MN sets the scene: Ah, that infamous BTCC showdown in 1992. Cleland was in the heart of the title fight but got embroiled in an on-track battle with fellow title-chaser Tim Harvey’s teammate Steve Soper. It came to a head at Luffield when Cleland and Soper clashed, dashing the Vauxhall man’s title hopes and handing the crown to BMW man Harvey.
Question: “If you sit down and watch that Silverstone incident now 28 years on, when you lost the title in a controversial fashion after a collision with Steve Soper and handed the title to Tim Harvey, what do you think?” Luke Barry“The thing that not a lot of people know is that Steve Soper, Tiff Needell, Tony Lanfranchi and myself did the Willhire 24 Hours at Snetterton in 1982 in an Opel Monza. Soper and I teamed up again in 1983, alongside Tony Lanfranchi. So we had already shared a car. We knew each other. We got on. We were friends..
