Street Racers
It’s been attributed to several figures over the years but certainly Firestone would like you to believe that it was company founder Harvey S Firestone who originally coined the phrase “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday.”
Nowhere in motorsport is that sentiment more appropriate than in saloon car racing where for the largest part of the sport’s history the cars have been broadly similar to the models you could order from your local dealer. How else could you explain the change in image for Volvo estates from lumbering load luggers to sleek lifestyle accessory and the genuine motorsport gloss attached to the otherwise workaday Nissan Primera?
The brainchild of Stirling Moss’s manager Ken Gregory, the British Saloon Car Championship was first run on Boxing Day 1957 and since then the BSCC and BTCC series have given countless regular family cars the glitter of motorsport success. They’ve also given rise to some prominent names in British automotive history: Janspeed, TWR, Broadspeed and Demon Tweeks to name just a few were all founded on the back of saloon car racing.
From Speedwell A35 to Coombs Jaguar, Sierra Cosworth and BMW M3, the sport has produced some real icons but we’ve picked just a few of our favourites from its first four decades.
1960s
AUSTIN
In the early days of the BSCC, regulations were pretty relaxed and allowed essentially any saloon car to compete. The series initially offered four classes – under 1200cc, 1201-1600cc, 1601-2700cc and over 2701cc – but the points within each class had equal value, meaning a driver could win the championship with a series of class wins and no outright race wins.
This meant that more affordable but easily tuned cars like the Austin A35 were popular and indeed the first few years saw an Austin A35 or A40 in the top three places, with John Sprinzel’s A35 tying with Tommy Sopwith’s Jaguar for the 1958 season – which was settled only after a tie-breaker race in a pair of identical Riley 1.5 rally cars.
Clever preparation allowed a hard-driven A35 to dance around the larger
