SUTTON PROVIDES AN INFINITI OF POSSIBILITIES
The Gilles Villeneuve of the British Touring Car Championship took home the ultimate prize in 2020 after a sensational display throughout this oddest of seasons, his otherworldly natural talent, car control and racecraft allied to an insatiable appetite for overtaking. And he did so at the wheel of a completely redesigned and re-engineered car that had a total dry-weather mileage still only in double figures when the action kicked off.
Ash Sutton, Laser Tools Racing, BMR Engineering and the Infiniti Q50 pulled off a smash-and-grab heist from under the noses of the acknowledged BTCC standard setters: four-time champion Colin Turkington, West Surrey Racing and the BMW 330i M Sport. It appeared to be a season-long performance of fizzing opportunism and audacity – far removed from the softly-softly Turkington/WSR approach – but in reality you have to delve much further back even than the coronavirus-extended 2019-20 off-season to discover the roots of what transpired.
Sutton, of course, had been the (literally) blue-eyed boy of his manager Warren Scott’s BMR Subaru team, winning the championship at the second attempt – and in only his fifth season of car racing – in 2017. But the Levorg was progressively handicapped out of consistent competitiveness by BTCC organiser TOCA. Meanwhile, Laser Tools boss Bob Moffat had gone it alone with his own team to run the Mercedes A-Class of son Aiden when their relationship
