GREEN LIGHT FOR THE BTCC’S HYBRID FUTURE
The push-button future is already here. The British Touring Car Championship heads into an era of hybrid power in 2022, and the series’ cognoscenti got a glimpse of it at the recent Silverstone round. There, 2013 champion Andrew Jordan drove a Speedworks Motorsport-built Toyota Corolla in free practice, qualifying and the races, using the new-for-2022 M-Sport produced TOCA customer engine and Cosworth Electronics’ hybrid system.
Cosworth was awarded the tender by BTCC organiser TOCA in July 2019 and started development the following month on the hybrid system, which will cost £20,500 per season per car to lease. By the summer of 2020, it was running on the track. That gave Cosworth a decent lead time to get things running smoothly, even amid the COVID-19 backdrop.
“The focus with the testing we’ve done has been on the hardware validation,” says Cosworth Electronics head of support Neal Bateman. “We’ve completed over a season’s worth of mileage on all the hardware components and the kit on the Toyota. It’s been made slightly more challenging under COVID being able to rent race tracks and go out testing,
