‘It cuts out all the costly research and development to find an unfair advantage by chasing down an engine with a particular characteristic. It means you can be competitive with whatever you bring’
Nigel Arnfield, technical director at M-Sport
2022 marks the start of a powertrain revolution for the TOCA-organised British Touring Car Championship (BTCC). The category becomes the first Touring Car series in the world to adopt hybridisation, supplied by Cosworth.
Also new this year is an all-new customer engine package. For the decade since 2011, Swindon Powertrain had supplied a competitive ‘TOCA Engine’ to the series, with proven durability and strict cost controls, available to all BTCC teams who do not wish to carry out their own engine programme.
But from 2022, that position has been taken by Cumbria-based M-Sport, awarded a five-year contract by the series’ organising body to supply the new BTCC TOCA Engine.
With stiff competition from several interested parties the firm, best known for its WRC efforts, was shortlisted to deliver a 10-page pitch to BTCC teams in May 2020. After the presentation, and further discussion with M-Sport managing director, Malcolm Wilson OBE, and technical director, Nigel Arnfield, TOCA selected M-Sport as its preferred supplier.
M-Sport will now oversee the design, development and supply of TOCA Engines to around 50 per cent of the 2022 grid.
‘We worked throughout the last two years specifically on this BTCC project,’ said Arnfield at the final of three 2022 BTCC pre-season tests held at the Thruxton circuit. ‘Designing an engine to these regulations, and ordering and producing the necessary parts, took a lot longer than it would have done before the global pandemic. Manufacturing was difficult for the
