“It’s like it’s been scripted all year!” quipped Ash Sutton as the teams packed up to leave Silverstone after the penultimate round of the British Touring Car Championship. And, to be fair, he could apply that observation to ooh… pretty much every season he’s been in the BTCC. But this one looks particularly juicy as the climax on the Brands Hatch Grand Prix circuit looms. Three-time and reigning champion Sutton leads Jake Hill by a mere five points and perennial nearly-man Tom Ingram by seven, while it looks as though it’s slipping away for four-time title winner Colin Turkington, 27 adrift after a heartbreaking weekend.
Of this quartet, it was Hill who was the undoubted star at Silverstone, although even he had to play second fiddle for the majority of the weekend to first-race winner Rory Butcher. That was apart from their battle for the win in the second encounter, in which Hill pulled off an exquisite pass to cap a manoeuvre that was set up for half a lap before completion, and in which both showed exceptional racecraft that left each enthusing about the other’s skills and trustworthiness in combat. Then into the limelight emerged Ingram and Sutton, first and second respectively in the finale and each chuckling about a ‘Moses moment’ as the top three on the grid eliminated each other from contention and the seas parted, while an angry Hill stormed from 11th to fourth, behind Butcher, following a first-lap assault that so nearly derailed his title bid.
If Hill does win the BTCC title, he wouldn’t be the first from his family to head a significant UK national ranking. The grandson of 1950s has been a children’s favourite for decades, certainly didn’t expect to go ‘clip-clippety-clop on the stair’ to the top of the podium at Silverstone. The traditional chilly conditions at ‘The Home of Overcast Motor Racing’ weren’t expected to suit the West Surrey Racing BMW 330e M Sport, which as a rear-wheel-drive machine takes longer to switch on its tyres than the front-driven opposition. Furthermore, Hill’s faithful engineer since his MB Motorsport Honda days, Craig Porley, was languishing in a hospital bed in Dunstable with pneumonia. “He’s Craig ‘Poorly’,” observed the Kentishman, who was relying on a technical triumvirate of Porley’s WhatsApp messages, his regular data engineer Rob Davidson and WSR team principal Dick Bennetts.
