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“Don’t make it sound like I’m bigging myself up,” pleads Rory Butcher at the end of a cosy chat with Autosport on the eve of the 2023 British Touring Car Championship kicking off this weekend at Donington Park. He’s probably going to hate that we’ve quoted his throwaway line, but the point is that, if there was a BTCC points table for drivers bigging themselves up, then Butcher would comfortably occupy 27th place out of 27. The Scot is a chap who’s as modest as they (usually don’t) come, but just happens to love driving racing cars – and he’s very, very good at it.
This is a crucial year for the 36-year-old and the Speedworks Motorsport-run Toyota team, one to move from their traditional spot on the fringes of title contention into the thick of it. After his nomadic early BTCC years from 2017-20, Butcher is entering his third season with the Cheshire squad and its Corolla GR Sport. Speedworks itself has expanded from two cars to three, adding the promising George Gamble to the incumbent duo of Butcher and Ricky Collard. For the first time, the team has ditched the TOCA customer engine in favour of a bespoke Toyota powerplant produced by BMW and Honda supplier Neil Brown Engineering. And all this has been made possible by the investment of long-time Speedworks supporter John Gilbert, who over the winter became what team boss Christian Dick describes as “a sizeable shareholder” in the company formerly owned outright
