The British Touring Car Championship is experiencing a blip in 2023: normal service will surely be restored soon. Ash Sutton’s winning habit in his NAPA Racing Ford Focus is perhaps the most dominant since Laurent Aiello’s march to the 1999 crown in his RML-run Nissan Primera GT and it shows no signs of slowing down.
The Frenchman’s crown 24 years ago was capped with 10 wins from the 26 rounds. Sutton has already achieved six victories from the five meetings so far and, if he carries on that trajectory, he will eclipse all benchmarks since the advent of the full one-class system in 1992.
This kind of form is not the norm in the UK’s most prestigious tin-top category. The British Touring Car Championship has come a long way in the last two-and-a-half decades since Nissan strolled to glory. The made-for-TV category positively militates against domination with the introduction of hard, medium and softer option tyres, the reversed-grid system (which came along in 2004) and the restricted use of hybrid systems, which was introduced last season with the advent of the electrical innovation.
There is a general feeling that the addition of the hybrid systems, even with tweaked deployment levels in 2023 to try and spice up the on-track action, has not quite gone far enough to mix up the order. Don’t expect that fact to be missed by the category’s top brass and further alterations could be on the way.
The option tyre strategy is also an interesting point with not enough of a real difference between the soft-medium or medium-hard split which has been
