Motorbase Performance is no more. But, then again, it hadn’t really been pure Motorbase anyway. Since 2021, the team had been operating in the British Touring Car Championship with a significant contingent from the old AmD squad; since 2022, with the addition of the nucleus behind Ash Sutton’s three titles at BMR.
‘Time for a new name’, thought owner Pete Osborne as he neared the end of his third year at the helm of the company.
“We decided to sit down, looked at lots of different things, looked at everybody’s names and initials to try and put them together,” smiles Osborne. “And then we said, ‘Hold on, we’re an alliance of people, we’re together, and it works for us’. Hence why Oly came up with this great idea of Alliance Racing.”
The ‘Oly’ to whom Osborne refers is long-time Motorbase team manager Oly Collins, and Autosport is sitting down on the eve of the Brands Hatch season finale – the team’s first weekend under the Alliance name – with him, Osborne and engineering wizard Antonio Carrozza to discuss what has become a BTCC phenomenon. In 2023, this Motorbase/AmD/BMR supergroup gelled spectacularly under the banner of NAPA Racing (logistics magnate Osborne is adamant that his team’s commercial partners are an equal part of his ‘Alliance’), and the previously unloved Ford Focus ST sledgehammered its way to 16 race wins out of 30, a fourth drivers’ title for Sutton, a convincing teams’ crown, and a narrow manufacturers’ victory over BMW.
Who would have thought in 2022, when Sutton drove the wheels off an unwieldy beast of a Focus to finish as championship runner-up? Towards the end of that season, paddock gossip was rife that Carrozza was to be charged with a return to his and Sutton’s rear-wheel-drive roots by developing a car to bring Audi back to the BTCC. “We’d got a great dialogue going with Audi, which was really positive,” recalls Osborne. “We weren’t going to be the usual team asking for a big payout; we wanted their support,
