The legacy of the nineties, it looms over the BTCC as far as the older, casual Touring Car fan goes. For most modern fans the realisation that the world has changed, and having eight or nine fully funded works teams on the grid is a flight of fancy, no longer registers as a concern.

The BTCC has cut its cloth to fit the current era, and in 2024 we saw at Oulton Park the kind of crowd sizes that the venue held in what is seen as the heyday of Tin Top racing. Despite the fact that comparative funds are poles apart from now to those days, and that the international influence of ‘our’ series has waned, it delivers a bigger bang for fans from each pound spent these days. But why are those days gone, and why are manufacturers unlikely to return with those massive marketing budgets?

Three decades ago we were coming off the back of a season where Gabriele Tarquini had routed his BTCC opposition in an Alfa Romeo 155 TS. The car, run by factory outfit Alfa Corse, had been at the centre of a bit of controversy thanks to a couple of bolt on wings. Tarquini had trounced second placed Alain Menu in the works Renault Laguna by 298 points to 222.

Despite withdrawing from one round, failing to start three, and retiring from two (including THAT Knockhill shunt) the Italian racer had built a 76 point buffer to Menu in the final standings  – who had only failed to finish twice all year. And this was a time when a win was worth 24 points. It was a game changer season.

The BTCC was on a strong run of form in the public consciousness. The racing was close and exciting. The grid was full of ‘name’ drivers that even people who weren’t fans knew about. The cars were race bred interpretations of all the major company cars that populated the motorways of the nation. But this Alfa squad? They changed the game with their two-car team, and it forced other manufacturers to up their game, because of the cash that the Turin company pumped into their BTCC assault.

Six million quid was the reputed outlay. In terms of 2024 that’s equivalent to £15 million, or £7.5 million per car. From there on the game was upped for manufacturer involvement, and it would eventually call an end to Super Touring in the UK with costs topping out at a reported £12million for the Prodrive run Ford Mondeo squad of 2000. Three cars running at a 2024 adjusted £8.5 million each – for a single season. To put that into further perspective, if each car on the 2024 BTCC grid had running costs of £8.5 Million, the total cost across last season would have been a whopping £170,000,000 – but it wasn’t.

Averaging out the supposed cost of drives for the 2024 season in the BTCC, an equivalent spend from Alfa Romeo 30 years ago should, theoretically, be enough to run 30 cars under the current costing of a BTCC seat.

WATCH OUR EXPLAINER VIDEO BELOW

There is constant debate among fans, and for some it includes dreams of a great manufacturer return. Hopes that companies like Alfa Romeo or Audi would look at tin top racing as their number one choice to promote their machines, with equivalent factory budgets to support that. The truth is however that while the BTCC can still attract manufacturer support, it cannot attract the kind of financial input from manufacturers that was on offer three decades ago.

After talking with a number of drivers – some who have raced in the BTCC over the last couple of seasons, and others who have tried to negotiate a deal to get on the grid – we have an average price tag for a seat. A little under half-a-million quid, plus damage expenses. That number, based on the figures from five drivers, could be tilted by seats being offered at premium prices in the negotiation process. One driver who didn’t make the field believes the drive he was chasing went for £50k less than he was quoted (and the quote was around £100,000 more than he could have raised) so it’s a rough figure, but still, it’s a lot of money to pull together. And almost all of the grid has to bring a budget.

The contraction of the UK economy over the last few seasons has had a greater effect, putting strains on both drivers and teams. The budgets needed to run cars are getting bigger, the budgets drivers can raise are getting smaller. Ideas such as pre-season testing on the continent, which was common up until the season before Covid Lockdown, seem to be a distant memory – never mind the almost unlimited tyre testing across the winter period in the days of Super Touring. In a recent chat a long time BTCC team gaffer stated about this that ‘starting the season later these days, three to four weeks later then before Covid means you will get testing in without going abroad – so you save money on both staff and travel costs, and it’s a significant amount for a multi-car team.’

A simple truth is the fact that motor manufacturers are not selling in vast quantities the machines that would feature on a BTCC grid. In that period in the 1990s when everybody went Touring Car crazy there was a domestic war between Ford and Vauxhall. The Mondeo versus Cavalier/Vectra battle sometimes saw one of the models top 100,000 units in the UK alone.

In the mid-teens cars like the Ford Focus and Vauxhall Astra were still strong in the market. While the Astra shifted 60,000 units in the UK as late as 2016, it was down to just over 20,000 by 2019 – the latest stats from 2022 suggest that just over 30,000 new cars under both the Vauxhall and Opel brand were shifted across all of Europe in 2023. In fact, in 2023 Vauxhall sold 100,417 cars overall. Thirty years earlier in 1993 when John Cleland and Jeff Allam raced for Vauxhall in the BTCC, the company sold 104,101 Cavaliers.

That battle led to Ford moving 127,700 examples of the Ford Mondeo in the year following Nigel Mansell having his one off BTCC appearance at Donington Park. Ford in 2023 topped the sales charts in the UK with the Puma shifting 49,591 units – demonstrating the shift in buyer habits.

In 2024 there is more variety and choice for new cars at the forecourt, which naturally spreads purchasing patterns. With traditionally motorsport led manufacturers taking a smaller slice of the overall market, and with performance and luxury companies shifting tactics, it leaves the BTCC in a place where manufacturers see no value in racing domestically, and selecting the best drivers for the job.

While there might be a bit of support, whether financial, marketing or technology for the manufacturer teams in the BTCC right now it still means a driver like Árón Taylor-Smith still has to find and run with a reputed 30 personal sponsors – which has also been shown by former Excelr8 race winner Dan Lloyd in his vlog series – makes the off-track aspect of BTCC racing a fulltime job in itself. The idea that the best drivers coming through will find a seat on talent alone – as was the case with multiple JCW Mini title winner Dan Zelos last term.

The BTCC is now a championship that serves a purpose as the leading domestic series in the UK. That’s not to say that it can’t once again be transformed into a series with a bigger grab of national, and international eyeballs, but the harsh reality is that those free for all days of the nineties – which nearly killed off the BTCC in the first couple of years of this century – will never return.