“I’m 61. In some ways, this is this is my Scalextric set for retirement! The best Scalextric set that I will ever have!”

Pete Jones, commercial director of Restart Racing, is in a good place having confirmed that the team he has been involved with since its emergence in TCR UK in 2022 will be racing a championship winning design in the BTCC in 2025. A pair of brand spanking new machines – the Hyundai i30 N Fastback – will be operating from their new Norfolk base near Snetterton soon but, like the entry into the championship in 2024, there was no ‘long game’ plan to tread this route.

“I don’t think it even happened six weeks ago to be honest,” Jones states about the very recent turn of events in having the cars become available to the team. “Ben (Taylor – Restart Team Principal) bumped into Antony Williams (Exelr8 Co-Owner) at the BTCC team meeting at Thruxton, and they just got chatting, and it went from there. I’ve been involved with Excelr8 since they entered British Touring Cars, so it was very natural conversation to have, and we decided to go for it.”

The squad has had a tough learning year as a team in 2024. Even with a core of BTCC veterans, including driver Chris Smiley – who will stay with the team for 2025 – the task of taking the Cupra Leon and trying to turn it into a competitive machine has not been easy. There have been highs and lows along the way, but its safe to say that the team has gained valuable experience, but have also outgrown what could be described as an ‘entry level’ car quite quickly. The Cupra it seems is a car that not only limits on-track performance, but commercial growth too. Jone said: “We looked at building another Cupra (the Scott Sumpton car appears to have gone with him after his post-season departure.) There are other cars out there that are now returning to the grid that I had conversations about (which suggests that the One Motorsport Civics are on the verge of a return) but the BTCC is an engine series at the end of the day. And Swindon and Hyundai is definitely the strongest front wheel drive engine. As an investor it’s important that we have the best tools to move forward as a team.”

The Leon is not a race winning car. It is hard to envision it as a front running machine at all, and with the expected expansion of the BTCC field with the release of a 24 TBL roster for next year, the likelihood is it would sink back down the order to once again sit in the area it resided in prior to last season.

“I think the biggest problem we had was that with the engine turned up so high we were getting overheating problems,” Jones said of the largest blight they found with the car. “We spent money developing a cooling package to try and compensate for that. We had Tom Hunt (ex-Team Dynamics) working on that and we felt like we were moving the car forward. But not anywhere near far enough. The car is nothing like as developed as the as the Excelr8 car. I could have spent another season running it. I think it was wiser to deal with Excelr8 and have a competitive car and hopefully two decent drivers. It’s about how much financial risk I’m prepared to take as an investor in the team. Getting onto the grid was one thing, but you can’t sell it unless you’re on the grid. One of the things I found with putting the Cupra forward was that drivers were a bit ‘Meh ‘about it. And certainly sponsors too. There’s just a negative association with the Cupra – which I hope we disproved last season. You can actually achieve things in. It I mean. Look what Dan Lloyd did even even at Team HARD (race three, Donington GP, 2023.) What a day that was!”

Lloyd has been mentioned in the wider media as a leading contender for the second Restart seat, and Jones makes no bones about his personal connection with the four-time race winner. “With Dan it was actually at Oulton Park,” he says of their first serious conversations. “We sat there and chatted before he had ‘the big one’ and then I was on the phone to him on the Monday and Tuesday, not really realising he was without a license at that point.” That 2022 crash left Lloyd on a temporary ban from racing for medical reasons, before finding the funds to pay off a £100,000 damage bill, but it doesn’t mean he’s a shoo-in at all. “Dan is just one possibility. I mean, there’s a few out there,” Jones said of that possible route.

That second seat at Restart has changed in the space of a couple of days, from trying to appeal to drivers, to having them come knocking. “I had two yesterday” Jones continued. “It certainly is still open, provided we all work together to close the gap, including the other driver – whoever that might be – and that’s why the choice of the other driver for next season, it’s pretty vital that we get that chemistry right between them and Chris. They’re going to need a budget, but next year will demonstrate that we can point the team in the right direction with a decent car.”

One of the reasons behind taking on a car that is attractive to both commercial partners and drivers is to have a machine that will be competitive in the final two years of the current NGTC ruleset, running in tandem with Excelr8. Putting out a car that won the 2022 drivers’ crown, and carried immense speed in 2024 is a solid foundation point, but it also allows for Restart to go in a different development direction to Excelr8 when the new for 2027 regulations come into force – if they choose.

This move isn’t one to be taken lightly, and Jones expects to lead to success. “Absolutely ******* gutted!” is his response to being questioned about what his feelings will be if there is no win in 2025.  “I’ve gone from – in 2022 – doing TCR UK to bringing the first new team onto the BTCC grid in five years, to trying to compete for the Independents’ Championship next season in a competitive package,” he points out. “It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. It’s one of the toughest championships in the world. I don’t think it gets enough credit for that.”

2024 gave the outfit a few Independent wins. The chances of topping Power Maxed Racing across the year was never on the table, but there were moments where their faltering, or supreme performances from Restart, turned the tables. A class win at Croft came after Árón Taylor-Smith and Mikey Doble tangled with one another: “Chris still had to to make the overtake to get the win” Jones rightly remembers. “Then we got to Silverstone race two. He just nailed it. He proved to the world he isn’t a snail. But at the start of race three we reached our high watermark! Literally!”

The atrocious conditions at Silverstone provided a lottery before the red flag, and Smiley was the loser. In similar conditions, just two years prior, the first steps of the Restart journey were being topped off with a championship title – the TCR UK crown that really fired the team and its members up for greater things.

“Chris had it in the bag once he gapped the field, he was just playing it safe,” Jones says of a Snetterton win in conditions that Smiley, and the rest of the TCR UK field, thought were outrageously dangerous. “It was a real ‘Days of Thunder’ season though. It really was. Your championship winning seasons are defined by the days it doesn’t go so well, and for us that was Castle Combe” (Smiley with a failing clutch started race two from the pits before roaring to the higher points positions.

There’s another part of the Restart story that directly affects Jones in a different way, one that is an emotional attachment. As he says it is “why I’m so bound to these guys, you know?” That is the role the squad played in the career of his son Nathan, which circles back to how the i30 deal came together.

From a Masters at Cranfield to a position as a trackside engineer with Pirelli, currently assigned to the Williams F1 team – that came via Restart – Jones’ son Nathan has also been along for part of the pre-BTCC journey. After a stint in Minis with Excelr8 he moved into data engineering on the tenth generation Civic with the team and Smiley in his TCR UK title winning season, taking charge of that side at the biannual FIA Motorsport Games – while studying advanced Motorsport Engineering, and getting some laps in with an ex-Louis Capozzoli Mini Trophy machine.

An uninvited lunch with Alliance/NAPA boss Pete Osbourne relating to that Mini led to the idea of going to the BTCC. “It came about just before Brands Hatch,” Jones explained about the moment in 2023 when the clock started ticking on pushing for a TOCA entry. “We were thinking about TCR Europe (with the Honda Civic FL5 Smiley had raced in 2023) or one of the more competitive European series like Italy – then we saw Monza and thought this will be carnage! So that was dropped. One thing led to another and suddenly we’re buying a Cupra from Tony Gillam. We were all set to run as one car team.”

The BTCC is a money hungry series. Even with the cost cutting ideology that is being brought into the series right now. Good commercial grounding is an important factor in the modern BTCC, and Jones has seen it from both sides. “That’s why I became the commercial director of the team,” he discloses. “I’m really there for commercial leadership. I understand start-ups. I understand what being a commercial partner means because I was one for five years. I was able to watch other partners to see what they needed, and how they reacted to certain things in the off-track environment. It gave me the experience to short circuit a lot of the normal commercial thinking. Going back to that lunch with Pete Osbourne, one of the key people that inspired me to do this was Pete, because he’s all about professionalising the paddock and doing it properly. From that I want to get the voice of the team right. The team is serious, but with fun. That’s the kind of ethos I want. Because until we’re challenging for championships, we want to have a good go at the Independents’. We want podiums and wins, but most of all, we actually want to enjoy doing it.”

This is the third ‘Restart’ for Restart Racing. Their TCR UK inception, the 2024 BTCC entry and the 2025 shift to a front running car have been huge steps in their short two-and-a-half-year journey since picking up their first TCR Honda in April 2022. The story has a way to go yet, but there are no false illusions that just picking up a fast car will make the next chapter a breeze. “You don’t buy wins,” Jones says with a deeply introspective tone. “You just put yourself in the best place to be able to achieve them. It’s about the car prep. It’s about the engineering. And then it’s about the driver. They’re actually the toughest. You’ve got to get in their head and get them right.”

In retrospect perhaps the Scalextric set analogy isn’t as straight forward as it seems. You can buy a slot car set and win in the same day, for Restart Racing this new i30 pair will need a little bit more than a fresh guide blade and some fancy controller fingerwork to get to the top step. There’s no doubt however that Pete Jones and his erstwhile band of Independents are going to mix it with the ‘big boys’ now.