Porsche Carrera Cup star takes final WSR seat for BTCC debut

Porsche Carrera Cup GB runner-up Charles Rainford has secured a plum seat at the West Surrey Racing BMW team for the 2025 British Touring Car Championship campaign.

The 26-year-old from Sussex has taken the final seat in WSR’s four-car squad of 330i M Sport machinery, shortly after the team had to part company with its quadruple champion Colin Turkington due to commercial reasons.

Rainford will line up in WSR’s two-car LKQ Euro Car Parts subset alongside the experienced Aiden Moffat, with reigning BTCC champion Jake Hill and series sophomore Daryl DeLeon occupying the remaining seats.

This means that Hill is the only one of WSR’s 2024 driver line-up continuing into the new season with the team.

Rainford, the son of historic racer Shaun, cut his car-racing teeth in small-capacity historic sportscar machinery before moving into modern motorsport in 2021 in the Carrera Cup GB with the family CCK Motorsport team. He claimed the pro-am title in 2022, during which he won a race overall, before increasing his total victory tally to four across the 2023 and 2024 seasons. He narrowly lost out in last year’s title chase to BTCC race winner George Gamble.

“I’m so excited, not just to race in the BTCC, but with the most successful team on the grid,” said Rainford, who bolsters an increasingly intriguing field in the Jack Sears Trophy sub-division for drivers with a maximum of one podium finish in the BTCC.

“Some of my earliest memories of racing are of watching the BTCC with my dad, so to be there myself feels amazing. Walking into WSR HQ for the first time and seeing the trophies and the names on the wall like [Ayrton] Senna, [Nigel] Mansell, [Andy] Priaulx and Turkington was incredible.

“I’d love to see my name up there one day and if we can win the Jack Sears Trophy this year, that would be a great start.”

WSR team boss Dick Bennetts added: “He’s had an unusual route to the BTCC, but from what we’ve seen of him in Carrera Cup GB and, in particular, the calibre of driver he’s beaten there, we’re confident he has the speed and skill necessary to turn his potential into on-track success.”

In common with new team-mate Hill, Rainford is also a race winner in Group 1 Ford Capri machinery – he has notched up five wins at the Brands Hatch Super Touring Power festival over the past two years aboard a Faberge-liveried Capri paying tribute to the car in which Stuart Graham was a BTCC race winner in the late 1970s.