A pair of fourth places for Jake Hill during the British Touring Car Championship opener at Donington Park went some way towards papering over the cracks. But it’s clear that the reigning champion and the West Surrey Racing BMW camp are struggling as the team enters the seventh season with its 3-Series.
This is not good for the BTCC. Over the years, WSR has built up a mythical status in the series on a par with, say, Penske in IndyCar. Hill is emphatically a top-line driver, and no one wants the familiarity of the Sutton/Ingram/Hill soap-opera storyline to be missing one of its central characters – especially with the team losing Colin Turkington from its line-up for 2025.
The cars have shed 55kg thanks to the abandonment of the hybrid concept for 2025, yet Hill’s best qualifying time was 0.565 seconds adrift of what he managed in 2023 with a much heavier BMW.
Over at the Alliance Racing Ford team, Ash Sutton set the quickest time of the day (in Q2), which, due to the Donington surface causing a few head-scratches and the realignment of the chicane parameters after free practice, was also surprisingly slower than his own qualifying lap record, but only to the tune of 0.052s. And the third prong of the heavy hitters, the Excelr8 Motorsport Hyundai squad, saw Tom Ingram whizzing round 0.155s faster than he had ever managed in qualifying here.
So… you lose weight and go slower.
“Ultimately the underlying issue is it’s a weight distribution thing we believe, so the car balance is not particularly happy,” explains Hill. “It’s hard to get a balance that we’re all happy with. The car is currently quite unpredictable, so we just can’t carry as much speed as we’ve been able to the last couple of years with the hybrid in.
Hill got his BTCC title defence off to a poor start with two fourth-place finishes and a 10th in the Donington opener
Photo by: JEP
“Really, the hybrid made the car a lot more balanced, but it’s just down to the weight increase and being able to put the battery, within reason, where we wanted to in the passenger footwell.
“We’re obviously not terrible, but we are still a good half a second away from where we need to be. It might be better at some tracks, it might be worse, but we’ve just got to try and find that balance at the moment.”
Hill’s engineer, Craig Porley, adds: “You’d think taking the weight out of a race car would make it quicker, but it shifts the distribution, and it’s where you then redistribute that weight in the car, accordingly, is how you can then tune your car.
Hill said during the week leading up to Donington that the set-up changes required from circuit to circuit are way more radical than the team is accustomed to
“The issue we have is with a rear-wheel-drive car, you’re much more limited with the weight you can bolt in the rear of the car compared to the front-wheel drive. They’ve gone through the same cycle of issues that we’re going through. So, it’s not that it hinders us more than them. Where we’re hindered more is that we can’t bolt the weight in over the axle that we want to bolt it over.”
And here’s the problem. All BTCC cars are built below their minimum base weight and are ballasted up to be made legal. In most categories worldwide, the positioning of that ballast is a highly useful tool to improve centre of gravity and handling. But in 2022, and coinciding with the introduction of hybrid, the BTCC implemented new FIA Appendix J safety regulations mandating that ballast must be positioned within the cockpit.
Its ideal location for the rear-wheel-drive BMW was in the boot, but no one wants a rear impact to trigger the dangerous situation of loose ballast flying everywhere. The cockpit is defined as the rollcage, meaning you can go as far as the rear axle in the BMW, the front axle in any front-wheel-drive car.
Car weight issues were behind Hill’s difficult Donington weekend
Photo by: JEP
Notwithstanding that, you can’t simply revert to your 2021 pre-hybrid set-up, because of the amount of development that’s gone on since then, plus the different tyres – featuring a more robust shoulder – that were introduced last year and are understood to have been among the causes of the Ford Focus’s struggles early in 2024.
“It’s exactly that – everything’s moved on,” agrees Porley. “If you look at the laptimes being done back then, we’re all going quicker now. Engines have moved on, everyone’s had four more years of development with their cars. If we just bolted on set-ups from back then we’d be slower, because the whole series has moved on, so we have to move on too.” (The last time before hybrid that Donington was a season opener, and therefore did not feature success ballast, was 2020, when Turkington’s BMW pole time was 1m08.998s compared to Hill’s 1m08.263s last weekend and 1m07.698s in 2023.)
Hill said during the week leading up to Donington that the set-up changes required from circuit to circuit are way more radical than the team is accustomed to. Usually, the baseline set-up is deviated from only slightly across a season to suit the characteristics of the circuit or preferences of the driver.
“We’re not making tickles to tune the car,” corroborates Porley. “We’re making big steps to try and even get it back into the window. And, once we’re into a good place, then those tweaks can return. But at the moment we need to go bold, and bold can work two ways – it can make you a hero or it can send you to the back.”
Bearing in mind the overall struggles, there were flashes of promise at Donington from all three of Hill’s team-mates – each of them new to the BMW.
The cheerful Charles Rainford, runner-up in Carrera Cup GB last season, impressed a lot of people in making it through to Q2 and qualifying just four places – and 0.201s – behind Hill. “We’re not where we want to be, but I’m happy because my benchmark is Jake,” he smiled. But the rough-and-tumble racecraft was rather less gentlemanly than he is used to from his background in Porsches and historics.
Donington was dominated by four-time champion Sutton, who won two races while Chilton claimed victory in the other
Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images
Rainford was tipped off at Coppice during race one, and didn’t want to mention who it was, but the lap chart does show that team-mate Daryl DeLeon was behind him on the previous lap. Another assailant in race two forced him off the road and into gravel that caused a race-ending puncture, but at least he got a full race under his belt at the end of the day.
DeLeon, who wowed everyone with his car control last year in the Un-Limited Motorsport Cupra Leon, couldn’t get out of Q1: “It’s just on a knife-edge. We’re struggling with the balance, especially at this track, but the team are so good. We’ll get there soon. It’s a matter of when, not if.” He rescued his weekend with three points finishes, the best of them 12th.
And seasoned Scottish racer Aiden Moffat has found that it’s not a matter of stepping straight into a car that’s like his beloved 2020-21 Infiniti Q50. He lost all of FP1 to an ECU issue and FP2 to a rollbar problem but battled through to a seventh and two ninths (one of them in front of Hill in the final race).
“We’re MB Motorsport [Hill’s management group], we’re West Surrey Racing, we will get there, we’re champions for God’s sake. You can’t rule us out, but it might just be a bit of a slow start” Jake Hill
The strength in depth on the engineering side means that, as DeLeon suggests, improvements will surely come. Apart from Porley, WSR’s 3-Series design leader John Waterman is back in regular harness with Moffat, Turkington’s 2024 techie Dan Millard is with Rainford, and Jenner Collins has returned to the team where he formerly guided Tom Oliphant to victories to work with DeLeon.
“We are very confident that we can get the car back to where we need to be, but it will cost us a lot of money and time,” asserts WSR sporting and operations director Carl Mitchell. “And we talk about cost-saving a lot in this championship…
“Our biggest issue here is we’re the only team with rear-wheel drive, and any idea we put to the Technical Working Group [in this case regarding location of the ballast] gets batted out of the window. All the front-wheel-drive teams will say we have a natural advantage, and not once has a front-wheel-drive car been punished in a negative sense.”
The team is confident it can turn around its fortunes, but knows there is a long road ahead
Photo by: JEP
If only Alliance Racing had succeeded in its plan to replace the Focus with a rear-wheel-drive Audi for 2023…
Much work is needed before the teams head to Hill’s local circuit of Brands Hatch for the next round. “No pace mate,” he shrugged gloomily of his run to 10th in race three at Donington. “I was surrounded by people that were on soft tyres with a lot more boost than me, and we also are continuing to try and develop and understand what’s going on with the car.
“The first race was an improvement for sure. The others were still up the road, but we were where our pace was, which at the time was P4. I’m a bit lost at the moment. We all need to go away and have a long old think and keep working through the process.
“Obviously we will. We’re MB Motorsport [Hill’s management group], we’re West Surrey Racing, we will get there, we’re champions for God’s sake. You can’t rule us out, but it might just be a bit of a slow start.”
What is important for Hill is that he continues to maximise these early weekends before the solutions arrive. It’s good for the championship to have a top boy in a BMW up there pitching for the title. And even Sutton and Ingram would have to agree that it’s more rewarding to win a title against an on-form Hill.
When will the reigning BTCC champion be back in contention for victories?
Photo by: JEP
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