2024 BTCC season preview: meeting the man who makes it happen

Gow shrugs off critics who point out that the World Rally Championship launched a strain of hybrid cars and has since binned them.

“That was completely different,” he says shortly. “Those cars had big batteries – we don’t – so they were heavy. There were potential safety issues, too, and all the tackle cost £150k per car. That’s not us. Our cars have small, low-voltage batteries. Besides, we have never learned anything for touring cars from rallying…”

Gow says there’s an option to increase the boost again for next year, but he doubts they will do it. “You don’t want the guy in front to be a sitting duck,” he says. “A driver needs a chance to defend. We have done a lot of testing with top drivers, and they came away seeing the potential and saying it was great.”

Another big change for this year is the way qualifying is organised, using an idea pinched from the Indycar series, which Gow loves. “We will have a half-hour knock-out quali, divided into three 10-minute sessions,” he says. 

“Half the field will do the first 10 minutes – a mix of the fast and slow cars – then the rest will do the second session. Everyone will have to get stuck in straight away; there will be no chance to drone around trying to improve the car. Then the top half dozen – the Quick Six, we’re calling them – will run off in the third 10-minute session. It will all make a great spectacle. Some drivers might lose out, but I don’t care. That’s racing.”

For 2024, the BTCC is also bringing back option tyres, because drivers love the opportunity for extra speed and it introduces a bit more jeopardy. But Gow is also cooking an evil refinement into the plan. “If you win,” he says, “you’ll have to do the next race on the hardest tyre. That will make a back-to-back win very difficult. The great thing is it’s something a team won’t be able to manipulate: who would sacrifice a race win so he can be on a softer tyre next time?”

Away from the track, the BTCC is taking a gigantic publicity and marketing leap by making every one of the season’s 30 races – over 10 race weekends – available to the vast global audience of TikTok, the Chinese-based social media phenomenon. It’s a move so full of promise that even Gow hesitates to quantify it, beyond enthusiastically labelling it “a game-changer”. 

Happily, global social media coverage won’t interrupt the “dream” deal the BTCC already has with ITV to televise eight straight hours of action every race day. Viewers can see all three BTCC races, plus support events, grid walks and driver interviews, although nowadays they rarely watch the programme right through, preferring catch-up or highlights shows and accessing races via smartphone or tablet.

Is this an end to the BTCC’s 2024 innovation? Not a bit. The series sets off this year on a thorough and detailed sustainability plan aimed at achieving full carbon neutrality in time to meet national targets. Gow is acutely aware that the BTCC – and motorsport – needs to care for the environment in order to have a secure future.

“We could achieve carbon neutrality easily enough if we were prepared to plant a few trees in the Amazon, but that strikes me as bullshit, a real cop-out,” he says. 

“We retained a team of specialists for five months to draw up a sustainability road map just for us. It entails changing how we get to and from circuits, it requires us to use 100% sustainable fuels [due by 2026], it affects the materials we use to build the cars and involves all relevant forms of recycling and upcycling. We have a clear timeline; we now know what we have to do and when. Everyone’s signed up to it and we’re very proud of it.”

All of this is designed to work with the BTCC’s next round of car and race regulation changes, due in 2027. They are still being framed, so Gow doesn’t go into detail. Hybrid powertrains may or may not stay, depending on the supply and effectiveness of sustainable fuels, but sustainability will be the priority, along with more moves to cut costs.

Right now, the BTCC’s enthusiasm for hybridisation is vital to two major entrants, Toyota and BMW, which each run four cars and are quite positive that they wouldn’t if they couldn’t be hybrids. Those are the cars both companies currently want to sell.

Talking costs, I ask Gow about well-publicised previous moves. Didn’t they work?