This book is a brief but affectionate, mainly pictorial panorama of twenty-odd years of the British Touring Car Championship, from the anarchical 1960s and early 1970s of flared wheelarches, lifting wheels and smoking tyres, through the Group 1 years when the rule-makers tried to make the cars look standard and as a result, slow them down. This had the classic effect on racecar builders, who were not worth their salt unless they could get around the restrictions. The eventual results were faster cars than before, which evolved into the tarmac-melting, fire-breathing turbo powered front-runners of the late 1980s. The story stops at the point where the rule-makers tried another clampdown as the final decade of the 20th century dawned.
This book is a brief but affectionate, mainly pictorial panorama of twenty-odd years of the British Touring Car Championship, from the anarchical 1960s and early 1970s of flared wheelarches, lifting wheels and smoking tyres, through the Group 1 years when the rule-makers tried to make the cars look standard and as a result, slow them down. This had the classic effect on racecar builders, who were not worth their salt unless they could get around the restrictions. The eventual results were faster cars than before, which evolved into the tarmac-melting, fire-breathing turbo powered front-runners of the late 1980s. The story stops at the point where the rule-makers tried another clampdown as the final decade of the 20th century dawned.