888’s Ian Harrison Talks Manufacturers, TOCA & BTCC

Monday, 12 September 2011 09:18

With less than a week to go until the next round of the British Touring Car Championship it looks like the most successful team in pit lane, Triple Eight Race Engineering, will be running only one car at Rockingham.

Despite currently running a close second in both the Independent Driver’s and Independent Team’s Championship Triple Eight have so far been unable to find a driver with a suitable budget to race in their second car. In the final in the series of columns based on my interview with the Chairman of Triple Eight Race Engineering, Ian Harrison talks to Girlracer about the difficulties of running without manufacturer support, what he thinks about TOCAs regulation amendments this year and how he sees the future of the BTCC.

How hard has it been to run as an independent after years of manufacturer support?
It is difficult because at the end of the day you’re still trying to do it the correct way. So you have to... I wouldn’t say cut corners but you have to cut your cloth to suit no doubt about that. We’ve got to get used to it because I think the days of the old manufacturer teams like VX Racing are gone. Those days aren’t going to come back. It’s going to be more like Australia really where you’ve got three teams from each manufacturer that are assisted and that’s it. The days of the big all singing and dancing works General Motors team are gone. I think the sooner everyone wises up to the fact the better, which is all the more reason to make the Championship commercial viable.

We’ve got 26 cars on the grid and we’ve got to try and keep 26 cars on the grid. There are four manufacturer cars effectively and if you lose four manufacturer cars you’ve still got a race. You piss everybody else off or they can’t afford to do it or whatever you haven’t got a race. So everybody’s got to change the way they think and their business model and what-not. What we really want is a factory endorsement and I think the manufacturers understand that. They also understand that means you can sell the rest of the car to finance it (as in Australia) whereas in the past that hasn’t been possible. They paid the full budget, but they wanted the whole car. So they were a sponsor and manufacturer supporter and all the rest of the stuff. You can’t have your cake and eat it too. So they do understand they can endorse a team like ours and we have to go out and sell the rest of it. But having that factory endorsement helps.

So how far away do you think a factory endorsement is for 888?
I don’t know. Ongoing discussions with various parties at the moment.

Would you switch manufacturers?
I’d go with anybody. We’ve obviously got a thirteen year history with General Motors but you know they dropped us... So there’s no, I don’t know what the right word is... You can’t keep hanging on, you can’t be the battered wife all the time you know you’ve got to sometimes move onto somebody else. We’d love to be with Vauxhall, love to be back with them obviously but we haven’t got a lot of choice. If somebody else comes along and offers us something we’ll take it. You’ve got to.

You’ve had some big names driving for you in the past, is there anyone who really impressed you?
The best driver we’ve ever had here is [Fabrizio] Giovanardi, but there’s not a lot in it between him and [Yvan] Muller. They were probably the best two guys we’ve ever had. Fabrizio was just a bit more rounded I think. He wasn’t with us for as long, six years or seven years or something, Fabrizio was with us for four years. He was great.

Having said that we’ve also had Jimmy Thomson, Jason [Plato] and Matt [Neal], we’ve had some of the great blokes. And they’re all good drivers and good guys and ninety percent of the time there hasn’t been an issue. You get the occasional wobbly but that’s how they are. But Fabrizio was the standout.

What are your feelings on TOCAs continued regulation amendments?
I think it’s a tool and a mechanism that is there for a reason and I don’t mind them adjusting it, but what I do object to is the fact that they’re not doing it in the correct manner in my view. The whole thing is about equalisation and parity. So if you’ve got one car that engine is performing at a higher level and another car whose engine is performing at a lower level. Then I keep asking the question but I do not get an answer, is why they all get moved down by the same amount? Why isn’t the one performing at a higher level moved down first before they are all moved down? It looks to me like there’s a bit of favouritism towards the manufacturer teams, but as I said earlier you’ve got to accept the fact that the manufacturer teams might not be around for very much longer. You know the two teams that are benefiting from having their own engines are talking about doing world touring cars next year. So where’s the loyalty?

It annoys me that we’re running the TOCA engine, the BTCC engine, which was all about cost reduction and it has achieved that, but other people are building their own engines and spending stupid money and we should discourage the teams from spending money. The whole idea of it is to keep it cheap which is like the car of the future in V8s or car of tomorrow in Nascar. It’s all about dissuading the teams from spending money. If they’ve got the budget to spend on them they should be looking at regulations and thinking ‘Christ well we can’t spend it, we’re not allowed to’. So overall the budgets to operate the cars get cut down, which means that more people can afford to sponsor the teams, which means that more teams can afford to do it.

While you’ve got one team prepared to spend an extra hundred grand or one hundred and fifty grand on engine development it’s nonsense: (a) trying to do it in a cost effective manner; and (b) parity. It’s stupid. It’s back to the old thing, the bigger the budget the more chance you’ve got. Whereas the whole idea of this is to stop that. I think TOCA aren’t doing a brilliant job on that front. I think the mechanism there is great and I’ve got no problem with that. You know you go and watch horse racing and one horse is heavier than the other because they’ve chucked a load of ballast on it to stop it to make a race of it and that’s what it’s all about. I don’t have a problem with that.

So how do you feel about the future of the British Touring Cars?
I think the NGTC principal is good. There are obviously a few issues with it at the moment. Nothing that can’t be rectified. But the racing... you know you go to V8s and the cars are fast and they’re noisy and there noisy and all that stuff but I still defy anybody to tell me that the racing in Australia is better than it is here. The actual racing here is different but it’s very exciting. We were watching something from 2008, Knockhill, and the cars there’s more contact. It’s a different sort of touring car racing but that’s what the punters want. You know we have to compete in BTCC with a lot more activities people have the choice to go and see. So the wow factor’s got to be something a bit different to Aussies. Don’t get me wrong watching the guys go round racing at Clipsal is fantastic but I defy anyone to say or tell me that it’s better than Knockhill when there’s 26 cars on the grid going into turn one. I just defy anyone to tell me it’s more exciting.

The biggest thing that needs to be addressed is the commercial setup of the Championship. It’s just what it was like when the Championship started and it’s not right and it’s old fashioned and it needs to be changed. It’s about time the teams got something back for it, especially in times like this. In times like this everybody’s struggling to get cars out on the grid and put a show on and what not and there’s not enough ownership for the teams. There’s not enough stakeholder feel for the teams like there is in Australia. And that’s where V8 Supercars really show everybody else, apart from Nascar and F1, how you should do it. It won’t be on the same level [here] because there isn’t the same amount of money because the focus isn’t on touring cars like it is in Australia, but it would be an improvement on what it is now.

So why anyone hasn’t got the guts to give it a go is beyond me, but they haven’t and they don’t. So it’s just status quo and we muddle along, but it could be so much better than it is. And already... look at the TV... the TV package is the envy of world touring cars of everybody. You compare ours to Eurosport WTCC and it is like night and day. It’s so much better, but we don’t maximise it and the teams don’t benefit enough from that sort of exposure.

I’ll put my soapbox back now! By Chelsea Woods

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