Still/PSP
With the advent of social networking, it’s hard to keep a secret – but Motorbase managed it ahead of Snetterton… It was no secret within the BTCC paddock that Motorbase was looking at building an NGTC-spec Ford Focus for the 2013 season but few expected the car to suddenly appear at Snetterton for the second half of the current campaign. Barely seven weeks after the Croft meeting - where team boss David Barturm pulled no punches in an interview with Inside BTCC about the Next Generation Touring Car Championship regulations [See Issue 12] – the team arrived at Snetterton with the all-new car, which was only completed the night before and which only turned a wheel for the first time in Saturday’s opening practice session. The car had been started earlier in the year, with the initial work on the Focus shell having been completed at Motorbase’s Inside BTCC 26
Wrotham base. More work was planned over the course of the season, but a debut in the sixth round of the season wasn’t on the cards. “We had started the shell over the winter with an idea that we would build it at some point this year,” team manager Oly Collins explains. “We’d already decided that it would probably be at the end of the year with a view to then running the car in 2013. Clearly you need an NGTC car to be competitive next year but even though we’d started the car, it was probably only 30 per cent complete because it was literally just the shell that we’d been working on. “Although we had some of the NGTC parts, we’d not had chance to do anything with them because we were working on developing the S2000
cars we were running. We’d said all along that when we had our driver line-up sorted, we would focus on the S2000 car and the NGTC car would only be worked on when the opportunity arose. Clearly there was a sevenweek break where would be some NGTC work would going on, but it wouldn’t have been to take it to the stage it is now at. Then Liam had his accident at Croft…” That accident had left Griffin’s car all but written off, with the team faced with a decision over how it would move forwards for the remainder of the season. One option, which was quickly ruled out, was to try and repair Griffin’s damaged car ready for Snetterton, which meant instead that focus turned to the NGTC shell sitting in the workshop.
The decision was therefore taken to use the summer break to build up the car and get it out on track, although before work could properly get underway, there was the small issue of where the money was going to come from to make the NGTC machine a reality. “I stand by what I told you at Croft when it comes to the financial situation around NGTC, because it is something that every team will need to look at when they come to put a car together,” team boss David Bartrum said. “But the reality is that if you can’t beat them, then join them. You have to be in the game if you want to try and win it. “When Liam’s car burst into flames at Croft, you only had to look at the damage that there was – both from the fire and www.insidebtcc.com