British Touring Car Championship 2016 kicked off in spectacular style at Brands Hatch at the beginning of April, and the next round is just around the corner. Warning: this is not prim and proper Formula 1, this is its wilder, bolshier bruiser of a cousin. GQ spoke to Honda Halfords Yuasa Racing drivers reigning champion Gordon Shedden and three-time BTCC champion Matt Neal to get the lowdown on what you need to know about British Touring Car.

Touring cars are road cars like you’ve never seen them before

GS A touring car is like a road car times a thousand. We start with a Honda Civic Type R, and then we take it to bits, get rid of the bits we don’t need, the stereo goes, the air con goes, we take it right back down to nothing and then we build it as a bespoke race car. It’s similar but very different – a road car needs to last twenty years, and do hundreds of thousands of miles. These race cars literally go back down to the last nut and bolt after every single event. They’re proper works of engineering.

MN A Type R road car you can by for £30,000 - these cars cost about £250,000 to build each. They need very painstaking maintenance every time they go out: they need nurturing.

© Tom Dymond/REX/Shutterstock

It’s a contact sport

MN It’s not meant to be, but agro puts bums on seats. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a free-for-all: we can’t just smash into each other. You can get points on your race licence, bans, the same as anything. But you do end up with personalities, you do end up with people not getting on with others.

GS It’s entertaining - it’s door handle to door handle, bumper to bumper, that’s what Touring Cars is all about.

Talk about ‘Success Ballasts’

MN British Touring Cars has a very intricate handicapping system, so if some guy is leading the championship he gets weighed down so he can’t qualify at the front and he’s got to race in the pack. At the beginning of Race One, the ballast is judged on your championship position so whoever is leading the championship will be carrying more weight than anyone else on the grid. That comes down in staggered intervals to tenth place and then from tenth and below, you carry no weight. You carry that weight for qualifying and Race One. After Race One, your grid position for Race Two is settled on the results of Race One but with the weight then realigned to the finishing positions of Race One.

Think you’re on pole? The third race of the day features a ‘Reverse Grid’

MN The third race of each day is reverse grids, so you’ve really got to fight.

GS The grid will be reversed anywhere between Position 6 and Position 10. You draw balls out of a hat, whatever number comes out between six and ten, that’s the number of cars that get their grid place reversed. So if they draw grid number ten, and you’ve won Race Two, you’re going to start in tenth with an additional 75 kilos of ballast. And with that, you aren't winning Race Three unless the planets align in a very strange way.

The ‘Lead a Lap’ system gets you extra points

GS There are different ways that you can accumulate points over the weekend. On a Saturday there’s one point for pole position. On the Sunday you obviously have points for winning the race all the way down to fifteenth place, but you can also get one point for Fastest Lap, and if you lead a lap, any lap, you get a point for that as well. As well as the points you get for putting the donkey work in during the race, there is the potential to score seven extra points over the weekend.

The rules are to make the racing better, not worse. Anyone can win a race

GS Inherently motorsport can be flawed because after qualifying the fastest car starts at the front and then they get slower and slower and slower so for anyone to overtake it becomes quite difficult. But in Touring Cars, we combat that. It’s entertaining because you never know who’s going to win the next race, with people having more performance because they’ve got less weight. The action comes thick and fast.

MN Technical regulations are to make the championship close, to bring us all close together because they restrict development. If some guy is leading the championship he gets weighed down so he can’t qualify at the front and he’s got to race in the pack. There are 15 or 20 drivers who can win races, very capably win races.

© Nigel French/EMPICS Sport/PA Photos

Every point counts

GS There’s thirty races in the championship, and the championship came down to four points last year. Every point’s a prisoner.

MN Over the course of the season, when we’ve had a bit of margin, we’ve swapped places just to give each other that extra point for the Lead a Lap, because that one point can make the difference at the end of the year.

Drivers tend to be older - it’s all about experience

GS What we don’t have is the extreme g-forces that Formula 1 has, so you’ve got to be able to race. There’s no point in just being fast over a lap, because that doesn’t get you through the season. You’ve got to get your elbows out; you’ve got to have some dust ups as the year goes on. It’s a little bit like poker, you’ve got to know when to hold them and know when to fold them. To start with you come in and you think “It’s ok, I’m just going to try and win every single race!” and that doesn’t work in Touring Cars.

MN The perceived youngsters, like Andy Jordan, they’ve all been over a decade in the series. It’s learning to roll with the punches over the course of the season, because not every day, every race, every weekend is going to go your way.

Subaru is the new big-name challenger in 2016

GS Subaru obviously have a history of rallying, from back in Colin McRae’s days, and hopefully they spent as much of the year in the grass and in the gravel.

MN They’ve gone for quite an innovative route with the car design so they should be very, very fast. But we’re hitting the ground running - if it’s big competition bring it on.

The drivers are suckers for dangerous tracks

MN Drivers do favour tracks they've been successful on. For me, Donington and Brands Hatch probably fit the description. That said, drivers secretly crave a bit of danger. It’s what makes your pulse race and gives you that buzz. Circuits for that in UK are Thruxton (we go to around 155mph top speed and average 115mph / lap), then I’d say Goodwood and Knockhill. At Knockhill the car is airborne a lot of the time, photographers love it. Thruxton is high speed and it’s a tyre killer, so can be like a loaded gun to your head in last few laps as you listen for every slightly unusual noise at 130mph waiting for your tyres to explode. You can’t relax but that’s ultimately what it’s about isn’t it?

© Rebecca Naden/PA Photos

Spectators should go to Knockhill or Croft

MN Tracks best for spectators are ones with the least run off so you're stood right next to cars coming past. You'll get blown by the wind and you can smell the burning rubber and fuel at Knockhill and Croft. But watch out - rubber flying off tyres can fly into crowd.

Names to drop (apart from Matt and Gordon)

MN Two of the iconic names over the years were Steve Soper and John Clennand. There was a big dust up in ’92, the final race of the season at a Silverstone. If someone’s never watched a touring car race, just watch that one: it’ll get you hooked on touring cars. It was chaos and action from start to finish.

GS You’ve got to remember, even Nigel Mansell came to Touring Cars. There’s a lot of people that have raced in Formula 1 - and now we’ve even got Kelvin Fletcher from Emmerdale! He knows he’s not going to set the world on fire but he’s living his dream.

British Touring Car Championship coverage is available on ITV and ITV4. Info on race times, highlights and qualifying available via itv.com/btcc

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