K&N-Equipped Team BMW Wins British Touring Car Team and Manufacturers Championship

9 Oct 2017

Turkington was just 6 points behind the series leader going into the last race

Rob Turkington was in the hunt for the Drivers' Title up to final race but was hit by a competitor

There’s a phrase commonly used around Britain that one should “take the long view,” meaning that you should think beyond the current situation. With one driver out injured and the other knocked out of the third race of the final weekend at Brands Hatch, things might look dim for Team BMW.

But not so, despite the aforementioned setbacks. The "long view" is that Team BMW won the Dunlop MSA British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) Manufacturers title, and the Team title, along with Colin Turkington finishing second in Drivers’ standings, and the still-recovering Rob Collard, who sat out the final races, still finished fifth among drivers.

Colin Turkington had positive words for the entire Team BMW operation after the race: “It’s a great achievement by the whole team to win the Teams’ and Manufacturers’ titles today and everybody should be congratulated for the hard work they’ve put in over the season.”

WSR designs and constructs their BMW race cars in house

Rob Turkington drove from 15th to win in the second-to-last race of the year

Team BMW for the UK is operated by West Surrey Racing founded in 1981 to field promising young drivers in British Formula 3. They achieved immediate success in their first race by virtue of a win by future F1 driver Jonathan Palmer. Other WSR F3 drivers who graduated to Formula 1 include Mauricio Gugelmin, Mika Hakkinen, Rubens Barrichello, and most famously Ayrton Senna.

WSR left F3 at the end of the 1995 season as the most successful team in the history of the series, both in terms of race victories and titles. The decision was made to apply its tremendous capabilities to the British Touring Car Championship.

For 2007, the team switched to BMW, and today runs BMW 125i M Sport models that were designed, engineered, and constructed in the WSR shops (unlike many other series around the world where BMW provides the team with a turn-key race car). With 2017’s double-title success, WSR has now won an incredible six outright BTCC crowns in the past four years.

Now with BMW for 10 years, WSR started out as a Formula 3 team

The entire West Surrey Racing team joins in the celebration at Brands Hatch

Still not 100% after his massive shunt at Silverstone last month Rob Collard was nonetheless at Brands Hatch as a spectator to support the team: “It’s a real shame I wasn’t able to race this weekend, but I’m proud to have played my part in the Teams’ and Manufacturers’ Championship wins for the second year in a row. To finish fifth in the points even after missing the last five races shows how competitive we’ve been across the year.”

Team Principal Dick Bennetts summed up the season: “Every member of the team can be very proud of what we’ve achieved and we are also extremely thankful to our partners, technical suppliers, and sponsors, without whom none of this would have been possible.”

And as one of those technical suppliers, K&N is proud to have been part of this championship effort and congratulate Dick, Colin, Rob, and the entire WSR team for an excellent season. To quote WSR from its Twitter post: Let’s do it again in 2018.

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