BTCC: works and Indy difference

[SPARK Msport]

With the BTCC looking to be mostly indy teams next year, with Seat and Vauxhall the only two manufactures running a works effort, what is the difference in terms of money?

If you took, VX Racing, Team Halfords and Mark Proctors small team, would you say the difference would be a couple of million pounds?

[Alfa Fan]

Quite easily, yes. I think Team Dynamics are financially closer to the works teams than they are to privateers like Proctor.

My guess would be

Vauxhall
SEAT
Team Dynamics
Arena International
West Surrey Racing
Speed Equipe
Techspeed Racing
Synchro Motorsport
Fast-Tec Motorsport

(Just a rough guestimate, but most teams will be in the right region)

[aland]

reckon you could take most of the indy runners apart from TD and WSR and take it as spending only when they really have to as speedquipe ran tight last year and Mark Proctor to his credit did it on a shoestring, felt sorry for Mark losing the engine at Donny test day, really shafted him for half the season. but good luck to all the indy runners as they are doing what most of us would love to do and that is to follow dreams

[redshoes]

At the indie forum TOCA ran last year Proctor revealed he had been running the team on as little as £5K per meeting. That's less than some Clio Cup teams are spending. By contrast VX Racing were rumoured to be asking for something in the region of £350K for a season in their third car.

The thing to remember when works teams talk about spending millions is it's difficult to work out how much of that actually goes to running the team and how much on promotion. Vauxhall's BTCC budget will include things like the hospitality marquee, trade stand, pit-lane walkabout giveaways, advertising, etc etc. With the exception of Dynamics most indie teams will spend very little on promotion.

[touringlegend]

It'd be interesting to know the budgets. I think there could be a few shocks, I'm guessing.

Dynamics and SEAT as examples. Dynamics developing a whole new car, albeit using some common parts from the Civic, and SEAT meanwhile simply run car's built and developed by their parent company in Spain. Jason Plato's wage is probably the largest chunk of the Seat budget!!

[chunder]

i know that is the old days Alfa famously came in to the BTCC with a 6 million pund budget which even now weems amazing, but ten years ago even more so!!

And they rose to silly fugures towards the end of Super Touring didnt they!

Differneces mainly to the teams are that the amateir teams dont get to do such fierce development, all they can really do is refine the settings.

Unless you are Dynamics which really in my eyes is only a privateer in name as they clearly have a large budget and R&D facilities

The real privateer just turns up has a fiddle with what he has and races, adn fair play to him.

I remember Proccy and his dad in rallycross and even then they were never the best funded! Where did that old flappy bonnt Nova go to! And what of the GA V6 Sierra his Dad had, what a car!

[kmchow]

Originally Posted by chunder

i know that is the old days Alfa famously came in to the BTCC with a 6 million pund budget which even now weems amazing, but ten years ago even more so!!

And they rose to silly fugures towards the end of Super Touring didnt they!

Which is equivalent to about 20MUS (10M GBP)--the rumored budget Dodge supposedly spent on their 2 race car/1backup car in the '96 NATCC! Audi supposedly spent 100M US on their 6 national ST championships?