I’m often asked what I consider to be the most interesting era of motor sport. It’s a tough question but for me it would have to be the 1990s. That’s the decade I found myself involved in three completely different activities: Formula 1, rallying and touring cars.
At Prodrive, we started off with the British Touring Car Championship and I was one of the original four people who established TOCA. To my mind the 1990s were the heyday of the BTCC, although others may think differently and of course the series is still going strong today. But we had proper budgets back then and developed really interesting cars: the BMW E30 M3s with the likes of Frank Sytner in the late 1980s and then at the end of what became the Super Touring era, the Ford Mondeos with Alain Menu winning the championship in one of our cars. It was a great period of creative engineering in those days.
The touring car scene became a worldwide phenomenon and wasn’t just about the UK as the 2-litre cars raced everywhere, including Australia. The BMW M3 was a truly global race car and that was where we cut our teeth in motor racing. Andy Rouse had his Ford Sierra RS500s with spectacular flames shooting out the back, but Ford were losing interest and we persuaded Andy that we should all change
