The Keith Prowse Touring Car Championship (class limits at 1300, 1600, 2300 and 3000 cc - with no over-3000 cc class now) produced some of the closest, most exciting racing seen for many seasons in the national RAC saloon car series. Yet it was not all wine and roses by any means for the so-called "Gp1" contest. The championship itself was dominated by two people who did their job so much better than anyone else in their classes that the public and press tended to lose interest in the destination of the overall championship title - especially as the two drivers concerned, Win Percy and Bernard Unett, were in the two smallest classes and therefore, inevitably, running well down the field.
Whilst some of the races kept up a nail biting tension right to the finish line, many rounds quickly developed from the pell-mell ruck of the early laps into a much more strung out pattern, so that by half distance the final order was largely predictable unless reliability problems intervened. At almost every round, the racing was initially extremely good at the front of the field, but it often seemed that either the drivers or their machinery could not maintain that degree of competitive pressure right through the race. Indeed, for a national championship, the reliability of many cars left a lot to be desired. Perhaps the real problem was that, for what was supposed to be the country's premier touring car championship, there still were not quite enough people in serious contention for victory. Certainly, there were regularly half a dozen or more cars in the early leading bunch, but perhaps in the pinnacle of British saloon car racing one might expect a dozen or more evenly matched combatants at every round.
The races: |
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