"I'M GOING FOR FIRST" SAYS CLELAND! The Story of the 1992 BTCC Season Finale 

Cleland’s overtake being rough wasn’t even the fault of Cleland. I remember watching the clip at 1/4 speed, Soper turns down on and touches Cleland twice before the kerb. That makes the two wheeling bit nothing more than the sort of racing incident BTCC was known for.

Soper was the Schumacher of BTCC... absolutely blindedly quick but pushed people off the track.

Whinging - Cleland’s default setting.

A better cover up than let’s go Brandon that’s for sure.

I think the Mansell in F1 feel helped too. Cos he was in that amazing blue and yellow Williams with the red 5 and was really dominant at Silverstone.

Marketing was murry walkers day job. He came up with the mars slogan

@@TheDjsmurph that's not true though. He signed off on the Mars marketing but by then he was an executive and not involved in day to day creative in marketing. He did however come up with "Trill makes buggies bounce with health" amongst many others for pet food products!

The Toyota comment wasn’t planned. He just came up with it. He said so himself in a BTCC documentary

@@ben6993 I saw the same doc, I think he was being economical with the truth for the benefit of the doc, he very rarely did his BTCC commentaries live and the vast majority were scripted, I remember Alan Gow talking through the process, wondering why they were paying a kings random for Murray to do the commentary! When they viewed the finished product they saw and heard exactly why!

Not David Croft? Wait.. they named a town after him.

@@GregBrownsWorldORacing I hate to disappoint but I don't think it is 😂😂 It would be funny if I got there to find a majestic stone statue of Crofty in the paddock though...

I thought it was John Watson

@@joeogle7729 With a Crown on his head and a microphone in his hand ;) . If you listened to his blather during FP1 for Montreal, he was discussing having a sandwich named after him. You gotta start somewhere ;)

I'll be there too

Think it was down to team orders tbh. Your right Steve could pass anyone anywhere.

Soper was the Michael Schumacher of BTCC in many ways. German, fast, but controversial.

It still is.

When he passed there were people on Twitter - including me - tweeting their favourite lines

97 was the sweet spot. But then in 98 and 99 that was when they were firing each other off because the aero had got too extreme and they were doing it because there was no other way by, and the blank cheque nature of the series meant it was fixed no problem

In 93, it was just the Ecurie Ecosse team running two Cavaliers who had sequentials, there was a segment where David Leslie explained it, ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-uTMPPXY7EX4.html RML who built the cars did so well that they were awarded the works Vauxhall team contract in 1994, and their work proved itself when Cleland took the title in the 1995 Cavalier, an "obsolete" car no less, since they stopped making them in 1995.

@@Zipa7 leslie and harry nuttall? Right?

Ford, Nissan and Vauxhall had sequential gearboxes in 1993. ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-ECNQQYiYBqM.html

Yep

This is them now.

Better the ad breaks in between the races than in the races. Suck it Indycar.

Volvo, surprisingly, were the ones who were really taking the piss with budgets. They'd teamed up with Tom Walkinshaw, a man notorious for hunting out those little grey areas in a rulebook. Initially, their engine was going to be significantly down on power compared to the rest of the grid, but then Tom looked at what the rules didn't say. You couldn't modify the valve angle, but there was nothing saying the cylinder head had to be bolted on the block straight, so he figured out the best angle to tilt it at. You couldn't weld new metal onto the cylinder head, but there was nothing about bolting it on, and Volvo's cylinder head was already designed in such a way that it would seal up just fine if you did that. And so on. By the time they'd finished, they'd taken a rule that was supposed to ensure that the racing engines had basically the same cylinder head as the production engines, and twisted it so far that instead of a couple of hundred quid production part, they had just enough of that part left to be within the rules, with about 20 grand in machining bolted onto it to leave it with 50 horsepower more than anyone else, in a roughly 300hp racing class. It was ridiculous, it was protested at every race, and it was 100% within the letter of the rules. And they messed about with the chassis as well; being a Volvo, it had an engine compartment the size of an aircraft hangar, and there weren't any rules saying you couldn't shift the mounting points about to move the engine for better balance. So the racing engine was absolutely jammed up against the bulkhead, and dropped significantly compared to the road engine, for better weight distribution. They hadn't had to change the bulkhead, so by the rules it was all just fine. I joke about not having forgiven Alfa Romeo for 1994 (when they did a special edition of their road car with adjustable aero, and kicked off an aero arms race that sadly doomed the racing estate), but honestly Volvo were doing just as much damage to the intent of "cheap and cheerful", just more sneakily.

Already did it.

Alfa Romeo joined BTCC in 1994

Soper was the Schumacher of BTCC

I’m told the erectile dysfunction stuff comes from Numan. The anti chafe pants come from step one. There’s some rugbyist advertising em.

Agreed. I used to watch it down here in Aus. Cleland was a bully like russell ingall. Then it just turned into bargefest.