Whither Touring Cars?

I once had a friend tell me, "I wish I could flog up your kind of enthusiasm for touring cars. They're just taxis after all." I know the spanner-twirlers who frequent motoring blogs usually aren't that introspective, but as I tiptoe back to updating semi-regularly, I wanted to take a moment to have a few deep rocks of the chair and outline, if it's not too pretentious to say, the philosophy of touring car racing.

What is it? Why is it? How did it come about? And why do we (okay, I) like it so much? 

Slow Down, Plato...
We'll start with the obvious. The person who made the "taxis" jibe above is a dear friend of mine, but they suffer from one of the worst cases of Engineering Brain I've ever encountered – Jeremy Clarkson's "silicon c-c-carbide" joke is uncomfortably close to the truth. And that's cool, it's a big world and it takes all kinds to fill it, up to and including engineers (though I maintain the trouble starts when engineers start setting their own destinations rather than working toward goals set by others, but that's another rant). So I think I get their objection: Why spoil all that lovely racecar engineering by applying it to a lumpen, slow, clumsy shitbox designed purely to get your shopping home? "They're just taxis," they say, as if that comprises an argument in and of itself. To which I reply, "Yes, exactly. They're taxis."

For years, these Aussie cars were our rides to school, drives to work, tradie rigs and repmobiles. Most importantly they were our taxis – the first cars our overseas guests experienced when they disembarked the Flying Kangaroo. Taxis weren’t usually the hero examples; vinyl seats and column-shifts persisted well after they ceased to be commonplace in private cars. And with many hundreds of thousands of kilometres under them before retirement, they might have gained a few rattles and squeaks. But they were our cars.

Case in point, no image of London would be complete without an austere congregation of black cabs. Historically, Austin, Beardmore and Metrocab have all supplied ‘Hackney Carriages’ conforming to Transport of London’s Conditions of Fitness. Seven inches of ground clearance and a 25-foot turning circle are required to ensure they can circumnavigate, quite specifically, the Savoy Hotel’s entrance roundabout.

Source.

Across the Atlantic the Checker Marathon spent 40 years sitting salient outside every airport, hotel and whorehouse from Kansas to Kalamazoo. The last of these beautiful behemoths retired in New York in July 1999, replaced en masse by a range of full-chassis domestic sedans, the most prominent and enduring of which was the Ford Crown Victoria. With the next generation of US cabs focussing on fuel economy and flexible cargo arrangements, the Crown Vic, a traditional sedan in every sense, is disappearing from US taxi ranks faster than the Checker did.

Source.

Yet the vision of a Checker Marathon or Ford Crown Vic taxi is burned deep into the Betamax of every American movie and TV show made since 1960. Likewise, the silhouette of these cars is imprinted on the brains of almost every Westerner on the planet. Only an educated few would bat an eyelid if a Marathon, lumbering and large, appeared at the rank outside Delta’s JFK Terminal Two. – Dave Carey, Fairwell to the Commodore Name, Unique Cars

Point is, these cars are embedded in the culture like few others. For half a century, when you got off the plane at Kingsford Smith, your first point of contact with Australia was the vast, cosy rear seat of a humble Ford Falcon. Having spent a year or two on duty, that Falcon was then traded in to become some P-plater's first car, generating another slew of memories. The metaphor might have broken down in the age of Uber, but I think the point still stands: Only such humble machinery can be such a deeply-embedded part of our lives, so when it's tarted up and hurled around a racetrack, there's an emotional heft there that simply can't be matched. 

That will either work for you or it won't: Take your pick. Carey's article ends claiming the problem with the ZB Commodore is that it was never a taxi. The same is true of the Camaro that's replaced it on the Supercars grid, but then I'd also argue that Supercars has ceased to be a touring car series and become a GT series, so the rules are a bit different. Now I'm not saying Supercars is circling the drain – having been there in 2019, I can report there's nothing much wrong with the trackside product – but I am prepared to say it's now a zombie technology. Like the phone book, it just happens that the financial plumbing is still connected and making things happen, even after the purpose it once fulfilled is now gone. 

But what purpose was that, exactly?

Themes Are For Eighth-Grade Book Essays
I think the "taxi" principle hints at something deeper, that motor racing is unique among sports in being tied hand and foot to an industry. No matter how corrupt it gets, I doubt the outcome of the World Cup is ever going to be affected by the latest cutting-edge developments at Big Ball¹, but motor racing absolutely has seen the results of major contests skewed by the boffins at this or that company's skunkworks. Racing sits at the intersection of sport, business and cutting-edge technology, which means a lot more forces affecting the outcome.

The relative strength of these forces depends on which series you're watching. For a WEC Hypercar race, the Technology leg is arguably the dominant one. In NASCAR, on the other hand, tech development was amputated early in favour of sporting purity and commercial interests. And today, of course, commercial interests rule the roost pretty much everywhere. If you asked any random Supercars exec what motor racing is for, I bet they'd say, "To make money", a play on the old joke from Harvard Business School ("What does your company make?" "Money"). It's a fair enough answer from them, personally, because they have mortgages riding on it and I don't want to begrudge them that: If they're making a living from their passion, more power to 'em. But it's still kind of a hollow answer out here in the fandom, especially in a world where Boeing is proving, definitively, that there's more to business than making money.

Just to illustrate that last point, I want to mention an extraordinary statistic I learned recently about Japan's Shinkansen bullet trains. The reason they can accelerate from zero to 270km/h and back to zero again before the next station is that these trains are a) absurdly overpowered, and b) built absurdly light, to the point that they're actually not much good in the event of a crash. So, what do you think happened last time they crashed one?

They've never crashed one. There have been mishaps of course, but in the entire 55-year history of the programme, no Shinkansen train has ever killed or injured one of its passengers. The Japanese accepted that they were going to have to build their trains this way, and then engineered them to make it work (no level crossings, for example, meaning no chance of ever meeting a car). My point is, it's amazing what can be achieved when you regard a company as something other than a way of generating executive salary packages.

So again, what is racing for? Why is it important? If someone raises that old chestnut, "They're just going around in circles!" what do you tell them? Pure commercial interest might provide the plumbing to make a series happen, but that in itself won't get audiences to care. To do that, I think a series needs what might loosely be called a purpose, a deeper meaning. So what, if any, is the deeper meaning of motor racing?

Me, I think it's at its best when trying to answer a specific question. Exactly what that question is, again, depends on the series. At Le Mans, it's brutally simple: "How far can a car go in 24 hours?" In Formula 1, it's a more nebulous, "How fast can a car go?" (And in the case of the drivers, "Who is the greatest in the world today?"). At Indianapolis, traditionally, it was, "Who will take home the richest prize in racing?" and that worked really well in the Gilded Age U.S., but less so now. The U.S. is supposed to be the home of the American Dream, the idea that if you are talented and hard-working, then one day you will be rich. Indianapolis used to be a place you could go to see that happen in real time – it would've been an unusual confluence of events, sure, but it was theoretically possible to see a some hopeful arrive penniless, get a lucky break in a good car and then drive heroically to take the win, ending the month of May a literal millionaire. The breakdown in that mythology, and whether that breakdown owes more to the betrayal of the American Dream, or to the fact that your modern racing driver is raised from childhood and so is rather walled off from the rest of the population, is a topic I won't dig into here.

A Penske smothered in greenbacks is an image you'd just never see in Formula 1, a series an order of magnitude wealthier than CART, even in its heyday. It doesn't happen often, but there are times I do love the Americans (source).

For traditional touring cars, especially Bathurst, the question is implied by its roots in ordinary production car racing: "Which car should I buy?" And because of that, we end up in a unique position where the Technology aspect is filtered through commercial interests. To put it another way: Because of its role as a tentpole for the Holden brand, the Holden Racing Team could not race any product except a Commodore. It didn't matter that the Commodore wasn't actually a very suitable machine for the regulations at the time, the paymasters sold Commodores, so that was what they had to race. In some kinds of racing, the tension between those two facts would simply see a new commercial deal, which is boring. In touring cars, it instead kicks off a desperate, years-long narrative of engineering and rule-bending to try to file off enough corners to fit this square peg into its round hole. See also: the saga of Gibson Motorsport as Nissan works team, ranging from surprisingly competitive (1986-'87), to the Dark Night of the R31 ('88-'90), to crushing domination and ultimate category-killer of Godzilla ('91-'92).

There's always a relevant XKCD (source).

And that, dear reader, as near as I can make, is where the appeal of touring cars lies: It's an oxymoron. Literally. The term dates from the early days of the sport, when there were racing cars (what we'd today call open-wheelers), and touring cars, meaning cars meant for taking on actual journeys. "Touring car racing" is therefore an oxymoron, and that tension is what drove the action for half a century. It's the challenge of precision driving with an imprecise instrument, with the pot constantly being stirred by new homologation updates or even whole new cars that may (or may not) have had racing in mind when they were designed. Business is always sticking its nose in, and while business may be infuriating, or dumb as rocks, or really really funny (you only need to listen to Trashfuture to know business can be funny), it's always a hint about what's cool in society right now, and who has the money. 

It's a gift to the pop historian, is what I'm saying. It's trying to hit a moving target with a gun that won't shoot straight, and while that may not be everyone's cup of tea, I think I prefer it over the dull, deterministic grind of technical development a la Formula 1 and WEC. Disagree? Great, it's your life and you should love what you love, you owe me nothing and I know that. But if my spiel here has given you a new perspective, a way to enjoy a kind of racing you maybe didn't before, then that's mission accomplished as far as I'm concerned.

Addendum
As a final note, I will confirm that yes, this blog will be getting updates again after a year off. I never intended this to be a Group A blog specifically, it just happened to work out that way because I'm a natural born contrarian, and the Group A era was the one that attracted all the hate. I stopped because it had become a bit of a treadmill, and the incoming V8 era interested me a lot less. So going forward I'll be adding stuff as I think of it, less because I want to please you, the reader, and more because it's an excuse to tidy up all the raw material I already have and make it readable. And because, to be brutally honest, writing is a necessary process for maintaining mental health, in a year where I badly need to get my head together. So expect to see updates, on the same shameless  "whenever I feel like it" schedule as before, but covering a broader timespan. Who knows? Maybe it will even be good, stranger things have happened...

¹Oh grow up.