“It’s relit my fire for motorsport again,” reflects Carl Boardley after winning the TCR UK title at his first attempt last season in a self-entered Cupra Leon Competicion.
Following four years in the British Touring Car Championship, Boardley spent 2022 largely on the sidelines, demoralised by a difficult 2021 campaign. A ride alongside title winner Ash Sutton in the Infiniti line-up had promised much but failed to deliver. It took a switch to the burgeoning TCR UK series to revitalise the Suffolk racer and deliver his first championship success since an ultra-successful National Hot Rod career.
A long and varied path for the 48-year-old, who has defied doctors’ expectations and battled ill health, began in the non-contact short oval formula of Stock Rods as a teenager, after growing up watching from the terraces of Ipswich’s Foxhall Stadium. Moderate success followed, before Boardley made his mark in National Hot Rods. Within a year of his debut, Boardley had qualified for his first World Final and finished fourth. He went on to win an unprecedented four consecutive world championships over 2006-09, and was already eyeing his next step.
He was tempted onto Rockingham’s 1.5-mile oval for some 2007 ASCAR rounds, but any plans for a full-time switch were halted when the series folded. But, by 2010, it was time to try the Pickups series of Sonny Howard, whose cars he raced in his early NHR days. Engine failures blighted Boardley’s Rockingham debut. But, weeks before his short oval farewell – which ended with a puncture while leading the 2010 World Final – Boardley burst onto the circuit racing scene with a fine showing at Mallory Park. It was his first race weekend involving right turns.
“My plan was to knock the Hot Rod on the head and just to do four or five [Pickup] rounds a year at Rockingham,” he recalls. “We got a new engine done, and Sonny was doing a round at Mallory Park. Then on the Thursday, Sonny rung me up and said, ‘I’ve got a bit of bad news for you.’”
Mallory’s oval was no longer licensed, forcing a switch to the full circuit. Incredibly, Boardley won the second race.
“It was like, ‘It’s not really what I was planning on doing, but this circuit lark is all right,’” he laughs. Two further Pickups seasons brought six more wins.
“The short ovals are where I learned my racecraft from, and that transferred over quite nicely,” Boardley reckons. “And then the engineering side, OK, the circuit stuff is a little bit different in what you need to make the car do but, fundamentally, the knowledge that I gained from Sonny and then doing our own things latterly gave me a good platform.”
A largely washed-out December 2012 test in Speedworks’ Toyota Avensis gave Boardley a taste of touring cars but “to be honest, at that time, the BTCC was too big a step for me and where I was at”. Instead he tackled the Ginetta GT Supercup, joining JHR Developments – fresh from running Tom Ingram to the title – for year two before illness intervened.
“I’d been diagnosed with a bowel condition and, at the start of 2014, it just got hold of me,” Boardley admits. “So I did the first meeting at Brands with JHR and I shouldn’t have because I’d only been discharged from hospital about three days before. Three or four days after Brands I got taken back into hospital.”
"Jason Plato was behind us and there was the tiniest, tiniest little gap and I’ve shut the door, and Jason’s just literally, ‘No, you’re not having that.’ I had to gather the car up and was off on the grass. That was my ‘welcome to touring cars’ moment" Carl Boardley
Most of the next 18 months were spent on the sidelines as Boardley faced a series of major operations: “I got told at the time by the surgeon that I wouldn’t actually be able to race a car ever again. That’s probably what fuelled the fire to try and get back.”
Eventually cleared to return, Boardley took wins in 2016 and 2017, while a potential BTCC switch in a Team Hard Volkswagen Passat was deferred for one final year in Ginettas. Six wins and second in the championship left Boardley ready for what proved to be a tough BTCC graduation, his first year of front-wheel-drive racing since his Stock Rod days.
“It was a baptism of fire,” he remembers. “I wasn’t under any illusion as to the difficulty of the task of adapting to it. I think a lot of it was that the Passat just was an outdated car, it wasn’t engineered that well at the time, and it was a proper handful to wrestle round.
“I remember my second race at Brands. Jason Plato was behind us and there was the tiniest, tiniest little gap and I’ve shut the door, and Jason’s just literally, ‘No, you’re not having that.’ I had to gather the car up and was off on the grass. That was my ‘welcome to touring cars’ moment. Nothing untoward, but that is what it’s like at that level.”
For 2020, Boardley acquired a WSR-built BMW 125i M Sport – sister car to Colin Turkington’s 2018 title winner. The COVID-delayed season eventually began in August with Boardley’s trusted engineer stranded in Belarus. Luckily, Power Maxed Racing’s sabbatical freed up Martin Broadhurst. Boardley progressed up the grid, but racing behind closed doors wasn’t the BTCC experience he envisaged: “It almost felt like every session was a test session.”
Sutton won that year’s title in an Infiniti Q50 – a car Boardley had the opportunity to pilot in 2021. But it would be a frustrating season.
“I suppose I got sold the dream of it’s going to be a three-car Laser Tools Racing team,” Boardley explains, “but my car was always done at Team Hard, whereas the other two cars were done by BMR Engineering.”
A promising start quickly unravelled: “Looking back on it now, that’s probably one big regret for me, that I didn’t invest a bit more time and resource into trying to really make the most of that 2021 season. Ultimately, what happened got to me that much that for ’22 I knocked racing on the head.”
A substitute appearance in his old car at Croft fell through, but Boardley sampled Team Hard’s latest machine in the season finale. “The plan was to do Brands GP, find out what the Cupra was like, and then potentially race in 2023,” explains Boardley, but a first-race clash ruined his weekend. “It was very disappointing, but I suppose not wholly unexpected.”
Fearing that Hard’s already stretched resources would be spread too thin by a plan to run more cars, Boardley walked away. Then a call from fellow BTCC refugee Stewart Lines, now the promoter of TCR UK, sent him in another direction.
Following a trip to last year’s Autosport International to check out the category, Boardley bought a TCR version of the Cupra. Former BTCC engineer Malcolm Cleland’s Zest Racecar Engineering squad came on board to run the car, but the relationship fractured at a difficult opening weekend. Boardley then joined forces with the Hart GT operation of Nick Hart, with whom he’d worked in Ginettas. Only a track-limits penalty denied him a maiden victory at Croft: “It was nice to be able to prove that we could do the business in a front-wheel-drive touring car.”
Track limits bit again at Oulton Park, where high temperatures and the compensation weight his Croft pace had earned contributed to set-up struggles. But the upside of his penalty was reversed-grid pole and a comfortable victory. Next was the series’ only triple-header round at Knockhill, a venue where Boardley has always shone.
“You have to grab it by the scruff of the neck and really wrestle the car round, and I think that suits me,” he asserts. “I went into Knockhill full of confidence and knowing that we would do well. We got the car in a really good window and I said to the boys on the Friday evening, ‘We’re going to stick it on pole tomorrow, win race one, and if we can I’ll stick it on pole for race three as well.’”
Prophecy fulfilled, Boardley grabbed the points lead. A fourth win in five races came at Silverstone, extending his points lead despite an over-optimistic lunge from Jenson Brickley in race two. Like Boardley, fellow Cupra driver Brickley – engineered by ex-Team Pyro chief Mark Hunt – was running solo, and the pair had formed a data-sharing relationship.
"It’s been a really enjoyable year. Pretty much all of the other guys in the series are really good, there’s no wallies" Carl Boardley
“The cars are quite complex from a data side, making sure everything’s working as it should,” explains Boardley. “So it gave us a comparison to make sure that we didn’t have any anomalies in the operating systems.”
After a wet race on the wrong set-up at Donington Park became a dropped score, the six-week break until the Brands Hatch finale could have induced nerves, but Boardley remained relaxed. After adopting a cautious approach to set-up in changeable conditions, he sealed his first circuit racing title with fourth in the opener.
“I’m doing something that I want to do, and it’s enjoyable – what’s the point in getting nervous?” reasons Boardley, who is close to confirming his 2024 plans. “It’s been a really enjoyable year. Pretty much all of the other guys in the series are really good, there’s no wallies. Everybody’s out for their own racing but, at the same time, everybody’s respectful and sensible with what they do. We’ve had an enjoyable time on and off track.”
How TCR UK continues to improve
TCR UK supremo Stewart Lines doesn’t shy away from the inevitable comparison with the British Touring Car Championship, but neither does he seek to fan the flames. “We need to exist in the same space, don’t we?” he reasons.
A former BTCC racer himself, Lines competed in the inaugural season of TCR UK in 2018 when grid sizes hovered around 10 cars. The following year he took over the promotion, initially incorporated within the Touring Car Trophy, which allowed other two-litre tin-top machinery. But since 2022, TCR UK has stood on its own two feet once more, with grids regularly topping 20 cars.
The past two TCR UK champions are former BTCC racers, so how different are the cars to drive? Carl Boardley, last year’s title winner, has driven versions of the Cupra Leon in TCR and NGTC guises and says: “With a BTCC car, it has to be on the edge of throwing you off in the gravel at all times. That’s the only way you can get a time out of a BTCC car. These TCR cars, although they do have the same characteristics and work in the same sort of way, you don’t have to have them quite on that limit and on that edge. They’re definitely a bit more forgiving.”
A TCR UK promotional push last year, including public grid walks at several rounds, brought a larger spectator presence. Lines is promising more of the same for 2024, along with the introduction of a Saturday afternoon race to make triple-header weekends the norm (except at the one-day Oulton Park meeting), and further boosts for competitors.
“We’re slowly but surely making it a little bit better,” explains Lines. “The viewing figures have gone up, the spectating figures have gone up. We’ve got grid walks this year at every round. There’s going to be fixed [dedicated] testing on the Fridays. And then we’ve got more races – we’ve gone from 15 to 20.”
The third race effectively replaces free practice, making better use of track time, while any fears of increased running costs are further allayed by the plan for tyre allocations to remain unchanged. Prize money for 2024 – a popular introduction last year – has yet to be announced, but all registered drivers will receive a package of engine and gearbox oil from sponsor Liqui Moly. Further incentive for drivers of older machinery comes with the introduction of the Gen 1 Cup.
A largely consistent package of support series will feature throughout the 2024 season, with the British Racing & Sports Car Club’s Audi TT Cup and Fiesta ST240 championship joining last season’s regulars, Civic Cup and Fiesta Junior. As well as benefiting from a higher profile, it helps teams running cars in multiple categories to spread their costs. In a world of economic uncertainty, TCR UK looks to have carved its place in the market.
