BTCC Driver Tom Chilton Joins The Sun

BTCC Driver Tom Chilton Joins The Sun

OK, let's break that down shall we?
BTCC - Brilliant!, Tom Chilton - OK, The Sun - Crap!

BTCC
I've been a big fan of the British Touring Cars Championship for many, many years now. I regularly went to the Oulton Park rounds and still would if my family shared my interest and I also saw them in Ireland when they raced there.

My interest grew as I became more and more disillusioned with Formula One. As a child, the British and Monaco Grand Prix were the highlight of my sporting year, seriously overshadowing the FA Cup Final or Five Nations Rugby (it was pre-Italy) both of which were important to me. But, as the Seasons rolled on and the commentators said at more and more circuits, "This is not a good circuit for overtaking" I discovered the BTCC - a competition where overtaking, and even barging-out-of-the-way was a regular event. This was helped by great, cantankerous characters - John Cleland stands out:

The racing was at it's peak towards the end of the last Century with factory teams from Ford, Volvo, Renault, Audi, Alfa, Nissan and more taking part.

Since then, the factory teams have all pulled out - Vauxhall were last to leave last year. This has not proved to be too much of a problem though as the independent teams have filled their places very neatly and the characters still exist - I love the inter-play between Matt Neal and Jason Plato - you can tell they really don't like each other very much and that is brilliant.

Formula One has improved a lot as well since Lewis first appeared - and here the entertaining needle and banter is between Eddie Jordan and David Coulthard presenting for the BBC - still needs more overtaking though.

Tom Chilton
Tom started driving in the BTCC at the age of six. OK, maybe slightly older than that but too young to be any good and too immature to understand what was required. I'm probably a bit jealous here because I never had chances like that when I was a teenager although it would have probably terrified me at the time if I had.
Since then, obviously, he has matured and had a few race-wins. Last year he was unlucky in that he had a particularly uncompetitive car for most of the Season - only coming good at the very end.

He fancies himself as a bit of a playboy and has appeared nude in Cosmo and appeared as a contestant on that game-show presented by Paddy McGuinness where 30 women check out blokes for a date. I'm not convinced he's had the success yet to warrant the playboy status. I've read his article on the Sun Website which wasn't easy because there was a fault either with their page or my laptop so it kept jumping to some weird search error. The article was somewhere between mediocre and OK which is all you need for a tabloid and I couldn't get his "cheeky video" to run at all.

The Sun
Living in Merseyside, I'm supposed to hate The Sun for the lies they printed about Hillsborough. As it is, they did eventually apologise and you have to remember that the team working there now have nothing to do with the ones who published the lies - it's a bit like punishing someone for what their grandfather did. I wouldn't expect their circulation to start rising in Liverpool, though, the hurt was felt very deeply but I would like to see a Scouse boycott of Radio 5-Live, it is there where the original perpetrator and still Hillsborough-denier Kelvin Mackenzie is allowed to ply his trade.

The reason I don't buy The Sun is the same reason that I don't buy any tabloid newspapers - they are all aimed at gullible people who can't read very well. They publish gossip about people I don't care about like Jordan or Mufti from The Sugarbabes, they publish opinion as though it is fact, and they try to scare the public about things they need not really be worrying about (TV News is bad for that too).


So there you go - three articles for the price of one!