"Not Bad For a Number 2 Driver!"

That's what I'd have said over the pit radio today if I'd been Tom Onslow-Cole in the third BTCC race at Silverstone today.

As usual, the BTCC provided lots of good racing action and thrills and spills (crashes) with Plato and Neal coming together as usual and Plato storming off in anger at the end - very entertaining.

In the first BTCC race of the day, Onslow-Cole was leading from his team-mate Chilton when he pulled out of the way to let Chilton past. This is not unusual in BTCC where you get an extra Championship point for leading the race for a lap so team managers will ask their drivers to swap position for just one lap in order to get the extra point. There are none of the silly rules about team-orders in BTCC that cause annoyance and confusion in F1.

Anyway, you would expect Chilton to make way after that lap for Onslow-Cole again - but he didn't. At the post-race interview, they both came up with a consistent story about Onslow-Cole messing up a gear change so letting Chilton through to avoid a collision while he regained his momentum - honest racing so no need to concede the position. This seemed plausible.

Then, in the second race, Onslow-Cole was leading from his team-mate Chilton when he pulled out of the way to let Chilton past. Hmmmm. Chilton went on to win and a fine bit of barging by Rob Collard knocked Onslow-Cole down to the third step on the podium. This time, they admitted a bit of team orders claiming that Chilton was faster because he had been more cautious early on so his tyres were in better nick.

Race three saw Onslow-Cole take the lead from the popular, very likeable Scouser, Paul O'Neill. Chilton couldn't get past O'Neill, possibly because he was carrying some extra weight (success ballast) or possibly because he isn't as good a driver as Tom Onslow-Cole but this meant that team orders would have been very silly so Onslow-Cole won the race fair and square and should really have won all three.

As previously mentioned, there is nothing actually wrong with team orders in BTCC, but surely it makes more sense to favour the guy doing better in the Championship?

Tom Onslow-Cole is now running second in the Championship and would be a lot closer to the leader, Jason Plato if the team hadn't interfered - so why did they? It's not as though Chilton has a very powerful sponsor is it?

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!