The car that killed the category

Budget is everything in motor racing. At one end of that spectrum is Alain Menu, at the other is his British Touring Car Championship-winning Ford Mondeo: one started out with nothing, the other was afforded everything. Yet they are united by their dominance.

There can be few drivers whose name recalls the golden Supertouring era of the BTCC as quickly as the Swiss racer’s. His career was built on talent alone and he overcame the obstacles that come with such foundations – in 1991, midway through a promising F3000 campaign, he was looking for a new vocation.

By the end of the next decade, he and his vibrant yellow and blue Fast Ford were so hard to beat that the golden era had turned into more of a golden hour – darkness was looming.

It wasn’t always so easy, for either. Menu worked hard with one of the first poster cars of BTCC, the Williams-developed Renault Laguna, and eventually won the 1997 title. It was five years in the making and after finishing runner up three times.

The Reynard-developed Fords, meanwhile, ended the year in seventh place for the second year running – out of eight…

In 1999, Prodrive moved from Honda to Ford with a heady budget of upwards of £10million to play with. Williams and Renault had shown the BTCC the budget bend, and Ford took the BTCC around it. 

Though unmistakably a Mondeo, gone were the days of cars plucked from the production line, so too were the doorcards of Group A. Most panels were replaced, the V6 was all-but new and packed with innovation, right down its placement in the car. The driveshaft was able to run directly through the vee, helping to create a perfectly balanced racing car.

Sixth out of six that first year was expected, because the fruit would bear in 2000. In 24 races, 11 went to Ford. The top three places in the standings went to Menu, a second title for the man who won more Supertouring races than any other, Anthony Reid and Rickard Rydell. A clean sweep for Team Ford.

All three went into the final rounds at Silverstone with a shot at the title, held in the darkness for added drama. As it was, Honda’s Le Mans legend in the making Tom Kristensen won both races, with Menu’s podium in the finale enough to deny Reid. 

Menu suffered his fourth retirement of the season in race one, giving Reid’s more consistent season the edge, but the Scot was tagged by Vincent Radermecker’s Vauxhall Vectra as they struggled to hold on to the coattails of Menu. Into the gravel he skipped, destined somehow never to win the title outright. 

Menu safely navigated the remainder, giving his charging former teammate Jason Plato a wide berth as he came through into second place, knowing third was enough for the title.

But the sun had set on this golden hour and era, and the darkness had closed in for Supertouring – the shark had been jumped. Costs had spiralled to such a height that the rulebook was ripped up to try and level the playing field, and organiser Alan Gow and TOCA even stepped aside. The manufacturers upped and left, their £1m+ cars nowhere to play.

Thankfully, as you’ll have seen at the Scramble in April, some of the very greatest have been saved for posterity. Prodrive itself, in this case.