Read how FUCHS Sponsored PMR have kept busy despite the 2020 delays

FUCHS Sponsored Power Maxed Racing:

2020 has been a strange year for motorsport. For us as a team, competing in a number of championships, it started as a normal year. In fact, it all started the day after the final race of the 2019 British Touring Car Championship season.

Having won the 2019 BTCC Finale at the hands of Jason Plato, the team were in high spirits as we entered our ‘Winter Break’, although using the term ‘break’ is something of a misnomer. At the time, Covid-19 hadn’t been heard of, and it was business as usual for us.

Our first order of business when we finish any race season is to assess areas that the car may have shown some weakness or vulnerability in during the season, and develop a plan as to how we can improve them. After all, motorsport is, by its very nature, driven (no pun intended) by a goal of winning races, and so, even if we’ve won, we can still find ways to make the car better.

For obvious reasons, we don’t talk about exactly what we look at to increase the car’s performance-that would just make it too easy on our competitors. But, to give you an idea as to how deep down the rabbit hole we go, our Chief Design Engineer spent most of the winter months working on improving cooling and lowering air intake temperatures, by running models of differing duct designs and intercooler/radiator end tanks. This ran into many months of work, basically working to get as much cold air into the engine as possible, because the more cold air you have going in, the more power you have coming out. It’s simple physics.

With lockdown being forced upon us quite literally the day after the championship’s Media Day at Silverstone, something of a dampener was put upon our plans of further developing the car. Both of the Astra’s were put in their respective bays in our race workshop and left to gather dust. Whilst this may not surprise you, it’s a very alien concept to us as a professional race team.

Normally, the second those cars return from an event, they’re stripped. Every single mechanical component is removed, assessed and replaced if necessary. It’s an integral part of minimising mechanical failures during races, and we call it lifing. We have a computer system called LifeCheck that literally logs every part of the car-from brakes, through gearbox internals, down to the circlip that holds the wheel bearing in place, every single part has a lifespan. So for the car to sit, effectively mothballed from March until what was, at that time, an undetermined date was painful for us.

More importantly, it was taking away from our limited time to develop the cars. With mechanical staff furloughed and access to the workshop off limits, it meant that we were unable to not only test the work we’d put in over winter for improvements, but to work on further developing the car to win races.

So what were we to do to keep the fans engaged and sponsors represented whilst no one could go racing? Well, as it happens, we’d been in discussions with a number of well respected online racing series organisers about doing something under the PMR banner. So, once MotorsportUK had made their announcement that all race licences were to be suspended until at least the end of April, we made the decision to create our own online championship-the PMR eSeries.

It would bring together world class racing drivers and the fastest sim drivers, racing from the comfort of their own living rooms. Every competitor would have exactly the same car, with no way of adjusting any setup or handling characteristics, giving a totally equal playing field. They would also be allocated a livery of one of our sponsors, with the series being live streamed every Wednesday evening. In the end, we had so many requests from both professional and amateur drivers, we had to organise a qualifying evening, then split them across 4 separate tiers, with the fastest 15 qualifiers joining some of motorsport’s biggest names in the top tier. By the time qualifying had come to a close, we had filled all 120 available spaces, with many waiting in the wings should people drop out.

The series was an unprecedented success, with just under 200,000 tuning in to watch the official live streams, and the overall winner receiving a fully funded test day in one of our Volkswagen Racing Cup cars. Amongst the regular drivers were multiple BTCC stars, including Jason Plato, Dave Newsham and Bobby Thompson, alongside Ferrari Factory Driver & Le Mans 24hr winner James Calado, and a number of World TCR race winners. We were also joined by F1 pundit Billy Monger and ‘The Voice of British Motorsport’, David Addison, as special guests.

As the series drew to a close in July, the world had started to turn again for real life motorsport, and multiple championships were vying for space at the UK’s racetracks. As by far the UK’s most popular form of 4-wheel motorsport, BTCC managed some semblance of priority, and a slightly reduced calendar of 9 race weekends was announced, albeit within a much tighter timeframe. In fact, the first 4 rounds would take place across just 5 weekends, meaning some seriously late nights for all the teams, ensuring cars are back to where they need to be for the following weekend.

It was around this time that we made a decision that no one has ever made in BTCC history-we were pausing our sponsorship commitments and driver line up for 2020, allowing us to concentrate on developing the car and the team. We would still run one car, giving young and upcoming drivers the opportunity to get to grips with a front running car, with Jade Edwards taking the seat this weekend around Silverstone’s National Circuit – the first female driver to compete a BTCC race in 13 years!

As a Technical Partner and Sponsor, part of our relationship is research and development - because if something can work as efficiently as possible on the race track, under the incredibly harsh conditions our cars are put through, then it can be used to further develop road car products.

With the difference between qualifying on pole or mid-pack regularly decided by thousandths of a second, even the slightest performance advantage we can gain can make all the difference. Which is one of the reasons we’re working so closely with FUCHS - to improve performance. Working with a company who, like us, is constantly working to improve vehicle performance and efficiency, is exactly what we need as a professional race team. Obviously, things have been delayed due to the current situation, but we’re well on our way to building a stronger programme than ever before, thanks to the proactivity and knowledge of Fuchs’ Technical Team, both in the UK and across the globe.

It’s going to be an exciting few months!

Catch all of this Sunday’s race day action from 11am on ITV2 & ITV2HD.