Chilton Ready To Step Forward In 2018

Jack Cozens finds out that Motorbase’s man is keyed up for this season.

- Jack Cozens

After a five-year break, the British Touring Car Championship was reunited with one of its most popular names of recent times last year. The spiked, near-bleached blond hair might be a thing of the past, but the return of Vauxhall as a factory name also brought with it a return for Tom Chilton.

An exploratory year with Power Maxed Racing yielded mixed results but if there were any questions about the motivation behind his return and how long his second BTCC stint might last, Chilton might just have silenced them with his destination for 2018: Motorbase Performance. 

To call Chilton a journeyman might be a stretch, but his latest deal will mark his sixth in 12 seasons in the championship – and that tally includes two separate three-year spells with Arena Motorsport.

Don’t call it a homecoming – Motorbase sits alongside WSR as the only long-running squad in the championship that Chilton had not driven for before his World Touring Car Championship move at the end of 2011 – but there will be some familiarities when he links up with the Kent squad.

“It’s one of the teams I haven’t been with, funnily enough,” says Chilton, who started talking to Motorbase around the time of the final Brands Hatch meeting of 2017. “When I was at Arena we used to build the Fords and then sell them to Motorbase [in 2010 and ’11], so I was kind of the development driver, so it’s quite nice to go to them now and see what I can do with them.