WHEN TOURING CARS TURNED HEADS!

Image taken from British Touring Car Racing – The crowd’s favourite – late 1960s to 1990. By Peter Collins.

These evocative pictures of British Touring Car racing will bring back some happy memories. British Touring Car Racing, a new book from Veloce Publishing's Those were the Days … series is an affectionate, mainly pictorial panorama of twenty-odd years of the British Touring Car Championship, from the anarchical 1960s and early 1970s of flared wheelarches, lifting wheels and smoking tyres, through the Group 1 years when the rule-makers tried to make the cars look standard and, as a result, slowed them down.

Race car builders were subsequently galvanized into trying to get round the restrictions, eventually resulting in cars that were faster, and evolved into the tarmac-melting fire-breathing, turbo-powered frontrunners of the late 1980s. The story takes us up to the point where the rule-makers attempted another clampdown as the final decade of the 20th century dawned … this excellent little 96-page paperback book is available now from bookshops or www.velocebooks.com.