It’s a fine line whether you want to qualify on pole, take the points, or you want to race your way through the day differently.” "I thought when I went to Le Mans with TVR was the highlight of everything, but that TCR race was fantastic. The latter measure is based on the qualifying results from the previous round.Īs Smiley points out: “You also score points in qualifying, so it’s a double-edged sword – you score the points but it means you carry the weight for the following weekend. Restart took its green flag with Taylor Jr on engineering duties, plus Darryl Taplin and Russ Higgs – from Excelr8 and BTC respectively – as mechanics, Colin Hewett (who previously worked with Taylor Sr on the TVR Le Mans project) as team manager and Mark Smart looking after everything else.Īfter that Oulton victory, there was a win drought until the finale at Snetterton, but in part that’s due to TCR’s joint balance of performance and compensation weight measures that are decreed direct from the category’s worldwide organiser WSC. Smiley won first time out at Oulton Park to set the Restart team on its way If we needed any help with anything, we got it.” They were a big part of it as well, making sure that we were organised. “It was good to get the first weekend out of the way considering how tight we were on time and everything, and thankfully the guys from JAS Honda in Italy sent us over a guy to give us a hand with the car for the first weekend, which was good. Any test mileage before the season? “None!” Yet Smiley claimed pole position and a race victory first time out at Oulton Park. Now he was armed with the ex-Nestor Girolami weapon that had been a race winner in the World Touring Car Cup. “This was looking on the up, and the cars looked good, and Honda offered us a deal to have the car.” “At that point of the year there’s no licences, all the deals are done – you can’t make a deal out of thin air,” continues Smiley. Taylor’s BTCC plans had also hit the buffers. That left us with no choice but to look for other things.” It was almost at the start of the season. After that, “I had the deal done to be in the third Speedworks Toyota last year, but Toyota canned the third car. Smiley looked good to stay with Excelr, but it fell through (“I have to be careful what I say on that one…”). But he was still closely associated with the Taylor family, with Ben moving to the Suffolk squad to engineer him in 2021. That year, and 2021, Smiley had surfaced at Excelr8 Motorsport, which at his time of joining was trying to establish a foothold in the BTCC with its new Hyundai i30 N Fastback machinery. Ultimately he won my first race – that’s something you never forget.”īefore the 2019 season, BTC announced that Dudman had bought a 50% stake in the team, and he had outright ownership by the time Taylor walked at the end of 2020. They’re both about the same age, they’re both doing the same thing, so of course he fitted in our family. The problem was, Norlin had been sold and, says Taylor, that was “just such a shame that it happened for Chris because I do believe that if we’d carried on then we would have won again”.ĭuring this time, Smiley was being engineered by Taylor’s son Ben: “Chris lived at our house for the three years – I’d pick him up from or take him to the airport or the station, wherever he was going, so he was more of a son really. That year, Smiley took his only BTCC win to date in a reversed-grid race at Rockingham, but across that season and the following term, when the FK8 Civic replaced the old FK2 model, he proved capable of showing genuine speed at several events. The team ran Smiley and Dave Newsham in Chevrolet Cruze machinery in 2017, before switching to the Honda Civic Type R in 2018. Smiley took his only BTCC win aboard battered Honda Civic at Rockingham in 2018 “I think it was the last Clio round at Brands Hatch that he said, ‘We’re doing it with Norlin’, and Monday morning there was £550,000 put in my bank account to start a team up,” recounts Taylor. Luckily, Smiley had the budget from property developer Norlin, a company owned by a relative.
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