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Rotek Racing outlines its BTCC programme

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Rotek Racing has outlined its entry into this year’s British Touring Car Championship, with backing from Oakley Motorsports and Audi Customer Racing, with American Robb Holland as the team’s driver.

The Sonoma-based operation, which functions out of workshops in Germany and the UK with its VLN and BTCC programmes, will field a new Next Generation Touring Car specification Audi S3 saloon in this year’s Championship, the second team to field cars based on Audi models after Rob Austin Racing, which has competed with a pair of rear-wheel drive A4s since 2011.

Holland, who raced for Tony Gilham Racing in two rounds of the 2012 BTCC in the team’s Super 2000-specification Honda Civic, for bamboo-engineering in that year at Sonoma Raceway in the FIA World Touring Car Championship, and then back in the BTCC for one race last year at Snetterton in one of Gilham’s Vauxhall Insignias, steps up to a full-time campaign for the first time since racing in the US-based Pirelli World Challenge series.

“Being the first American full-time entry in the BTCC is a huge achievement for both myself and Rotek Racing,” said Holland. “This is the culmination of several years of hard work and, because the BTCC is what got me into racing in the first place, joining as a full-time entrant is definitely a dream come true.

“The BTCC rounds I’ve contested to this point were all done with the view of understanding what the series is about and what it will take for us to be successful in it. We still have a huge amount of hard work to do to make the grid at Brands Hatch and 2014 will definitely be a learning year.”

Holland added: “Trying to build a new car and develop it with very little testing is a tall ask for anyone and there are still many tracks for me to learn. That being said, I’m really looking forward to running the Audi S3 saloon. I think it will be a good fit – from a marketing perspective it’s great to be running the S3 at this time. Audi has just launched the car and, as the first of the new generation S3s to race anywhere in the world, I’m really hoping that it will attract a lot of attention from Audi fans across the globe.”