Ian Harrison: “No diesel for Vauxhall”

Vauxhall team boss Ian Harrison is not pleased with the current diesel development in the British Touring Car Championship.
“The diesel car has made it a completely different game. With all the other cars we have competed against, the only difference has been whether it is front or rear wheel drive,” said Harrison to Crash.net.

“They are all petrol engines with the same horsepower and perform the same, and you can see that on the grid as it is so tight with the petrol cars. It shows things are pretty right in terms of the regulations and the equivalency that is written into them.”

SEAT entered the diesel version of the Léon for this season. Vauxhall-man Fabrizio Giovanardi leads the championship ahead of SEAT-man Jason Plato. But Harrison suspects that things will be different for the future in BTCC.

“What we don’t want is a situation where there are two cars with three-tenths of a second advantage over everyone else and the rest from third to 17th then covered by a second, which is almost what we have now. We have to be very careful as the punters turn up to watch the BTCC because it is close and tight. What they don’t want is to see a Formula One display from someone with a good car and a different type of car who can drive off into the distance. It isn’t what
the fans want.”

The discussion has been up at Vauxhall if they should develop a diesel engine. But the development cost would be too high according to Harrison.

“We have been looking at next year’s car for the last two months, and we have a programme that will start the week after Brands Hatch for next year. It is a bit of an issue as we are running out of things to modify to make our car better as year on year you make improvements, but as for making the big jump we need to make, I’m not sure we can to be honest. It will be a challenge, but I honestly don’t know if it is doable, I really don’t.

“We have looked at the diesel route and frankly for Vauxhall, it isn’t affordable. Vauxhall do very well in the passenger car market because they are careful about how they spend their money and they run their business very tight. It shows because they do well and are profitable. They can’t just start to throw a million pounds at a diesel programme when there should be an equivalency mechanism in the championship which allows everyone to compete against each other whether you are running diesel, petrol, gas or whatever.

“You shouldn’t have to go and spend millions of pounds just to compete, it shouldn’t be like that.”

Read the full interview at Crash.net here.