Fabio Fabiani, 2011 Jay-Ten Trophy Champion?

Proteam Racing driver Fabio Fabiani presently looks destined to spend the final 16 races of the 2011 World Touring Car Championship on the podium, and surely can’t be stopped from being the WTCC’s newest trophy’s winner?

Last year, the WTCC found itself in a predicament heading to the opening race of the season in Brazil. Despite SEAT’s withdrawal, their satellite SUNRED squad were set to appear with six turbo-diesel powered SEAT Leóns, as well as one car for the new independent WTCC team Zengö Motorsport for Norbert Michelisz. The WTCC decided not to allow the highly competitive ‘works’ status León TDIs to compete in the independents’ trophy, instead creating a new Rookie Challenge category for 2010.

For 2011, we’ve seen the opposite happen. With the majority of the independent teams now upgrading to the 1.6 litre turbo packages on offer by BMW and Chevrolet, the WTCC instead created a category to allow those cars still conforming to the older pre-2011 regulations to compete.

So the Jay-Ten Trophy was created, slightly oddly named, it refers to the technical specification of the eligible cars, being those that conform to the 2010 version of Article 263 and 263D, Appendix J(so, J-10).

Going into the opening round of the season at Curitiba, three teams were entering cars which were eligible to compete in Jay-Ten. Bamboo Engineering had their two Chevrolet Lacettis, SUNRED Engineering with the four Leóns for Fredy Barth, Michel Nykjaer, Pepe Oriola & Aleksei Dudukalo (Tarquini and Monteiro are exempt under the same reasons that exclude them from the independents’ trophy) – and the Proteam Racing BMW 320si of Fabio Fabiani, the only normally aspirated BMW in the championship.

After one race, the number of competitors reduced by two, with Bamboo Engineering switching to their new Chevrolet Cruze 1.6 turbos, leaving SUNRED vs. Fabiani. With SUNRED now targeting introducing their Lehmann developed 1.6 turbo for all six of their drivers from the Hungaroring race in June, it seems likely that by round four of the season, the only driver eligible to compete in the Jay-Ten Trophy category will be Proteam’s Fabio Fabiani.

So, with no competition in the category for the final two-thirds of the season, the Italian driver will overtake current points leader Pepe Oriola in short order, and will share the podium at the end of every race with the top three finishers and the Yokohama Independents’ Trophy victor. The Italian will also bag about 22,500 Euro in prize money (as long he finishes every race), whilst the remainder of the Jay-Ten prize pot for second and third place finishers will be unused unless other cars enter, but the small size of the prize money in comparison to the Yokohama Independents’ Trophy goes nowhere in regards to covering costs for any entrant.

It’s a bizarre situation, but it does show that the take-up of the new engine format has been more successful than perhaps even the WTCC organisers anticipated. By the end or even middle of 2011, it’s likely that 20 cars will have switched to the new 1.6 litre turbo engine, starting from a blank slate for this year, though all at varied stages of development.

So congratulations in advance to Fabio Fabiani, the 2011 Jay-Ten Trophy champion. I say this now as there’s a fair chance this will get a rethink quite soon. Most certainly well done to the WTCC teams for embracing the new engine regulations so quickly. With all of the competitors running the same engine package by mid-year, the season will only get closer and make it a harder fight for Chevrolet, even if they have a good head start.