Ian Gallagher: “In short, touring car racing is brilliant.”

As someone who grew up in the 90s, touring car racing to me was always BBC Grandstand, Murray Walker’s commentary, dramatic in-car cameras and the likes of Alain Menu, Gabriele Tarquini, Rickard Rydell and John Cleland duking it out around the provincial tracks of the UK. In short, it was brilliant.

We may not have known it at the time, but that was the BTCC at its peak. We effectively had a bona fide world championship on our shores many years before the WTCC was reborn, with the best tin top drivers in the world being paid big bucks by big manufacturers to race here.

My only interest in Formula One was supporting Damon Hill at the time, but everything about touring cars grabbed me straight away. I was lucky enough to go to a few Super Touring-era races and witness the scale of those meetings. I went home with dozens of signed posters, models of the cars and an interesting collection of freebies, as the team’s huge awnings dished out everything from coffee to mouthwash!

The crowds were massive, everyone had their favourite drivers and both the cars and the racing were spectacular. Perhaps only with the passing of time can we appreciate just how good that era was – especially when we got to see all those glorious cars once again at Oulton Park last year.

But as series boss Alan Gow always says, if you keep looking back you get a sore neck, and we’re lucky to have a fantastic championship to watch in 2015. It’s different to the 90s, but no less entertaining, and the standard is going up every year. We’ve got some great young drivers challenging the establishment, and the big name drivers who’ve returned to the BTCC in recent years have found it far from easy. There are many reasons to be optimistic about the future of the BTCC.

As for TouringCarTimes, I’m in my third season writing for the site now and it’s still an absolute privilege to write about a sport I’ve loved for so long. I’d spent many years in newspapers before I spotted a tweet from Neil saying the site was looking for a new BTCC reporter, and it just goes to show there’s never a bad time to take on a new challenge no matter how long you’ve been doing something.

I’ve spent dozens of BTCC meetings on the other side of the fence, watching the races trackside and like many fans, kept an eye on TouringCarTimes to get underneath the skin of what’s happening at the track. And that’s not really changed – I might be providing the BTCC content myself, but TCT is still the first place I’ll look for my WTCC or V8 Supercars fix.

It’s great writing for a site where there’s no party line – we’ve got no publishers or promoters to keep happy, so we can tell you exactly how it is from trackside every weekend. And long may that continue – here’s to the next 20 years for TcT!