The TCR category: New base for global touring car racing

TCR stands for “Touring Car Racing.” The series founded by the Italian Marcello Lotti is rapidly evolving into a new base for touring car racing around the globe.

The nineties were the heyday of the Super Touring Cars (STW), which Audi Sport dominated with the Audi A4 quattro for some time, and with which the brand clinched seven championship titles around the world in 1996 alone. The successor category, S2000, was successful for many years as well and provided the basis for the FIA to sanction a World Touring Car Championship (WTCC). The development of this series, however, increasingly headed in the direction of costly factory-backed racing so that all of a sudden a standard global touring car platform ceased to exist.

This was precisely what prompted Marcello Lotti to take action. The former WTCC promoter transferred the successful GT3 concept to touring car racing and founded the TC3 (Touring Car 3) from which the new TCR (Touring Car Racing) class emerged in 2015. That only two years later an amazing number of 180 races per year are held with TCR cars and more than ten racing series exist for TCR cars underlines the worldwide demand for such a class.

“Our goal was to create a base again for touring car racing,” says Marcello Lotti. “The crucial part about it was to keep the costs for the cars low and to ensure equality of opportunity. We’re achieving this with a balance of performance rule. We’re convinced that more and more manufacturers are going to include the TCR category in their customer sport programs, and that the TCR will provide teams and drivers with an opportunity to get started in touring car racing.”

The TCR organization itself runs an international TCR series with some of its races held as part of Formula 1 supporting programs. However, the TCR mainly focuses on continually increasing the number of national series, such as the ADAC TCR Germany or the Italian Touring Car Championship in which Audi caused a sensation in the nineties with the Audi A4 quattro and drivers like Dindo Capello and Emanuele Pirro. Endurance races like the 24 Hours of Nürburgring permit TCR vehicle entries as well.