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Originally Posted by chunterer
From memory, the Snobeck prepared cars were the most competitive 190's in ETC in both 85 and 86? Danny and Alain got their car up amongst the Rovers, Volvos and Sierras on a few occassions in 1986.
But as has been said the M3's arrival took the wind out of Merc's sails a bit, although i'm sure that if they had wanted to take BMW on in Europe as they latterly did in DTM they could've tweaked it a bit. i guess marketing led them to concentrate on the home series.
Still Stuttgart must've been pretty impressed with the French squad to hand them a prep deal for DTM in the late 80's early 90's!
Shame we never got to see a privateer version in BTCC in mid 80's, a well run and driven car could quite easily have won the title outright.
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I wonder what might have happened if the ETCC had carried on after 1988, bearing in mind the development work Merc did on the car for the DTM. I guess their growing involvement in the Sauber Group C programme took precedence in term.s of international racing involvement, although I'd have thought an uprated 190 could have sold a fair few customer cars.
Snobeck were always a good outfit- they went on to run Opel's French Supertouring programmes in the 90's didnt they?
Yes, a well-run Merc in the hands of a good driver could have made hay in Class B in 1985/6- going on the comparitive form in Europe it would have murdered the Alfas, although Graham Goode's Bluebird and the Richard Longman RS Turbo might have been stiffer opposition, as they could both get amongst the big cars on occasion- neither had a great record for reliability though...
I remember Longman taking the Escort to the 85 TT and putting it inside the top 10 in qualifying, and splitting the Linder BMW 325s at the front of the class, outqualifying all the Mercs in '86, although Snobeck were absent on both occasions. The 325 is another car that would have been a certain class winner in the BTCC if anyone had ever brought one over. The class B battles in 85/6 could have been truly spectacular with a good Merc and 325 in the mix, although the arrival of the Prodrive/Sytner M3 would have put paid to that in mid-87...
The only Merc BTCC appearances I can think of were from the prodsaloon cars of Martin Carroll and Roger Eccles- Eccles' silver Swinford Motors car even did the TT in '86.
Was there ever any suggestion of one of them stepping up to the BTCC? I was looking through some old Autosports a couple of months back, and I thought I saw a mention of one of them (Carroll?) possibly upgrading his car to Group A...