Where have all the good touring car games gone?

I recently spent the weekend at Goodwood’s secret best event. Far from the enormous crowds and lengthy toilet queues of the Festival of Speed and the faintly silly fancy dress party that is the Revival, the Goodwood Member’s Meeting is the best place on the planet to watch historic racing cars absolutely thrashed around a circuit.

This year I was treated to on-track hustle from professional pedallers including 2009 F1 world champion Jenson Button, ‘Mr Le Mans’ Tom Kristensen and Indy 500 winner Dario Franchitti.

Having decided that in addition to appealing to old duffers, they should cater to marginally younger duffers as well, the highlight of this 83rd Member’s Meeting was a brace of 1990s touring cars, most of them from the British Touring Car Championship, driven by the biggest names in the discipline.

Naturally the format for these precious museum pieces was a fast lap ‘shootout’ rather than a doorhandle banging, wing mirror endangering race; unfortunately whoever organised the event had clearly never met a touring car driver before.

As someone raised on the TOCA Touring Car games on the original PlayStation, seeing these cars in action again I was instantly transported back to the class’s inarguable golden era. ‘Super Touring’ was a technological arms race with runaway costs that resulted in bizarre situations like the Williams Grand Prix team building a Renault Laguna positively stuffed with contemporary F1 technology.

Like all these golden eras of motorsport, it ended when budgets got so out of hand that board members lost their sense of humour about it all, but for a while the BTCC drew staggering crowds and produced some of the greatest racing ever committed to Sunday Grandstand.

For ages, fans begged for another BTCC game after the championship’s final appearance in TOCA Race Driver in 2002, but disagreements between series organiser TOCA and developer Codemasters means there hasn’t been an official BTCC game for over a quarter of a century.

We got a handful of BTCC cars in simulator rFactor 2 in 2022, but without all the circuits it was far from the full game that was initially promised. These days I tend to get my fix from the excellent selection of ’90s Super Tourers that were added to RaceRoom Racing Experience in late 2024.

I did wonder if the drought was because the BTCC simply isn’t as good as it used to be, but then I caught up with coverage from the first event of 2026, which occurred while I was busy getting dewy eyed at Goodwood, and the racing was absolutely phenomenal. The sort of racing that makes me wonder why I spend two hours every other Sunday thinking about F1 hybrid deployment.

Now I’m inclined to believe the BTCC’s waning popularity is because as a nation we’ve become hopelessly addicted to SUVs and crossovers, and the humble front-wheel drive hatchback isn’t as relevant as it used to be. Bring back Touring Cars and bring back Touring Car games...