BTCC Season 2025 – Donington Park round 1 preview
Hello everybody and welcome to the start of the 2025 BTCC season this weekend, here at Donington Park in the East Midlands. So far we have had 3 outings in the cars in official practice and the best word to describe them has been changeable! The weather has been “changeable” at all 3 tests, the track conditions have been “changeable” and that has led to Aiden and Charles’s experiences and the engineering data to be….. ok, you guessed it, “changeable”.
Looking at the latest forecasts, it is hopefully going to be a dry and warming up on race day at Donington this weekend. The current thought is for it to be cool early on Saturday morning leaving a largely dry day with sunshine and reaching about 12 degrees. For race day, it is looking like a dry start, but much warmer as the day goes on reaching 18 or 19 degrees.. We’ll just have to wait and see, but with our 2 outstanding drivers we are hopeful of good things!
The 30-round season takes place over ten weekends and sees the championship visit eight of the most iconic venues in British motorsport. Donington Park, Brands Hatch, Snetterton, Oulton Park, Thruxton, Croft, Knockhill and Silverstone. It is Thruxton, with its high-speed and relentless layout that poses perhaps the ultimate BTCC challenge.
The calendar starts with Donington Park across this weekend and then rolls on at two-week intervals with meetings at Brands Hatch’s Indy layout (10th & 11th May), Snetterton (24th & 25th May), Thruxton (7th & 8th June) and Oulton Park (21nd & 22rd June). Following the traditional summer break, the series will resume at Croft (2nd & 3rd )of August, Knockhill ( 16th & 17th August), Donington Park’s Grand Prix (16th & 17th August), Silverstone (20th & 21st September) before the Brands Hatch Grand Prix layout hosts the season finale on the 4th & 5th October.
All but two weekends this season will feature a mix of tyre compounds to spice up the action. Tyre regulations mean the driver who wins the first race must choose the hardest compound available for the following race. This will force teams to play the weekends strategically on tyre usage, and opens the door for a wide variety of race results. Thruxton, of course, is excluded as the high speed nature of the circuit means it has own singujlar tyre compound!
This weekend’s race day action will feature on the home of the BTCC, ITV4, from 1100 on Sunday (27 April) while the ITV YouTube page will host qualifying on Saturday (2 April) from 1515.
Worldwide, every race day will feature live on the BTCC YouTube account and in North America on the RACER network.