Canadian Touring Car Championship (CTCC): 2008-2021
Launched in 2008, the Canadian Touring Car Championship was at the top level of national motorsport in Canada for over a decade. While in some regards it resembled more of a club championship, it was run to a fairly professional standard and enjoyed very healthy grids for much of its run.
Primarily, the championship featured two classes: Touring and Super Touring (not to be confused with the ruleset from the 1990s of the same name). The touring class consisted of lightly tweaked road cars, with limited modifications beyond the necessities to prepare the cars for track use. Primarily the cars in this class were hatchbacks and lower-end performance cars: JCW Minis and Honda Civic Sis in particular.
Super Touring allowed more freedom to extract performance, as well as a naturally wider variety of cars. These cars generally had basic aerodynamic parts fitted, maybe a splitter and a rear wing, and visually looked like proper touring cars on the most part. A variety of cars enjoyed success in this class, from Subaru Imprezas to the Pontiac Solstice.
Eventually another class was added, known as B-Spec, which featured small low-performance hatchbacks. These cars had around 100hp and very limited modifications, but were quite a charming addition to the field. Unfortunately though competitor interest was limited, so the class didn’t last very long.
However the next classes added exposed one of the championship’s flaws; its inability to properly define a touring car. The Super Touring class may have seen some slightly questionable inclusions - indeed, the Solstice is something of an edge case - but the Grand Touring classes were another story entirely.
The first to be introduced was simply called Grand Touring, later Grand Touring Sport, which initially remained roughly within the realms of touring car racing. M3s and Mustangs were fair enough, although the Porsche 911 that popped up was pushing it. Then there was a GT4-spec Porsche Cayman, which was really starting to take the proverbial. However the point where the series stumbled into a real problem was when a Ferrari 458 Challenge was permitted to compete, and absolutely annihilated the rest of the class on its limited outings.
There is absolutely no way of justifying this car’s inclusion in a touring car championship, and this frustration was seemingly felt among competitors. From this point on the series increasingly began to struggle for entry numbers, all while switching focus from the original classes, which were very amateur-friendly, to much more expensive machinery.
A positive step came with the formal inclusion of a TCR class in 2019, however the damage had been done at this point. This eventually culminated in a messy falling out in 2021, ignited by the formation of the Sports Car Championship Canada as well as the loss of the CTCC’s TCR deal to this new rival.
The Canadian Touring Car Championship went on hiatus after the first round of the 2021 season, and it’s hard to see the series returning at present. It was an unfortunate end to what was, at its peak, a thoroughly interesting national touring car series.
Note: While all classes are included in the results for each season for the sake of completion, the Grand Touring classes are ignored when it comes to stats. While many of the cars in these classes were touring cars, it would be slightly ridiculous to include a bunch of GT4 cars, Ferrari Challenge, and Porsche Carrera Cup cars in this site’s stats.