Falcon and Commodore no more — when racing cars aren’t the cars people buy

The decision made by the Holden in Australia this week to focus on “utes” (utility vehicles) and SUVs (sports utility vehicles, also known as crossovers) has set the wheels in motion to cause an end one of the most famous racing feuds in motorsport — the long war between the Ford Falcon and the Holden Commodore in Australia.

In fact, Ford had already ducked out when they switched from the Falcon to the Mustang this season, romping to championship success with the car.

The reason for that change was that Ford had ceased production of the Falcon, their large saloon car, and had aligned with Ford’s general principle of promoting the Mustang as its premier performance road vehicle from this year.

Holden had chosen another path, and had attempted to keep the Commodore tag alive, but with the group no longer building its own cars (both Ford and Holden ceased all Australian production two years ago), the GM-brand imprinted the name on the imported Opel Insignia, which is a smaller saloon model produced for the European market, but was already exported to the American as the Buick Regal, and now to Australia as the new Holden ZB Commodore.

Holden is struggling at home. The GM brand has slipped from the third most popular car maker in Australia just five years ago, to the ninth as of this year — with Toyota, Mazda and Hyundai now fixed in place as the top three — with Toyota commanding an incredible 20% of the market share of new vehicle sales.

The Australian love of the high-powered saloon hasn’t gone away, but the Insignia-based ZB Commodore isn’t that, with its front-wheel drive and its 2.0 litre engine (unless you go for the automatic 3.6 litre option), its fans have gone elsewhere. The ZB Commodore is there nowhere to be seen on Australia’s roads — with just 309 sold last month (November 2019), while the Supercar version is more in-line with the general public expectation of a Commodore, with its 5.0-litre V8 engine and rear-wheel drive, due to the series’ spec formula.

While the large saloon can still be seen in Australia — whether you count the German premium brands, or the popular models from Toyota (Camry), Mazda (Mazda6) and Hyundai (Sonata), it’s still a declining type of car — as the SUV buzz has gripped the country, along with the tendency to downsize, which has also been the case across Europe for a number of years.

The Hyundai i30 is actually now the most popular hatchback/small sedan-sized car in the Australia, closely followed by the Mazda3, and the Toyota Corolla.

It’s this market where TCR plays, and so right now, it’s the grid of the TCR Australia Touring Car Series which more accurately represents the models which are most popular in the region.

This in part demonstrates why there’s already been strong national dealer interest in the series — perhaps the strongest interest of any national TCR series to date, with Renault, Hyundai and Honda all having been quick to jump onboard, and it’ll be surprising if Mazda didn’t quickly join the fun on the back of the new Mazda Motorsports USA-developed Mazda3 TCR coming in next year.

This is all a good sign for Australia, and shows touring cars working well for manufacturers that align their motorsport programmes with their road sales success — but that also highlights a potential problem in the TCR homeland of Europe — and that’s that while Australia is shifting to Corolla-sized cars, Europe is already moving away from those.

Likewise, the SUV-craze is all the rage in Europe — but SUVs make for terrible racing cars — they’re too high off the ground and have way too much body roll — they’re poor base cars for race cars; unless the object of the race is to carry as much shopping around the track as possible, and have a lovely amount of headroom in the back seats for a guest rider.

Side note: About 15 years ago, BBC’s Top Gear already demonstrated how a race would look using the previous motoring craze, the “MPV” (multi-person vehicle), using the Renault Espace, and a host of BTCC drivers including Tim Harvey, Matt Neal, Anthony Reid, Rob Huff, and Tom Chilton. Worth a re-watch if you’ve forgotten it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJDIeeSdAE

Europe is pushing towards even smaller cars — such as Ford Fiesta, Toyota Yaris, and Hyundai i20-sized cars, which again, aren’t great bases for race cars due to their high drag, small two-box shapes, but are better than SUVs. Though very rarely would you find a racy 2.0-litre turbocharged engine squeezed into one.

When TCR was launched, the SEAT León Cup Racer (based on the SEAT León Cupra) and the Honda Civic TCR (based on the Honda Civic Type R), were the target models for the series, but these performance models themselves are a niche — not every manufacturer is selling cars in this arena, especially as the push for greener vehicles continues.

While Nissan has touring car-ready shaped vehicles in Asia and America with the Sentra and Altima, in Europe, its Pulsar model never really took off, and its go-to family car is the popular Qashqai crossover — again, one for shopping, not for racing.

Just as sports cars are racing specialist models for the discerning motoring enthusiast, the small saloon/hatchback market itself is becoming a specialist market — so will the touring car model have to adapt to what the motor manufacturers want to sell en masse?

If it does, soon it won’t be nostalgia for when touring cars used full-size road cars like the Accord, Laguna, Sierra and Audi A4s — but “bring back the Civic” — so, will the next generation of touring cars be fighting Fiestas? Or colliding Qashqais?