In 2023:
TOURING CAR MAGAZINE MOVED OVER 3,000 COPIES PER ISSUE
OVER 18,000 INDIVIDUAL READERS HIT THE MOTOR RACING UK WEBSITE
YOUTUBE REBRANDING HIT 49,000 VIEWS AND 966% SUBSCRIPTION GROWTH IN LAST 6 MONTHS OF YEAR
We’re not usually ones to get the swinger out and shout about our successes, but as the 2024 Touring Car season is preparing to get under way we thought we’d share some of our hits (and the misses!!) about where Touring Car Magazine has positioned itself over the back half of 2023, and where we’re going in 2024.
In the middle of the 2023 season we made the decision to rebrand Motor Racing UK after being in print for almost five years – it wasn’t a universally popular decision, but to better represent where the magazine had organically grown towards, it was necessary.
While MRUK had become renowned for covering club racing, GT racing and British racers competing internationally, the Touring Car content (both BTCC and TCR UK) had become the focal point for the majority of our readers, and after having ‘earned our spurs’ we felt it was time to refocus and hone in on an area that we love – and that our audience loves to read about.
Motor Racing UK always saw a boost in sales if a Touring Car was on the cover, or if a racer from that sector of motor racing was a feature interview, so the natural step was to rebrand the magazine and dip our toes into the water exclusively for the second half of the season – and it worked.
After a predicted initial drop in sales due to our club racing audience choosing to go other places for their coverage the mag began a steep climb as four issues filled out the end of the season, and more is to come.
With a yet to be announced TCR UK racer and a BTCC racer providing columns the mag is truly rooting itself in the tin top world. And with additional coverage of TOCA and TCR UK support packages and Tin Tops from around the world, Touring Car Magazine aims to become the ‘go to’ print product for Touring Car fans, but it isn’t just print where the growth is found.
While the Motor Racing UK website went quiet towards the end of the season as we bedded in the magazine it still managed to grab 18,000 unique visitors to read an average of 4.6 stories each across 2023. Touring Car coverage took centre stage with the most popular article being this feature about the new track limits rules being introduced into the BTCC:
Over the first six weeks of 2024 the website has been visited by 3,300 readers already with that growth set to continue with plans to utilise the website much more in 2024.
Over 75% of the website engagement came via links from Touring Car fan groups on Facebook with over 16,000 of the readers in 2023 being UK based.
The Touring Car Magazine moniker was also used to rebrand the Motor Racing UK social media pages. The Instagram, Twitter and Facebook followings are the ‘miss’ with only around 3,000 followers combined. But the big surprise was the Touring Car magazine branded YouTube channel.
A concerted effort to provide some lighter hearted coverage of Touring Car racing and Motorsport Photography saw the channel grow by 966% from a handful of followers in the second half of the year. Almost 50,000 views of the content created came in the six months through December (after amassing 4,000 views across the preceding four years.
The most popular video, with over 8,000 views, was from a series of postcard videos from each event we covered in 2023 – that edition being the BTCC round at Croft. Other videos including onboard rides, POV photography, shorts, vlogs and mini documentaries (including one about the history of Ukrainian Touring Cars) have become the foundation for a series of soon to be revealed projects in 2024.
Naturally 2024 isn’t just about growing the YouTube channel or social reach, the primary focus for this coming season is to dedicate unrivalled coverage of Touring Car racing in the UK. The magazine (in both Motor Racing UK and TC Mag forms) is built upon long form journalism, with in depth interviews and curated opinions and knowledge offered to inform (and at times entertain) readers without the rush and pressure of digital immediacy.
The magazine strives to remain independent, and to move forward without outside or undue influences, which is an integral motivation behind the print product and its digital offspring.
To quote a giant of investigative journalism, Carl Bernstein: “The pressure to compete, the fear somebody else will make the splash first, creates a frenzied environment in which a blizzard of information is presented and serious questions may not be raised.”
It’s year six for this magazine, and we’ve reached that point where it’s time to ‘Go Big, or Go Home.’ But we ain’t gonna rush just to be first. We’ll be asking those questions because you do it properly, or not at all.
motorracinguk.com 