TOCA Touring Car Championship

Sometimes the map I’m using for this journey means reaching driving routes through history in the wrong order, at least in chronological release terms. Colin McRae Rally set the pace for Codemasters, but it was on a road they had already taken. The previous year, they released TOCA Touring Car Championship which had the same engine, but a different chassis, so to speak. In 1998 TOCA had gone budget and, perhaps coupled with slipstreaming its successor, it was enough to reach the top spot. 

Together with its common elements from Colin McRae Rally, it has much of the same strengths of nicely balanced handling and graphics, but applied to a different sport. The British touring car championship of the title is one based on souped up road cars racing around British circuits. This was again something that I watched on TV at around this time and not since, and more of my memories of touring cars come from the game series. To this day, if I see the tail light shapes of a Ford Mondeo it’s TOCA which comes to mind.

The game has 16 cars racing at once, and incurring damage when they hit each other, two things it still had over Gran Turismo even after that had added so much to the souped-up-road-car genre by the time TOCA ascended to the top. TOCA’s cars have an accessible but weighty feel to them (stopping them always feels like the brute process it is) and that extends to the on-track clashes with rivals that Colin McRae Rally didn’t have. The way that the player gets given a huge straight line speed advantage is clumsy, but getting into scraps with several other cars at once is fun and there’s even a set of penalties for dangerous driving to rein your tactics in away from the torpedo approach. There’s sadly no Nicky Grist giving directions of course, although you do get earlier Top Gear presenter Tiff Needell making comments between races and needlessly assuming that the player is male.

The only reason that TOCA didn’t live as long as Colin McRae Rally for me as an obsession at the time was because its superior sequel came out sooner. I loved both a lot. But returning to them, of the two there was only one I wanted to keep right on playing, and it wasn’t TOCA. A large part of that is that it requires a time commitment which is that much more of a challenge in my life now. Each championship round takes two races on the same track of six laps, which is a lot more than Colin McRae’s bite-sized pairs of stages. It doesn’t help that Donington Park is the first round, which is a long and challenging track, and probably wouldn’t have been the choice if it wasn’t dictated by the real sport’s calendar.

That is further exacerbated by all but two tracks being locked until you complete some championship rounds. Back when I had the time to spare, that was a nice reward system that made fighting it out for the tough points requirements all the more thrilling. Now it feels rather old-fashioned and harsh, and I reach for the cheat to open them up. Two results come of this. 

First, I get to experience other tracks and confirm my memories that their careful recreations really do make for an excellent range of experiences, at least as effective as the fictional tracks of Gran Turismo. In particular, the steep downhill first corner of Brands Hatch is exactly the terrifying release that I remember it as. It’s a track I knew from living near-ish to it and also from games going past Speed King all the way back to Pitstop II, but here it was brought to life in a new way. That brings back some more of what I loved, even if the full championship is too much.

Second, I get reminded that Codemasters included cheats to let you drive a tank, or on a track built out of volcanic rock surrounded by lava, or under a colour-changing disco sky which makes it impossible to pay any attention to where you’re going, plus many more besides. Truly, this era was a golden age for racing games with ridiculous mods built in by the developers themselves. There are plenty of them in Colin McRae Rally too. I was just already enjoying it so much I didn’t get to investigating them.