Steve Soper on Joachim Winkelhock: My greatest rival

I’m going back to 1993, and it’s one that got away – my great rival Joachim Winkelhock beating me to the British Touring Car Championship. It still hurts. I was supposed to win. The BMW bosses said, ‘It’s your home championship, we’ll give you everything you need to win,’ but Joachim won five races and I won three.

“We were team-mates at the Schnitzer team, running the BMW 318i, and he beat me fair and square. If it had been in Germany I would probably have been asked to hold back, but that wasn’t the case in Britain.

I had a good relationship with Schnitzer, but Joachim had a great relationship with them: he was German, they were German, and deep down I think they were rooting for him. Nothing was held back from me though. I won two races early on, and then he gave some stunning performances. Being the British championship I’d go home after races whereas he’d stay with the team, eat with them, drink with them – he was very much one of the boys but I really don’t think anything went on behind my back.

“I got equal, however, when we went to Macau in 1997. I’d won races there but never taken outright victory in both races over the whole weekend. This was with the Bigazzi BMW team and Joachim was going to be my team-mate so I knew it would be a tricky weekend. He was very good round there.

“I put it on pole, won both races, and I’d never seen Mr Winkelhock so rattled. He was never one for spending time looking at data but in Macau he spent hours comparing my data with his. There’s a really quick corner between the two main straights in Macau and I was 7 or 8mph faster through there and he just couldn’t work out how

I was doing that. I think I’d improved my driving after racing a McLaren in the GT series and I just got more out of the BMW than he managed to do.

“On his day he was unbeatable but he didn’t have 365 of those days a year. I mean when we were doing DTM he was very fast but he was prone to having an off-day and he’d crash. He was one of those drivers who needed a team to be right behind him, like at Schnitzer, to give him the confidence to find those last few tenths.

“We weren’t good friends, but there was mutual respect, and we never got into a situation where we were driving into each other to win a corner, or win a race. He put some good moves on me, I put some good moves on him, and they were fair.

“Joachim was a great rival. I had to get everything right to beat him, and he was on top form in that 1993 British Touring Car season, so to be fair to him he did a great job. But yeah, it still hurts that he beat me on home ground.”

Steve Soper and Joachim Winkelhock head-to-head

Figures taken from the 1993 British Touring Car Championship