2020 Touring Car Championship season

The **2020 IVRC Touring Car Championship season** was the 4th IVRC TCC season. While Marc Stwerka, Repsol Swinegel Racing and Cupra were able to defend their respective championships, Peter Jones had a breakthrough year to finish runner-up in overall and become the next rookies' cup winner.

Just as confirmed on Dec 2nd 2019, the season and race format goes back to the 2018 edition of the TCC, abandoning the idea of two half-year seasons.

## Teams and Drivers

### Driver changes

* Jon McDonald left the Swinegel Racing at the end of 2019 to start his own team, racing a Hyundai i30 TCR. However, as technical difficulties prohibited him from participating, he was picked up by Siestin Autosports at round 2 of the championship.

### Team changes

* Tevez Sim Racing Team joined a partnership with Shadow Racing and Swinegel Racing to form Swinegel Racings junior team for 2020.
* 20:12 Motorsport was a new team introduced before Round 5 at Spa, hiring newcomer Callum Gunn.

### Mid-season changes

* As Oscar Evers-Jahnsen recieved a one-year ban from competing at IVRC on April 20th 2020, Joe Gausditis was promoted to FRA simracings main team after round 3.
* Similarly, Unai Aguado and Jonathan Holohan changed cars to the Opel Astra TCR and CUPRA León TCR respectievly after round 3.

## Changes

### Sporting regulations

After the experimental two-season year in 2019, IVRC decided for 2020 to go back to the full-year format that was used in the inaugural TCC season in 2018. Also, the number of races per event were reduced to two again, while race distances were raised from 15 to 20 minutes each. This doesn't count for the Nürburgring round however, as the rounds endurance format of 2019-2 will be kept for upcoming TCC seasons, meaning the sixth round will see only one race with a distance of approximately one hour and 10 minutes.

The weight penalty system, introduced in 2019-1, was heavily revised for 2020: instead of penalizing the best drivers of the previous event, it's now rather sanctioning the five best-placed drivers of the drivers' championship, aswell as the rookies' cup leader. This was introduced to bring the championship standings closer together, instead of bringing the field on track closer together. Also, the amount of success ballast was increased.

The most drastic change however was the introduction of a drivers-per-team limit, setting a maximum of four drivers per team per event. This, plus banning all mid-season driver switches, was introduced as reaction to the numerous huge teams in 2019-2, which stacked their amount of drivers so far up that some of them even put their drivers into other teams. However, with the new rules enforced in 2020, the league administration wants to make sure that drivers look outside their regular teams for new possibilities.
The amount of four per team was chosen on the fact that each team can still bring enough drivers to each event to score points towards the teams' championship (where only the two best results of a team each race count towards it), in case they need a replacement for their regular top scorers.

While it was usual in TCC to run a reverse grid of race two, it's now changed from only the top eight of race one to all classified finishers of the first race reversed for the grid.

### Technical regulations

As a compensation for the possibility of losing all VAG manufacturers, the league administration worked hard on finally implementing the missing Hyundai i30 N TCR, Honda Civic Type-R TCR (FK8) and Opel Astra TCR models. Also the outdated and semi-fictional Alfa Romeo Giulietta QV-TCR has been replaced with the 2018 real-life counterpart.

Despite all this, the league administration has ultimately allowed the Volkswagen Golf GTI TCR and Audi RS3 LMS back in the series, as they are still used by privateers in the real-life counterparts of the TCC.

## Race calendar and results

A 16-round calendar was announced on 2nd December 2019.

**[1]** Repsol Swinegel Racing was disqualified from the teams' results due to 5 drivers participating and thereby breaking *§10.3 TCC rules and regulations*. This will be remembered as the *5-driver-incident*.

## Championship results

### Scoring system

Points will be awarded to the top 15 classified finishers in all three races equally.