One car, one quality driver for GA.

One car with one quality driver, that's the aim for GA Motorsports in the British Touring Car Championship in 2005 after the team admits mistakes made last season.

The Thruxton-based race team is currently hard at work building a new Alfa 156 to the 2005 World Touring Car specification to compete in this year's championship, and is targeting a 'quality' driver to pilot the car.

"We are talking to Kelvin Burt, Gavin Piper, Jamie Spence and Stefan Hodgetts," says Mike Thompson from the team. "These are all quality drivers of the kind GA needs after our poor showing last year."

In 2004 GA Motorsports ran with an Alfa 156 and two Astra Coupes, and a 'squad' of drivers over the course of the season including Carl Breeze, Charlie Butler-Henderson, Gavin Smith, Stefan Hodgetts, Kelvin Burt and Paul Wallace.

Although they will have two Alfas ready for the start of the 2005 season, the team expects to start the year just with the one car. "At this stage we are expecting to run just one car," says Thompson, before adding, "It was a mistake for us to run three cars, especially when they were two different makes."

The team's Astras are currently up for sale and there is interest from runners in James Tucker's Britcar series.

As well as building their own car for the BTCC, the team also has launched a range of racing parts for Alfas, developed from the Alfa 156 ETCC car that GA raced in the BTCC last year.

The range is designed to offer proven competition parts at an affordable price to those competitors running Alfa in the club championships. It ranges from modified wishbones right through to complete kits for converting Alfa 156/147 to a six-speed sequential gearbox.