Not Just the People's Champion.

Byline: Richard S. Chang

If you're a sucker for a good underdog story like I am, then it doesn't get any better than Matt Neal winning the 2005 British Touring Car Championship.

A decade earlier Neal was more comic relief than competitor. He was a young privateer. His Nissan Primera was sponsored by his father's wheel company, Team Dynamics, and the British fan-boy car magazine Max Power. And Neal aptly played the part, hamming it up for poster shoots, which often required him to exercise his skill in bulging his googly eyes at half-naked car-model babes.

It didn't help that Neal stood six-foot-six with a lollipop head and looked like Ichabod Crane after a few days on the rack. A couple of years ago I was at Thruxton while Neal was doing some preseason tire testing for Team Honda. Watching him silently fold his scarecrow body in and out of his Civic's roll cage was mesmerizing, like watching Mr. Bean in person.

Of course the Brits loved him. Neal was the perfect hero for a country that savors its failures as much as its accomplishments. (Eddie the Eagle, anyone?)

Professional racing is a predictable sport. The team that spends the most wins the most. And privateers-even well-funded ones-may place well or, once in a long while, when the sun is shining on them, podium. But they never win.

Keep in mind, this wasn't the BTCC of today. In the 1990s it was called Super Touring. Honda, Nissan, Volvo, Ford, Renault and Audi threw millions of dollars into their works teams. The cars may have looked like road cars with bad sticker jobs, but they were anything but. They were state-of-the-art, purpose-built race cars with repositioned engines and six-speed sequential gearboxes. In terms of talent, the series was stacked, complete with fisticuffs.