Árón Taylor-Smith joins Toyota Gazoo Racing for 2025 BTCC

Árón Taylor-Smith has been confirmed as the second driver for the Speedworks Motorsport-run Toyota Gazoo Racing UK team in the 2025 British Touring Car Championship.

Taylor-Smith, 35, has driven for Power Maxed Racing for the past two seasons, progressively improving since joining the team, culminating in clinching the Independent Drivers’ title in 2024.

The Irishman also enjoyed his best-ever overall ranking in the championship since he first joined the grid full-time in 2012, ending the year seventh overall having claimed two outright podiums and finishing 20 of the season’s 30 races in the top ten, as well finishing every single race in the points.

He joins Ronan Pearson as the second driver to be confirmed at the Cheshire-based team, which once again has four TOCA BTCC Licences this year.

Taylor-Smith says that joining a top manufacturer-backed team has been something he has been targeting for some time.

“Over the last few years, we have tried to hatch a plan for this to come together, and it just never quite came to fruition,” said Taylor-Smith to TouringCars.Net.

“Speedworks are one of those teams you look in to from the outside and you always admire the setup, the scale of the team and how fast the cars are.

“It was always on my radar that this is a team that I would love to be a part of. A little bit of a dream has been realised, and it already feels like I’ve won.”

Arguably the last time that Taylor-Smith was in a team capable of regularly winning races was in 2015 when he was part of the then-burgeoning Team BMR.

He then spent a year with the small BKR outfit, and raced with Triple Eight in its final season, before taking a sabbatical for three years and returning with Team HARD in 2021.

From that point on, Taylor-Smith has been working to rebuild his profile and he believes that joining Speedworks is the best opportunity he’s had in his tin-top career.

and then it started to gain momentum only recently.

“I genuinely feel like I’ve never had this opportunity on my career, to be in a regular race-winning package with a team that has been in contention for the championship on multiple occasions.

“When I look back at my career, I’ve been with enormously successful teams, but they’ve predominantly been independent-run outfits. You always look in at the manufacturer programmes, thinking ‘if only we had that engine programme’ or ‘if only we had that support’.

“In previous years, we’d be saying ‘if we could improve this, then we can have a go at that team’. Well, now we are that team. It feels a lot different to anything I’ve been involved in before.”

Taylor-Smith also gave credit to Power Maxed Racing for the impact they had on resurrecting his touring car career in recent seasons.

“I will be forever grateful for what Power Maxed gave me. They resurrected a touring car career for me and gave me a car that won the Independent’s title, that allowed me to be in that mix the whole time.

“I do think we were making great progress, but we were always chasing the package of what the likes of Toyota Gazoo Racing had. We were always trying to get to that point, we were emulating their engineering, we were trying to copy their design, we were always just that little one step behind.

“It is an absolute shame that the PMR story for me has come to an end. I have no doubt that they’ll continue to be an enormously successful team, because they have a fantastic group of people around them, but at the same time this, in my opinion, is a career break.

“This is my chance to really carve something out over the next few seasons that may not have been on the cards before.”