Date Of Birth: Lives: Nationality: Seasons in BTCC: Championship Wins: Synopsis:

27th September, 1951 (Harrow, England) Monaco English 1982 - 1984, 1988, 1991 - 1994, 2001 None. One of the best saloon car drivers in the world but failed to secure a number of championship wins due to problems often outside his control. Renowned for his incredible drives from the back of the field and the incident which cost Cleland his 1992 title.

Driver History

Soper actually started racing before he was legally old enough to, using his fathers competition licence to race in sprints and autotests. This obviously gave him the bug to race more and, once he was able to obtain his own licence, he moved into circuit racing. The funding for early activities came from working in his fathers shop, selling car tyres, so budgets were obviously limited forcing him to only race locally to his London home using cheap self-prepared cars.

Soper's first main successes came from racing in the Mini Challenge, which he first joined in 1976. By this time he had become a full time racing driver and had started using specialist tuning companies to help prepare his cars, so he soon became a front runner, winning races in his first season and taking the 1275GT class title in his second. He went on to take the overall championship title in 1979, which effectively launched Soper's career and he was never to look back.

In 1980, preparation company Radbourne Racing approached Soper to help develop and race their new Dellara built Fiat X1/9 in the Modsports series, in which he took a class win. He was also kept busy winning the Ford Fiesta championship on his weekends off, winning 8 out of the 14 races. 1981 saw more success in the Fiat, this time in the Donnington GT championship with another class win. He also took the MG Metro Challenge series after a close battle with initial series leader and similar one-make specialist, Patrick Watts.

His success in the Metro series brought him an Austin Rover works drive in the Group 1 British Saloon Car Championship in 1982. His first car was another Metro, with which he took 5 class wins taking 2nd in class and 3rd overall. He stayed with Austin Rover for 1983, but this time driving a TWR prepared Group A Rover Vitesse alongside Jeff Allam and Peter Lovett. Soper took the title, but it was stripped from him the following year after technical aspects of the Rover cars were declared illegal. Soper stayed with TWR and Rover for the 1984 season, but following the irregularity problems from the previous year, Austin Rover pulled out of the championship part way through the season. TWR and Soper then contested the European series, but with little success, the Rovers being out classed by the BMWs and Jaguars.

He did return to the BTCC for one race, the 1985 season opener, driving a Rover Metro Turbo. Second on the grid ahead of much more powerful machinery could not be turned into anything after his car failed him on the 1st lap.