The STCC was launched in 1996, heavily shaped by the success of the BTCC and the strong following that British touring car racing had built among Swedish television audiences. The series succeeded the Nordic Touring Car Championship, which had operated from 1991 to 1995. Cars were built to the Super 2000 regulations used in the FIA World Touring Car Championship, providing a technically credible framework aligned with international standards. A national counterpart category, N2000, also existed to allow teams to build and enter their own cars without requiring full FIA homologation.
Manufacturers represented in the STCC across its history included Alfa Romeo, Audi, BMW, Chevrolet, Honda, Opel, Peugeot, SEAT, Volkswagen, and Volvo. The presence of Volvo gave the series particular domestic resonance, with the Swedish manufacturer competing on home soil.
Race weekends followed a distinctive two-race format with reversed-grid elements to maximise competition. A twenty-minute qualifying session open to all drivers first determined the broad grid order. The eight fastest drivers then contested a Super Pole shootout, running in order from slowest to fastest, with the fastest Super Pole lap earning pole position for race one. The grid for race two was determined by reversing the results of the top eight finishers from race one, while those outside the top eight retained their race-one finishing positions. Both races ran for approximately twenty minutes each, with all starts conducted as rolling starts.
The series also featured a number of supporting classes that raced alongside the STCC on the same weekends, including Radical, the Camaro Cup, Superkart, Pro Superbike, the JTCC, and the Porsche Carrera Cup Scandinavia.
Television coverage was central to the STCC's profile and profile within Sweden, though the series moved between broadcasters across its lifespan. The championship was first televised in 1997 by the public broadcaster SVT, featured within a programme called Race that also included coverage of the British Touring Car Championship. When SVT dropped the BTCC at the end of the 1999 season, the STCC was elevated to become the primary focus of Race, with CART coverage supplementing it.
In 2003 the STCC moved to TV4, which aired it on TV4 Plus rather than the main channel. TV4 sold the rights after one year to TV3, which ran highlights in 2004 and from 2005 extended coverage to include several hours of live programming per race weekend on the TV3-owned sports channel Viasat Sport. The series returned to SVT in 2006 before eventually settling on the Viasat Motor channel in its final years.
The shifting broadcast landscape reflected the tensions between free-to-air accessibility and the commercial demands of rights deals, a dynamic familiar to touring car series across Europe.
The final STCC season under the original structure was held in 2010, when the series merged with the Danish Touringcar Championship to create the Scandinavian Touring Car Championship, pooling the two national series into a joint cross-border competition.
In 2023 there were plans to revive the STCC as an all-electric category, with the relaunched series intended to debut on a street circuit in Helsingborg using vehicles from multiple manufacturers. Production delays pushed the launch to 2024. Demonstration laps were held at Mantorp Park in September 2023 and an official test day followed for the leading drivers from the NXT Gen Cup series, keeping the concept in motion ahead of a planned full season launch.