Before the modern WTCR, a separate FIA Touring Car World Cup event ran for three editions in the mid-1990s. Held as a single annual race for drivers from national touring car championships worldwide, it drew competitors from Super Touring series across Europe and beyond. New Zealand's Paul Radisich won the 1993 race at Monza in a Ford Mondeo, then repeated the feat at Donington Park in 1994. Frank Biela won the 1995 edition at Circuit Paul Ricard in an Audi A4 Quattro. A planned 1996 race at the A1 Ring in Austria was cancelled due to insufficient entries and the concept was not revived.
On 6 December 2017, the FIA World Motorsport Council approved the creation of the World Touring Car Cup, effective from the 2018 season. The new series adopted TCR regulations, which had already gained widespread traction across numerous national and international touring car championships. As a direct consequence, both the WTCC in its existing format and the TCR International Series were discontinued. Because manufacturer factory teams were not permitted under the revised structure, the series carried Cup rather than Championship status — a meaningful distinction within FIA classification.
The WTCR introduced a revised race weekend format: a single qualifying session and one race on the first day, followed by a three-phase qualifying session and two races on the second day, with the top ten reversed on the grid for the first race of the second day.
The WTCR attracted teams aligned with Hyundai and Lynk & Co as de facto manufacturer proxies throughout its existence, despite the nominal ban on full factory entries. The series employed a compensation weight system intended to balance competitive performance on top of an existing Balance of Performance framework. This dual-balancing approach attracted persistent criticism: the overlap created incentives for teams to deliberately underperform in qualifying and race sessions to minimise penalty weight. The resulting strategic sandbagging reduced overtaking and undermined the authenticity of the competition.
The political dimension of the BoP became acute in 2020 when Hyundai instructed its customer teams not to participate at the Race of Germany in a dispute over the BoP assignments. Cyan Racing, the primary Lynk & Co operation, departed the series halfway through the 2022 season following what they described as unsatisfactory Balance of Performance treatment.
In October 2022 it was confirmed that the series would not continue in its existing format beyond the 2022 season. From 2023, the concept evolved into the TCR World Tour, which aggregates selected rounds from existing regional and national TCR series worldwide rather than operating an independent calendar. The change shifted the model from a standalone international series to a coordinated tour across existing championships.
The WTCR served as the primary global stage for TCR-spec touring car racing during its five-season run, giving the TCR technical formula international visibility. Its structural difficulties — dual-balancing controversies, effective manufacturer dominance through proxies, and the challenges of maintaining independent commercial viability — informed the more federated approach taken by the TCR World Tour that followed.