Why Priaulx isn’t really retiring
The three-time World Touring Car champion last month announced his climbdown from full-time racing, but he has plenty of mileage left him in yet
“HE HAD BEATEN SUCH TALENTS AS SATO, DAVIDSON, LOTTERER, BRUNI AND COURTNEY IN F3 RACES”
“You’ve not only got the stress of performing well, but of whether you have a job next year. You’ve got your family, your travel, trying to organise something as a back-up in case things don’t happen. It’s a lot of juggling.”
Those are the words of Andy Priaulx, who last month lifted an enormous burden off his shoulders by finally pressing ‘send’ on an email to Cyan Racing chief Christian Dahl, with whose Lynk & Co squad he was due to make a second successive attack on the World Touring Car Cup this year. Priaulx is stepping down from full-time racing, but he’s not retiring, and it certainly looks as though full-time driving is very much still on his agenda.
So, after 18 consecutive seasons as a manufacturer driver – one with Honda, 13 with BMW, three with Ford and one with Lynk & Co – an era comes to an end.
It’s an era this writer was privileged to have seen begin. Back when Priaulx was making the transition in late 2001 from slightly-older-than-theopposition British Formula 3 battler to the British Touring Car Championship, I was covering both series for Autosport’s magazine and website. I was at Oulton Park in August 2001 when Priaulx – then battling for F3 honours on a frayed shoestring budget with Alan Docking Racing – made an unexpected BTCC debut in a Triple Eight-run Vauxhall Astra Coupe in place of the suspended Phil Bennett. He had beaten such well-supported talents as Takuma Sato, Anthony Davidson, Andre Lotterer, James Courtney and Gianmaria Bruni in F3 races, so it was no surprise that, without success ballast, he outpaced his only realistic opposition –
Triple Eight stablemates Jason Plato, Yvan Muller and James Thompson – to top both qualifying sessions in the Astra.
Although he won neither race, he’d clearly impressed a few people. A couple of months later, Priaulx called your narrator up – he was sounding out a few motorsport acquaintances about whether he should give up on the single-seater dream, at the age of 28, and accept the offer of a BTCC Honda drive. “Do it!” was the enthusiastic reply, not because of any doubts that he had the ability to go further along the road to F1, but because it was obvious that, without being a protege of an F1 team or big manufacturer, he’d never find the budget to move up to the next level, Formula 3000.
Here, it’s worth nothing that he had enjoyed manufacturer backing in his rookie F3 season in 2000, with the Renault Uksupported team of Promatecme. As the runaway 1999 Renault Spider Cup champion, Priaulx was getting his first proper singleseater chance alongside the highly rated Matt Davies, who’d enjoyed a promising maiden F3 campaign and was expected to challenge for the title with the team that had run Jenson Button the previous season. It turned into a struggle, with huge question marks over the Renault engine. Priaulx, showing the determination that would become a hallmark, suggested to Davies that they make the road trip together to visit the French base of engine builder Sodemo – far better that than whingeing in the media, sounding ungrateful and annoying them. This they did, and Priaulx scored three podiums, Davies none – nobody outside the Priaulx family would have expected that.
At that time Priaulx’s wife Jo was pregnant and, two decades on, one big factor in his latest decision is the career of son Seb and the family’s relationship with Multimatic Motorsports. While dad was good enough to win four rounds of the World Endurance Championship across 2016 and 2017 in a Multimatic-run Ford GT, lad is now also a fully fledged Multimatic driver – narrowly denied the GT4 crown last year as a British GT Championship rookie in the team’s Mustang, and now competing in the IMSA-RUN Michelin Pilot Challenge for the same category in the US.
Multimatic and its charismatic boss Larry Holt are clearly going to play a big part in the lives of the racing – or even semi-racing
– Priaulxs. “For me it’s about Multimatic and potentially some amazing things are happening there,” he says. “There are some good-quality programmes. I’ve always been very focused on set-up, Multimatic have seen that, and it’s great that I can give them what I’ve learned over the past 20 years.”
Does that mean we might see Priaulx getting heavily involved with test and development driving? “My deal is quite varied. I’m glad it’s a long-term contract. Definitely they’re going to be using me for testing and developing and some races, ambassadorial work, sporting work, and helping on the customer racing side. Over the next two to three years there’ll be some high-level races with them. I’m not hanging my overalls up. But what I didn’t want to do was to be the guy that’s continuing to try and do something when you should have stopped four or five years ago.
“So, I’ll be in the US quite a bit. Multimatic is one of the best-kept secrets in motorsport and the engineering expertise is phenomenal. They’ve built some of the best racing cars I’ve ever driven. Larry is a genius, and so are the engineers and his other employees. People want to work with him because he’s a loyal man, which you don’t find in motorsport very much.”
It’s appropriate that Priaulx should be working with his son at Multimatic. The family has always been like a little Guernsey gang, with ‘grandad’ Graham vociferously supporting Andy’s career from his first steps when they went hillclimbing together (Andy won the 1995 British title). Priaulx’s wife Jo experienced two premature births with Seb and little sister Danniella, and their subsequent work with the Priaulx Premature Baby Foundation resulted in Andy’s MBE. Unsurprisingly, Andy retains that ‘up-and-at-’em’ mentality regarding the exploits of Seb, claiming that ‘politics’ denied him the GT4 title last year and, before that, the Ginetta Junior crown.
Seb won’t remember this – he was only three months old at the time, after all – but he fell asleep during his dad’s drive to his maiden British F3 Championship race win in 2001 at a wet Snetterton, something Andy and Jo were amused to relate to Autosport later that day.
“That was quite a defining moment for me actually,” recalls Priaulx. “I developed late in racing, and I thought, ‘I don’t want to screw this up for my family, I want to do everything I can to make it work’. People say you lose lap time when you have a child, but that’s bullshit. In F3 I put every commercial deal together. One minute I’d be checking up on 90 guests in the hospitality suite at Silverstone making sure they were OK, the next I’d be on pole position trying to win a race. I stalled on the grid – but at least I’d won the earlier race!
“Jo has brought the kids up in hotel rooms for 20 years, and made a lot of sacrifices. And [with the COVID-19 pandemic] we’d have been looking at one of us staying in Europe [for World Touring
Car Cup], one in America [Seb with Multimatic], and the wife in between in Guernsey.”
Hence the message to Dahl: “They were shocked, but Christian was very nice, and he understood why I needed to do it. I’m very grateful to him.”
Cyan is just the last in a list of top motorsport organisations for which Priaulx has driven. Apart from Multimatic and Triple Eight, in his BMW days he tested F1 cars for Williams and Sauber, and also raced for Schnitzer and – probably closest to his heart – RBM, the Belgian team with which he claimed his
2004 European Touring Car Championship crown and then the World Touring Car titles in 2005-07.
“That was a phenomenal team,” he sighs. “Bart Mampaey [RBM boss] made me realise what you need behind you to win, and I only realised when I left what I’d had there. So many engineers forget that there’s a human side in this sport, and that’s worth at least two tenths of a second. In touring cars, that can be the difference between 15th on the grid and pole.”
Priaulx still believes there are poles in him, so is keen to assert that “it’s not an immediate stop, it’s a tapering”, and that he wants to carry on competing in “the big endurance races. The Daytonas and Sebrings, and to drive Le Mans with Seb would be amazing.”
There’s still just too much passion for him to stand entirely back from competing to support his son, and besides, Priaulx knows what racing dads can be like: “I need to be there for Seb, and as much as dads screw it up at the race track he needs help away from it to structure his life and to be the best racing driver he can be. I still get hairs on the back of my neck standing up, whether that’s from watching Seb do well or driving out of a circuit when you’ve done a good job yourself.”
And that is a very gratifyingly Priaulx thing to say and illustrates the family DNA. After all the blood, sweat and tears of the racing career, the baby scares and the charity work, you wouldn’t expect a Priaulx to ever give up on something entirely, would you?
“SO MANY ENGINEERS FORGET THERE’S A HUMAN SIDE. THAT’S WORTH AT LEAST TWO TENTHS”