STARTING FOR TEAM PARKER
How a national racing stalwart took off
Stuart Parker cut a forlorn figure, sitting on his own at the end of the bar. It was the awards evening for the Vauxhall onemake series at the end of the 1996 season, and this was before the festivities had even got underway.
Parker had stepped up from karting and battled year-long in his self-run Formula Vauxhall Junior car, but without any real rewards.
The then-21-year-old was reaching a personal crossroads. He said, out loud and to no-one in particular: “I’m not very good at this, am I?”
Motorsport News was sat a few feet away, and we jokingly concurred, and bought him another pint. The only time Parker had made it into the pages of MN that season was when he shunted at Brands Hatch and ended up with the nosecone of his car straddling the cockpit of a rival. MN printed a picture caption with the headline ‘Nosey Parker’.
After that awards night, Team Parker Racing was born. OK, so MN can’t take all the credit, but it was the start of a remarkable journey that would take the team to the top step of the British Touring Car Championship rostrum and the overall title in British GT in 2017 among myriad other titles.
Parker himself knows that the end of that 1996 season marked a watershed. He says: “Because I was racing against the likes of Luciano Burti, Dan Wheldon and Tim Mullen and all those people, I realised that I simply don’t have that level of ability.
“I was a little bit older than them, by a couple of years. I had a think and asked myself whether I wanted to spend a load more money trying to be a racing driver. I realised that I had loved everything I had done, I had really good fun, I had made some good friends, but it was time to move on. That was me done at that point.”
Parker admits that waking up after that night at Chateau Impney in Droitwich with a fuzzy head, he had no clear direction. Motorsport had been something he and his brother Andy, who was racing in Caterhams, had been obsessed with.
But, very quickly, there was a way back into the paddock in 1997. Stuart Parker remembers: “The team really got started because [karting team boss] Ricky
Flynn, who I knew from my karting days and who was running some drivers there, phoned me and said he had a kid who wanted to have a go in a Formula Vauxhall Junior car and could I run him in mine? That’s what kicked it all off.
“We didn’t have a plan to run a team, it just fell into place. Andy and I had always done everything ourselves. We still used to work for our dad Geoff in the Peugeot garage he had in Nuneaton and then, when we had finished our day’s work, we would start on the racing cars. Then every weekend we would bugger off and go racing. It was all we knew.”
The initial test led to Team Parker Racing running Austrian wildchild Thomas Jakobitsch in full programme of Class B Formula Vauxhall Junior in 1997 and, at the same time, there was an expansion in car preparation in the Caterham racing series too.
“Because we were running Andy’s car in Caterhams in 1995, other people approached us and asked us to run them too. The Caterham side began to pick up,” says Parker. “We ran one car which quickly became two, then that was then six, and then it became a monster. All of a sudden, we had outgrown my dad’s place. Then we had to find some premises and then, not long after that, even bigger premises. The monster is now a black hole, which we somehow manage to fill every year.”
After Formula Vauxhall Junior, Jakobitsch moved to Caterham Roadsports in 1998 and placed third.
That was what set the team on its footings.
After several successful years in Caterhams, which included running Scottish interloper and Formula Ford graduate Barry Horne in Britain and Europe in 2002, the team was facing another watershed.
Alongside Caterhams in 2001, TPR had also run Brazilian Ernani Judice in the National Class of British Formula 3, but it was Horne and his father Max who pushed the squad in a new direction.
Barry Horne explains: “I was coming down and doing the occasional Caterham race in the south, as well as racing at Knockhill, with our own team Maxtrac.
“There was a time we went down to Donington Park to race and our engine blew. Stuart’s dad Geoff went back to the TPR base, got their spare engine and lent it to us. They never charged us for that.”
That cemented the relationship between the pair, and it flourished in Caterhams. The Caterham arm stayed under the control of Andy and pushed the boundaries of success in Britain and in Europe.
Horne, on the other hand, wanted to enter the new Porsche Carrera Cup GB in 2003 and there was only one team he wanted to do it with.
Horne says: “The way Andy and Stuart presented everything was so professional, their knowledge of set-up was so good, that I wanted to be with the team. And, above everything, there is such a nice atmosphere. It is like a family: I know people say that about lots of teams, but it is true with Stuart.
“And the Parkers would never rip us off – which is rare in motorsport. Often, my dad would have to ask him to invoice us because we were owing him money. Have you ever heard of that happening anywhere in motorsport?”
Horne won the Porsche title, and the team did it again with Irishman Damien Faulkner in 2005-2006 and with singleseater convert Tim Bridgman in 2009.
But it is those early days with Horne that stick in Stuart Parker’s memory as the floodgates opened.
Stuart explains: “To begin with, it was just us against the world and it was a fantastic time. There were only four of us [running the car], and we worked so hard.
“People sometimes ask me which period
in racing I would like to go back to, and I would always pick that. It was just so much fun. We were such good friends, and Barry and I still speak every day. He is now the team manager for our Carrera Cup arm, and he was best man at my wedding and I was best man at his.
“It would always be hard to replicate what we did [off-track activities, clearly]: we were all of a similar age and we were just having such a laugh. It was golden times. You couldn’t put in print some of the things we got up to back then…”
Whatever the antics, it didn’t stop success and drivers tend to stay with the team in the longer term, which has sent TPR in many different directions. After initial steps in GT racing with customer Ian Loggie in 2014, that ultimately led to a Bentley GT3 deal for British GT and the overall title in 2017 with Seb Morris and Rick Parfitt Jr.
The family has a long connection with Bentley and Parker’s grandad had been friendly with WO Bentley, so it completed the circle.
TPR’S journey has also led to a British touring car campaign, which started with Alex Martin in a Ford Focus in 2015 and ultimately took them to a round victory at Oulton Park last season with Stephen Jelley behind the wheel of a BMW 125i M Sport (he was classified first when on-theroad winner Jake Hill was penalised).
Stuart Parker explains: “The ethos of our business is that we are very much a family team and we try to look after people. A great number of people in this game are sharks, all they are interested in is pounds, shillings and pence and if they can get one good year out of you, they will have one good year out of you and that’s it done.
“Our attitude is different. It is ‘why can’t we have five years running at the front with you rather than just one good year?’ We genuinely try to look after people and get them to become part of our family so they feel welcome and want to stay. As a result of that, we go off and progress through motorsport together.”
And it isn’t only the team that progresses as a result of this philosophy. Parfitt’s greatest success in motorsport, winning that British GT title in 2017, was something he remembers with great fondness. He says that is down to the feeling Team Parker Racing created.
“When you join Team Parker Racing as a driver, you never feel like you are a commodity, like you do in so many other teams,” says Parfitt, who was battling Crohn’s disease as he raced. “Sometimes I would be feeling really ill as I raced, doubled up in pain, and Stuart was such a good man manager and a real arm around the shoulder. We became such good friends and he knew what I was fighting against and seemed to just understand.
“He also knew that I didn’t have bundles of cash to race with,” adds Parfitt. “He knew I was putting everything into it, and you know that Team Parker Racing is just as determined as you are. You never feel like you are going to be ripped off and the atmosphere is just so good.
“Our backers bought into the feeling, our supporters bought into the feeling and it is something special that Stuart creates with Team Parker. They gave me simply the best launchpad to achieve what I have. At the end of the season, we looked at each other and just said ‘we’ve done it!’. The team had been on the same journey I had, and that is a rarity.”
Team Parker Racing has been on many, many journeys, and that is what makes it hard for Stuart Parker to pick out an individual highlight over the 23-year history of the team. That’s not a surprise when, in some seasons, it can run anything up to 20 cars across so many difference disciplines.
“It is difficult to pick out one particular moment, because so many things mean so much to you,” adds Parker. “Winning with Barry Horne in Porsches was personal, because we were such a small team. Winning British GT in 2017 with Seb and Rick, that was incredible too.
“Last year in the BTCC with Stephen [Jelley], we didn’t win a race in the way we wanted to, but we did win. After years of slogging away at the BTCC, we suddenly started getting podiums and then we won. That was very special, too, even though it was by default.
“There are so many things we’ve done, and so many memories that we’ve made. And that makes each programme we tackle, and each driver we work with, an absolute pleasure.”