Putting in the BTCC groundwork
It’s not just about taking the glory from the pitwall. Matt James finds out the intricacies of the important job
There are numerous photos of team members climbing the fence when their British Touring Car Championship driver crosses the line first. The staff members are enjoying their moment in the spotlight, but rarely will the team manager be among them.
Instead, the managers are busy plotting and planning the next success. For them, a trophy is a job done, and it is the stepping stone to the next result. There is no time to bask in the triumph, it is merely a validation of the work they have done away from the circuits.
In the British Touring Car Championship, the team manager job differs across the different operations. There are the team owner-managers, and then there are those who are in the role specifically who report to the squad’s patron.
Ian Harrison has a foot in both camps. He was the owner and team manager of the hugely successful Triple Eight Race Engineering team, latterly Triple Eight Racing, which ran Vauxhall’s programme in the early part of the century. More recently he was drafted in by BMR Racing to manage its Subaru operations.
From his days as team owner, Harrison says the job is extremely complicated with many different elements.
“The first thing you do as a team owner is to get the money together to do the job, so you spend a lot of time getting sponsorship,” he explains. “You are trying to find the resources to then go on to step two, which is to employ the right people to do the job. That then gives you the ability to do step three, which is go and win as many f**king races as you can. If you haven’t got the first two in place, step three can’t happen.”
The staff recruitment is a tricky topic, but Triple Eight was a magnet to top talent as it was the most successful team on the grid. Gathering those brains is vital to the desire to win races.
Harrison says: “There is this misconception among the public that all of the cars are the same because of the control parts. They are not. All the parts are identical, but it is how you use them that makes the difference. You can see the teams with the good engineers and the ones without the good engineers. You have so little to work with now: it is not like the old days, where you could go and redesign the front suspension if it wasn’t working. Now, you have got what you have got and you have to do what you need to do to the nth degree, because the operating window is so small. There are teams out there that are all show and never win a championship”
Speedworks Motorsport is unique in that it is run by two people: husband - and-wife crew Amy and Christian Dick. The works Toyota team, which runs
Tom Ingram’s Corolla, is a regular race winner, but the groundwork that goes into that success never stops.
Christian Dick says: “Amy and I are doing everything from a management side and the organisational role. You are making sure that everything on the truck that was used up is replaced and replenished. You organise vehicle movements for the next weekend’s racing and make sure that is working properly.
We have a movement schedule that everyone has to see and you have to organise meetings between drivers and engineers and make sure that all of the information you have collated over the weekend goes into the right place. If something went wrong on a race weekend, you are trying to make sure that it doesn’t happen again. [And] all the logistics are sorted: tyre orders, brakes, hotels booked, all of that kind of thing.”
Oly Collins is the team manager for Motorbase Performance, which is owned by David Bartrum. He works part-time with the team, and this is where the responsibility is split.
Collins says: “David takes on the organising role of the headquarters. Him and his wife Barbara run the workshop and the staff; I run the race weekends.
I am just the gelling piece for everybody, I bring together the engineers, drivers, mechanics and the boss and everything else in between. I help David almost in an advisory role.
“I do all the mileages and lifing on the parts of the car. I put the systems in place at the start of the year and it should pretty much run itself after that. I get all the setdown information after each race and I distribute that. I work through the set-ups with the engineers and communicate them to mechanics. I go through the stocks and organise that and the reordering too.”
Away from the tracks, the roles are very different, but it is at the track where the real focus is. That is where the team manager’s role comes into its own.
Harrison says keeping a clear channel of communication is important. Briefings are where the black magic happens, but engineers and drivers aren’t allowed to have things all their own way and that is for the benefit of everyone involved.
“I used to run all the briefings,” Harrison explains. “I don’t know if that is how other teams do it. We would have a list of topics, and we would go around the room and everyone would chip in. It was all open, so there was no secret squirrel bollocks and we just got on with the job. After that, it is down to your crew chief to make sure that all the jobs decided upon are done and the cars are being prepped in the way that the drivers and the engineers want.
“Then, when the race starts, I am not there talking to the drivers. That is the engineers’job. That is the key relationship, I only get involved when you have got a driver who is acting like a spoilt brat in the car and the engineer doesn’t really know what to say. Then it is my job as his employer to step up and tell them how it is, including giving them a rocket. You sometimes have to do a bit of a Top Gun on them: you have to remind them that they don’t own the f**king cars, I own the f**king cars.”
Martin Broadhurst is the team manager of Adam Weaver’s Power Maxed Racing crew, and he is another who takes a leading role in the debriefs.
He says: “Nine times out of 10 you have to pull everybody together [geographically] because drivers tend to go off on tangents and do other things. You have to drag them all together in the same room, and some drivers are terrible. In the debrief, I keep an overview. I have a good steer on what direction they are going with their cars. If I think they are going to put a set-up on that is wild,
I will pull on the reins a little bit.
“I try not to override anyone in that room, because we are employing engineers to do that role and you have to let them do it. If I feel it is getting too far out of control then we need to have a reset and I will make that happen.”
That is part of the job at a race track, but there is even more work to do when the final chequered flag falls. That is when the job list is at its height.
Broadhurst says that the work begins after the weekend. “We have a running list across the meeting of things we need to do and issues with the cars that we rectify as the year goes on, and then we renew it at the end of the year,” he says. “Some of those are things we can develop and upgrade over the winter and work out what needs to be done.
“[But] there is a constant flow of keeping it going, but we do put a lot of effort into developing what we can during the year. There is work behind the scenes, even if it is just small bits that don’t include a lot of budget and we can do it in-house. Where I am different from a lot of other team managers is that I do all the work on the dampers myself. I spend a lot of time between races doing that, as well as the organisational side of things. There is never a dull moment really because there is always so much going on and no teams these days have the luxury of having too many people.”
The job list in the early part of the week after a race event can be big, and the team manager is in the middle of that.
Collins explains: “I work somewhere else on a Monday, but by the time I come in on Tuesday I go through what we have to buy, repair and paint and we go through the fall-out of the weekend. You get a report from your driver and engineer, decide what went right and what went wrong and how we are going to fix it. Normally, you get two weeks [between races]. [On a Tuesday] you should only really be evaluating race three, because you do it as the weekend goes on, but often we look at the event as a whole.”
That is the car side of things taken care of. But there is another very important part of the job which often gets overlooked: the man management side. A crew can include up to 40 people, depending on how many cars it is running, and each of those staff members has to be cared for and encouraged.
Christian Dick, whose squad runs just a single car, says the tight group of people involved makes that part of the job more intimate.
“We are such a close-knit team that you know all of the individuals and you know if someone has got something going on in their personal lives. If they need a break or less pressure, you can switch them out of a job or try to take the pressure off them a bit. You are doing that role too,” he says. “There has definitely been times when we have had a bit of good cop, bad cop going on with myself and Amy, but I am not telling you which one is which though! She runs the hospitality with up to 100 guests over a weekend, but the dynamic between us works really well. If I am having a stressful day and everyone can sense that, they will take any problems to Amy rather than make me worse, and vice versa: it operates very well like that.”
Broadhurst says it is part of the role which can be hard work. “Most people would rather just be getting on with the job of racing because man management can prove to be the most difficult bit. It can be a bit political at times,” he admits.
“People just want to get on, so that aspect of it is outside of everybody’s natural instinct and not something that people are always cut out for. You do have to put the arm around the shoulder a bit sometimes, and the driver can get a bit volatile and you have to manage that situation well, otherwise the thing just breaks down.”
So the hardware has been taken care of, and the cars have taken to the track with contented staff and with motivated drivers. But there is another important issue that each team manager has to take care of: the presentation of the team. In the high-profile world of the BTCC it is crucial, particularly if the team is a works squad.
Christian Dick explains: “It isn’t just a question of going out and getting the job done. You have got to look at the commercial aspects and the way you present yourself. It did take me a while to click on to that. We spent a lot of time with our heads down trying to get results. It wasn’t that presentation wasn’t important, it is just that we focused on other areas.
“The pitlane is a shop window and you have to make sure that the thing looks right and the team is slick going about what it is doing. If your team members are doing cartwheels down the pitlane every time you get a good result, it doesn’t work. Everyone has to be well trained in their role and need to work well together to make it look slick.”
Harrison agrees, but also says that his ears and eyes are open to other members of the squad to help lead the direction.
“People have to buy into that vision that you have,” he says. “But you also have to be not egoistical enough that if someone comes up with a better idea than you, you have to go with it. You jump on it. We did lots of that – you have to employ people who are better than you at the job you employ them to do. That should be the reason they are there.”
Collins too knows that preparation can lead to the right image being portrayed. “David Bartrum prides himself on the appearance of the garage more than most.” he says. “I have to be the person who keeps his standards up and make sure everyone works in the Motorbase way. We have got a good group of people that have been with us for a long time.
You don’t need to reinvent things , be that how you do a diagonal wheel change or whether that is how you put the bullshit boards up at the weekend and how you keep them clean. There is a system for everything as long as we adhere to that, it is fine.”
It is all about systems, and making sure that everyone is on the same page. Doing that among a group of highly creative and motivated individuals is not easy. That is what makes the role so demanding.