Le Mans winner and sportscar hero faces his toughest test: the readers’ questions…
The 2015 La Sarthe winner tackles the readers’ questions.
From a background racing Minis, Nick Tandy’s rise to the very top of motorsport is the stuff of fairy tales and has taken him to the richest rewards that racing has to offer. He climbed through single-seaters too and up the Porsche racing ladder to become a mainstay of the German firm’s driving roster. His outright win at Le Mans, sharing the 919 Hybrid with Nico Hulkenberg and Earl Bamber, was a sign that he had truly arrived.
But now he has branched out and joined the Corvette Racing squad, making his bow with the team in the recent 24 Hours of Daytona in Florida, a race he rates as one of his favourites on the planet.
Tandy’s story has also featured some dark times when his brother Joe, a formidable racer in his own right and the founder of the JTR team that Nick still runs, was killed in a road accident in 2009. Far from derailing Nick, it galvanised him and the memory of Joe is never far from the successes he has.
He took time out of his schedule to tackle the MN readers’ posers and gave each one some serious consideration.
Question: You were brought up around the short oval scene and still have a passion for it. What is it about short oval racing that you like so much?
John Charles
Via email
Nick Tandy: “My dad, Joe, raced on short ovals. He started out at Brafield and ended up doing National Hot Rods. I used to go all over the country with him. Even to this day, I enjoy the fact that the racing on the short ovals is closequarters combat, whether it is a contact or non-contact formula. I enjoy the fact that the fastest cars usually have to start at the back. I love the short race formats and the multi-category schedule of oval racing in general: there is always something different to watch. You might have four different formulas, and they all race within 45 minutes, and then they go on repeat.
“I love the fact there are heats and a final at each meeting. I really enjoy the Saturday evening meetings under floodlights. It is a brilliant evening out, you can go with your mates and you can watch the races that you really want to watch and then you can go for a beer or walk around the pits and chat to people. It’s what I grew up around.”
MN: So were you always destined to do Ministox: was it almost preordained?
NT: “I am pretty sure that my brother
Joe and I almost expected it would happen, really. When we were going
Hot Rod racing, we were growing up with other kids whose dads raced and their elder siblings would be doing Ministox. It was just something that this group of kids ended up doing. There was
quite a few of us: Phil White’s son,
Ricky Hunn’s boys and the Masons: there was loads who made the step. We just seemed to assume that this was what our lives would be. Sure, when it came to our time, we nagged and nagged and nagged our parents. We wanted to get on with it. My mother said that she didn’t want us starting at 10 years old, because she thought we were too small up against big 17-year-olds. Se we had to wait until we were 11, that was agony! Joe was two years older so he got there first and I spent two years watching him. I was very ready for it by the time mum said I was old enough to get out there.”
MN: Do you think there are skills you learned in short oval racing that you’ve taken with you all the way through your career? Do you learn things there that you wouldn’t have picked up in other disciplines?
NT: “That’s 100% the case. You learn so much about spatial awareness and traffic management is key on the ovals. I am sure that I feel more comfortable in an environment with many cars around me because that was always the case on the short ovals. You are always in a pack of cars and you always had to know where the corners of your car were. In all my racing, I have never been scared to be millimetres from another car or do a crossover passing move, and I am not worried about going four-wide into a corner if I have to. That’s useful in all multi-class racing.
“What I also think helps is that we were racing full-sized cars from the age of 11. We weren’t racing go-karts. So when you transition into a formula car or a racing saloon, you are used to dealing with the dimensions around you. It wasn’t that different and you know that scale of car from the beginning.”
Question: You decided to go circuit racing in Minis: that wasn’t a traditional route. What prompted that switch? The natural progression would have been National Hot Rods, surely? Barry May
Via email
NT: “The motivation was the British Touring Car Championship. We were in Ministox in the late 1990s: my brother Joe finished in 1999, and I was a bit after that. But on TV, throughout the 1990s, the thing we watched the most was the BTCC. We both wanted to be
BTCC drivers.”
Question: Who was the better driver: you or your brother Joe?
Jack Crowther
Via email
NT: “Tough [laughs]! I feel I had an edge on Joe from a performance point of view but he was a better mechanic and engineer and was probably a better general package. He would beat me because his all-round package was better and that was something he worked on.
“His cars were always better, whereas I was just more interested in turning up and going flat out! But take into account, I had the benefit of seeing all of his learning, because he was that little bit older than me. I was able to learn from his mistakes, and I think the younger sibling always has that advantage.”
MN: So how come you guys both switched to single-seater racing?
Did the BTCC dream fade away?
NT: “We both made the switch around the same time, in 2005. After racing for four years in the Mini Se7en series, it dawned on us that [our career paths] probably weren’t going to happen the way that we wanted it to.
“The BTCC scene was falling away a bit from the heady days of the mid1990s. I went single-seater racing because I had been watching these cars at meetings and I just fancied having a go in one. There was no thought about Formula 1 or professional racing: I just wanted to have a crack at it and I thought I could probably do alright in one. Joe was working for Formula Palmer Audi, so he had an ‘in’ there, of sorts, but he still needed to fund it, and I happened to enter the BRDC Scholarship, which was just something for me to do over the winter and have a run in a few cars. I never expected to win it, but I did and got a year in the BRDC Formula Ford championship. So it was never a conscious decision to go single-seater racing, if you like, but it all fell into place for both Joe and I. Our hands had been forced a bit though, because we had been thrown out of the Mini Se7en club…” MN: Explain?
NT: “We had a difference of opinion to them, and I think it stemmed from a difference of background, really. I really don’t think they liked us being there. So we took our toys out of their pram and went elsewhere…I look back on the Mini racing fondly, but some of the people in the club were very hard to get along with, that is the polite version.”
Question: Nick, the first time I saw you race was in the Formula Palmer Audi shootout at Snetterton that late crisp cold autumnal day in 2007. It was fantastic racing and very competitive series for young talented drivers. Did this meeting kickstart your racing career and what memories do you have of FPA?
Bob Seaward
Via Facebook
NT: “That might have been the first time my name really registered with Bob, but I had been doing a lot up until that point. The background to it is interesting though. I had just won the Formula Ford Festival and we had had a great season in Formula Ford, although we didn’t win the title. I was hoping to get selected for the McLaren Autosport BRDC Award young driver shortlist, primarily because I thought I would have a good chance of winning it and I wanted to go Formula 3 racing, so the connections and the prize money that came with the Autosport award would have been very beneficial. But I wasn’t on the initial shortlist.
“Joe had already found a backer to move our team, JTR, into Formula 3. We looked at the situation and for a £5000 investment in racing in the Formula Palmer Audi Autumn weekend at Snetterton [which offered the winner a place in the Autosport award final], there was a chance to be in the mix for the £100,000 on offer for the young driver award and everything else that come with that award. We decided to go for it and do our best.
“That worked out for us, and that is why I entered it.”
MN: So what happened in your young driver award assessment?
NT: “I think I would have won it had
I not had a massive shunt in the World Series by Renault car! I had a really
good couple of days. I think everyone was pleased with what I was doing, the DTM team and the Porsche team. Everyone was saying good things, but I knew that Dean Smith was going pretty well too. Right at the end of the second day, they put Dean and I out at the same time in the World Series cars. The pair of us knew that it was, effectively, a shootout. Dean went out and had a massive shunt at Coram and destroyed the car. I still didn’t know quite what the score was, so I thought I would go out in the car and give it my all. I wanted to give them no reason why they couldn’t pick me. On my third flying lap, I put a wheel on the grass on the entry to Riches and had a massive accident of my own – so that was the end of that. I am not bitter about it though, because if I had have won that, my life would have taken a very different route. ”
MN sets the scene: Just two weeks after the death of his brother Joe in a road accident in 2009, Nick and the team continued their campaign in British Formula 3 with the Mygale chassis, Nick took a breakthrough win at Rockingham, and so enthusiastic were his celebrations that he broke the suspension on the slowing down lap…
Question: Winning the F3 race at Rockingham: how emotional was that? How did you even manage to drive that weekend?
Emma Facey
Via email
MN: Was that a weekend just to get through, or was there extra motivation?
NT: “I think for a lot of us, especially me and the family, the best and the easiest thing we could do to deal with what was happening was to go racing. We went to that weekend, and we had something else to think about. There wasn’t any extra motivation but it was something to focus on. We were back at a race track and it was time to go racing again, so it was a nice relief from what had been going on.
“All through pre-season testing, we had been super quick at Rockingham. It was a high-downforce track and although the Mygale I was driving had a lot of drag, it had a lot of downforce too. We had been looking forward to Rockingham all season. It was a nice release from everything to go there and it was also an opportunity, because we knew we had a chance of a strong result.”
MN: Did it hit you after the race then? Were you drained?
NT: “After the first race, which I won, I tried to do a ‘stoppy’ across the line so there would be tyre smoke and it would look spectacular, but it went too far and I broke the suspension! Race two was about three hours away and some of the suspension parts that had broken, we didn’t have at the track. We had a spare chassis back in the workshop though, so as soon as the race was over, I had to get in the girlfriend’s car and cane it back to HQ in Bedford, strip down the spare car and take all the bits back to the track… I only just managed it too.
So it wasn’t until later in the day that things started to hit me emotionally.”
Question: You eventually got your dream ticket with a factory Porsche drive. How did that come about?
It is something any young driver would love!
James Hilton
Via email
NT: “We stopped our British Formula 3 season because the team was in trouble. The man who was supporting Joe pulled out of the squad and we didn’t have the cash to go on racing. I got a drive with Volkswagen to do the F3 Euroseries in a Kolles car– they were looking for an experienced driver and I didn’t have to take any money and I didn’t have any other racing that was happening. It was a simple decision for me. It turned out to be a complete shower of shit. We never did any good but, on those race days, the Euroseries was with DTM and with the Carrera Cup Germany.
“I was in a hotel bar in Zandvoort with a friend from Hewland gearboxes who I knew from the F3 stuff. He was with a friend Chris Crawford who was engineering a Carrera Cup team. Us three Enlgish men in a bar in Holland: sounds like the start of a joke, doesn’t it? Chris said why don’t I go over the next day and he would introduce me to [Carrera Cup team owner] Franz Konrad. I thought that was a great idea because the F3 thing was so bad.
“I went to see Herr Konrad, told him who I was and told him I thought I could do a good job for him if he were to give me a chance and if he was ever in need of a driver. I told him I had done a guest drive in the Porsche Carrera Cup GB and won first time out. If you don’t ask, you don’t get… but I never really expected anything to really come from it but why not? He seemed interested and so I kept calling him and checking in. About a month later, he had a driver who was unable to test at Dijon the next day and so he asked me to go. I drove overnight from Bedford to Dijon and I was quick. Franz asked if I would like to do the race and I did, and I finished second. He invited me to do a Supercup round at the end of the year in Abi Dhabi, and I finished second in that too. Through the winter, he went about trying to fund a car for me in the Supercup and Carrera Cup Germany. That’s how it all started.”
MN: From there to a factory deal, there is still a journey though…
NT: “In the Porsche Carrera Cup in Germany, a lot of the time the presentations were done by the top people at Porsche, because you are right under their noses. You quickly get to know some very key people. The first time I was contracted by Porsche was the back end of 2010, they asked me to share a car with Nicolas Amindo and Martin Ragginger for a VLN round at the Nordschleife because Porsche was about to do the World Cup thing at the same track the following year and they wanted to check out the cars around there.
“They wanted an experienced guy, a complete rookie, which was me, and an in-between driver. They paid me to be part of it, which I thought was just fantastic. They saw I could do a good job and gave me bits and pieces after that. I went to my first Le Mans in 2011 [in a Team Felbermayr-Proton Porsche with Abdulaziz Al-Faisal and Bryce Miller] on a Porsche contract whilst I was still racing in the Carrera Cup.
“I did races in America too as part of the Porsche deal. I asked at the back end of 2011 what it was looking like and what would be the chances of a factory contract, they said there was no need but they would be in contact. I did a load more Porsche racing in 2012 and I won the Porsche Cup [for the top performing privateer driver in the German machines]. And at the back end of 2012, they asked me to be a factory driver.” MN: Did you know about the proposed LMP1 programme at that time?
NT: “I must have heard about it, obviously, but it wasn’t on my radar. I knew it was a separate project. There was Porsche Motorsport which had typically been one thing – looking after racing in the American Le Mans Series or the European Le Mans Series. They all managed that from the same department, but when the LMP1 crew set up, it was a totally different department. There were different drivers, a different staff and a different crew. I wanted to be part of the Porsche Motorsport division that it was in 2012: we just race 911s. The LMP1 thing only came on my radar when Porsche announced the third car.
“I was halfway through a season racing a factory car in America and I could judge my pace against the other guys in the line-up. I thought ‘well, if they are testing some of the other guys, then surely I deserve a shot too?’ I sent a message to [Porsche Motorsport boss] Andreas Seidel asking if he would like me to test the car and I told him I had F3 experience so I knew about aero. He said OK, come and have a run…”
MN: So when was your first run?
NT: “It was in MotorLand Aragon in Spain. Honestly, it was just light years away from anything else I had ever driven. The power involved was just mind-blowing, especially in the days of the eight Megajoule class. Before they started restricting it, the output of that car was unbelievable.
“There was three of us new drivers, and I think we did two tests. We had two runs of eight laps each to try and get a job for life! No pressure! It was intimidating because of the speed, the grip and acceleration, but we knew we had limited time. I just went flat-out.”
Question: Which is your favourite 24-hour race, and which is the hardest? Russell Scobbie
Via email
NT: “I think my favourite event is the Nurburging 24 Hours. As an event,
I like it. I spent a lot of time racing in Germany and I like it there: I enjoy the people and the place and I have lots of friends. The way the event is so open in terms of where people can spectate from is cool. And how the paddock is open and just the fun atmosphere that makes it stand out.
“Having said that, my favourite 24-hour race is Daytona. I like the US regulations about the safety car. It is not like Le Mans where, if get unlucky by five seconds, you can lose 90 seconds because you are in the wrong bloody safety car queue. I like the track at Daytona and the slipstreaming. It is almost a track of two halves, which makes it a challenge. You need a car that has a good balance for the infield, but everyone is trimmed out as much as possible to maximise the straightline speed – because lap time in a straight line is free...”
MN: So which is the hardest one?
NT: “The Nurburgring. There is a such a disparity in the types of car and there are so many cars on track. And the track is so easy to make a small mistake on which will then lead to some pretty massive consequences because it is so narrow and there is no runoff. There are 190 other cars out there with you with various levels of driver who could do anything at any given moment. So, the chances of something happening to you are high. On top of that, you haven’t got six top-class cars like you might have at Le Mans: there are probably about 30 in that race that have a chance to win. That is the toughest one because there are so many factors and that is why I was so happy to win it in 2018.”
Question: If you could share a car with anyone, who would it be?
Malcolm Munt
Via email
NT: “It would be easy to say my teammates who I have had success with before. And it would be easy to say the team-mates that I have now. But if we go away from that, somebody that I have grown a huge deal of respect for is Rene Rast. We were sworn enemies for two years in the Porsche Supercup and Porsche Carrera Cup. We didn’t like each other, we didn’t get on, we were at each other’s nemesis. But since then, I have grown to realise how much of a better driver he made me and probably vice versa.
“A few years later we became quite good friends. Over time, we stopped hating each other and started respecting each other. We became friends instead of enemies. He was very quick in a
P1 car when he drove that. And what he has done in the DTM has been pretty unbelievable.”
Question: How different is the Corvette team from Porsche? Why are you certain it is the right move for you? Damien Doherty
Via email
NT: “I would say that the teams are very similar. The way people go about the racing and the professionalism on show is very similar, and the cars are fairly similar too. I would say the biggest difference is probably the way of working, which is different between the German way of doing things to the American way of doing things. Both have their good and bad points. I would say the US way is maybe a little bit more relaxed but it leads to success, clearly.
“Also, one of the big appeals for me ever since I started looking at sportscars, was that I knew Oliver Gavin from way back when and he came to my school when I was about six years old – we’d gone to the same school. I looked up to him and he was the guy that you want to emulate. In terms of his professionalism and his speed.
At my first Le Mans, my wife took a picture of the timing screen because it had Tandy and Gavin at the top: that’s one for Sharnbrook Upper School!
“Ollie was a hero and he drove for
“The 919 was just an mindblowing racing car” Nick Tandy
Corvette Racing and it has always been a team I had looked up to and the success and the continued success it has had over the last 20 years is amazing: if they go for another 20 years, that is the sort of programme you want to be involved with.”
Question: What other goals do you wish to achieve in your racing career? Any particular races or series that would keep you hungry? Is racing in NASCAR a possibility whether it is on road courses or ovals?
Mario Viloria
Via Facebook
NT: “I definitely want to win Le Mans again. At least once more. And with the LMPh and the LMH rules coming in [for the Hypercars] coming up that looks good. There might be a chance to race in the top class again. That is definitely one goal.
“And also, I have yet to win a drivers’ championship since my Carrera Cup days. I have done part-season stuff and I have won teams’ championships and different races, but it has always been bits and pieces. That is key goal.
“Then I would like to win Daytona outright, because then that would complete the set of all the major
24-hour races [Le Mans, Spa, Nurburgring and Daytona] that I would have won, and that would be special.”
MN: What about those other championships that are out there like, say, NASCAR or Australian Supercars?
NT: “I love NASCAR and I love the racing. I know a lot about the sport and I would like to race in the series because I like the look of the way the racing is. It reminds me of the oval racing that I grew up on: short tracks, cars together all the time in a pack, etc. That appeals, but I am also aware that NASCAR is different from any other branch of motorsport and it is a niche thing to be able to get into. It is not like the times when the money was around for people like Dario Franchitti or Juan Pablo
Montoya to go and do it and land a top seat. It would have to be a conscious shift away from what I am doing to go and dedicate myself to it. Maybe one day…my aim in life is to be able to earn enough money for me to go and do a season in NASCAR!
“I love V8s too, and I love the idea of the Bathurst 1000. When I was growing up and watching the Ford Sierra RS500s around there left quite an impression. It has taken my fancy. Beyond that, a series I have always had a great attraction to is British touring cars. I love the racing and I still watch it all the time. It is a British series and I haven’t raced in a British series for over a decade. I miss having my friends come to watch me race and being around the British people I grew up in the paddock with. That would be something I would love to do.”
Question: Is there any young driver you’ve run at JTR that you think would give you a run for your money?
Jon Wood
Via email
NT: “Dan Harper. The season he did when he won the Porsche Carrera
Cup GB title in 2019, his driving was just exemplary.
“Since we started the Porsche team with JTR, I will often jump in during testing and we have little race offs and do bits of set-up work. But when Dan got a grip of the Porsche, it was amazing. He got to a level where it would have taken me half a day of practice to get up to his speed. He is someone who has really impressed me.”
MN sets the scene: Tandy co-drove alongside the charismatic David Ashburn in a Trackspeed Porsche in British GT in 2013 in a colourful season, which included Ashburn writing the car off while coming in to the pits at Silverstone…
Question: Do you now regret telling David Ashburn to push all the way on his in-lap at Silverstone in
British GT in 2013…?
Keith Cheetham
[Then-Trackspeed team manager] Via Facebook
Question: What was it like to have David Ashburn as your team-mate and team boss in the British GT? I co-drove for David when he switched from the circuits to rallying…
Jonny Evans
Via Facebook
NT: “The season I did with David Ashburn was probably the most fun I have ever had in motorsport. It was just a laugh-a-minute thing.
“He had retired from racing, but then realised he had a car spare and thought why not do the opening races. He called and asked me to join him – but it was only for the start of the year.
“On our maiden weekend at Oulton Park, we came first and second in the two races! After that, I said to David that maybe we should carry on in the series because we were leading the championship points. He umm-ed and aah-ed about it, but in the end we did the full year.
“David was a good driver, but it was very difficult to keep him focused. He would do a really fast lap, fastest of the amateurs, but then he would do something stupid on the next lap and lose five seconds, for example.
“At the Silverstone three-hour race, I said before the race that he should attack the pit entry because I had seen him just ambling in and shedding loads of time. I told him to go flat out into it and brake at the last moment possible. In the race, it is his turn to come in and we are all suited up waiting for him to come in and the car never arrived.
“There is a kink in the pitlane entrance to the national pits at Silverstone which is not quite flat out in a GT3 car. He tried to go flat out because I had told him to push, had a massive shunt and ripped the engine and gearbox out of the car! I wish I had not encouraged it…”
“We were set on becoming BTCC aces” Nick Tandy