KENNARD: KEEPING AN EYE ON THE PAST
British racer who is making his name in historic racing
West Londonbased Jonathan Kennard, 35, has had quite a racing journey so far and is now moving into a new phase that has Masters Endurance Legends as a key prong. These are the GT cars and sports-prototypes that raced internationally as recently as five seasons ago, adding a very different dimension to the type of cars covered by the generic ‘historic ’heading. It is a place where Kennard is very at home.
However, the Jonathan Kennard racing story goes back two decades. “I did a little bit of karting but mainly started with T Cars and went from there to Formula Palmer Audi. I grew up with cars as my dad John loved them. My dad was one of the first employees at Crosthwaite and Gardiner down in Sussex.”
Crosthwaite and Gardiner is a renowned engineering business with some remarkable race car projects in its back catalogue. “I did work experience there when I was young as well,” said Kennard. “My dad never raced but we used to go to Silverstone and Brands quite a lot.”
In 2003 he tackled the Palmer Audi Autumn Trophy and won it before graduating to the main series the following year and won that as well. Formula 3 then beckoned, first with
Alan Docking and then with Raikkonen Robertson and he finished sixth in the 2007 British championship.
“There wasn’t a great deal of family money to just throw at things but I picked up a sponsor, which helped me in Formula 3 a lot. Without that, I wouldn’t have got anywhere near Formula 3,” he admits.
In terms of scaling the single-seater ladder, Kennard accepts that the arrival of GP2 was a killer blow to his career hopes as budgets rocketed.
“The issue was that GP2 came along,” he explains. “If they’d kept it as Formula 3000, it might have been achievable to carry on doing that, because the budgets were £500,000 or £600,000. To do GP2 was adding a million pounds onto that. That was overnight from one year to the next. And, you know, I had always had in my mind that Formula 3000 would be a good route to go.”
Instead of racing in the F1 support series, Kennard hooked up a role as a test driver for Williams Grand Prix Engineering for 2008. “I was very lucky to do that and it was quite an honour to drive for Frank Williams,” he says. “It was mainly straight line testing at Kemble. They had their flywheel KERS system, which was quite a novel idea at that time. And that was really what they were working on.
It was a lot of aero testing as well and stuff like that. So it was a big deal.”
It then became apparent that the Williams role would be a catalyst for the next phase of his racing career as he looked toward sports-prototypes and Le Mans. Although barely 25 years old, Kennard was realistic enough to accept that a Formula 1 drive was unlikely.
“I was competing against people like Pastor Maldonado who was funding the team. So, you know, that was never going to be a future for me,” says the driver.
In 2009, he raced in the Super League Formula and in International Formula Master, but his single-seater career was coming to a close even though he then spent three years as a test driver in FIA Formula 2.
He says: “I’m proud of what I achieved in those years of my career, and I raced against most of the F1 grid.
“I loved every minute of the Williams work, and actually, that helped me get the Le Mans drive because of being a Williams driver; they know you’re not an idiot and that you know what you’re talking about. So it definitely helped me a lot and that was really the transition into sports prototypes.”
The switch to sports-prototype nearly happened five years earlier as Kennard came close to racing for Team Jota in 2005.
“Instead, I chose to go to the Formula 3 route because I wanted to be in Formula 1,” he remembers. “So I had sort of been teetering on doing sportscars for a long time before that and I’ve always loved it. I think Le Mans is just the best event in the world. So I’d always wanted to do it and then the opportunity to do it with a smaller LMP2 team came along. And I absolutely loved it.”
That was in 2010 when he raced for Kruse Schiller Motorsport in both the European Le Mans Series and the 24-hour in the team’s Lola B-07/40. In the 24-hour race, he was teamed with Hideki Noda and Jean de Pourtales as they finished 26th and tenth in LMP2.
“I haven’t done enough of that,” he admits of his clear desire to return to Le Mans. In 2011 he did six races with Lamborghini in the GT1 World Championship. “And then that ended, because it was exceedingly expensive and it was never going to work long term. But it was fantastic while it lasted. The Murcielago I was driving was the best car I’ve ever, ever raced. And then I found my way into historics!”
The opportunity to race older cars came about purely by chance and at a time when he’d not raced regularly for a couple of seasons.
“One of my engineers was working for a team that had an Arrows A3. And they said the normal driver couldn’t make it. ‘Would I like to do it?’ I’d never really thought that I would end up in historics though I’ve always loved it to bits. But I grasped the chance and I absolutely loved it. It was a bit like driving a big Palmer Audi,” he jokes.
The landmark event was the 2017 Silverstone Classic in the Arrows A3 run by Swiss-based Scuderia Classiche and he promptly put the 1980 F1 car on pole by half a second from Michael Lyons and Nick Padmore. After two fine races with the two leading Historic F1 exponents, Kennard took a second and a third place.
“I loved that experience,” he said without hesitation. “I think they’re the best cars ever. It’s an honour because of the drivers that have driven them in the past that you’ve always looked up to.”
Over the next couple of seasons, Kennard tackled several more historic races and joined Martin O’Connell’s team for the Spa Classic Six Hours.
Some drives were linked to coaching work he was doing with drivers and car owners.
But still he kept himself current in modern sports-prototypes with drives in Radical European Masters and last year he got his second chance at Le Mans with a slot in the Oreca 07 run by the IDEC Sport team alongside Patrick Pilet and Kyle Tilley. They finished 15th overall and 11th in LMP2.
However, a return to La Sarthe this August seems unlikely. Kennard says: “The team I did Le Mans with last year has got an entry. I don’t think I’m going to be
“Driving work for Williams gave me a boost”
Jonathan Kennard