LLEWELLIN JR: FOLLOWING IN THE RIGHT WHEELTRACKS
Why David’s son is ready to prove his mettle
Thirty-five years ago, on his 26th birthday, David Llewellin blew the candles out on his cake and set off from Cardiff to start the Welsh International Rally in his MG Metro 6R4. He and co-driver Phil Short were in redhot form having won the Circuit of Ireland Rally a month earlier and were keen to avenge a local curse that had prevented Llewellin from winning his home event.
Things started swimmingly as he led the early stages, only for a trip into a ditch and then a barrel roll at a hairpin to prolong the wait for another year.
“I remember it well,” Llewellin tells MN today. The day we are talking is
May 4, 2021 – the day after Llewellin’s 61st birthday – and the focus is on the next generation of the family. We’re still in Wales, but not on a rally. Instead, it’s a test for David’s son Tom as he acclimatises to the Mitsubishi
Mirage R5 he will drive in 2021.
“He won’t let me [drive]!” David, who stopped competing full-time after 1995, jokes. “He doesn’t trust me.” MN asks: “Maybe he’s scared that you’ll beat him?”
“Yeah, that’s right,” adds David. “I’m telling everyone I’m getting old and slow, and I just don’t want to be proved right…”
Despite the good spirits, there is something serious afoot. While presence at Walters Arena in south Wales is dressed up as a launch day for Llewellin Jr and his backers, it’s also a fantastic opportunity to get out and learn the new car. Tom will compete in the BTRDA Rally Series and Welsh Rally Championship this season, and he’s a rally driver. He doesn’t like being uncompetitive. Around 45 miles of testing were completed at Sweet
Lamb a few weeks ago and another 60 will be clocked on this day. Things are starting to come together.
“We made some really good changes to the car, mainly suspension-wise,” Tom affirms. “We just improved the balance of the car and obviously that improved my confidence a hell of a lot as well, and yeah I just felt like I could do whatever I wanted to do with the car.”
More comfortable than at Sweet Lamb? “Yes definitely, a lot more comfortable.” Not words Llewellin’s rivals will want to be hearing, as the one trump card they may have held over the 20-year-old looks to have dissipated already.
His route to reach this R5 chance has been a touch unorthodox, meaning he’s learning a lot of new things that he’d have otherwise already been on top of had he driven a more traditional R2 as opposed to a Ford Escort Mk2 in recent years.
Tom fills us in: “I’ve always been involved in motorsport because of dad and going to a few shows and then my brother and dad started hillclimbing, they got an Escort and I was always with them, I wouldn’t ever miss an event. And then basically when I was 11, 12 years old
I thought ‘when I’m 14 I’m going junior rallying’. That’s what I wanted to do. So then I started rallying in a Nissan Micra and I just got hooked then, that was it.
“And obviously we had the opportunity then to have a go at some rallycross, got into the juniors, started doing really well and won the British championship in 2017,” he adds. “In 2018 I went to the seniors and I was second in the championship then, had a really good season in the car but when I moved to the Escort, I got in it and was like ‘this is what I want to do’. Obviously costs got a bit more expensive so I kind of had to commit to one or the other in a way but for me it wasn’t about the cost it was just ‘I want to go rallying now’.”
Go rallying he did, and he quickly became a winner, claiming the 2019 Welsh Junior title with the Escort. Although David thinks Tom has, perhaps, got to adapt a little bit more than others because, Dad says, “if you’re in an R2 car you tend to be left-foot braking and have a sequential gearbox so it’s a lesser step”. Tom is confident the Escort has still taught him well.
“To be honest to drive an Escort you’ve got to drive it hard,” says Tom. “It’s very physical, no power steering, the car is forgiving but physical to drive. The Escort was a fast car in a straight line but the cornering speeds weren’t too high so I think it was a really good stepping stone for me to learn pacenotes and learn everything else that goes with rallying
before I got into a four-wheel-drive car and before the cornering speeds got a lot faster. As soon as I got into the Escort from juniors I wasn’t going to go to an R2 from that, as that would’ve felt like going backwards.”
Ross Whittock – who’s co-driving Chris Ingram in the World Rally Championship this year – sat with Llewellin back in 2019 and will call the notes on his first R5 start too; the Nicky Grist Stages in July. He is expected to share that role with James Morgan, and both were at Walters Arena to guide Llewellin. Whittock was impressed with what he saw.
“It took the day to change his driving style a little bit, adapting to the R5,” says Whittock. “[That’s] because you have to use the suspension travel to your advantage. On the brakes you have to make it grip and it’ll help the turn-in, so we made quite a lot of set-up changes to the car but also with those set-up changes it helped his driving style.
“James Morgan also sat in a little bit with him today, and by the end of the test we both said to each other ‘If he goes this pace on the rally, he’s going to win the BTRDA’. There’s no problem about that, if he goes that pace on a stage, he’ll win it.
“He’s definitely ready for the car, there’s no doubt about that. We’ve just got to work a little bit on the pacenotes with him, just making them a bit more detailed because everything comes up so quick you need to know those details for those cars. But yeah in terms of his driving there’s no issue that [means] he won’t be able to drive the car or anything like that.”
Tom agrees that creating better pacenotes is something to work on. “I think there’s still some more development I can do on my notes which would probably give me a little bit of time, gain a bit of pace,” he says, before diving into more detail about how that worked in practice at Walters Arena.
“They’d actually changed the loop a little bit so I drove some roads I’d never used before so that was really, really good. We made notes, did two passes like you’d do on a recce and went out on the first lap and drove it kind of like you would on a rally to try and get that feeling again.
And for me they worked quite well and I was quite happy with them, but you can always develop your notes.
“At the start of the day, driving technique-wise I was still a little bit in the Escort mindset,” he adds. “I was trying to feed the throttle mid-corner a little bit whereas this car, you hit the apex and you’ve just got to plant it to pull yourself round the corner. By the end of the day I felt I’m pretty much gelled now to that driving style for the four-wheel-drive car.”
So what about the car? The Mitsubishi Mirage – although built to R5 specification – was never homologated by the FIA and has therefore been something of a stranger on the British stages compared to the sea of Fiestas currently in competition. That’s not to say the car is a slouch though. In Jamie Jukes’hands it has won rallies, most notably the 2018 Pokerstars on the Isle of Man, and it almost won the Nicky Grist Stages with Tom Cave against soon-to-be British and BTRDA champion Matt Edwards that same year too.
The Mirage has been sold and developed by Spencer Sport in this country, and the team is on-hand to support Llewellin’s programme this year.
Team principal Charlie Jukes says: “We’re expecting it to be very competitive in Tom’s hands to be fair. We’re expecting good things [but] we’ll see. He’s obviously new to it, new to four-wheeldrive, [has] done a bit of testing but until we all get out and do a rally we’re not going to know.
“He’s a really, really good lad and we’re super glad to have him in the car and see what he can do. He’s very grown up [and offers] very good feedback as a driver as well and that’s been really helpful to move the car on to what he wants which has saved us a lot of time. He’s done a fair bit of testing now, the car’s run faultlessly so we’ll see what happens.”
The package seems just about perfect then; it’s now time to see if it can all harmonise. Tom isn’t targeting wins from the off. He says: “Towards the end of the season, I’m going to want to be pushing to be up on top with the top boys.”
Is he under-selling himself there? Dad suspects so. “In my experience with Tom coming through juniors and into an Escort he does like to know a car well before he pushes it to the full limit. But I rode with the car in him today, and he’s going pretty bloody quickly I can tell you that!” laughs the 1989 and ’90 British Rally champion. “I would say he’s becoming quite comfortable with the car already. He’s a natural driver and he won’t take long to be on the pace I’m sure.”
Whittock has no concerns either. “I think with the right programme and the right budget, not pushing him on too fast or too quick, he can go as far as he wants to go to be honest,” he enthuses. “The natural talent is there. The natural raw talent and raw speed is there as much as it is in Chris [Ingram], I just think with Tom he has more support from other people than
Chris had when he was coming up through which probably will help Tom a little bit more because he’s very calm and relaxed in the car, nothing else really fazes him and I think that’s all come through Dai.”
That family link does place some expectation on Tom’s young shoulders – “definitely people know who I am because of my dad. The name is big already, so people expect a lot from me, now” – but he insists he isn’t feeling any pressure to deliver the first Llewellin rally victory since the 2012 Neath Valley Historic Stages.
“I think naturally there is pressure with the name isn’t there but Tom’s very good at absorbing all that,” says David. “But probably him playing it down is me saying ‘look just go and enjoy the car, enjoy driving it and if it all works well, the results are going to come’. We’re enjoying it as father and son and I’m trying to pass on my experience to help him up the ladder as quickly as we can. We wanted to get him in a four-wheeldrive car as soon as we could to get that experience and let’s hope we can go and do some rallies.”
Amen to that.
“If he goes at that pace, he will be a winner” Ross Whittock
“I feel like I can do what I want with the car” Tom Llewellin