GB3: single-seater support
Melvyn Evans is an engineer, driver and businessman. And he’s the man who has brought the Toyota Yaris Rally2 to this year’s BRC. caught up with him
It’s tempting to think that this year in GB3 – the junior single-seater contest on British GT’s support bill for the most part – the title battle will be a simple transfer of last year’s British Formula 4 championship fight.
Both title-winner Louis Sharp of
Rodin and runner-up Will Macintyre of Hitech step up to GB3 and with the same teams – both of which are also
GB3 powerhouses. And both the Kiwi and the Englishman fully intend to fight at the front from the off in their new surroundings. While Sharp came out on top last year, Macintyre points out that was with Sharp having an extra year’s experience in the formula, and now they will be level.
But the probability is that it won’t just be about those two, mainly as there are potent championship returnees who also most likely will be in the thick of the fight for the crown. McKenzy Cresswell is lead among these. He finished fourth in the table last year, and the vast majority of his final 94-point deficit to the table top was carried from a difficult opening weekend at Oulton Park. He is firm that winning the title is his only option this year, and he has the benefit of returning with the same Elite Motorsport team.
Tymek Kucharczyk also returns, and he clearly was much more talented than his final distant seventh place in last year’s table indicated. Losing Silverstone double pole as his halo bolts were taped over was particularly regrettable, while other misfortune and the odd misjudgement also impeded the Pole.
For 2024 he’s switched to Hitech with which Luke Browning won 2022’s GB3 title and Alex Dunne nearly won the last year’s crown. Kucharczyk is another with a resolute title ambition this year.
Another driver worth attention is Nikita Johnson. The 15-year-old comes in to VRD Racing by Arden’s all-American line-up with already bags of singleseater experience and race wins, and is doing a joint campaign with one in USF Pro 2000. He’s looking for GB3 podiums and wins and certainly has big ambitions more broadly.
GB3 is only on British GT’s support bill for half of the junior contest’s meetings this year, as – to further cement its role in developing Formula 1 future stars – it’s added another contemporary F1 venue visit with the Hungaroring, joining Zandvoort that was added last year and the longestablished Spa and Silverstone GP.
GB3’s little brother GB4 meanwhile enters its third season and at the time of writing has a 12-car grid. The evidence of testing is that the chief battle for honours could be fought between Harry Burgoyne, who joins reigning double champion KMR Sport after a debut GB4 campaign with Graham Brunton Racing, and Ginetta Junior graduate Alisha Palmowski, who in testing has well and truly hit the ground running in single-seaters.
Her Elite team-mate, and another Ginetta Junior graduate Finn Harrison, has also shown up well in testing and got an early sample of GB4 late last season.
Based out in rural Ceredigion, Melvyn Evans has been around rallying for the better part of four decades. His company has an enviable reputation that dates back to road rallying in the 1980s and then through stage rallying with Subaru World Rally Cars and more recently, VW Polo GTi R5s. But 2024 is a whole new chapter for the team as it has been entrusted by Toyota Gazoo Racing in Finland to be the UK spearhead for the Yaris Rally2.
The newest and most eagerly awaited Rally2 car has arrived in the UK with major backing from Castrol and a tremendous driver pairing of Melvyn’s son Meirion and European Rally champion Chris Ingram.
There is a lot to prove, with precious little time to prepare, but Evans Sr and his team have all the right credentials.
Now 59 years old, Melvyn has lived his life in the Lampeter area and, though not exactly a rags-to-riches story, he has scaled the rallying ladder to establish one of the most respected rally teams in the UK.
He takes up the story of his formative years: “I was brought up on a farm and loved driving tractors, then racing cars around the field as soon as I could reach the pedals. Obviously, I started road rallying in the early 1980s. That was the thing in those days. I think on the first rally we were leading the class so we progressed and were quite competitive.
“With me being a mechanic, I started getting good results in the cars and doing modifications and started doing work on other cars for customers. We started prepping a lot of cars for people. Then we concentrated on the garage business a bit more, and then foot-and-mouth disease came along in 2001.”
The Evans garage business is Derwen Garage, just outside Lampeter and its rural location means that the farming community is a key customer group. Foot-and-mouth disease hit hard and Melvyn found demand for his rallying services in Belgium.
“I started doing more on the preparation side. I was always getting asked: ‘Will you do this for me?’
‘Will you do that for me?’,” he explains. “It just sort-of escalated from there.
I saw a bit of a market for hiring cars and we started getting good drivers in our cars and doing well.”
Given his road rallying heritage, it was Escorts to begin with it and he even hired a historic-specification car to Jimmy McRae for some British Historic Rally Championship events.
“We started winning events and started winning championships and getting the right people to work around us as well,” he adds. “We’ve been very, very lucky with the mechanics we’ve had and it’s hard work. But I just get a good buzz from seeing somebody else doing well in my cars.”
By 2009 he was competing in a Subaru Impreza WRC and won the asphalt championship in the UK as well as making regular trips to Ireland. “I started doing a lot in Ireland because that was where the closed-road rallying was and I’d come from road rallying,” he says. “That’s what I enjoyed doing. I started going to Ireland and being competitive and started winning events. I went to do the national championship in 2010 and we thought we’d do it as a two-year plan. But we won it in the first year.
“Patrick Walsh and I probably won six out of the eight events or something like that, against people like Derek McGarrity and Eugene Donnelly.
So go to beating them on their own soil was good for me. I really would have liked to have done the Irish Tarmac Championship, but it was just too much time away from work for me.”
As well as running his own car, Evans built a strong reputation for running similar cars for customers as well as doing car set-ups and rebuilds. “We had a lot of success in Ireland and the late Manus Kelly won the Donegal Rally three years in a row. So we’ve had a lot of very, very good results,” he explains.
“What I find is that because I’m a mechanic myself and a fairly good driver, hopefully, as well, you know what people need. When people come to me with a car, you know how to do the set-up, and you can do probably
80% of the work for them. The last bit is down to them, so it’s a big help factor in hiring cars.”
For the last 15 years, the rally car business has been pretty well full-time. “When we started off the rallying it was a hobby, and we looked after a few
people’s cars and then it turned into a business and we started employing people to run that side,” he says.
Derwen Garage is still very much part of the business operation as a local garage that does MOTs and servicing and has a bodyshop with a proper oven for accident repairs and insurance work.
“On that side of the business we’ve been lucky because it is always busy. Because you never know with rallying. People can say they’ll do full a championship but halfway through, they pull out or Covid comes along,” he reflects. “We still build an historic Escort from time to time and we’ve got another one on the go now. I think the motorsport took over more than I anticipated it would, hopefully because of the success we’ve had with good drivers.”
After a great deal of success with Subaru Impreza World Rally Cars, the time came to move on. Evans says: “We went to the R5s because that’s seemed the best route to go. It was competitive and not stupidly priced compared to when we ran Subarus. They were very, very expensive. If you needed to change the clutch on the Subaru WRC it would be £5000 just for the clutch. An R5 clutch is probably just under £1000.
“We were the first to have a Hyundai R5 in the UK, then we used a few
Skodas and then we went into the Polo R5s, which was a good move for us.
I had a lot of contacts from Prodrive and a lot of the engineers from Prodrive went to work at Volkswagen. So that’s how it came about.”
Before long, Melvyn Evans
Motorsport became the ‘go-to’ team in the UK for Polos. “We started with the Polos and we got competitive. We had a lot of wins and a lot of success. We had five Polos in the workshop that I owned at one time, but we’re back to three now. And I bought and sold them and supplied a few of them to customers in Ireland,” says Evans.
Though it is now seven years old, the
Polo R5 is still a very strong and competitive car on both gravel and asphalt. “When the Polo came out it was so advanced. A lot of the geometry on the front end came off the 2016 World Car, and it’s still competitive today,” he says. “In the right hands, it’s still a winning car. Eric Wevers took over everything from VW and he’s doing a brilliant job in supplying the parts: everything you need to run them for years and years. But the problem is, you find that people want the current car.”
With remarkably good timing, as one door was starting to close, another door was about to open. “I had a phone call from a friend of mine who was working for Toyota in Finland and he said they were looking at getting a Yaris Rally2 over to the UK to go into the Irish or the British Championship. Would
I be interested?,” he recalls.
It was an obvious opportunity to start a new chapter of Melvyn Evans Motorsport and the team’s first Yaris arrived two weeks ago.
Evans adds: “It’ll take probably take a few events to get it sorted. But with the backing from the engineers, and what we’ve got from Toyota, it has potential to be a very, very good car. Toyota are in this for the long term and we decided to go with them and aim to be the ‘go to’ for the Yaris in UK and Ireland.”
Melvyn Evans has come a long way from being a young mechanic prepping his road rally Ford Escort. But the passion for the sport and the desire to win are as strong as ever. The Yaris is set to be another successful chapter in the story. ■
“The Yaris has the potential to be great”
Melvyn Evans