Guerrieri: losing but winning
Esteban Guerrieri narrowly lost out in the 2019 World Touring Car title fight with Honda. But the fact that he is still racing on the international stage at all is a major victory
Glancing at Esteban Guerrieri’s CV, it’s easy to characterise his career – in single-seaters, at least – as one full of setbacks that never fulfilled its potential. But for a driver who has adopted the nickname ‘The Tiger’ in the World Touring
Car Cup, a phoenix is perhaps a more appropriate mascot considering Guerrieri has, more than once, reinvented his career in the face of adversity.
Born and raised in Buenos Aires, Guerrieri and his family were of moderate social standing, so he didn’t have to go to the drastic lengths some go to in order to raise budget, but equally his journey wasn’t without sacrifices.
“In 2000 when I did my debut in Formula Renault in
Argentina when I was 15, we had two bags of clothes in the bus terminal in Buenos Aires,” says Guerrieri, who persuaded his parents at a young age to move him to a bilingual school after hearing his idol, Ayrton Senna, speak about the importance of learning English. “So my mum, my brother, my sister, my father, they were all working, all saving money.
“This is something that I always appreciate about my family, that my dad sat with my sister and my brother and he asked them, ‘Is it OK if we save this money for Esteban to race next year?’ This was in 1999, and they said, ‘Yes, let’s save the money for Esteban’.”
That money, plus help from his team as his personal budget only covered half a season, helped Guerrieri claim the Formula Renault 1.6 Argentina crown, and he was then one of three drivers – alongside future World Touring Car Championship dominator Jose Maria Lopez and Mariano Altuna – picked for a programme that took Argentinian drivers to Europe and placed them at the Italian Lucidi Motors team the following year.
Three years in Formula Renault categories on the continent, which culminated in the 2003 Eurocup title, preceded a solid
2004 campaign in Formula 3000 – after failing to reach a deal with Toto Wolff that would have given him a role in Mercedes’ Formula 3 programme for 2005 – that yielded a podium and jointsixth in the drivers’ standings with Lopez (who got the nod by virtue of his two podiums finishes to Guerrieri’s one). But then came what Guerrieri describes as “one of the chances of my life” when he tested for Arden at Jerez, as the team evaluated drivers for the 2005 GP2 season, which would also have involved a tie-up with Red Bull’s scheme.
“But that test was not great for me,” says Guerrieri. “I did only a few laps, and in Jerez there is only one shot in the morning with the weather and then the track is a bit slower, and I didn’t know the track.”
Instead, he took a “step backwards” by moving to F3, first with Midland, then Manor, before racing for British F3 start-up Ultimate Motorsport in 2007 and 2008. Guerrieri became “part of the family” during that spell with the Mygale-equipped team run by Barry Walsh, who was keen to buy into the Toro Rosso F1 team. The ‘collapse’, as Guerrieri puts it, of Walsh’s property development business put paid to those and Guerrieri’s ambitions.
But his nearest of misses came in 2010, as Guerrieri thought about throwing in the towel. Having raced in Superleague Formula in 2009, he was contemplating completing the studies he had
“THAT JEREZ TEST WAS NOT GREAT FOR ME. I DID ONLY A FEW LAPS AND I DIDN’T KNOW THE TRACK”
sacrificed to move to Europe when he was called up for the final round of the Formula Renault 3.5 season with RC Motorsport.
A fourth and a fifth marked a good return, but results weren’t the most important part of that weekend. Instead, it was his introduction to Igor Salaquarda, whose ISR team was taking over RC’S entry, and a subsequent offer to coach Salaquarda’s son Filip, who in 2009 had scored a solitary point for Prema. “They were paying for testing, and Igor said, ‘Esteban, do you want to stay to coach my son, Filip?’” says Guerrieri. “I had no money, and ‘OK’, I said. And after the two days of testing, Filip was first, he was P1.”
Come January and February, ISR was still holding out for a paying driver to take the second seat, but few were forthcoming. Guerrieri was at his mother’s house in Argentina, planning his return to education, when he received a phone call. “I remember that day,” he says. “I got this phone call from Igor: ‘Esteban, what are you doing?’ There was nothing but to study. ‘OK, do you want to come and do the first race of the year?’ So I said, ‘OK, yeah, but give me at least two races’, because one race is difficult to prove that the car is good.”
Salaquarda honoured that request and gave Guerrieri, now 25, a final shot. Three retirements from the first three races was hardly an auspicious start, but Guerrieri won the second race at Spa and, having been replaced by Alexander Rossi in Monaco, then earned a full-season agreement when he scored a double victory at ISR’S home race at Brno.
It was a campaign Guerrieri describes as “incredible”, even though his defeat in the title race was not without controversy.
His disqualification from victory in the opening race at Silverstone, after his car was protested for a piece of tape affixed to his hastily rebuilt machine following a qualifying crash, is well remembered as the points he forfeited there would have crowned him champion ahead of Mikhail Aleshin (and Daniel Ricciardo), but he also missed the entire Hungaroring weekend when ISR elected to withdraw both cars.
“We got to scrutineering [and were told], ‘No guys, you cannot race with these chassis because they are cracked underneath’,” he says. “For Igor, his was a new team, and he thought that he was getting f ***** by the French. He’s a guy with principles, and he said, ‘Esteban, I’m sorry, but we’re going to quit this weekend’.
I was there fighting, I was P2/P3 in the championship, really fighting for it. I was crying. We left the circuit and we didn’t race.”
“I COULDN’T RAISE THE BUDGET. SO I COULDN’T GET THE… THE BREAKTHROUGH TO FORMULA 1”
In another development typical of his career, the F1 momentum stalled – this time once and for all. Guerrieri’s relationship with the Manor team behind Virgin’s grand prix operation was strong, following his spell at the team in F3 and living in Sheffield, and Guerrieri and team boss John Booth agreed a priority contract that would have given him a shot in an MVR-02 for 2011.
The stumbling block was the budget. Guerrieri can’t recall the exact amount – he guesstimates $5-6million; the reported number was $8m – but regardless of the actual figure it was still a whack to raise for a driver not unfamiliar with walking to race tracks because he was short of money in his pockets.
“He [Booth] sent me the proposal, with the official intention to race, and I went to the government in Argentina, to some connections I had here, but I couldn’t raise the budget,” says Guerrieri. “So I couldn’t get the… the breakthrough to F1.”
Two years and two runner-up finishes in Indy Lights followed,
which didn’t pave the way for an Indycar move, after which Guerrieri finally made the call to return to Argentina and race in Super TC2000. It was while Guerrieri, now firmly off the radar, was competing there in 2016 that he got his WTCC break in a Campos Racing Chevrolet.
For a career that’s included so many setbacks, Guerrieri’s rise to prominence on the world stage is just deserts for a fiery yet amiable individual with an undeniable talent. The way he has applied the lessons learned from his defeats is also in keeping with a philosophical outlook, which has undoubtedly helped him make the most of his opportunities in World Touring Cars – first with Campos, then standing in at the Honda WTCC squad, and for the past two seasons as a title-challenging factory driver for the Japanese make in WTCR.
Asked about the chances he has grasped in World Touring Cars, Guerrieri recalls a conversation with Autosport in the aftermath of his WTCR title defeat to Norbert Michelisz, saying: “Sorry, I want to interrupt because you remember [at the Sepang season finale] you were like, ‘Yeah, Esteban, you lost the championship, how do you feel…?’ Many asked me that. But my biggest challenge was to grow within me, and try to understand the opportunities and chances I had, why they happened, how they happened, what I had to learn from that, and if I would have another chance, how I would act.
“That was, I would say, the most satisfactory process of my life so far – trying to make those chances that again, I couldn’t get profit from, to then when I had a new one to try to do the opposite. Even when you lose, you lose in the result but you never lose really.”
Guerrieri’s place at the Munnich Motorsport Honda WTCR squad has, at the time of writing, not been confirmed for 2020, but there is little doubt that he will be on the grid again this season. The omens are good too: in the previous three seasons, Guerrieri has placed fourth overall, then third, then second.
Not that he needs omens. Even if a title isn’t forthcoming, Guerrieri seems happiest achieving personal growth by learning from his experiences.
“MY BIGGEST CHALLENGE WAS TO GROW WITHIN ME. IF I HAVE ANOTHER CHANCE, HOW I WOULD ACT”