WHY PRO-AM RACING IS IMPORTANT TO PRO TEAMS
WRT is renowned as one of the world’s best GT teams, both in the big endurance races and across championships.
It has won 24-hour races outright at Spa (2011 and 2014) and the Nurburgring (2015), claimed the 2018 Bathurst 12 Hour and scooped multiple titles in GT World Challenge Europe – including four of the last six in the Pro class in the Sprint Cup.
The team has also achieved great success in Pro-am racing. In the fiercely competitive
Dubai 24 Hours, which requires each GT3 entry to feature a Bronze-graded driver, it claimed a 1-2 finish this year. After second places in 2019 and 2021, it underlines the emphasis WRT places on customer racing.
This year it has entered five cars across the Pro, Silver and new-for-2022 Gold class. CO-GT programme manager Kurt Mollekens says all are treated with equal importance. It’s a cyclical process, with success in Pro feeding customer interest that allows the team to stay competitive against other Pro squads.
“As a team we can’t afford to be quick in one category or with one car and not at all with the others,” explains Mollekens, who previously ran his own KTR team in junior single-seaters. “You have to be very wary of not giving the rest of the paddock the impression that you can only function around one lead car and all the others are not taken seriously and they run in P20.
“If you want people to know about your results, then overall victory is more important than finishing P14 but first Pro-am. But as a business finding the customers every year, it’s just as important to us to win that Pro-am category.
“We can at any time swap our race engineers or mechanics from one car to the next and we’ll achieve the same result. If you’ve got some good ones that always go on the Pro cars and then you take some youngsters coming out of school that you put on the Am car, then that Am car may not be as reliable and then you will get missed opportunities and you will lose potential drivers for the year after.”
one little thing to change. That’s why he’s improving so quickly.”
TF Sport chief engineer Grant Clarke, who has worked with amateurs across GTE, GT3 and prototype racing in LMP2, says it’s important to remember that “each driver is their own individual”.
“There isn’t a one-size-fits-all methodology to working with the Am drivers,” explains Clarke, who won a British GT and GTWCE Endurance Pro-am title double in 2019 and ran its Le Mans 24 Hours-winning GTE Am crew in 2020. “Am drivers come from all walks of life, and some are able to get up to speed much quicker on a race weekend because they’re in and out of the car much more often. You have to put into perspective each individual driver, what their abilities and their shortcomings are, then tailor your programme to suit them.”
3 GET THE BASICS RIGHT, UTILISE THE DRIVER AIDS
One of the fundamentals of racing with an amateur driver is to prioritise, reckons Clarke. He explains that the focus for an engineer shifts from car performance towards helping the driver exploit their potential by “picking one or two points around the lap where you can find a big chunk of time rather than the minute detail”.
“When you strap an Am driver into a car, you’re taking them massively outside their comfort zone,” says Clarke. “Their eyes are on stalks and everything can become a complete overload. So the biggest thing is getting the basics right. That means being able to work in traffic, being able to drive in different track conditions and then nailing the brake application, throttle application, smooth steering.
“It’s not about necessarily carrying two or three kilometres through a high-speed corner because that will only gain you a fraction of a second. It’s about preparing the car properly in the low and mediumspeed corners where you can gain half a second just with basic driving technique.”
Millroy explains that laying a solid foundation of understanding “that is totally transferrable”, rather than simply giving instructions that will “only help in that car, on that day, in those conditions, that tyre-life, that fuel-load”, has allowed Iribe to “work things out for himself”.
“I’d say 95% of the focus with Brendan is on his technique, getting him to understand that what he’s doing with the pedals affects the balance and the weight transfer,” says Millroy. “If he gets a little bit of understeer somewhere, he will now trail the brakes a bit longer to try to keep the weight on the nose.”
These basic principles apply regardless of what car an amateur driver is put in. But while West has raced lots of different cars, including an LMP2 Ligier in the Asian Le Mans Series, he believes it’s most beneficial for drivers starting out to
“stick to one car and get used to it”.
“In the first couple of years there’s so much going on occupying your brain,” says West, who switched to Pro-am racing in the GT Open series in 2016. “You’re trying to learn the tracks, understand the car, get used to racecraft, all of that. Everything
“You have to put into perspective each individual Am driver and tailor your programme to them”
from how the car behaves to simple things like the steering wheel, it’s just easier being in a familiar environment so you can reduce how much of your brainpower you need to be focusing on surviving rather than getting better at driving.”
GT3 cars have myriad traction control settings, plus anti-lock braking systems, that Millroy says “help the Ams to get up to speed very quickly and keep them out of trouble a lot of the time”. But for drivers looking to push on, learning to optimise the driver aids is vital.
“You do definitely need to use them,” says Millroy. “The tools are so advanced that it’s a skill now learning how to use
ABS and traction control properly. On the Mclaren, we use the traction control a lot and you change it throughout the tyre life. As Brendan has developed his feel for a car, he can tune those systems to how he wants them based on the track grip level, the tyre life and stuff like that.”
4 MATCH UP PERSONALITIES, ACCEPT COMPROMISES
This advice is all well and good. But the chemistry between a Pro driver and an Am driver isn’t something that can be taught. It’s either there or it’s not. “Those relationships aren’t always going to work,” Millroy says. “You can have the best coach in the world but if the personalities don’t fit with the Am, you’re never going to get the best out of each other.”
Lemmer adds: “Am drivers have got strong personalities, and it’s important that you have a Pro driver that you can match the personality to complement that.”
In all cases, the assigned Pro has to be willing to enact the necessary compromises to make their co-driver faster and achieve the lowest possible average lap time. This means sacrificing their own practice time – and therefore understanding of the tyre’s peak performance window – to give their Am driver more seat-time. As a result, the Pro is largely reacting in the few laps they do get and with a car set-up designed to inspire confidence from the Am – which is therefore slower in the Pro’s hands. As Lemmer puts it, “everything is based around the Am and the Pro is just there to do a job”.
“A good Pro in Pro-am will realise that the ideal set-up is probably one where he’s going to be two tenths of a second per lap slower than he would ideally like,” West says, “but it would be a set-up where I’m half a second per lap quicker than with his ideal set-up.”
Pro drivers working with an Am therefore have different priorities when giving feedback to the engineers. “I’ve got to think – is that quicker? Yes, it’s probably a couple of tenths quicker, but is Brendan going to struggle with that?” says Millroy. “You make compromises for yourself as well. I have to split my time and my mental capacity over the race weekend between my own performance in the car and, most importantly, Brendan’s.”
The fact that, like Iribe, Millroy was a Le Mans rookie last year didn’t change that focus. He says it’s important as a Pro to manage expectations and “stay totally focused on your own programme”, rather than worrying about comparing to others.
“I just try to be realistic about it,” he says. “The race result is going to be dictated by the average pace of the three of us over the whole race, so you have to make decisions to balance that as well as possible, put your ego as a racing driver to one side and fully understand your role.”
West singles out Jonny Adam and Come Ledogar as the best Pro drivers he’s worked with because of their aptitude for coaching. He says amateurs derive the most benefit when their co-driver “gets satisfaction out of helping the Am get better”.
“I’d rather have someone that’s interested in the coaching aspect rather than somebody who might be a tenth or two quicker that has no interest in coaching,” he says. “Yes, they might get you a pole, but that’s not going to win you the race.”
Effective communication is a vital component of any Pro-am relationship. Millroy has spent several years honing his ability to translate feedback “into how your Am thinks, and for it to make sense to them so that they can put that into practice”.
“Fundamentally that comes from understanding how your Am’s brain works when they’re in the car,” he says.
Being constructive in criticism is equally essential. As West puts it, “not everybody is born to be a teacher or a coach”.
“I don’t mind the Pro telling me, ‘That was shit’,” he says. “But if he stops there, then it’s not very helpful. We’re all grownups, I can take criticism and I can see every single lap that I’m not as quick. I want to know, ‘What can I do to narrow that gap?’ For lack of a better word, it’s a job that you’re trying to do and you’re trying to be as good as possible at it.” ■