JOINING THE MOTOR SPORT ELITE

Four years ago, Elite Motorsport team boss Eddie Ives was preparing for a maiden Ginetta Junior campaign with just a single car. Last season his squad took a clean sweep in the category with its drivers winning the overall and rookie titles and Elite taking the teams’ honours too after running six cars. It’s a rapid turnaround for the team – one that Ives himself is surprised by.

“It was probably the dream [to have a six-car title-winning squad in a couple of years] but I didn’t think it at the time,” admits Ives. “At the time we were just trying to build the blocks and make sure we were here for the long run.”

He’s made sure of that with the yellow and black cars now firmly established as frontrunners. But the team has been on quite an unusual journey to get to this point.

Elite was initially founded when Ives himself was racing in a number of 750 Motor Club categories. And the team built its own car too – with Ives winning the Sport Specials Class C title in 2014 in an Elite Pulse, a Caterham-style machine.

“We had a really successful year in Sport Specials – the car we built was really good but it was possibly too expensive for the market,” recalls Ives. “Although people liked it and were interested in it we didn’t see that there was a future in it – from a commercial perspective it didn’t really take off.”

That led to a change of direction for the team ahead of the 2015 season.

“At the end of 2014 we looked at joining a [national] series,” Ives continues. “We went to the British Formula 4 launch and that was what we were looking at. But that expanded rather quickly with F3 teams joining. We then had a meeting with Ginetta and bought a Ginetta Junior car.

“Working with the junior kids was possibly the main attraction. I was relatively young, I was 22, and thought it would be a bit easier to build bonds and relationships with the kids. We did see it as the entry level into national racing and could then progress into big Ginettas or other BTCC support categories.”

It was at this point that another key figure in the team’s success became involved with the project. Two-time British Touring Car champion Chris Hodgetts heard about the operation from his good friend Jonathan Lewis and met with Ives to find out more. And a bizarre coincidence helped encourage Hodgetts to get on board.

“I went to a show and there was a stand there all black and yellow and I went to talk this very young lad [Ives],” explains Hodgetts. “He had a car there and I looked under the bonnet and saw its chassis number was 16 and that was Jody Fannin’s car from 2010. I was coaching Fannin in 2010 and there was an instant link there. I took Geri Nicosia from Fiestas to be the first driver from Eddie’s team. It just got bigger from that point onwards.”

That first year was very much a learning season as Fiesta Junior champion Nicosia battled against well-established multi-car operations in the competitive series. But for 2016, the team signed Harry King – having run him in the Ginetta Junior scholarship – and karting graduate Tom Wood, with success starting to follow. The pair took a 1-2 at Rockingham and the team’s reputation was growing.

This meant it was ideally placed to profit when the frontrunning JHR Developments squad was suspended from the series towards the end of 2017. A number of drivers were rehomed with Elite and, along with other signings, it meant the team ended the year with an incredible seven racers.

One of those JHR refugees was Tom Gamble and – after winning four of the eight races he contested with Elite – he went on to take the title.

And then this year, Elite ran two of the three main title protagonists with Adam Smalley eventually just beating Louis Foster to the crown.

“The first couple of years were really hard – trying to find a driver when you had just one car was tricky,” says Ives. “There was a bit of luck with JHR and HHC [another leading squad] leaving, that helped us. But there was a lot of hard work to be in that position [to capitalise]. It’s a case of working with the right people, the right driver coaches and mechanics and we are a friendly, family team.”

Hodgetts agrees: “It’s a happy team, a fun team but also a bloody serious one. I’m surprised it’s grown incredibly quickly and we must be doing something right for it to do that.”

Hodgetts, who has been joined at the team by his son and 2007 Renault UK Clio Cup runner-up Stefan, puts that down to attention to detail.

“External people, who are not familiar with them, think they’re relatively simple cars but it’s probably the hardest championship to be successful in in the UK because there are that many little parts that have to be to perfection,” he says.

Last year was also a significant season for the team as it moved into a second series: the Ginetta GT4 Supercup ( see below). But Ives doesn’t have any definitive targets in mind for the future.

“I’m not someone to have a set goal in five years’ time,” says Ives. “We’ve got to see what opportunities appear. I would quite like to get into GT racing but will wait for the right opportunity and time.”

With people like the Hodgetts’ keeping Ives “on the straight and level” it’s likely success will follow whichever direction the team takes.