EXCLUSIVE: Patrick Watts Q&A
Tin-top hero and headline-maker tackles the readers’ questions
Peugeot was the plucky underdog at the height of the British Touring Car Championship’s boom time of the mid-1990s, and it had a driver who was perfectly fitted to that mould. Patrick Watts had been a product of the hugely competitive one-make landscape in the UK and was a multiple title winner on his way up through the ranks.
There had been an early taste of the big time when he was signed by the Austin Rover Group as it sought to boost the image of the grandma’s favourite car, the Metro. The rug was pulled from under his feet when ARG backed out of racing in 1984, but Watts wasn’t finished.
The Kent racer would get another shot at the BTCC, firstly with Mazda in 1992 and then as a Peugeot factory driver for four seasons. Although it never quite delivered him the results his ability merited, Watts was a mainstay of the category during arguably its most competitive era.
Since then, he has broadened his motorsport horizons and even won the Historic Rally Championship in a Sunbeam Tiger.
He has become one of the favourites in historic racing too, hauling his Studebaker, Allard and Mini around with great aplomb.
The motorsporting challenges haven’t stopped, and there is a second-generation Watts talent to nurture in 2021. Patrick is a long way from slowing down just yet, as you can discover here.
Question: How did the motor racing passion begin in you? Was it something you grew up with?
John Charles
Via email
Patrick Watts: “I started my motor racing career by hillclimbing. It was in a Mini. My dad was doing it with his friend, and I wanted to take part too. My brother bought this Mini Miglia, but he didn’t really understand the technical parts of it like pumping the tyres up and changing the spark plugs occasionally. I was only 17, but I knew about things like that so I gradually took over the car. I borrowed a van from a garage down the road and it went from there.
“I was leading the Guyson British championship in 1977 but I had no money, so the car was on the same slicks that had been fitted to it when it was bought. Eventually the front ones were down on the canvas. At Loton Park towards the end of the championship, I put the back tyres on the front to try and alleviate the wear issue a bit. The rear tyres were very grippy on the front, but the front tyres on the back were shot, so I was oversteering everywhere. I had a big oversteer moment into the first long left-hander there and I ended up upside down in the pond there after hitting a tree. I remember all the water coming into the car! I managed to escape though. But that was the end of that Mini.”
MN: Why did you decided to move on to the circuits then?
PW: “Because I used to go to Brands Hatch and watch the Minis: people like Chris Tyrrell and Steve Hall and all those guys. I thought what I would do was try to try to find a Mini bodyshell and build all the various bits and pieces into a Mini 850. And I did. I was sponsored by Nick Whiting at All Car Equipe: he gave me a lot of stuff at cost price – there was never much money that changed hands. I went racing and I couldn’t believe, after a couple of races, I was beating my heroes. I did half a year in that first season and then did a full year in 1979 and I won the title. All the others had disc brakes and I only had drum brakes on mine.”
MN: Maybe that is why you were so fast: you couldn’t slow down...!
PW: “Well, that is what happened the first time I ever led a race at Donington Park. We were all going into the chicane and braked at the same point as the others – I ended up sailing straight past the others who had disc brakes…They had all slowed down and I hadn’t. I led by accident!”
Question: Did you set out with the intention of being a professional driver, or was it just a fun thing for you to be doing?
James Hilton
Via email
PW: “I was just having fun. I was never really interested in single-seaters, I always just loved saloon cars. My dad always used to drag me up to Brands Hatch – mainly to get me out of my mum’s hair – where he would volunteer as a doctor. He would stick me in the press box section at the front of the main grandstand. I was there with my packed lunch and got to watch all the racing.
“When I won the Mini 850 Championship in 1979, [two-time
BTCC title winner] Richard Longman was helping me with the engine. Well, I won the 850 Championship but I lost the overall title to Steve Soper, who was in the 1275GTs that year. And the overall winner, the Mini class driver with the most points, won a new car that year so I just missed out. I was skint and I really wanted – well needed – that prize: I had a badge on my overalls that looked like a Visa card and it read: ‘Live now, pay later’. That was what I was doing at the time! There was a scrutineering issue on the secondto-last race and I lost 10 points, and that was a hammer blow for me. I ended up more into debt.
“Then Richard Longman persuaded me into the 1275GTs for 1980. We put together some sponsors and I came second in that too. I would have won it, but on the last race against Steve Harris I melted a piston in qualifying and so
I was down on power. I hung on to Steve Harris’s slipstream throughout the race and went down the inside into the last corner at Mallory Park, and the race was mine. But he just drove me straight into the wall and took the front wheel off my
car. I went up to him afterwards to complain that he’d had me off. I remember him turning around to me and saying
‘as I see it Patrick, I won and you lost’ and he walked away. I realised I was playing with the big boys.”
MN: And then you went to the new Metro Challenge? Was that quite a leap for you in terms of budget?
PW: “I got backing from Dutton Forshaw: they gave me £12,000 and a van to tow it around with. Longman supplied the engine. Again, I came second to Steve Soper in the championship. It was a struggle initially because my car was down on performance because I didn’t realise all the tricks you needed to use to work with the hydrogas suspension. I remember Steve coming past me in qualifying and I couldn’t believe how fast he was around the corners without leaning over. I wasted a couple of meetings learning what you did to get the suspension to work. When I did, I caught on, I beat Steve quite a lot of times. I was second the following year too, behind Dave Carvell but I think the Austin Rover Group [ARG] and John Davenport realised that I did it on a very low budget. I got the works deal to drive the Metros in the British Saloon Car Championship [BSCC] to run with Roger Dowson Engineering. I thought I had arrived.”
MN: What were they like to race: you’ve said they had some pretty bonkers suspension. Were they actually enjoyable?
PW: “Oh yes. They were very competitive in their class for a half-hour race in the BSCC, but put them out for any longer than that and they started to struggle a bit. The tyres would wear out and throw the treads off and the whole car would get too hot.”
MN: Then you had the rug pulled from under you when ARG went off in a huff following the exclusion of Steve Soper’s Rover from the 1983 BSCC points…did you think at that point it was all over? PW: “Yes, and I had been leading the championship when ARG pulled out. I wanted to get back into [the BSCC], of course, but there weren’t many works drives around then. Everybody else was in there with money. Most drivers had a connection or a dealership. I realised that I’d been lucky to get into it at that stage. I don’t think many people were paid to be there in the early 1980s. It was probably only Steve, James Weaver and I.”
Question: You were the king of one-make racing in the latter part of the 1980s and into the early 1990s. Were they some of the most enjoyable times of your career? Russell Scobbie
Via email
PW: “I went into Honda CRX Challenge in 1988 when it was introduced and I won that. I went back for the second year and did some races with Mardi Gras and then joined Edenbridge for 1990. Peter Briggs at Edenbridge offered me the drive and it wasn’t going to cost anything, but I had already committed to the new-for-1990 Mazda MX-5 Cup because I had been approached by a dealership in Rugby to race for them. We looked at the dates and none of them clashed, so I did them both. I won both titles that year.”
MN: But they were very different cars, though: it must have taken you a while to adapt from one to the other?
PW: “Well, it was also the first time
I had raced a rear-wheel-drive car with the Mazda MX-5. They were both very high profile and well thought of championships: there was the likes of David Leslie, Barrie Williams, Andy Ackerley and Tim Sugden in there along with all the one-make experts. It was lined with top, top drivers.”
MN: As part of your career, was it part of a stepping-stone to get back to the British Touring Car Championship or were you just along for the ride?
PW: “I always wanted to do touring cars, but it was just out of reach unless someone came along and gave you the money to do it. The BTCC then, when ARG pulled out, just turned into a privateer club racing thing. Then it became all Ford Sierra Cosworths, and they were all privateers too. That was all down to money. OK, Karl Jones got a deal with Duckhams, but it was loads of very rich guys.
I never sought to have a Sierra Cosworth, that was way beyond my dreams.”
MN: You would have been spectacular in a Cossie…
PW: “I would have loved that, certainly!”
MN: So how come you won the Esso Production saloon title in 1991 – a deal which opened the relationship with Peugeot…?
PW: “That was Richard Longman’s deal, and he was asked to drive the 309. It had a Longman engine and it was all put together by the Peugeot factory and [Peugeot’s] Des O’Dell, but Longman told them to put me in the car and he would come in and share for the twodriver races. We won that title too.”
Question: Getting back to the BTCC in 1992 happened at just the right time in terms of the series’growth. What prompted your return?
Jon Wood
Via email
PW: “I had a relationship with Mazda because of what I had done in the MX-5s. I had a relationship with Shell, which had backed the Peugeot 309. It worked for Dunlop too, because I was the only driver who had stood up for them when they were coming under attack at the start of the MX-5 series: people were saying they were too fragile when drivers locked up. I had a solution to that – don’t lock up! So I had four friends there: Roger Dowson from
Metro days, Mazda, Shell and Dunlop.”
MN: When that programme started, it did seem like it was maybe a bit underprepared and maybe underfunded too?
PW: “It was totally underfunded, and we had the wrong engine to start with, and that didn’t get better until the Xedos came out the following year with the V6. That worked! But even with the Xedos, it was a low-budget car. It was a low-budget team. We didn’t do a lot of testing.
“Roger built and designed the car and I remember going up to his workshop and he was working out where the rear wheels were going by putting a wheel on the end of a broom handle. The wheel and suspension was held up with this broom handle while he welded bits in place…that is what it was like. I think you’d call it old-school engineering.”
MN: But it almost seemed appropriate for you as a driver: you were an underdog, a fan favourite, and someone who overcame any obstacles that were put in your way…
PW: “I took every chance as it came. I could have been in with Kieth Odor and Nissan in 1991. They asked me to drive, and I went to see them in Salisbury, but unfortunately I had already signed with Mazda. They only ran one car instead of two in 1991. I also had a phone call from Alan Gow, who, at that stage, worked for Andy Rouse. He asked me to go and see them and they wanted me to drive in that Toyota. If all those phone calls had have happened at different times, I would have been in with Andy in the Carina for 1991.”
MN: Is that regret?
“Touring cars were just out of my reach”
Watts’s early career
PW: “Oh absolutely, I would have loved to have raced alongside Andy. It was a winning car.”
Question: Did you ever get to drive the full Super Touring-spec Mazda 323F that came later? Did you think that could have been competitive?
Kelsey Ingram
Via email
PW: “Roger Dowson built that for Slim Borgudd. The orange one. That had the V6 in it. Unfortunately, Borgudd didn’t have the money to pay for it so it never went out and it was parked. That was actually built for the Swedish championship, but I didn’t get to drive it.”
Question: Snetterton’s British Touring Car Championship race in the Xedos in 1993 – you were on pole position, but it all went wrong. What actually happened? Emma Facey
Via email
PW: “Steve Soper was alongside me on the run to Riches and Steve was on the outside of me. I had slightly cold tyres and therefore the back stepped out, like it does. Steve was three-quarters of the way past me and very close to my front wheel. The natural reaction would have been to put opposite lock on and get out of the slide, but if I had have done that, I would have taken Steve out too. I just couldn’t do that. That was a real shame, I had been looking forward to that race and the car was very fast around Snetterton. I had been very surprised to have put it on pole position but I like the track and it obviously suited the car.”
Question: I remember Patrick Watts in the BTCC: he was brilliant. Does Patrick have a favourite and a worst race that he participated in?
Andrew Rankin
Via Facebook
PW: “Well the worst races were the ones where the car broke down through no fault of mine, and that happened quite a lot! They were endless. One of my best I think was at Snetterton in 1995. We were on the grid and the heavens opened and we were all on slicks. Everybody went around to the pits to put wets on. But by the time we were forming up on the grid for the green flag lap, it was drying. I went back into the pits and put slicks on – as did a few other people – but that meant I had to start from the back of the grid. I carved my way through the pack to eventually come second. I went past [reigning champion] Gabriele Tarquini and all these people. Kelvin Burt won the race. What frustrated me was, after coming from the back to second was I thought I did that as the only one on slicks! To find that all the ‘ star’ drivers I had passed were also on slicks just reminded me what I could do if I had have been in one of their cars...
“There is also something else that sticks in my mind. In those days of 1996, you would go testing the week before the race and I remember the whole circus going up to Brands Hatch ahead of a Grand Prix circuit meeting. We were quickest in testing in the wet in the morning, but that didn’t surprise me because I liked the wet. I remember some friends from New Zealand came along to see me and they were telling me how well I was doing.
I told them that when it dried up in the afternoon, I would probably slip down to 12th or something.
“It did dry, but all through the day, I was quickest or second quickest. I was trading times with Jo Winkelhock. I spoke to the engineer at the debrief and he asked what the car was doing wrong, and I said it had a slight amount of understeer at Druids, but that was it. The rest of the track was fantastic, it was on tip-toes through the fast stuff and it was the best thing out there. It was a revelation. They had put a new differential in it, and I thought that was the secret. Wow: we had cracked it.
“That week, [Peugeot team-mate]
Tim Harvey tested with it and didn’t have any success with it. Come the race weekend, it just understeered everywhere and I qualified in my usual place. The mystery is that we never got that performance back again. I don’t know what the team had done on that test day, but they had nailed it. When we replicated that set-up on the race car, it was nowhere. It was a pig again, like it always was.
I had that glimpse there, that moment of seeing the speed in that package and it was fabulous, but we could never get it back again.
It was so frustrating. The potential was there.”
Question: Of all the team-mates you had in the British Touring Car Championship, who was the best one? And why?
Adam Stokes
Via Facebook
PW: “Funnily enough, I didn’t have many: I was usually in a single-car team. Thinking about this, I would have to say Tony Pond when I was racing the Metro in 1983. That gets me out of a difficult question, doesn’t it? But I loved Tony, he was an absolute professional and he taught me a little bit about politics. I was very young and very naïve back then, and he was always there for advice. We had to battle a little bit with the politics of a professional works team. I think his advice was
‘keep your mouth shut Patrick and just drive’.”
Question: Why did you leave the Peugeot British Touring Car Championship team at the end of 1997?
Scott Ambrose
Via Facebook
Question: What was Patrick’s thoughts of the Andy Rouse Toyota Corolla he tested: could it have been competitive?
Paul Cunningham
Via Facebook
PW: “Paul Radisich had talked his way into the drive. They got rid of Richard Longman as the engine builder and they were looking for excuses why it wasn’t winning anything. But it seemed the person doing all the sackings and the one changing things was the one who should have been falling on his sword. So Radisich got in there and proved he was not the saviour of anything…”
MN: Did you knock on any other doors when the Peugeot thing fell over?
PW: “Before the end of the Peugeot deal, I got approached by Alfa Romeo but that never happened – they took Derek Warwick instead and that proved to be a disaster. There was an offer from Andy
Rouse again to go and test his newly built Toyota Corolla. I drove the car at Snetterton and it was great and very fast. We both went away to look for sponsorship because Toyota didn’t want to back it. This would have been for 1998. But it just never materialised.”
Question: It must have been great to have been a home-grown driver in the BTCC in the period when all the manufacturers were looking to overseas stars. Did you feel like you were waving the flag for Britain?
Ed Sleigh
Via email
PW: “It was good. But it seemed at the time that if a driver had a foreignsounding name, all of a sudden it would give them half-a-second a lap according to the team managers. But there was a whole wealth of UK talent out there and they were proven, because we have very competitive one-make series. OK, they might have been diluted a bit since because there are so many of them, but they were really tough nuts to crack back then. You can therefore deduct that anyone who was winning in those categories was going to be pretty good. But there were foreigners turning up with a fancy-sounding name who’d maybe won one thing in their homeland.”
Question: What was racing in Australia like? You did Bathurst at the end of 1997, and then carried on out there… Jack Crowther
Via email
PW: “Bathurst was my last foray with Peugeot. It was a very sad time, really. I went out there and I share my car with Neil Crompton and he blew the engine up on the very first lap he did. That was the test engine and they only had two engines. Therefore we had to run around on just three cylinders to just learn the track. Then they put the race engine in for qualifying and I did the shootout. I was in the top 10, and that was only my 12th lap around the circuit. Paul Radisich, who was sharing the other Peugeot with Tim Harvey, was miles off the pace and he knew the place like the back of his hand.
“Although we failed to finish the race, it was a lovely circuit: I think I clicked with it because it was like a bit of hillclimbing mixed with the Silverstone Grand Prix track. I needed more laps though, but I proved that I was a better driver than Radisich. Radisich didn’t say anything in the debriefs, I was leading the technical side, and I told the Peugeot people that too. I asked them to change their mind [about signing him]. They didn’t.”
MN: And you went back to race in Australia in the Peugeot 406?
PW: “A guy over there called Paul Grimm, he did a deal with Peugeot to take the 1998 cars and everything to Australia: the cars, all the parts, the anoraks, the mechanics’ overalls, everything. He was hoping that Peugeot Australia were going to back the cars, but they wanted to see some performance first. There was due to be a race supporting the Formula 1 race in Melbourne, but that never happened and Peugeot got cold feet. Paul had seen me drive at Bathurst, and he got me out there to do three races in 1999 in an effort to get people interested in the programme. I was in Tim Harvey’s old car. I won at Lakeside and got two second places at Oran Park before it all came to an end and I had to come home for work reasons.”
Question: What are Patrick’s memories of racing a Peugeot 106 in New Zealand?
Graeme Swan
Via Facebook
MN: How did that come about and when was it?
PW: “It was about 1990. It came about
“I had a glimpse of how good it could be”
Watts on the 406
through my old next-door neighbour in the UK, who had emigrated to New Zealand when he was 10 with his family. We kept in contact and he followed my racing career. He basically put the deal together, and Peugeot
New Zealand jumped at it and I won all the races over there that I did.”
Question: Looking back on your British Touring Car Championship career, do you have any regrets?
Malcolm Munt
Via email
MN: We would guess not winning a race or a championship would be one of them…
PW: “I guess my regret is that I never really had anyone in my family into motorsport and I am down here in Kent. Everybody else had family or friends high up in motorsport who had done it before. You name anybody, they have got connections. I needed a manager: if only someone had adopted me, or
I had put myself up for adoption by someone who could have looked after my interests. I needed someone to do my deals and shout where I wasn’t shouting. There was so much going on at Peugeot that I couldn’t say anything about.”
MN: You seemed to have a character and a personality that resonated with the fans trackside and watching on TV. Was that something you worked on?
PW: “I was just myself. I talk to everybody, and I see everybody as an equal. My business employs 200 people and I am as happy cleaning the toilet as I am in the boardroom being a managing director. I am just me.
“I have often thought that you can walk into a touring car race dressed to the nines with two bodyguards, wave away all the fans and everybody thinks ‘oh, he is a hero’. You can do that, or you can be modest and sometimes perhaps I was too modest for my own good. I always play myself down and if I had an accident or made a mistake, I said so. To build up an image in motorsport you have got to be slightly unobtainable, you must always brag about yourself and you must never admit a mistake. That’s just not me.
“The drivers that I admire are the ones who are honest. For me, that is part of being a racing driver. I wasn’t a politician and I didn’t big myself up all the time. All I did was drive: I thought motor racing was all about driving, but you have to be involved in so many other areas and you have to be streetwise. Those are the bits I failed on, which means I was not the complete driver.”
Question: Patrick, did you enjoy the change from racing to rallying and, apart from another person in the car, what are the biggest differences in attitude or sportsmanship that you found?
Karen Spencer
Via Facebook
PW: “I loved rallying: it is a whole day of motorsport. It encompasses more skills than going around and around in a racing car. Not only must you be able to handle a car, you are also constantly reading the road surface, the corners, listening to the navigator, all of it.
“The old adage that to finish first, first you must finish is never more true than in rallying.”
MN: You built that Sunbeam Tiger yourself, didn’t you?
PW: “Not quite: initially it was a road car that I built in 1990. Then Richard Asquith converted it into a rally car for me in 2006 and I won it in 2007.
That is the car that I am actually putting together now and I am doing the Peking to Paris Rally with it in 2022. This time next year, it will be on its way, in a boat, to the other side of the world.”
MN: You seem addicted to racing: there is no sign of you stopping, though, is there?
PW: “The big thing will be racing in the Citroen C1 long-distances events with my daughter Aimee, who is 25. I enjoy the racing with the C1s. We did three races last year and she is a total novice.
“I gave her a book on how to drive a racing car by Jackie Stewart and she was coming back and was asking all the right questions about the rollbars, the rollcentres and what happens if you change them, all that sort of thing. She understood it all and was questioning me about all aspects of it. I am looking forward to doing as many races as we can in the Citroen and we will have great fun. I will help out with funding the C1s, but if she wants to go further than that, then it is down to her!”
“I was always too modest as a driver”
Watts on himself