Drayson Racing: The Chemical Formula for Success

Image via Wikipedia

If putting together a race team was a scientific formula and Step One is outlining the basic program, Step Two has to be adding the people. How many times have we all seen a great group of individuals come together as a “team” and go absolutely no where? There are always reasons for this but I think the best definition of why some “super” teams succeed and others don’t is chemistry.

A group of great individual talents is just that; a group of individuals. Chemistry is what takes a team from you and me and makes it “us”. The last month and a half I have been devoted to the task of creating “chemistry” at Drayson Racing; finding the right balance of talent and personality. In light of the recent Valentine’s Day holiday, it seemed like I should tell you a little about matchmaking… racing style.

I have always believed that a small, moderately-funded operation can stand toe-to-toe with any of the big dogs if the group works together. It has been my privilege to win at Le Mans twice and earn two American Le Mans Series championships with teams and budgets that were dwarfed by our competition. That is why I put such a strong emphasis on people.

Nothing gets done without people. You have to have good people around you, people you can trust to do their job so that you don’t have to micro-manage them. There are team owners and team managers out there that feel they have to have their hand in every decision and oversee every detail. My approach is different. I believe that you find the best people, the brightest people in their specialty and give them the resources and the faith to do their job. Wrenching on the car, picking out the dinner menu, writing the press release is their job. Being there to give direction and answer questions is my job. Once you have those people you need to make sure that they are “team players” and interact well with others. Someone might be great in one environment and a disaster in another.
Finding the right people sometimes requires passing on the better resume for the person that seems to work best with the group. Every gear has to fit to keep the machine moving forward smoothly. My task is to find those people that fit into our environment and, like a head coach, can “play in our system”.

When assembling any team I start with the organizational chart. What needs to be done, how many people are required to do it, who needs to do it and what are our resources? After over 25 years of racing and a decade of sports car racing I have a good understanding of what it takes to field a top-level entry in the sport. I also have a pretty serious contacts list of mechanics, suppliers and specialty people that I know are team players and fit into the system that we are creating at Drayson Racing.

With that, in early January, I pulled out my Org. Chart and started pencilling in names. The first thing you do is look at who you have worked with before and would want to work with again. Paul and Elspeth Drayson had mentioned that they would like to have Jonny Cocker as a driver, Ted Higgins as crew chief, Guy Drayson and Anna Sarphie for Commercial/Marketing. After having worked with all of them in ’08 I couldn’t agree more. Those components of the formula fit. I have had the opportunity to work with some very good talent at White Lightning Racing over the years. I mentioned to the Draysons that we must have Tom Moore, Dennis Chizma, Sam Andrus and Corey White on the team as they were key to the past White Lightning Racing success. They couldn’t agree more. We now had our core team with most of the management and business side in place.

Ted soon had five or six more UK-based personnel to add to the list. These were top-notch mechanics he had worked with or seen work and knew they would be good additions to our team. A few more pieces of the puzzle that fit into place perfectly.

As for the rest of the team, we now only had a few positions left to fill into the Org. Chart. However, some of these were critical such as our team engineer, our tire partner and our third-driver for the endurance races. We have now made all of those choices and will announce them shortly so stay tuned. Amazing how they all came together within two days of one-another. When something fits, it fits; another case of chemistry at work.

Once you have made your hires, the next step is to assign tasks, duties and responsibilities. During the season I handle the sporting details and daily operation with Ted. Elspeth oversees all the administrative and overall aspects of Drayson Racing. She works directly with Tom and Anna for all the branding and commercial side of the sport; media relations, marketing, hospitality, uniforms, hotel bookings all the details that make a race team move off of the track. Knowing these details are taken care of allows the team to operate in the paddock without worry. That keeps the small conflicts to a minimum and the chemistry strong.

We had established hiring guidelines and started drafting up agreements and contracts in early January. Time disappears quickly in the “off-season” and the first week of January was spent hiring people and getting these agreements in place.

One of the critical agreements was also one of the simplest as we quickly re-signed as an Official Partner Team of Aston Martin Racing (AMR). AMR is an incredible asset. Their experience is extensive not just in sports car racing but, through Prodrive, in virtually every form of racing. That agreement was also pivotal in making other choices of personnel, technical partners, branding and much more. The partnership with AMR impacts nearly every aspect of Drayson Racing so chemistry with Oxfordshire is vital.

We got the cars back to the U.K. after they spent the winter in the U.S. Because of the early season schedule and the different fuel requirements for the American Le Mans Series and the Le Mans Series – IMSA allows us to use E85 fuel while the A.C.O. currently allows only E10 in the GT2 class – we opted to ready one car for our first Le Mans Series test at Paul Ricard (March 8-9) and the other for the American Le Mans Series opener at Sebring (March 21).

We’ll keep one car in Europe for the LMS season-opener at Spain (April 4). The “ALMS” car will be shipped to Sebring for the race and then shipped back to the U.K. as a back-up for the summer in Europe. That Vantage GT2 will be readied for Le Mans should we receive an invitation on February 26. This allows us to balance both the immediate needs of the team while looking ahead to what we will need all while minimizing the mileage on each car.
The updating and preparation of these two cars was the first critical test of the chemistry between the mechanics. All the reports back from the shop have been very positive despite the heavy workload and an unprecedented winter that has left much of England under a blanket of snow.

I still have pages of notes on my computer that outline the tasks of the Team Manager at Drayson Racing. But, for now, this outlines the basic chemical formula of success: people. We’ll get to my checklist of items and preparations for Paul Ricard and Sebring in coming weeks.