Playing The Name Game - Bradley Gravett

BRADLEY GRAVETT

Playing The Name Game?

Well, unfortunately, there’s no ‘but’... apart from the ‘but’ I hope the title grabbed your attention, so you’ll now read my first ever article for MotorWerks Magazine, how exciting! Hello, my name is Bradley Gravett; I’m a 27-year-old British born, racing driver based just outside of London, England. And, as you already know from my introduction, I’m the son of the multiple British Touring Car Champion, Robb Gravett. My father was fortunate enough to win the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) two times, once in 1990 in a Ford Serria RS500 and again in 1997 in a Honda Accord, during the famous Super Touring years. Among the two wins, the 1990 win is by far the most well-known and was for sure the ‘thing’ that put the Gravett name on the map. At that time, the British Touring Car scene was very much being dominated by Andy Rouse, who was, up until recently, the most decorated and successful Touring Car driver of all time with 60 wins. Andy who had worked with Ford tuning colossus Broadspeed had access to the best equipment, skill, engineers, financial support and the car to dominate, or so he thought until Robb Gravett and Trakstar Motorsport came along to beat him in 1990. Fueled by a whole host of monotonous motorsport politics, that I’m not going to delve into in this article, Robb and his then teammate, BBC TV personality Mike Smith, decided in 1989 to form Trakstar, the team that in 1990, against all odds, and I mean all of them, beat Andy Rouse fair and square. Trakstar in 1989 lost to Andy by just a tiny fraction in their Dick Johnson built, Australian imported, tired RS500s. In 1990, Robb and Mike both decided that if they were going to beat Andy, they’d need a new car. So in 1990, Mike decided to step away from a driving position into a team manager position to allow the underfunded Trakstar team the ability to find the budget to build and focus their attention on one brand new, in-house built Ford Sierra RS500. The famous, white, unsponsored RS500 that became one of the most iconic RS500s of all time,

and the only ever RS500 to get an outright BTC championship win and beat Andy at his own game, it was a very special moment for Gravett and Smith. Built from a new chassis it retained the running gear from the previous year’s Dick Johnson car, together with all the ‘trick bits’ including Eggenberger suspension, a Getrag 5-speed dog box and a topspec Mountune RS500 engine, producing 500bhp. The result was a record-breaking season with nine wins, eight pole positions and eight fastest laps. 25 years later, Robb and his son, me, Bradley, decided it would be a great idea it have a go at what dad did so well! Having spent a lifetime growing up around motorsport, I don’t really remember too much of my childhood away from the track. I mean, it was pretty cool; my dad was a racing driver, but for me, that was just the norm. Born in 1993, I never got to see the big 1990 win, but I was there for the 1997 win, and I remember it well, albeit just 5 years of age. That time in the BTCC was extraordinary; the TV viewings were huge, the fans flocked in the 10s of thousands, and the money was massive. This was the Super Touring years, and we’re talking colossal manufacture support; it was the biggest the British Touring Cars had ever been, and most likely will ever be, and that’s how I remember it. One of my most prominent memories is just rows of people all trying to get an autograph from Dad during the pitlane walkabout, with some even asking me to sign. I mean, I was only just learning to write my name at school at the time, let alone sign an autograph; I have to say, it was awesome! So in 2007, at 13 years of age, I decided it would be a good idea to start racing in karts, which I did; I kept nagging dad to have a test in one. Eventually, he caved in and called an old pal, the late, great super kart world champion, Martin Hines.

Gravett and Smith Martin at that time owned and ran the Zip Kart Young Guns team. And, after a relatively short meeting in their Essex-based workshop, I was signed up as a Zip Young Gun factory driver, whatever that meant? 2007 was a challenging year for me, as I was very much thrown right into the deep end. I ended up doing two back-to-back British championships, Super 1 and Stars of Tomorrow, driving in the Junior Rotax class on Zips premier chassis, which I believe they called the Evo; I wonder where they got the inspiration for that name from! It was tough; I was

racing against some very fast drivers, albeit many of them younger than me; most had been racing from around 6 or 7 years of age, so at that time, half their life. My first year of kart racing was definitely my learning year, spending the vast majority of it getting to grips with the racing lines, racecraft and just generally what I should and shouldn’t be doing on the track. Then, towards the end of 2007, I actually started to go quite quickly, which looking back, was a fabulous achievement, considering many of my competitors from back then have gone on to do some quite exciting things with their racing careers; Formula 1, IndyCar, Formula E and even the BTCC to name a few. At the beginning of 2008, we decided it was prudent to follow the natural progression of the sport and take a step up in class, and to be fair, it was quite the step; we went from Junior Rotax into

the KF3 class. KF basically was another ‘type’ of kart engine to Rotax, but it had a clearer stepping stone system at that time into the Global Karting scene and was the replacement to the highly popular JICA engine that already had its roots very much embedded into global karting. In 2008 we moved away from Zip Kart into an independent kart team called Millennium Motorsport, owned and run by another ex British karting champion. We also switched away from the Zip Evo chassis and onto the hugely popular Tony Kart equivalent, which in comparison to the Zip, was just so much more compliant and faster. With my learning year of 2007 out the way, our focus for 2008 was to start to go quickly and consistently, which towards the second half of the season is exactly what we did. The final race weekend of the year was definitely the one I remember best; I remembered mainly because of my qualifying pace as I managed to qualify 3rd on the grid in very tricky drying conditions. Unfortunately, the race following qualifying didn’t go so well as we had to retire the kart with engine issues, but it put us in good stead for the following year, 2009, or so we thought. Us Gravett’s very much like to work with long term 3-year plans, and we had one of those in karts. Our plan looked a little like this; year 1 learn, year 2 go quickly, and year 3 start getting some serious results so we can begin to raise budgets for car racing. However, unfortunately, with the falling over of the global financial system in late 2008, our budget for 2009 was quite seriously hindered, sorry did I say ‘hindered’, I meant pulled entirely, and that was the end of that; no more serious racing until 2019!

The only positive to the premature end of my karting career in 2008 was that I was young, and I had time on my side to sort it out; it took me 10 years, but eventually, I managed to get myself back out racing and wow was it a journey. To cut an incredibly long story short, in the 10 years I wasn’t racing, I went off to study business and started businesses so I’d fully understand what’s required to make a sponsorship deal commercially viable to a company or person who gets involved with my racing. At the end of the day, any form of investment into motorsport is ultimately marketing, and it’s up to the driver to make that investment

work for that individual; that’s the challenge. During my 10 year hiatus, having an ex BTCC champion as a father did mean that I was generally pretty close to the sport, and yeah, various opportunities did arise from time to time. The most significant being an opportunity to race in the BARC Formula Renault 2.0 single-seater championship. I got to test the car with the full intention to race it in the 2012 season, but we just couldn’t complete on budget as our sponsorship deal at that time fell through. I then dabbled in a bit of historic racing in 2015, but nothing serious came from that. Spooling forward to 2019, Dad had a call from the EnduroKA series’s event organisers asking if he’d like to drive in a 4 driver 8-hour endurance race in a Ford KA at Brands Hatch for charity, and of course, he answered yes on the proviso that I could be one of the 3 other drivers. So we went down to Brands Hatch a couple of weeks before the race to test the car; Dad drove it in the morning, and I drove it in the afternoon. Of course, being an ex BTCC champion, his lap time was very much the benchmark time for me to beat. So after lunch, the team did a seat fit for me, and I jumped in. Yeah, was I proper in the deep end here, I’d never driven Brands Hatch, and I hadn’t driven a racing car for a very long time, but within three laps, I went two and a half tenths of a second faster than his time; I even impressed myself. The rest really is history; after that KA race, Graves Motorsport, the team who ran the KA, invested in a MINI Challenge UK Cooper class car, and a few months later, I found myself sitting on the grid at the first round of the series at Oulton Park. The championship of 2020 in the Cooper Class MINI went very well, albeit I didn’t manage to get myself on the podium; I did manage to run and race right at the sharp end of the series all year. Once again, following the natural progression of the sport, this year in 2021, I’ve taken another step up forward, and I’m now racing in the premier MINI Challenge series, the JCW class supporting the British Touring Car Championship in my Liqui Moly liveried F56 MINI JCW. I am incredibly fortunate to be where I am today, it has and will continue to be an exciting journey for my team, my partners and myself, and we’re now only just one step away from the BTCC. Keep your eyes peeled for the Liqui Moly MINI; we’re coming for it! And best of all I get to tell you all about it in my new MotorWerks Magazine column ‘Playing The Name Game’

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Bradley Gravett Age: 27 Lives: Berkshire, UK Occupation: Racing Driver, Commercial Director at LM Performance