Friday favourite: How Volvo's "no ego" pole king endeared himself to a BTCC champion

Tim Harvey only spent one year as a TWR Volvo driver in the British Touring Car Championship, between stints at Renault and Peugeot. But his 1995 season alongside Rickard Rydell sticks in the 1992 champion’s mind, for all the right reasons.

“I can say almost unequivocally my best times and favourite team-mate without any animosity, ego, anything, would be Rickard,” says Harvey, speaking backstage at the Autosport International show. “We honestly never had a bad moment between us which is rare among team-mates. I thoroughly enjoyed his team effort, his friendship, his work ethic, everything was just very easy to get on with.”

The understated Swede was in his second season as a touring car driver in 1995, after spending the previous year hustling the ungainly 850 Estate. But with a car worthy of his talent, the 850 Saloon, he took pole for each of the first four races and secured a maiden BTCC win at the opening Donington round.

Harvey’s clean sweep of a wet Brands Hatch meant he took the early points lead, but after three wins from the opening four races the Volvos were overtaken in the development stakes by Renault’s Laguna and the Vauxhall Cavalier. Still, Rydell continued to dig poles out of the bag – his season-high tally of 13 was five greater than he managed in his 1998 title season, and four more than with the all-conquering Ford Mondeo in 2000.

He remained in the title hunt until a long brake pedal threw him off while leading at Snetterton, allowing Vauxhall’s John Cleland to seal the crown next time out at Oulton Park. A late surge from Renault’s Alain Menu meant Rydell ultimately finished third in the standings, two spots ahead of Harvey.

Arriving at the team after two years at Renault, Harvey says he had “a little bit” of apprehension over whether he would receive equal treatment given Rydell’s nationality. The rapid pace of development meant, Harvey explains, “there was always going to be an element of ‘he is the Swedish driver, he is the favoured child’”. But the pair became good friends during the year, bonding over golf and their rigorous testing schedule, and Harvey believes both learned things from each other.

“Back in those days, we were testing all the time,” says Harvey. “In mid-90s Super Touring, we had full-time test teams, so we could test twice a week, separate to the race team, so we were always out. And Rickard and I used to play golf quite a lot together.

Rydell and Harvey bonded over extensive testing - and golf - in 1995

Photo by: Sutton Images

“In fairness, yeah maybe Rickard did get the development engine first or this first. But I didn’t really mind. There was a good atmosphere within the team and when it was wet, I could beat him!”

The results support Harvey’s view that he went better in the wet. Aside from his Brands double, he charged from eighth to third at the British GP support race before his Dunlop wets went off and then so too did the Volvo as Harvey attempted to hold off Kelvin Burt’s Ford.

In the dry, his best showing came at Knockhill where he followed Rydell home both times to complete a 1-2 and a 2-3 respectively, while he also finished second to Will Hoy (Renault) at Snetterton after Rydell’s exit. Harvey puts his better showings in the wet down to the conditions slightly negating the Volvo’s front-wheel tendencies “because you can induce more rotation in the car in the wet”.

“I never really was 100% comfortable in front-wheel drive cars,” explains Harvey. “It was a job, and I had to adapt to it. I had to say it made no difference, but I grew up driving rear-wheel drive road cars, I started racing in Formula Ford, I raced Sierra Cosworths and Rovers and Group C cars. Everything was rear-wheel drive.

"Rickard felt the pressure from Volvo far more than I ever did, I didn’t feel that. I wasn’t Swedish, I didn’t have every Volvo top brass in my ear talking to me in Swedish, so I’m sure he felt the pressure far more than I did," Tim Harvey

“And [FWD] was never something I was comfortable with, but I couldn’t say that because it would have been professional suicide. Even at that stage, I don’t think I was as good in a front-wheel-drive car as I would have been in a rear-wheel drive car.

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“Rickard had a really good touch for front-wheel drive. Of course, we were doing a tonne of testing in those days and he and I would be almost identical on times all the time given whatever set-ups we were at. We’d do free practice and we would be the same, but come qualifying he would always find a couple of extra tenths.”

Looking at the data didn’t provide answers to this for Harvey, who reckons it’s more of “a feel thing, because you’re talking about such tiny nuances”.

“It’s just that intimacy of touch,” he says. “It was almost his thing that he had to find a tenth in qualifying over whatever his best time had been ever before. And he always used to find that little bit extra on his new tyres in qualifying and I could never do that.

Harvey felt he could challenge Rydell when the heavens opened - and won twice at Brands Hatch to take an early points lead

Photo by: Sutton Images

“I could replicate the best time I’d done before, which would have matched his time from before, but I could never find that little bit extra. And he had that special ability, he was in that top echelon of exceptional drivers who can deliver that bit extra when it comes to it.”

Harvey’s admiration for Rydell is also evidenced by his stance on dipping into the driver’s box of tricks. Cleland “always made a point” of trying to unsettle Rydell with mind games before starts, one area that many deemed a weakness of Rydell’s, as the man himself acknowledged in a 1995 interview with Autosport.

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“I agree, my starts sometimes don’t look too good,” he said. “But I think it’s because cars like the Ford Mondeo – especially the Mondeo – seem to be able to get away better than the Volvo.”

But Harvey maintains he “never played any psychological games with Rickard at all, unlike most team-mates and rivals”. He points out that in Paul Radisich’s book, the Kiwi refers to his Peugeot team-mate of 1997 and 1998 as a “smiling assassin”.

“Rickard felt the pressure from Volvo far more than I ever did, I didn’t feel that,” Harvey explains. “I wasn’t Swedish, I didn’t have every Volvo top brass in my ear talking to me in Swedish, so I’m sure he felt the pressure far more than I did.”

Following Peugeot’s BTCC withdrawal, Harvey came close to linking up with Rydell again for 1999. TWR approached him to test the S40 after Rydell, then the reigning BTCC champion, had double-booked himself on a skiing holiday. But, instead, the drive went to cost-effective alternative Vincent Radermecker.

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While Rydell is Harvey’s number one pick, he recognises two other team-mates who had a profound influence too. Harvey relished learning from Sierra king Andy Rouse, “an engineer first almost and a driver second” in the early days of his touring car career and also acknowledges his 1992 Vic Lee Racing BMW team-mate Steve Soper as another “key figure”.

“He was the first real exposure I had to what I’d call a full-time professional driver and how he goes about his work,” he says. “I learned an awful lot from Steve about application because he was almost the [Alain] Prost of touring cars in that he left no detail unturned, he was into everything form examining engine dyno graphs to damper graphs, to everything.

“He really went into it and that was where I learned how much effort you had to put into the technical side and the relationship with the team, it wasn’t just turning up at a weekend and driving a car.”