The stalwart tin-top boss still shaping careers more than 40 years on

He’s renowned as one of the most amiable, down-to-earth members of the British Touring Car Championship paddock, of which he’s been more or less ever-present over the past 20 years. And his lifespan in Britain’s premier tin-top series goes further back to the tune of two and a half decades to the mid-1970s.

Yet pinning down top team manager, former team principal and all-round good guy Marvin Humphries to chat about his career in motorsport isn’t easy. Why? Because he’s so modest and humble about it that he doesn’t see why anyone should make a fuss. The last thing he wants to do is blow his own trumpet.

So… we need to get some others to do that for us. Ask Tom Ingram, current lead driver for the Excelr8 Motorsport squad that Humphries joined as team manager prior to the 2019 season, and he enthuses: “One of the things about going to Excelr8 was working with someone like Marvin, whose experience of motorsport is enormous. It’s an honour and a privilege to work with someone with such a decorated career. I love him to pieces – as much as anything else, he’s such a passionate fan of the sport.”

BTCC race winner and latter-day ITV pundit Paul O’Neill, who drove for many years with the Tech-Speed Motorsport squad of Humphries and wife Sandra, adds: “I owe my life to him. If it wasn’t for Marvin and Sandra, I think I would have lasted probably two years in motorsport.”

Humphries’ career is long and varied, encompassing Formula 1, the world sportscar championship, IMSA and manufacturer-promoted one-make championships. But it all started with rollbars. From school, he found a job in 1968 with rollcage pioneer John Aley Racing, then went into an apprenticeship with British Leyland, before “I decided this maybe wasn’t what I wanted to do, so that’s when I saw a job advertised at Broadspeed”.

This was 1973, on the eve of the new Group 1 regulations for what was then known as the British Saloon Car Championship, and an era when Broadspeed was renowned as a benchmark operation in touring cars. Humphries moved onto the race team in 1977 to run the Triumph Dolomite Sprint of the late Tony Dron.

“I’d started in the service shop and basically worked through to high performance,” he explains. “Then I got onto the race team with good old Dronnie.”

Humphries was mechanic on Dron’s Broadspeed Dolomite in the British Saloon Car Championship

Photo by: Motorsport Images

The giantkilling Dolomite occasionally beat the hordes of Ford Capris from the top division, but the class-based structure of the championship meant Dron could not quite match the points of overall champion Bernard Unett, whose Chrysler Avenger GT prevailed in the 1300cc class. Broadspeed tried its best to help Unett’s main class rival Richard Longman.

“We did a lot of work on Longman’s Mini to try and get him to beat Unett,” says Humphries. “Put it on the rolling road, and stuff like that.”

PLUS: The rise of the unlikely Capri-slaying Dolomite 

Humphries stayed on in 1978 to run Dron and the sister, Hermetite-liveried car driven by John Fitzpatrick, but Broadspeed’s star was beginning to wane: “Two or three of the guys had gone on from Broadspeed to Shadow. I think Shadow worked out that if you’d done a bit at Broadspeed you’d probably been through the gearbox shop, the diff shop, the engine build, every shop you could find.

"I remember Eric Broadley going to bed about nine or 10 o’clock and saying, ‘You boys won’t be here in the morning’. We’d bloody well push the thing round if we had to, and we were there the next morning" Marvin Humphries

“It wasn’t a massive place, but it was all under one roof pretty much. We did just about everything there. It was a great place to learn a bit about your trade, that’s for sure. I think Zakspeed was based on what Ralph [Broad] had done in Southam – all under one roof. There were some really good guys there.”

Now in Formula 1 with Shadow, Humphries was mechanic for Hans Stuck for the last three races of the 1978 season, before a sponsor exodus led to redundancies.

“That was a bit of a blow, but I drew the short straw by getting a job with ATS!” laughs Humphries, who therefore found himself back with Stuck, who had moved to the squad owned by the famously highly strung Gunter Schmid for 1979: “Working for Gunter was an education and a half! He had his moments. He was a nice enough chap in his way but he was the most impatient man you’ve ever come across; all sorts of antics.”

In 1980, Humphries worked with Jan Lammers for the first two events before transferring to Marc Surer’s machine for the South African GP, where the Swiss crashed heavily in qualifying: “They [the rescuers] were pretty useless there so we had to go round and get him out of the car. He broke his ankles and he was in a bit of a bad way. Then two or three of us left and went to GRID.”

Humphries had a spell in F1 with Shadow and ATS, and was part of the rescue crew helping to extract Marc Surer after his 1980 Kyalami shunt

Photo by: Motorsport Images

This was the Leamington Spa-based team of Giuseppe Risi and Ian Dawson (hence the ‘GRID’ acronym), which was running Arrows machinery in the Aurora British F1 series, with Guy Edwards as lead driver. It started with victory at Oulton Park.

“He had quite a big shunt in testing, we managed to build the car up again and he won the Gold Cup on the Good Friday,” remembers Humphries.

Edwards was third in the championship behind the ground-effect Williams FW07s of Emilio de Villota and Eliseo Salazar, “and then we went on to build sportscars. In 1981 we started with the Lola T600. It wasn’t a bad car at all. We raced that at Le Mans with Edwards, Villota and Juan Fernandez. We finished 15th but we ended up with two gears. I think Emilio could get two gears down the Mulsanne Straight but Edwards could only get one, so we were struggling.

“I remember Eric Broadley [Lola founder and designer] going to bed about nine or 10 o’clock and saying, ‘You boys won’t be here in the morning’. We’d bloody well push the thing round if we had to, and we were there the next morning. Things were falling off it like it was going out of fashion, but we managed to get it across the line, which was a good result. When we got the car back the gearbox really was wrecked.”

Two weeks later, Edwards and de Villota won the thinly supported Coppa Florio round of the World Championship for Makes at Enna-Pergusa: “After the 24 Hours, the car was just about falling to bits and we had to rebuild it when we got there. And then Ian decided to build his own car.”

This was the GRID S1, designed by ex-Lotus F1 man Geoff Aldridge. It raced at Le Mans in 1982 with de Villota, Desire Wilson and Alain de Cadenet, but what Humphries remembers best are the frequent trips to the States to race in IMSA in 1983. This was the dawn of a new glory period for sportscars in the US, but some of the leading contenders of the time would become infamous for their involvement in the drug trade. Not GRID though, which had a best result of fourth in the 1983 Road Atlanta 500Km with 1978 Indycar champion Tom Sneva at the wheel.

“He was an ex-schoolteacher,” says Humphries. “He was getting on a bit and he looked like a teacher! He was a bit of a character. We had a few people out there who were characters. I do remember sitting in front of a truck with John Paul Jr and asking him what his dad did for a job, and a few people sniggered at the back! They told me that maybe I shouldn’t ask that question… A few years on you think, ‘Jesus, we were a bit close to trouble there’.”

Humphries was part of the GRID team that ran Geoff Aldridge's S1 at Le Mans in 1982, but it only lasted seven laps in the race

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GRID also came close to victory in the 1983 Sebring 12 Hours with Skeeter McKitterick and Milt Minter: “We were leading up until about two hours from the end when the wheelbearing went. We always reckoned that if we’d won Sebring then we’d have sold cars in America. It was very close but we never quite made it.”

The GRID was then sold to the Tech-Speed Racing team of Birmingham meat businessman Gil Baird, who had a long involvement in sportscar racing dating back to the 1960s.

“Gil was a racing man without a doubt, a lovely chap,” reflects Humphries. “He bought the GRID and we were seconded to run it in Thundersports.”

The team also bought two Shrikes to run in Sports 2000. Ex-Formula Ford ace Sean Walker won the 1985 title before returning to single-seaters in 1986 in the British Formula 3 Championship. Here started a new era for Tech-Speed.

"The idea was right, we all thought the principle was right, and the radials were coming. Maybe it wasn’t so much the tyres that were the problem, but in France they were nearly all Dallaras and they had it all pretty well sussed" Marvin Humphries

Walker finished runner-up in the Class B standings in 1986, and the team went on to run talents such as Roland Ratzenberger, Oswaldo Negri, Jordi Gene and Gary Ayles in the top division. It also gave future Indycar champion Gil de Ferran his F3 debut in Class B at the final round of 1988.

“I tried desperately to get Gil to drive for us the following year but they couldn’t put the money together,” says Humphries, who has been a proud British Racing Drivers’ Club associate member since 1985. “Jordi in 1990 was doing national service in Spain, and that made it very difficult to do any testing. We lost him the following year to my good mate Dick Bennetts [at West Surrey Racing]. We also ran Paul Smith, who’s still one of my best mates, and his son Rob ended up driving the touring car at Excelr8 [the MG6 in 2019].”

Tech-Speed became the first team to run a Dallara in British F3. Raphael del Sarte had handled a Reynard with the squad in 1988, and Humphries recalls: “He had three brothers, and they were in the stock market in Paris. They decided that the Dallara was the future and we went out to see the last race of the French F3 at Dijon. We turned up with a van and bought it from Graff Racing and took it away. They were convinced that the car was going to be the business, but we didn’t have any spares so they decided to buy another one.

After failed experiment with Dallara, Tech-Speed ran future Formula 3000 race-winner Jordi Gene in 1990 British F3 championship

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“But the issue we had was that we were crossing it over from radial tyres to crossplies, and the car didn’t seem to want to work. We struggled at places like Donington – we couldn’t get enough downforce on the thing, and of course Raph was really learning. We had no comparison to say it was the car, the driver, the engine or us. We were struggling to get grip – mechanical and aero. And that was the end of the road from that point of view.

“The idea was right, we all thought the principle was right, and the radials were coming. Maybe it wasn’t so much the tyres that were the problem, but in France they were nearly all Dallaras and they had it all pretty well sussed. The car itself was pretty good, we were impressed with the engineering, and old boy [Gian Paolo] Dallara did help us quite a lot.” Four years later, Dallara flooded the UK market…

By now, Baird had surprised Humphries by making him a partner at Tech-Speed, and “I was pushing towards trying to get into touring cars. You always look where the fashion is, and it was difficult to keep with the F3 budgets.” The new two-litre rules that would become known as Super Touring were arriving, and the team prepared a BMW 318is for Baird’s son Nick to drive in 1990.

For 1991 “we bought two BMW M3s from Prodrive”. Among the drivers across the next two years were Walker, Baird, Nick Whale, Karl Jones, David Leslie and BTCC newcomer Matt Neal. But, with the manufacturers arriving in their droves, “it started drifting off – to run as a privateer was near-impossible”.

Through the rest of the 1990s, Tech-Speed competed in the Rover Turbo Cup and its successor the MGF Cup (tasting success in both with Alastair Lyall), the Vauxhall Vectra Challenge, and built and ran Whale’s TVR Cerbera assault on the British GT Championship. And then onto the scene came O’Neill.

The brother of Spice Girl Mel C was a racing nut who’d been given the financial wherewithal to pursue his dream by his sister’s success, and joined Tech-Speed for 2000, his second season of MGFs.

“I was walking around with a cheque book,” says O’Neill of his early days, where to some in the paddock he smelled of popstar money. “Marvin looked at some damage that had happened in qualifying at Castle Combe and said, ‘We could have fixed that for you and got you out for the race’. After that, I’ve driven for Tech-Speed most of my life. So many people were on my case trying to get me to drive for them. I look at where their trajectories have gone and it’s always been bust, bust, bust.”

Tech-Speed gave O'Neill his BTCC break in 2001 in a Production class Peugeot, before Humphries ran his Triple Eight Vauxhall Astra in 2002

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Baird Sr had died in 1990, and his son took over his Tech-Speed directorship until he decided to step down in 1999. “Sandra and I bought the assets and started Tech-Speed Motorsport [a change of suffix from ‘Racing’],” explains Humphries. Soon after, the BTCC – with waning numbers – adopted a Super Production class, and Tech-Speed joined the fray with a team of Peugeot 306 GTIs, led by O’Neill. Then they targeted a move to the new BTC Touring top division in 2002…

“I went down to Triple Eight to buy a Vauxhall Astra Coupe for Paul,” says Humphries, “and ‘H’ [Triple Eight co-founder Ian Harrison] said, ‘Who’s it for?’ I said it was for Paul and he said, ‘Well, Egg might be interested in doing something there’.”

The credit-card company had backed a second team of Triple Eight’s Astras alongside the works cars in 2001, and there was a vacancy alongside new signing Neal, which went to O’Neill.

"If you’ve had an incident, he’s the first one up to the TOCA bus even if he knows in his heart of hearts it’s a tough one. He’ll go to a gunfight with a spoon" Paul O'Neill

“‘H’ said he was looking for a team manager,” continues Humphries. “I didn’t want to lose contact with Paul – it was a massive step, going up alongside Jimmy Thompson and Yvan Muller [in the main Triple Eight line-up] and I wanted to help him as much as I could. So Sandra ran Tech-Speed then with Annie Templeton and Mark Fullalove, and we were both in the drivers’ briefings in those days!”

“It was unbelievable,” relates O’Neill. “The horrible thing was that I didn’t take my first BTCC win with Tech-Speed, but Marvin was crying on the pitwall…”

Humphries stayed for two years at Triple Eight, then remained associated with the squad when Tech-Speed ran Vauxhall machinery through to 2008. First this came in the form of the VX Jr satellite team, fielding Michael Bentwood in an Astra Coupe, before the bio-ethanol project with Fiona Leggate in 2005 and then the Arkas Racing Astra Sport Hatch for Erkut Kizilirmak.

After that came a return for O’Neill, who had suffered serious illness with diabetes, forcing him out of the sport for two seasons. Against the Super 2000 machinery, he pedalled an ex-Dynamics BTC Touring Honda Integra Type R to some good results in 2009-10, before the acquisition of S2000 Chevrolet Cruzes from works team RML for 2011.

“Rockingham should maybe have been our maiden win,” states Humphries of a 2011 race where O’Neill was running second to title contender Jason Plato’s RML Chevy. “I remember RML coming down and saying Jason’s concerned about the tyres and he wants to back off, and Paul was following him. So I radioed Paul and said, ‘What do you want to do here mate? He’s worried about the tyres. Are you going to follow him, or are we going to have a go for this?’ He said, ‘Mate, I can’t carry on at this pace, I’m pleased to hear that story, I’m going to have to back off’.

Runner-up O'Neill applauds Plato's win at Rockingham in 2011, a race Humphries believes was Tech-Speed's best shot at a BTCC win

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“I always regret that, because I think that was probably our one opportunity – we got second places, we got third places, trophies and all that stuff. It was very nice of Tom Ingram to give me one of his first-place trophies last year so I’ve got the set.”

Talking about that era, O’Neill adds: “Marvin never took a penny off me. It was paid for because Marvin made sure the sponsors he had got were behind me. He convinced Sunshine [backer of the Honda] to believe in me, but he underwrote it. That sums him and Sandra up. It was a risk, but they got it back.”

Over 2012-13 it became increasingly tough to find backing for the BTCC, and the boom was over for Tech-Speed’s historic preparation business. For 2014, Humphries joined WSR as team manager for Colin Turkington’s second title-winning season, before he moved to the Eurotech Racing Honda squad from 2015-18, and then on to Excelr8.

“It did become more difficult without a doubt, and some of the guys that were involved with historics were having a bit of a tough time in that era,” he says. “Since then they’ve been getting on a bit better so I probably should start again! It was getting more and more difficult every year to find the sponsors and to find the money. We got to a point where we needed probably quite a bit of investment to push on, and maybe it was the time to stop, but since then I’ve met a few people I wish I’d met earlier!”

For now, though, Mr and Mrs H, who celebrate their golden wedding anniversary this year, are effectively team mum-and-dad at Excelr8.

“I think you need that,” asserts Ingram. “Motorsport can get over the top and serious at times, and sometimes you need that loving input from Marvin and Sandra.”

“Sandra’s always behind me, she’s always been more important than anything to see things succeed and still is,” says Humphries. “If one of us stopped, the other would stop for sure because it just wouldn’t work.”

Ingram has huge respect for Humphries, now his team manager at Excelr8

Photo by: Jakob Ebrey Photography/Motorsport Images

It’s a family business too – son-in-law Alistair Weston, who was a dab hand in FFord in the 1990s, is a technician at the Mercedes F1 team, and he and wife Donna (the Humphries’ daughter) are keeping the Tech-Speed name alive by running youngsters in karting.

Apart from the friendliness, what makes him so good as a team manager?

“I always say if he’s in your corner no one will beat you in a fight,” says O’Neill. “He’s very, very sharp. If you’ve had an incident, he’s the first one up to the TOCA bus even if he knows in his heart of hearts it’s a tough one. He’ll go to a gunfight with a spoon. And his guidance doesn’t stop at motorsport – it’s guidance for life.”

"He’s one of the loveliest men you’ll ever meet, and a bloody good man to have around the paddock. I want to win a championship for him" Tom Ingram

“He’s old-school in his approach to fairness,” states Ingram. “A number of things we had last year, Marvin was massively aggrieved, but it’s his passion – he never tried to pull a fast one.”

Humphries, now 70 but a few years younger than Bennetts, warns that “there’s a good chance this might be my last year”.

“Antony and Justina [Williams, Excelr8 bosses] keep saying ‘no no’, but I think it probably will be,” he says. “Tom was one of the reasons to carry on. When he announced he was going to Excelr8, I wanted to be part of that because I’ve always respected him and felt he was a top driver, and I’ve not been disappointed. We were pretty unlucky last year and I hope we crack it.”

“He’s one of the loveliest men you’ll ever meet, and a bloody good man to have around the paddock,” says Ingram. “I want to win a championship for him, and I hope we have him and Sandra as long as possible.”

Humphries is now 70 and eyeing the title with Ingram in what could be his last year in the BTCC

Photo by: Excelr8 Motorsport