How to get the best out of amateur racers

The Bathurst 12 Hour on 15 May will be a Pro-Am event, with each GT3 crew required to field a Bronze-graded amateur driver, due to the continued impact of the COVID-19 pandemic. It will bring another dimension to the Australian enduro as company directors and entrepreneurs sharing with top professionals go for outright honours in the Intercontinental GT Challenge curtain-raiser.

Wealthy so-called ‘gentleman racers’ are the backbone of modern GT racing. Their support of the world’s biggest endurance races – 23 cars will contest the GTE Am class at the Le Mans 24 Hours this year – and the many championships run to the homogenised GT3 rules makes participation in sportscar racing viable for manufacturers and enriches the entire ecosystem by providing opportunities for teams and drivers alike to earn factory-aligned status.

But it’s a form of motorsport that is often derided, and its skillsets trivialised – largely due to misconceptions about what it involves. Rather than seeking the last tenth and pushing the envelope of what the car can do, Pro-Am racing is motorsport’s equivalent to a team pursuit in cycling – it’s about improving the performance of the team’s weakest link.

The smaller the gap between the professional driver and their amateur team-mate, the more likely success is to follow. But it’s a highly specialised game that requires an acute understanding of driver psychology and a willingness for compromise that goes beyond simply extracting one-lap pace.

Autosport assembled a crack panel of experts including a team boss, a professional and an amateur driver, plus an engineer to uncover the secrets of working with amateur drivers in a GT racing setting.

Pro-Am racing is about minimising the laptime difference between Pro and Am drivers, rather than chasing the best outright times

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Set expectations – and don’t rush

Former racer Mark Lemmer is the team principal at Barwell Motorsport. The Lamborghini squad has clinched the past two British GT drivers’ titles with a Silver and a Pro-Am crew, sweeping the teams’ titles in both years and winning the 2019 Pro-Am crown too. It is also a stalwart of GT World Challenge Europe, winning Endurance Am titles in 2018 and 2019.

Lemmer says the starting point with an amateur driver is to establish how serious they are about their racing and set expectations. What do they want to get out of it? Are they realistic? Where is the best place to achieve those goals?

“An Am can be anything from, ‘I want to go racing and tick the box of having gone to Le Mans, to say I’ve done it’, all the way through to Am drivers who are super-serious and they’re in it to win their class every week or win their championship,” explains Lemmer. “Then once you’ve established that, then the type of racing that they do is the next stage and that can be relative to their development stage.”

"Seat-time is great, but it needs to be quality seat-time. Every time Brendan drives a car, we come up with a plan for the next session, even if it’s one little thing to change" Ollie Millroy

The key here is not to rush in. Swedish financer Alex West admits he “had no idea that I was going to end up doing Le Mans or winning a championship” when he started racing in Ferrari Challenge in 2015. But, he points out, as most amateur racers are successful in business, they “tend to be fairly driven people and that translates into how you approach the racing as well”. The 2020 GTWCE Endurance Pro-Am champion and Garage 59 team co-owner says it’s wise to take a long-term view.

“Depending on your age and budget, taking a five-year view rather than a two or three-year view at least for me has been the right thing to do when it’s time away from work and family,” says West, who says he’s seen amateur drivers pushed up the ladder too quickly “by a Pro who wants to go there”.

Lemmer explains that “there’s no better place in Europe than British GT” for beginners to race against other Ams because of it’s Am-versus-Am, Pro-versus-Pro format, relative to racing in a mixed pack in GTWCE against Pro racers, or together with much faster prototypes.

“That’s a tough gig,” Lemmer adds. “We would seriously consider advising them not to do that if they weren’t up to that level.”

Barwell boss Lemmer (left), with Dennis Lind, says British GT is an ideal series for newcomers

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

As reigning Asian Le Mans Series GT class and International GT Open Pro-Am champion Ollie Millroy explains, this requires a totally different approach compared to racing for outright wins.

“It’s more of a game of survival rather than just eyes forward and pushing as hard as you can,” says the Briton, who has coached US tech entrepreneur Brendan Iribe across a number of series since they met at a Mont Tremblant trackday for McLaren owners in 2019 and Iribe’s “unlimited bravery” became apparent.

“A lot of their mental capacity is being used up just driving the car as fast as they can, so then when you’ve got prototypes coming at them at warp speed, it adds a really difficult element. We’ve had to teach Brendan about the spatial awareness, how to be passed by a prototype losing as little time as possible.”

Use time – and budget – effectively

Once a driver has decided on their race programme, the next element to organise is testing. This is important for building up familiarity and confidence in the car but, as Lemmer points out, “more testing isn’t necessarily best”.

“It’s a sport that involves technique and confidence, just like golf and tennis,” he says, “so practice is important from a rhythm and muscle-memory point of view. But in all forms of motorsport, testing is extremely expensive. It’s obviously budget-driven, but we work out what the key objectives are and that’s how we decide where, when and how much we’re going to test.”

Millroy agrees that “every time you go out on track, there needs to be an objective”. This applies for Iribe whether he is driving the Optimum McLaren 720S GT3 the pair will campaign in GTWCE Endurance or their Project 1 Porsche 911 RSR-19 in the World Endurance Championship.

“Seat-time is great, but it needs to be quality seat-time,” says Millroy. “If [Iribe] was just driving around making the same mistakes, he’s going to stop improving. Every time Brendan drives a car, we come up with a plan for the next session, even if it’s one little thing to change. That’s why he’s improving so quickly.”

Test mileage is valuable, but it has to be used wisely

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

TF Sport chief engineer Grant Clarke, who has worked with amateurs across GTE, GT3 and prototype racing in LMP2, says it’s important to remember that “each driver is their own individual”.

“There isn’t a one-size-fits-all methodology to working with the Am drivers,” explains Clarke, who won a British GT and GTWCE Endurance Pro-Am title double in 2019 and ran its Le Mans 24 Hours-winning GTE Am crew in 2020. “Am drivers come from all walks of life, and some are able to get up to speed much quicker on a race weekend because they’re in and out of the car much more often. You have to put into perspective each individual driver, what their abilities and their shortcomings are, then tailor your programme to suit them.”

Get the basics right, utilise the driver aids

One of the fundamentals of racing with an amateur driver is to prioritise, reckons Clarke. He explains that the focus for an engineer shifts from car performance towards helping the driver exploit their potential by “picking one or two points around the lap where you can find a big chunk of time rather than the minute detail”.

"It’s not about necessarily carrying two or three kilometres through a high-speed corner because that will only gain you a fraction of a second. It’s about preparing the car properly in the low and medium-speed corners where you can gain half a second just with basic driving technique" Grant Clarke

“When you strap an Am driver into a car, you’re taking them massively outside their comfort zone,” says Clarke. “Their eyes are on stalks and everything can become a complete overload. So the biggest thing is getting the basics right. That means being able to work in traffic, being able to drive in different track conditions and then nailing the brake application, throttle application, smooth steering.

“It’s not about necessarily carrying two or three kilometres through a high-speed corner because that will only gain you a fraction of a second. It’s about preparing the car properly in the low and medium-speed corners where you can gain half a second just with basic driving technique.”

Millroy explains that laying a solid foundation of understanding “that is totally transferrable”, rather than simply giving instructions that will “only help in that car, on that day, in those conditions, that tyre-life, that fuel-load”, has allowed Iribe to “work things out for himself”.

“I’d say 95% of the focus with Brendan is on his technique, getting him to understand that what he’s doing with the pedals affects the balance and the weight transfer,” says Millroy. “If he gets a little bit of understeer somewhere, he will now trail the brakes a bit longer to try to keep the weight on the nose.”

TF Sport engineer Clarke says its important to remember that all Am drivers are different

Photo by: Andrew Lofthouse

These basic principles apply regardless of what car an amateur driver is put in. But while West has raced lots of different cars, including an LMP2 Ligier in the Asian Le Mans Series, he believes it’s most beneficial for drivers starting out to “stick to one car and get used to it”.

“In the first couple of years there’s so much going on occupying your brain,” says West, who switched to Pro-Am racing in the GT Open series in 2016. “You’re trying to learn the tracks, understand the car, get used to racecraft, all of that. Everything from how the car behaves to simple things like the steering wheel, it’s just easier being in a familiar environment so you can reduce how much of your brainpower you need to be focusing on surviving rather than getting better at driving.”

GT3 cars have myriad traction control settings, plus anti-lock braking systems, that Millroy says “help the Ams to get up to speed very quickly and keep them out of trouble a lot of the time”. But for drivers looking to push on, learning to optimise the driver aids is vital.

“You do definitely need to use them,” says Millroy. “The tools are so advanced that it’s a skill now learning how to use ABS and traction control properly. On the McLaren, we use the traction control a lot and you change it throughout the tyre life. As Brendan has developed his feel for a car, he can tune those systems to how he wants them based on the track grip level, the tyre life and stuff like that.”

Match up personalities, accept compromises

This advice is all well and good. But the chemistry between a Pro driver and an Am driver isn’t something that can be taught. It’s either there or it’s not. “Those relationships aren’t always going to work,” Millroy says. “You can have the best coach in the world but if the personalities don’t fit with the Am, you’re never going to get the best out of each other.”

Lemmer adds: “Am drivers have got strong personalities, and it’s important that you have a Pro driver that you can match the personality to complement that.”

In all cases, the assigned Pro has to be willing to enact the necessary compromises to make their co-driver faster and achieve the lowest possible average lap time. This means sacrificing their own practice time – and therefore understanding of the tyre’s peak performance window – to give their Am driver more seat-time.

Millroy has coached Iribe for the last two years. An implicit part of his job is sacrificing his own seat-time and ideal set-up

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

As a result, the Pro is largely reacting in the few laps they do get and with a car set-up designed to inspire confidence from the Am – which is therefore slower in the Pro’s hands. As Lemmer puts it, “everything is based around the Am and the Pro is just there to do a job”.

“A good Pro in Pro-Am will realise that the ideal set-up is probably one where he’s going to be two tenths of a second per lap slower than he would ideally like,” West says, “but it would be a set-up where I’m half a second per lap quicker than with his ideal set-up.”

Pro drivers working with an Am therefore have different priorities when giving feedback to the engineers.

“I’ve got to think – is that quicker? Yes, it’s probably a couple of tenths quicker, but is Brendan going to struggle with that?” says Millroy. “You make compromises for yourself as well. I have to split my time and my mental capacity over the race weekend between my own performance in the car and, most importantly, Brendan’s.”

"I’d rather have someone that’s interested in the coaching aspect rather than somebody who might be a tenth or two quicker that has no interest in coaching. Yes, they might get you a pole, but that’s not going to win you the race" Alexander West

The fact that, like Iribe, Millroy was a Le Mans rookie last year didn’t change that focus. He says it’s important as a Pro to manage expectations and “stay totally focused on your own programme”, rather than worrying about comparing to others.

“I just try to be realistic about it,” he says. “The race result is going to be dictated by the average pace of the three of us over the whole race, so you have to make decisions to balance that as well as possible, put your ego as a racing driver to one side and fully understand your role.”

West singles out Jonny Adam and Come Ledogar as the best Pro drivers he’s worked with because of their aptitude for coaching. He says amateurs derive the most benefit when their co-driver “gets satisfaction out of helping the Am get better”.

West says its more important to have a co-driver that is interested in coaching than outright speed

Photo by: Garage 59 Racing

“I’d rather have someone that’s interested in the coaching aspect rather than somebody who might be a tenth or two quicker that has no interest in coaching,” he says. “Yes, they might get you a pole, but that’s not going to win you the race.”

Effective communication is a vital component of any Pro-Am relationship. Millroy has spent several years honing his ability to translate feedback “into how your Am thinks, and for it to make sense to them so that they can put that into practice”.

“Fundamentally that comes from understanding how your Am’s brain works when they’re in the car,” he says.

Being constructive in criticism is equally essential. As West puts it, “not everybody is born to be a teacher or a coach”.

“I don’t mind the Pro telling me, ‘That was shit’,” he says. “But if he stops there, then it’s not very helpful. We’re all grown-ups, I can take criticism and I can see every single lap that I’m not as quick. I want to know, ‘What can I do to narrow that gap?’ For lack of a better word, it’s a job that you’re trying to do and you’re trying to be as good as possible at it.”

Constructive criticism is vital to help the Am improve

Photo by: Asian Le Mans Series

Why Pro-Am racing is important to Pro teams

WRT is renowned as one of the world’s best GT teams, both in the big endurance races and across championships. It has won 24-hour races outright at Spa (2011 and 2014) and the Nurburgring (2015), claimed the 2018 Bathurst 12 Hour and scooped multiple titles in GT World Challenge Europe – including four of the last six in the Pro class in the Sprint Cup.

The team has also achieved great success in Pro-Am racing. In the fiercely competitive Dubai 24 Hours, which requires each GT3 entry to feature a Bronze-graded driver, it claimed a 1-2 finish this year. After second places in 2019 and 2021, it underlines the emphasis WRT places on customer racing. This year it has entered five cars across the Pro, Silver and new-for-2022 Gold class.

Co-GT programme manager Kurt Mollekens says all are treated with equal importance. It’s a cyclical process, with success in Pro feeding customer interest that allows the team to stay competitive against other Pro squads.

“As a team we can’t afford to be quick in one category or with one car and not at all with the others,” explains Mollekens, who previously ran his own KTR team in junior single-seaters. “You have to be very wary of not giving the rest of the paddock the impression that you can only function around one lead car and all the others are not taken seriously and they run in P20.

“If you want people to know about your results, then overall victory is more important than finishing P14 but first Pro-Am. But as a business finding the customers every year, it’s just as important to us to win that Pro-Am category.

“We can at any time swap our race engineers or mechanics from one car to the next and we’ll achieve the same result. If you’ve got some good ones that always go on the Pro cars and then you take some youngsters coming out of school that you put on the Am car, then that Am car may not be as reliable and then you will get missed opportunities and you will lose potential drivers for the year after.”

WRT took a remarkable 1-2 in the 2022 Dubai 24 Hours

Photo by: Markus Toppmöller