The British pair at the heart of Lexus's IMSA push

Have you heard the one about two northerners driving for a Japanese manufacturer in America’s top sportscar series? Time to sit down and talk with Jack Hawksworth and Ben Barnicoat about racing across the pond… and your accent being mistaken for Australian

Lexus is perhaps an unlikely manufacturer to take motor racing, but Toyota’s luxury brand has been developing a sportier edge for quite some time and enters its sixth year in the IMSA SportsCar Championship with two Brits driving its GTD Pro class entry.

Jack Hawksworth has been with Lexus’s programme since the beginning, following a three-year stint in IndyCar that peaked with a podium in Houston. This year, the 31-year-old West Yorkshireman is joined by Ben Barnicoat, who hails from across the border in Derbyshire. Despite their proximity, and similar karting careers, they’d never actually met until Hawksworth saw the opportunity to bring 25-year-old Barnicoat on board…

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Author Charles Bradley

Charles Bradley is Chief Editor of Autosport US. After spending five years in the aerospace industry in his native North Wales, while working weekends as a freelance writer at racetracks around the UK, Charles joined the staff of Motoring News in the heart of London. He transferred to the nascent Autosport.com team in 2000 before transitioning to the magazine, becoming its Editor between 2011 and 2014. Charles then upped sticks to work in America, as Motorsport.com’s Editor in Chief, where he created the multi-national and multi-lingual editorial team that quickly became the world’s most-read motorsport website. He was instrumental in delivering three of the biggest Global F1 Fan Surveys in sports history and is also a multiple award-winning scriptwriter. Charles is an overseas member of the Guild of Motoring Writers and lives in Miami Beach with his wife Helen – and a cat that’s named after Serbia’s top football club.