The former rival to F1 greats eyeing a future in hypercars

When Ben Barnicoat emerged from the karting ranks into Formula Renault in 2014, he did so as a standout from a golden crop of talent against future Formula 1 stars and 2024 Le Mans 24 Hours winners.

“I came through the junior ranks with high hopes, high expectations,” he reflects. “That year I was European karting champion, it was against Charles [Leclerc], [Max] Verstappen, Lance Stroll, Nicklas Nielsen and [Antonio] Fuoco… George [Russell] was a junior in 2012, but in 2013 he was in with us.

“You look what we’ve done now, and I feel like it was arguably one of the greatest generations there’s been. There is a small part of you where you think, ‘Ah, what if?’, but at the same time, making the move to GTs was 100% the right thing for me.”

The Derbyshire native did that aged just 19, after a mere three seasons on the single-seater ladder. That was a career crossroads for him. Now, at 27 and as a Toyota factory driver, he potentially stands at another. And much of this is down to his claiming the IMSA GTD Pro crown at the wheel of Vasser Sullivan’s Lexus RC F in 2023 with fellow northern Englishman Jack Hawksworth.

That title led both Barnicoat and Hawksworth – four years his senior, so their junior careers never overlapped – to be invited to test Toyota’s GR010 HYBRID Le Mans Hypercar in the end-of-season World Endurance Championship rookie test in Bahrain, and set off a domino effect, for the younger man at least.

“Bahrain is a track I really like, I clicked with the car fast and I went well,” recounts Barnicoat. “And I went to do the Super Formula Rookie test off the back of that in Japan. I got to drive with TOM’S at Suzuka – the way I saw it was it was kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The best car in the world outside of F1 on one of the greatest tracks, in the greatest Japanese team of all time! It was so long since I’d done any single-seaters but it went really well.”

Maiden test in Toyota's GR010 HYBRID in Bahrain led to another run out in Portimao for Barnicoat

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

And due to that, he was invited back behind the wheel of the GR010 earlier this year in a pre-season test in Portugal: “I see the Super Formula Rookie test as the big door-opener in being able to go back and drive the Hypercar in Portimao. When I performed on the Toyota big bosses’ home turf, that probably opened their eyes to my capability and they wanted to try me out again in the Hypercar. The test was very wet and I didn’t get a lot of running, but it was an amazing opportunity.”

And because of that, the phone rang in May when Team Impul, one of Toyota’s historic teams in Super Formula, needed a late stand-in for IndyCar-bound Theo Pourchaire at Autopolis.

“I literally found out the Sunday before as I finished the race at Laguna Seca,” he relates. Well, at least he was on the right side of the States to get to Japan quickly…

"I’ve definitely not enjoyed my racing as much as I’m doing now. A lot of that is down to the American culture of racing"
Ben Barnicoat

“For racing in open-wheel now you have a different regulation of helmet with a smaller visor following Felipe Massa’s crash in Hungary. I had to fly back to the UK to get my helmet for that. I left Laguna on Sunday night and got to Japan on Tuesday evening!”

Travel woes aside, Barnicoat did a sound job. The numbers aren’t remarkable – qualified 17th, finished 13th – but he’d never seen Autopolis, the track’s high degradation pretty much gives you just one shot in qualifying, and he set the fastest lap of the race.

“At the time I was a bit disappointed about it,” he admits. “But the race went really well – I moved forward a little bit, we maybe weren’t quite on the right strategy, and it was good for me to show my versatility. Kamui [Kobayashi, Toyota star and WEC team boss] does that so well – to give them the evidence I could do it was fantastic.”

For now, however, the ‘day job’ remains bidding for that second successive IMSA GTD Pro crown with Hawksworth and Vasser Sullivan. Ex-IndyCar driver Hawksworth was instrumental in poaching Barnicoat from the McLaren GT ranks in Europe, even though the two scarcely knew each other beforehand, and they’ve formed a strong partnership. Barnicoat even shares an apartment with his co-driver in Charlotte, close to the team’s Carolina base, although estimates that he spends 40% of his time – whenever there’s a long stretch without racing, basically – back with his folks in Derbyshire.

One-off outing in Super Formula yielded the fastest lap on his single-seater return

Photo by: Masahide Kamio

“I’ve definitely not enjoyed my racing as much as I’m doing now,” he enthuses. “A lot of that is down to the American culture of racing. The atmosphere is always really good – they do a great job of drawing a big crowd – and the ruleset.

“You speak to some people and they don’t like it, and that’s around the yellows – there’s no FCY, it’s always safety car and wavearound and class split, so the race is never over until it’s over. When I first came over here from Europe, you had to have a small mentality shift to get used to that and be attacking.

“It’s always just super-close. In the last round [at Mosport] the top four were separated by two seconds, and a similar-length GT World Challenge Europe race can sometimes be won by 30 or 40 seconds. I think that suits me and Jack – we come from a very similar kind of karting background in the UK. I was a bit more on the aggressive side and sometimes it did get the better of me, but as I’ve matured, I’m not saying I get it right every time, but I do feel it works for me and this style of racing.”

Unfortunately, that Mosport event brought a second non-finish of the season for the pairing, engine problems following another DNF in the Daytona 24 Hours season opener. It leaves them third in points, among a swathe of fellow Brits including leader Seb Priaulx (Porsche), runner-up Ross Gunn (Aston Martin) and fourth-placed Alexander Sims (Corvette). Add in Oliver Jarvis (McLaren) and Harry Tincknell (Ford), and no wonder Barnicoat quips that “we’re all looking out for our points in the BRDC Gold Star!”

Can he and Hawksworth win another crown? They have one win to date in 2024, at the Sebring 12 Hours, but the consistency-biased points system hammers non-finishes…

“Aside from that our worst result has been fourth,” he points out. “We were in a hole after Daytona with the DNF, we were pretty much out of it, and then scraped our way back towards the top, but Mosport was a bit of a blow. It’s not just Jack and me – as a team at Vasser Sullivan we’re so close and it just feels like nothing can stop us.

“It’ll make a good story if we do come back and win it. All we need is we have a good day and they have a bad day and we’re right back there. We’ve got four races left and we’ve just got to crack on.”

Winning the crown in 2023 did count as some validation for Barnicoat.

A second GTD Pro title in IMSA alongside fellow Brit Hawksworth is the goal for Barnicoat in 2024

Photo by: Jake Galstad / Motorsport Images

“I feel like I have a good reputation as a driver,” he muses, “but I’d only had the one championship success in 2014 in Formula Renault NEC. I won Asian Le Mans in 2022, but that’s more of a winter series. When you come into sportscar racing you see IMSA as one of the biggest championships in the world – in my eyes it’s second only to WEC, which gets most of its credibility from Le Mans.

“There’s a lot to it in sportscars – the races are long, so much can happen over a season, that it was good to get a major title on my CV. Eurocup Formula Renault [in 2015] I made a few mistakes, and I only had a rookie year in F3 [alongside second-year driver Russell at Hitech GP; each of them won twice]. In sportscars I’d never had a year where I’d been in the right team, right team-mate, everything come together to have a real championship assault.”

Even if they don’t win the IMSA crown, Barnicoat has a Le Mans 24 Hours class victory from 2024, after linking up with Nico Varrone and Francois Perrodo at AF Corse to claim LMP2 Pro-Am honours. And they weren’t far off an overall LMP2 win either.

"Le Mans is our crown jewel in sportscar racing – to have the trophy with first place on it, and the IMSA trophy, it really feels that I’ve achieved something with my sportscar career"
Ben Barnicoat

“That was phenomenal,” he gushes. “In 2023 I made a mistake while we were having a good run in the Pro-Am category, crashed the car and lost the chance of a win. For Francois and Amato [Ferrari] from AF to ask me back was great of them, to give me the opportunity to put last year right.

“This time it was a little bit different – I was the lead driver in the car; it was Nico’s first time at Le Mans in an LMP2. From midnight to 1am until late morning we were controlling the overall [LMP2] race, AF were calling an amazing strategy and we’d got Francois’s drive time done, so it was ‘game on, we’re going to have a go for this’.

“But from a certain point in the morning we started having problems with the starter motor which meant we were losing five, six seconds every stop. The race was so tight, but until about two or three hours to go we were second overall.

“There was a safety car where we decided to stay out, when we should have pitted immediately if we were going for the overall win. But we had a lap advantage in the Pro-Am class, and with an eye on the starter motor we decided to stay out to protect the Pro-Am race, which for sure was the right thing to do.

Victory in the LMP2 Pro-Am division at Le Mans was especially sweet after crashing out in 2023

Photo by: Emanuele Clivati | AG Photo

“There’s a lot of talk about these Pro-Am cars going for the overall win, but we were very clear that Pro-Am was our target and that’s what we did. Le Mans is our crown jewel in sportscar racing – to have the trophy with first place on it, and the IMSA trophy, it really feels that I’ve achieved something with my sportscar career.”

Like his recent Lexus-Hypercar-Super Formula saga, that initial move into sportscars was very much a domino effect. Barnicoat is at pains to credit the Racing Steps Foundation triumvirate of founder Graham Sharp, manager Derek Walters and late karting talent finder Martin Hines for his career: “Without them, we wouldn’t be having this conversation”.

But Sharp was looking to wind up the scheme after a decade that also produced future stars such as James Calado, Oliver Rowland, Jake Dennis and Jack Harvey. At the same time, Sharp’s stepson Stuart Leonard had been racing in the Blancpain GT series with the WRT Audi squad, which needed a substitute driver for the 2016 Endurance finale at the Nurburgring…

Barnicoat takes up the story: “Graham said, ‘You can have one of my guys’. RSF sent me and Jake to Barcelona for a test with WRT, and at the time we just thought we were doing it to see how we liked GT. It was fun, and the night after I got this call from Derek and he said, ‘Where are you?’ ‘I’m sitting with Jake at the airport about to fly home.’ ‘Right, well this is a little difficult as you’re with Jake, but it was actually a shootout and you’re going to race at the Nurburgring this weekend with WRT.’ That was an awkward flight home.”

While he was on the grid at the Nurburgring, Barnicoat was approached by Garage 59 chief Andrew Kirkaldy, who at the time was responsible for overseeing the McLaren GT programme and recalled the youngster’s strong performance in the GT3 discipline of the 2014 McLaren Autosport BRDC Award shootout: “As soon as Andrew got wind that GTs was the direction for me, he went to Derek and RSF and that’s how the deal was put together for me to go to GTs with McLaren as a junior initially, and then a factory driver until moving to Lexus.”

Since then, it’s all worked out rather well.

“To get to Hypercar is my dream and goal from where I am now,” says Barnicoat. “I understand I’m in a fantastic place with Vasser Sullivan and Lexus, and I don’t see myself leaving here to go to any other GT programme, but my next step if I am to take one is to the Hypercar team – I would love to do that with Toyota. I feel I’m doing the right things – it’s just a matter of time, waiting for doors to open and things to fall my way. I’m just doing what I can at this stage.”

Even if that doesn’t happen, “I’ve got such a fantastic life, travelling the world driving race cars in different disciplines. I’m so lucky.” His vanquished 2013 karting rivals in the F1 goldfish bowl can’t say that.

Barnicoat has no regrets over the path his career has taken

Photo by: Michael L. Levitt / Motorsport Images