Why Richard Westbrook has called time on his fairytale sportscar career

“You’ve got to be honest with yourself and say, ‘You know what, I’ve had a good run and it’s time to pass the baton’.”

Richard Westbrook isn’t just being honest with himself with those words, but also the wider world. The Briton isn’t pulling any punches as he draws a line under a successful sportscar career that took him onto the podiums at Le Mans, Daytona, Sebring and beyond. Westbrook reveals that he wasn’t enjoying his racing as much as in the past, that his passion for the sport was ebbing away, and that there are a few regrets as he hangs his helmet on the peg.

“My heart just wasn’t in it anymore,” admits Westbrook, who contested his swansong race in last month’s Petit Le Mans IMSA SportsCar Championship finale at Road Atlanta. “I wouldn’t say that the motivation had gone and I still believe I was performing, but I’d got to the point where I wasn’t excited about getting in the car. This year was the first time I’d felt that, though perhaps a little bit in 2023, too.”

It’s why he took the decision not to continue for a second season at the wheel of the customer Porsche 963 LMDh fielded in the GTP class by JDC-Miller MotorSports. ‘Westy’, as he is known in racing circles, points out that he had a two-year contract with the team to which he returned this year after a season competing with Chip Ganassi Racing Cadillac in the World Endurance Championship.

It turned out to be an apt way to finish his career: IMSA, he says, is his “true love”, and he makes no bones about his preference for racing in North America.

“I’ve always felt more at home in IMSA: I love the circuits, I love the style of racing and I love the people,” he enthuses. “I never really got on with the WEC. It seemed to me to be rule after rule after rule.”

Westbrook (right), together with Bamber and Lynn took outright Le Mans podium with Caddy in 2023 after achieving the same result for Glickenhaus in 2022

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Westbrook can’t explain why he started to feel the way he did when he was back racing on his favoured patch, and in the top class to boot. But he knew that it had consequences for his career.

“At this level you have to give it 120%: anything less than that, and you shouldn’t be out there,” he reckons. “If you’re not revving to climb in the cockpit, it’s time to do something else.”

The Briton says he’s “happy with the decision” and that he has made it “on his own terms”, but he concedes that “he wasn’t going to win a lot more” as he entered the final stretch of his time as a racing driver. And he achieved a lot over a sportscar career stretching back more than 20 years.

"“The chance to come back was taken away from us by the red flag. That was just the circumstances as they unfolded, because it was too wet to continue"
Richard Westbrook

There were those back-to back outright Le Mans 24 Hours podiums in Hypercar with Glickenhaus and Cadillac in 2022 and 2023 respectively, and a further trio of top-threes in class – on his debut with the Scuderia Italia Porsche team in 2010, with Ganassi and Ford in 2016, and then Aston Martin in 2020. Class wins at the Daytona 24 Hours came with Ganassi and Ford in 2018 and at Sebring 12 Hours with Corvette Racing in 2013.

And then there were the championships, two in the Porsche Supercup on the Formula 1 support bill in 2006 and 2007, and one before that in Porsche Carrera Cup GB in 2004. They were his launchpad for the successful career in sportscar racing proper that was the result.

Another championship success quickly followed with a class title in the 2009 FIA GT Championship. But it is the ‘titles won’ column where Westbrook has regrets: “Not winning enough championships, that will always be a bit of a regret. Too many seconds and thirds.”

What rankles the most, more than missing out on a Le Mans victory, is his failure to a claim an end-of-season crown in his beloved IMSA series. That’s probably not surprising given that in the first five years of the series as we know it today, which kicked off in 2014 after Grand-Am’s takeover of the American Le Mans Series, Westbrook was second or third in the points four years out of five. And he was fourth in the missing year, and then fourth again the year after that run.

A strong shot at the IMSA title in 2015 fell apart in the soaking wet Petit Le Mans finale with spins for co-drivers Valiante and Rockenfeller

Photo by: Richard Dole

Missing out on the overall title in the Prototype class while racing for the Spirit of Daytona Chevrolet squad in 2015 remains a big disappointment, as does failing to win the GT Le Mans class with Ganassi and Ford after ending up a close second in both 2016 and 2018.

The overall crown went west in the ultra-wet Petit Le Mans finale won by a GTLM Porsche when the race was cut short on eight hours as a result of the conditions. Westbrook had put his Coyote-Chevrolet DP on pole by more than a second in the wet and led the early going. Two spins within the space of 30 minutes at restarts by his team-mates, full-season partner Michael Valiante plus Mike Rockenfeller for the enduros, dropped the car off the lead lap. Action Express Racing duo Christian Fittipaldi and Joao Barbosa pipped Westbrook and Valiante to the crown by just three points.

“That really hurt because we should have won,” rues Westbrook, who ended up fifth in class and 12th overall with Valiante and Rockenfeller in Atlanta. “I was absolutely gutted about that because Spirit of Daytona was a small team up against the big guns like Action Express and Wayne Taylor Racing. It was tough to beat them, but we were up there all season.

“The chance to come back was taken away from us by the red flag. That was just the circumstances as they unfolded, because it was too wet to continue.”

A failure to win the title over the four years of the Ford GT programme add up to a greater cumulative hurt for Westbrook.

“We had so many wins over those years with the Ford GT,” he says. “Not coming away with the championship after having gone into the final round at Petit a couple of times with a strong chance and both times losing out to Corvette was a bit galling. A victory in the IMSA championship is something that I felt my performances and those of the team deserved.”

Westbrook looks back fondly on his years with Ganassi and Ford, when he was paired with Ryan Briscoe throughout.

“We had such a good group of people,” he recalls. “Me, Ryan, our engineer Brad Goldberg, and Mike Hull [managing director of the Ganassi team] on the pitwall calling strategy. It’s a favourite time of my career.”

Westbrook rates his time alongside Briscoe at Ford as his favourite period in his career

Photo by: Richard Dole

Not just for the results notched up – eight wins and a further 10 podiums – but for the way he was driving, ‘Westy’ adds. He believes he peaked as a driver in the final years of his time with Ford. Perhaps the remarkable thing about that is that he had already passed the big 4-0 when he called time on his five-year relationship with Chevrolet, first racing GT cars for the Corvette Racing squad and then its prototypes, to start his Ford adventure in 2016.

“I reckon most sportscar drivers hit their peak somewhere around 36, but mine came much later,” he explains. “I always say that 2019 was my best year – I was driving better than ever.”

Westbrook has a theory about that. He suspects it’s not so much age that slows you down, but miles on the clock. There was a five-year period when there were no racing miles at all for him.

"I was already in my early thirties when I got the big break when I became a Porsche factory driver in 2008. And I still had a lot to learn at that time"
Richard Westbrook

He was firmly on the sidelines after his single-seater career fizzled out after a part season of Formula 3 in Germany and Austria in 1996 until his comeback in the Porsche one-make ranks in 2002. (Completists might like to know that his only miles, testing and not racing, came at the wheel of Formula 3000 Lolas with Gabriele Rafanelli’s World Racing Team and Redman Bright early in what was a financially induced hiatus.)

“I still felt fresh deep into my forties,” explains Westbrook. “Maybe it was because I had those years off. I was already in my early thirties when I got the big break when I became a Porsche factory driver in 2008. And I still had a lot to learn at that time. Maybe that combined to allow me to keep on going longer than a lot of other drivers.”

Westbrook never liked talking about his age during his sportscar career, as though he didn’t want to draw attention to the fact that he was generally older than his team-mates. He’d bat away questions about it and describe it as just a number.

“There are a lot of other more important things that make you fast in a racing car than how old or young you are,” he once sagely told this author. Today, he just points you to Wikipedia when the age question comes up. It lists him as 49 in case you were wondering.

Westbrook only recently lost his zest for racing, which he puts down to his enforced hiatus

Photo by: Brett Farmer / Motorsport Images

That five-year break is perhaps the most amazing thing about Westbrook’s career – or rather what he went on to achieve in the 22 seasons that followed is. No one could have predicted, when he made his comeback in the Supercup with the Kadach Tuning team, that he would go on to become a factory driver. And not just with Porsche. Over the course of what he calls his second career, he has also had full or quasi-factory contracts with Chevrolet, Nissan, BMW, Ford, Aston Martin, Glickenhaus and Cadillac.

“I pinch myself sometimes when I look back over those 20 or whatever years and think what I have achieved,” he states. “Sometimes I couldn’t believe what was happening to me: I went from doing nothing in London to driving for all these manufacturers. But I think those five years off made me stronger because I never took anything for granted.”

But he did take a risk to end his layoff. Westbrook eventually decided that enough was enough and he was going to try to get back on track. He knew about the Supercup because the Opel Lotus Euroseries in which he won races in 1994 and 1995 also appeared irregularly on the F1 bill, so he sold his flat in Stockwell, South London to buy a drive with Kadach.

The equity only stretched to a part season, but it was enough to get his foot in the door. Westbrook pulled together some bits and pieces of sponsorship to enable him to carry on racing the following year in the British Porsche series. The Carrera Cup GB title in 2004 took him back to the Supercup as a paid professional and onto the factory drive with the German manufacturer.

It’s a fairytale really. Especially when Westbrook admits that he didn’t set out on his comeback with a clear plan to become a professional racing driver.

“I didn’t really know what I was doing except that I wanted to get my bum in a racing car again,” he laughs. “All I knew was that not racing made me miserable: in my mind I was never an ex-racing driver. I can’t say that there was a grand plan and that I set out to start getting paid. But I was able to turn racing into a career, and that’s something I’m proud of.”

There are all sorts of rumours about what Westbrook did in his seasons out of racing. He could have been anything from a debt collector to beach bum if you believe them. The reality is that he tried all manner of jobs and none of them floated his boat.

And the one that did spark interest in the young Westbrook brings us on to what the future holds for him. When he took the plunge and sold his home, Westbrook was in the middle of training to be a chef at college in London.

Comeback season with Kadach in 2002 Porsche Supercup led to opportunities to become a factory racer

Photo by: James Moy

“That was the only thing that I thought could replace racing in my life,” he recalls. “I started a year-long course, but I didn’t finish it because racing took over. But I always say that if I hadn’t ended up being a racing driver, I would have been a chef.”

More than 20 years on, the same “love of flavours and recipes” has led him to start brewing beer. The catalyst for Westbrooks Brewery, established in 2022, was his inability to find low-carbohydrate beers in the UK.

“I’d been big into nutrition to try to extend my career and always looking for ways to cut down on the carbs,” he explains. “I’ve always liked a beer, I don’t shy away from admitting that, and after a race in the United States I would have a couple of low-carbs. Whenever I came back to the UK I would find it frustrating that there was nothing out there in terms of those kind of beers.

"I’d say 99% of our customers don’t know a now ex-racing driver is behind these beers" Richard Westbrook

“I wanted to do a low-carb beer that reflected on the craft brewing scene, not the fizzy dog wee you get in the States. We’re trying to do something different, hop-forward beers, as is the trend, but without the sugar and the carbohydrates for those of us who are trying to look after our waistlines.”

The result of that desire is a range of beers that Westbrook started to work on in 2020 in conjunction with an independent brewer in his native Suffolk. The first, released in 2022, is known as Laguna and is a west coast pale ale, then there are a couple of lagers, Karussell and Peraltada, and two more ales, Lime Rock and Dingle Dell. The names, says Westbrook, are a “subtle nod” to his racing exploits rather than a marketing ploy.

“Some people think we are trying to sell to the racing market, but we aren’t,” he explains. “I’d say 99% of our customers don’t know a now ex-racing driver is behind these beers.”

Brewing – which Westbrook currently outsources, though he has ambitions to start his own brewery – drives him in the same way that racing did when he was a whippersnapper dreaming of F1 and then for another 20-odd years in his second career. One passion appears to have replaced another.

Westbrook can retire with his head held high

Photo by: Marc Fleury