The father and son team taking GT racing by storm

It’s been a long and eventful road to a first British GT win for Richard Neary since his entry into the championship with a BMW Z4 back in 2016.

In the intervening years, he’s had his car engulfed in flames, causing burns to his co-driver Adam Christodoulou (Spa 2018), been hooked into the wall at flat chat (Oulton Park 2017) and suffered heartbreak when a gearbox let go while well-placed to challenge at Silverstone last year. But, when his Team Abba Mercedes-AMG GT3 came across the line first at Donington Park in July, the result was made even sweeter by the fact that his 19-year-old son Sam was at the wheel for the giant-killing performance of the year.

PLUS: The consistency that brought Barwell back-to-back British GT glory

The Neary family had already emerged as regular winners in Bute Motorsport’s GT Cup series angled at smaller, private teams, running an ultimately successful campaign that yielded both the GT3 class and the outright title last season. But there could be no denying that this victory for the family-run team against the heavyweights of British GT, including top Mercedes customer team RAM and proven title-winning squads Barwell and Beechdean, was a hugely significant accomplishment. Not least after a brake disc explosion in FP2 had forced them to miss qualifying and required an all-hands-on-deck repair late into the night.

“We’ve had quite a few standout performances [in 2021] where I think we’ve surprised a lot of people,” says Sam Neary, who started racing alongside his father in 2018, entering the 24H TCE Series round at Spa in their BMW M3 GTR before embarking on a Britcar campaign together in 2019. “Being a family-run team, it’s not easy to compete with big teams like RAM and Barwell, but we seem to be doing it and that stint at Donington has helped with confidence. The more confident I’m getting, the faster I get.”

Coached by AMG driver Christodoulou and by former British Touring Car Championship racer Luke Davenport, Neary Jr has come a long way since his first involvement with the team “when I was about 12, I think” washing the cars. His father observed in those initial BMW outings that he had “got a flair for it, he took to it very well”, and wasted no time plugging Sam into the GT3 Mercedes in 2019. Then, in 2020, he replaced Christodoulou as the ‘Pro’ in their British GT Pro-Am line-up.

British GT victory at Donington was the icing on the cake for the Nearys, who swept to two titles in GT Cup in 2021

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

There was still plenty of learning to do, and usually it was done buried in the pack as the proliferation of Silver squads left the Pro-Ams to feed off scraps – though the distinctive black and green-liveried machine shone at the Silverstone finale, where Neary Jr kept pace with the leaders until a penalty for his father’s start procedure indiscretion dropped him back.

But the series’ return to a solely Pro-Am footing for 2021 played into the Nearys’ hands, beginning the year with a strong fifth at Brands Hatch. Their final championship position of eighth is skewed somewhat by the Silverstone DNF following Neary Sr’s charge from 10th to third, his huge startline shunt at Spa that required the car to be reshelled and miss Snetterton, and a gearbox infringement that disqualified the car from Oulton Park after they had scored maximum points for Neary Jr’s wheel-perfect defensive drive to second in race one. Behind him was none other than champion-to-be Dennis Lind, but Neary wasn’t bowed by the pressure.

"I can still help Sam by teaching him not to make the mistakes that I’ve already done, so he can circumnavigate them. When to do things, when to go for things, what not to do. They’re the things I’ve already got wrong, so he doesn’t need to" Richard Neary

Amid it all came that famous first win at Donington, Neary Sr taking advantage of a first-corner fracas before passing Ian Loggie for a lead they would never lose, Neary Jr ensuring the gap – inflated by a 10-second success penalty for RAM – was never truly threatened by Loggie’s team-mate Yelmer Buurman. “A lot of the Pro drivers now respect me as a Pro,” Neary Jr said at the time. It was an important mental step.

For Neary Sr, though, the satisfaction taken from individual British GT performances is no greater than their achievements in the GT Cup last year, beating Topcats Racing’s GTC contenders Jensen Lunn and Warren Gilbert by 22 points after the Abba crew tallied 17 class top scores across the season.

“The championship fight in GT Cup was really hard-fought in the end,” he says. “I know it looked like we had some dominant performances, but the visual on-track performances that people compare us against aren’t actually what we’re fighting. What we’re fighting is someone in another class, so it’s like an invisible contender. But, nonetheless, it went down to the final race in the final round, it couldn’t have been closer and, at the end of that race, we were as elated as if we’d just won the Oulton Park [British GT] round.”

Sam maintains that you cannot easily compare success between the two categories.

“Obviously British GT is a harder-fought championship, there are bigger drivers, bigger teams, bigger cars, but to be perfect all season, they both add up to the same amount,” he says. “You can’t say one of them is easier than the other.”

Supreme drive at Oulton Park didn't earn points after exclusion on a technicality, but showed Neary Jr's progress

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

Although they don’t have especially similar driving styles, taking different lines through some corners and even using different gears in places – “I like to get the rear out by using the gears,” says Sam – they make a formidable pair. With Neary Jr now capable of performances matching the championship’s best, it has meant a shift in their dynamic from the early days when Sam was still very green, but Richard still believes he can help as “more of a mentor”.

“I can still help Sam by teaching him not to make the mistakes that I’ve already done, so he can circumnavigate them,” says Neary Sr. “When to do things, when to go for things, what not to do. They’re the things I’ve already got wrong, so he doesn’t need to. That’s where I see my role is – about scenarios and how they might play out.

“Sam coaches me through data and what I’m doing wrong on-track. He has the ability to think while driving the car, that’s the bit I don’t have because of my age, your brain capacity slows down as you get older.”

The relationship has benefited both parties, allowing Neary to learn under the radar without the weight of expectation to distract him – “It started off very low-key, go out and enjoy yourself and see what you can do,” Neary Jr recalls – and means the niceties of the usual Pro-Am coaching relationship don’t apply. They can be totally straight with each other. That has helped when it comes to building trust in their feedback.

“If you look at every great driver pairing, there’s always a great friendship,” says Neary Jr. “Obviously him being my dad, it’s a bit more than a friendship, but everything is built on trust. I tell him something I’m doing and he has to go out there at 150mph and try it, trusting what I’ve said is correct. Because we have that dynamic, I tell him something and he does it straight away. He’s been so consistent and that’s because of the dynamic of trusting in each other.”

Neary Sr – who also charged to the lead in the Donington finale, where they ultimately finished third – believes this factor is just as important as the benefit of gaining more track time across both series.

“Seat time definitely helps,” he says. “Obviously we get more at one with the car and we just know what we’re doing. You know exactly what the other is doing and nine times out of 10, we’re thinking the same stuff. We just come to the same conclusions.

Sam Neary enjoys coaching his father

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images

“We’re running the car better now as well,” he adds. “I don’t think it’s just that we’re driving quicker, I actually think that we’ve managed to engineer more speed into our car.”

Neary Sr is as hands-on as it gets, driving the team lorry to the track himself, working on the car and sleeping in the lorry at the end of the day’s work. Together with loyal team members Stuart Donohue, team manager, and number one mechanic Shane Fearns, it’s a tight-knit unit.

“For me, this is how you go racing,” he says. “I always stay in the lorry. Once I come to the race circuit, I stay here all weekend and then go home. And I’ve always worked on my cars, I quite like racing something I’ve engineered.”

"Becoming a factory driver would be the ultimate aim. And now GT3 is going into Le Mans and DTM has gone GT3, I feel like I’m in the right area for the changes that are coming" Sam Neary

That makes the Nearys’ shared experiences – good or bad – all the more special. They plan to keep the original Generation 1 car in 2022, rather than take the pain of starting afresh with the updated model used by RAM.

“We’ve spent so much time and we think we’ve gone so far with this car, we think as a little team we can run a Gen 1 car better than we would run a Gen 2 car,” Neary Sr says. “We’d have to start again gaining our experience with that. At the moment, our yardstick is RAM and, while we can beat them with a Gen 1 car, we’re going to keep doing it.”

Further success will only help the younger Neary in his long-term ambitions to establish a career in racing as a factory driver, with membership of the BRDC Rising Stars scheme a clear step in the right direction.

“Anything I’m in I want to try and win,” he says. “Becoming a factory driver would be the ultimate aim. And now GT3 is going into Le Mans and DTM has gone GT3, I feel like I’m in the right area for the changes that are coming. By the time Le Mans is [GT3, it will be] 2023, so two years on I’ll be 21 and right in the prime age to jump in and give it a good go.”

After a banner year for Team ABBA Racing in 2021, Neary Sr plans to continue running the Gen 1-spec Mercedes

Photo by: JEP / Motorsport Images