A man of many parts, is Ian Dawson. Mechanic with Ralph Broad’s team in 1970 at the age of 19, he later helped to build five Formula 2 cars for Ron Dennis’ Rondel Racing outfit, was number 1 mechanic at Team Lotus to Jacky Ickx, then Mario Andretti, then turned constructor with the GRID racing organisation that he founded with Giuseppe Risi (GR-ID) in 1977.
That’s just background to the interesting bit, when he became the first to run a diesel engined Le Mans Prototype in the big 24-hour race, earning congratulations from Dr Wolfgang Ullrich. He arrived there after holding senior positions with Zakspeed USA, Buick March USA, Saleen Ford Motorsport USA, then, nearer home, manager for Richard Lloyd’s Porsche 962 GTi team, John Mangoletsi’s BRM sportscar team and Klaas Zwart’s Ascari prototype team. Also in the frame are spells with Keith Wiggins’ Pacific Racing, and director of motorsports at the Canadian company, Multimatic.
Ian Dawson has packed more than most contemporaries into the last four decades on the motor racing scene, either working with well funded factory programmes or on extremely challenging low budgets. Typical of people who have experienced the highs, and endured the lows that motor racing throws up, he has a strong entrepreneurial spirit, indominatible one might say, and after each knock (there have been a few) he gets up, dusts himself off and moves on to the next big project. He has spent eighteen months securing the sponsorship for what seemed great possibilities in the merger of IMSA and Grand-Am and made plans to contest the Grand Touring category…or LMP2, with the sportscar project in preparation for the 2014 season in America.
Project Libra completed the November tests at Sebring and Daytona, the Roush Yates Ford 3.2 litre V6 powered Radical SR9 driven by Robbie Kerr and the young Belgian, Nicolas de Crem. With main sponsor PetroComm on the engine cover, it was trouble-free but just too slow, seven or eight seconds off the front-running prototypes at both venues. “We ran the 3.2 litre engine which needs a major development on boost control” says Dawson. “We had a 29mm restrictor but really needed a 32mm restrictor to get the power we needed. The new 3.5 litre EcoBoost Ford engine is streets ahead, in another class.”
As things stood 17 prototypes were accepted for the Daytona 24-hours plus three reserves, Project Libra being the third behind the 8Star Corvette DP and the Starworks Riley DP. Recognising the shortcomings of the Roush Ford V6, which was hopelessly outclassed, Dawson made a late switch and installed the omnipotent Nissan LMP2 engine. “This would seem to be a safe, no risk route” he reckoned at the turn of the year.
Despite making two bad decisions on engine suppliers and experiencing a sponsor default in the past four years, Dawson was looking forward to the 2014 season with renewed enthusiasm, until a fresh plunge was met on the roller-coaster: Roush withdrew their support, following the switch to Nissan power, and Libra’s entry was rejected by the Tudor United Sportscar Championship.
Yet another change of direction was required. Out went the Nissan engine, and in went an order to Roush Yates for the latest Ford EcoBoost power unit, a 3.6 litre, twin-turbo V6 as supplied to Chip Ganassi Racing and Michael Shank Racing. Then another setback arrived with the non-delivery of the engine “due to their workload on DP cars” explains the frustrated team owner. And that’s how the matter rests, midway through March, with the third round of the TUSC due at Daytona Beach on April 12.
Been there, done that
Ian professes to have had limited interest in racing when he got an introduction to Broadspeed through his technical college, where he obtained his City and Guilds certificate in mechanical engineering. He started in the manufacturing department producing Group 2 Ford bodyshells and axles, and was soon promoted to supporting customer teams in British and European touring car championships. These included spells in Maastricht, looking after Capris raced by Toine Hezemans and Gerry Birrell, then as number 2 mechanic on Franz Lubin’s Capri RS2600, before moving to Broadspeed’s operation in Spain, looking after Escorts for Rafael Barrios and José Uriarte.
He has good memories of working for Ralph Broad, an experience that increased his knowledge of hands-on engineering. “At Broadspeed it was fantastic because you built everything, and when you spend a couple of years in that environment, where everything is being done in-house, you develop a range of skills that really isn’t possible nowadays because everything is so specialised. Broadspeed was engineering based, nowadays that’s regarded as old school. It was a challenge, making everything from scratch, whereas today young people wouldn’t have a clue how to make a set of wishbones, for instance.” That word ‘challenge’ crops up frequently in conversation.
From Broadspeed Spain, Ian worked as a fabricator at Rondel Racing, then at Jo Marquart’s Modus Cars when Tom Walkinshaw drove the Modus F5000 car powered by Ford’s Wessex V6 engine, with which Ian was familiar. His recollection was that the Ford V6 wasn’t strong enough to compete against the American V8s, and Walkinshaw lost interest in single-seaters after his fourth race which resulted in a massive accident at Zolder. Two more hops took him to Team Lotus, via Dave Brodie Racing (silhouette Capri with an ISO Formula 1 back end) and Ford Competition France.
On the treadmill, at Lotus
“I needed stability” says Ian, though working for Colin Chapman for three years (1975-78) was hardly a rest cure. “The experience with Colin was very much like the experience with Ralph Broad, very hands-on, we made everything. The Lotus 77 was a very small car, and it was fascinating to be involved in the early work with ground effects, with brushes and moving skirts, it was fantastic. They experimented with a car without wings, just ground effects. The arrival of computers brought about a change in design procedures, of course. When Peter Wright was working on the first ground effect Lotus he put a computer and printer in the cockpit, and Gunnar Nilsson was doing test driving at Paul Ricard. In the end Gunnar had to stop because the printout paper was filling the cockpit, wrapped round his legs, and in the evening Peter laid it all out in the restaurant in Bandol, to analyse the results (here’s Gunnar at the Race of Champions at Brands in 1976).
Ian has good memories of working with Ickx and Andretti, but stronger recollections of working for Chapman. “That was an unbelievable experience, he was a tyrant, he worked his people into the ground! During the season we were working 70-80 hours a week just building, getting the cars back into shape for the next race. Colin would be there, all the time, pushing people to the limit. ‘This needs changing, that needs changing, redesign this, change that’…I don’t think the cars ever ran in the same configuration from one race to the next.
“People in the design office would come into work in the morning and find that everything they had been working on the day before had gone! Colin would come in at night, look at everything and leave notes, change this, change that. Little things, but they mattered. One day we came into work an hour late and Colin was waiting for us. ‘What time do you call this?’ Well Colin, we didn’t leave here until three o’clock in the morning. ‘Well, you should have stopped at two, and come in at the right time!’ He would pull up a box and sit behind you, watching all the time, he absorbed everything, then asking why we did this, did that. He was on it all the time.
“Colin and Ralph Broad were two very influential people in my life” Ian reflects. “Some people couldn’t have coped, but even today I still see guys whom did the same as me and a few of us are still in contact now and again, but it taught me a great deal about engineering, about discipline and people You had to do everything, there was nothing you would say you couldn’t do. People like Broad, like Chapman, like Tom Walkinshaw if you like, were task masters, they were driven from one project to the next, but you need people like that to run a successful team.”
There was a sea-change in Ian’s career in 1977 when he and Giuseppe Risi formed GRID Motor Racing Limited, initially as an extension of Hector Rebaque’s privately funded Formula One Lotus team. Risi brought Emilio de Villota, who drove a private McLaren M23 in four European Grands Prix in 1977. That was pretty much the end of private F1 teams, Ian reckons, because the arrival of turbo engines put the costs out of reach. John Barnard designed the Rebaque Formula One car, “a Lotus 79 lookalike, but it wasn’t the right thing to do. It was built in cooperation with Penske Cars but it needed a big operational structure behind it, and Rebaque raced it only once, in Canada, and then the contract ended.”
Sports-racing beckoned
Looking for the next big thing, Ian switched his attention to sports car racing. GRID formed an agreement with Lola Cars to run the new Lola T600 Group C car in the 1981 Sportscar World Championship, for de Villota and Guy Edwards. “This was the first prototype built by Lola, and it was a fantastically challenging car. It was the beginning of an era, we were working with Lola, working with Cosworth, it ticked all the boxes. It was a successful car, quite revolutionary, and of course it preceded the Ford C100.”
GRID presented their Lola-Cosworth at scrutineering for Le Mans, only to have it rejected. “It didn’t meet the regulations in a number of ways so we had to re-enter it as a Group 5 car in the GTP class.” The windscreen was not the right size for Group C, but good came of this as GRID’s Lola won the GTP class after a fine drive by Edwards, Villota and Juan Fernandez. Later the team went to Sicily and won the Enna 1,000 Kms race, then to Watkins Glen where Edwards had an enormous accident and cut the car in half. GRID built a new car for the final event at Brands Hatch, and won it handsomely.
Then Ian saw the design of the Lola T610 (phwaw!) and asked himself why GRID bothered to make its own sports car, a neat design by Geoff Aldridge. “We had backing from an oil company in Texas and they kept asking us, ‘why don’t you build your own car?’ so we did. We had all the resources, were self sufficient with the monocoque, body moulds and suspensions, and the car was quick out of the box, but realistically it takes two or three years for a small company to develop a car fully.”
“David Hobbs drove it, with Villota, and we had some success. We nearly won the Sebring 12-hours in 1983. Risi and I were in it together for the American races, but we were unable to keep up with the technology changes, and the Cosworth DFL had terrible vibrations which tended to shake the car to pieces.
We never had a mechanical issue with that, but we had to keep reinforcing the monoque as the suspensions were pulling away. It was difficult financially but someone (no name) came along and wanted to buy the company, and run the GRID with a Porsche engine. So we did the installation, tested it then split the company up.”
Mike Kranefuss, head of Ford’s motorsport operation, knew Ian well and offered him the job of running Zakspeed’s American operation in Detroit, in 1984, while Risi concentrated on developing his new Ferrari dealership in Houston. “Paul Brown designed the Zakspeed GTP, he is a brilliant guy. He made the first carbon monocoque, it was a modular type of racing car, quite innovative, lots of downforce, and we had some excellent drivers: Klaus Ludwig was a stunning driver, Bobby Rahal, Geoff Brabham, Lynn St James, it was a super team and we could do all the things we wanted to do.” Ian was responsible for the Ford factory’s IMSA sportscar team, race team, test team schedule and production shop, and he managed the team at weekends and engineered the number 1 car. Some undertaking!
Great team, but the all-important feature, the small four cylinder high boost turbo engines, were a disaster. “Ford wanted a small-bore turbo engine, 2.1 litres, because of the fuel crisis at the time but we never had enough power. I think we blew 40 engines in one year and although we won races we were not consistent enough to win championships.” The politics were increasingly fraught, too. “Jack Roush was fed up that he was dealing with Zakspeed in Germany, when the team was based two blocks away in Detroit.” The Zakspeed Ford team was disbanded in April 1987 and Ian moved on to his next posting, setting-up and managing Buick’s March race team featuring John Paul. Here again, the 4.5 litre V8 engine was not strong enough for the job, the car was uncompetitive against the turbo engines with upwards of 700 horsepower, and the programme was cancelled midway through the 1988 season.
Ian moved back to England with his family at the end of 1988 to manage Richard Lloyd’s Porsche 962 GTi team, always one of the leading privateers despite the dominance of the Jaguars and Mercedes at the end of the Group C era. “We had great drivers, Derek Bell and Tiff Needell, it was a really good project, but where the team had been up at the front it was now struggling to get into fourth or fifth place, the whole situation changed in the space of a year.”
RLR continued in 1990 running variously James Weaver, Manuel Reuter, Steven Andskar and Perry McCarthy, but Lloyd was ambitious to form a partnership with a manufacturer and got involved in serious discussions with Subaru. They were well down the line with an agreement for Subaru to supply flat-six engines for the Group C2 category, RLR would make new cars designed by Nigel Stroud, but the virtual collapse of the WSPC at the end of 1991 killed the plan stone dead.
Ian’s next stop was managing John Mangoletsi’s BRM sports car team in 1991-92, the introduction made by designer Paul Brown. “It was a great car, it was really the (Zakspeed) Probe 2 that was never built, but it was let down by the engine. This again was a disaster!”
Terry Hoyle and Graham Dale-Jones worked on the Weslake V12 engine but it was underpowered, at just 500 horsepower, and initially it was unreliable, so it was sent to Ricardo Engineering for assessment. “They said there was a lot wrong with it but if you do this and that to it, and restrict the engine speed, you can have 550 bhp reliably.
“That done, we took it to Silverstone and did 160 laps, and it was perfect…but it was two seconds off the pace. Against the Peugeot, with 800 plus, we never stood a chance.” Nearing the end of the project late in 1992 Ian was asked to prepare a report for the Owen brothers, recommending that if they would spend a lot of money, with Ricardo for instance, for a new engine they would stand a chance.” Not surprisingly, in view of the fact that the WSPC was effectively deceased, Rubery Owen canned the BRM and took possession of the P351.
The dead-hand management style of the World Sports-Prototype Championship by Bernie and Max broke many hearts, ended careers for some, and prototype racing was only supported by a lifeline offered by the ACO. That, and Grand Touring racing virtually founded by the BPR organisation. From BRM, Ian Dawson threw in his lot with Keith Wiggins’ Pacific Racing organisation, and spent the next five years on various Formula One, F3000 and sports car projects.
With Ian as team and general manager, Pacific switched from F3000 (1989 to 1993) to Formula One (1994-95) – Oliver Gavin was the test driver, but never got to race — then back to F3000 with Oliver Tichy and Marc Gené, and later David Coulthard and Michael Bartels. Sports car racing was nagging away, though, and in 1997, urged on by Malaysian backers, Pacific Racing negotiated with Rubery Owen to take the BRM and run it with a Nissan twin-turbo engine (the car now renamed BRM P301).
“Janspeed supplied the Nissan V6 engine, it wasn’t a difficult installation, and we went to Le Mans with Harri Toivonen, Elisio Salazar and Wido Rössler to keep the Malaysian sponsors alive. We didn’t have enough time to turn the engine into what was needed, the whole concept was shaky, and it ran until midnight when engine issues stopped us.”
The Pacific BRM-Nissan project staggered on with sporadic appearances in the International Sports Racing Series without results, and Ian decided to return to America, to help his former colleague Giuseppe Risi establish his sports car team running the new Ferrari 333 SP. It was being readied for the 1998 season when Ian took it to Multimatic in Canada for a four-post rig test – and was denied re-entry to the United States because his visa was out of order! Unable to return to the States until he obtained a new visa, Ian was given a senior appointment with Multimatic, as director of the motorsport division, responsible for steering their sports car programme with the goal of racing at Le Mans.
Ian renewed his relationship with Lola Cars and bought a B2K/10, powered by a Nicholson-McLaren prepared Chevrolet V8. “The engine was a big mistake” he said, not for the first time in his career, nor the last. “It was unreliable, and I put my hand up, it was my mistake.” Moving on quickly, Ian took Multimatic into the LMP675 class with a Lola B2K/40 powered by an AER prepared Nissan V6.
“The ACO wanted us to do this, it was the beginning of the 675 formula, we got some sponsorship together, Morgan Stanley were involved, and I have to say it was a very good programme.”
Good enough for the all-Canadian crew Scott Maxwell, John Graham and Greg Wilkins to win the class. Success at last! “It was stinking hot that year, I told the drivers not to try and race anyone, the car just ran and ran with no troubles at all.”
Back to Europe
Trouble is, there was no challenge remaining with Multimatic as the programme wound down. Challenge, that word again. Challenge is what Ian faced when he accepted an invitation from the Dutchman, Klaas Zwart, to run his Ascari sportscar team, and more, to establish Ascari as a sports car manufacturer. “We got it from a team that could hardly function to one that could win. We were able to establish a fantastic team together, and supervised the move from three factories in Sittingbourne to one in Banbury, where the road cars would be made.”
Ben Collins was the lead driver in the Judd V10 powered Ascari, and the 2001 season culminated with Collins and Werner Lupberger winning the Donington Park ISRS event.
They were second at Monza, fifth at Spa, fourth at Brno and fourth again at Magny Cours, a pretty good haul, but Le Mans was a disappointment as one car retired with a fuel pump defect and the other due to an accident, in rain.
Zwart, an abrasive character on a good day, wanted Michelin at Le Mans in 1991 and the French refused to supply their tyres ‘for a gentleman driver’ in 1992. “This was the policy at the time which was a great shame as he was a very competitive driver. I had to say we can get the tyres but not if you are driving” Ian told him. They only want professionals in the car. “He was very upset, he said he was paying for everything. Next thing, Klaas told me to shut the whole LMP 1 thing down. Get rid of everybody, we’re not going to Le Mans. The team is finished. I was responsible for a whole bunch of people on the team, who had moved jobs and family so I argued, you can’t just get rid of them all at short notice !. Well we all went to Le Mans, and Klaas didn’t turn up of course.” The Ascari retired ignominiously with suspension failure early into the second hour, and that was the end of the prototype programme. “This was a great shame and all we needed was a cool down period to change direction, but there were many projects in the system at Ascari and they continued. Today Ascari have a state of the art facility in the track in Ronda Spain and I respect what Klaus achieved with this.” Collins, as we learned more recently, became known as The Stig!
Diesel pioneer!
BRM, Ascari, whatever next? Lesser men might have become disillusioned, but every dark cloud has a silver lining, and Ian Dawson’s solution was to work for himself, form his own team, control his own destiny. He chose to do so under his star-sign, Taurus. He met Martin Birrane at the Racing Car Show in January 2003 and a deal was done. Taurus Sports Limited would run a B2K/10 with a Judd V10 engine in the Le Mans Series, and hopefully at Le Mans, with Justin Keen and Phil Andrews.
The season started well enough with a good finish at Sebring, but then Ian learned that his Lola was first reserve for Le Mans. Don’t worry, there are always cancellations, the ACO assured him, but June approached and there was still no entry for the Taurus Lola. A crash in Portugal cost the team a lot of money and the intended sponsor pulled out, on the grounds of not racing at Le Mans. Already, Taurus was up a creek without a paddle! “I was looking for a way of getting out of it. The ACO were talking about running a class for production engines, but there was no clear pathway. Then a friend of mine, a civil engineer, said he couldn’t understand why they didn’t have diesels running at Le Mans. That got me thinking. I was like a train spotter, looking at all the diesel engines to see if they would fit into a hole ‘this big’. They were all massive, there was nothing suitable.”
Fortuitously a friend working for a Volkswagen dealership in Milton Keynes suggested he should look at the new Touareg, one version of which was powered by a 5-litre V10 diesel engine. Ian went with a tape measure and found that it was “tiny. We couldn’t buy an engine from VW so I bought the car, took the engine out, re-engineered a lot of stuff and in three months we had the car running.” A joint presentation to Shell, with Cosworth, came to nothing but an approach to the Perkins diesel company showed promise as Caterpillar, the parent company, was interested in the potential of engines that were smaller, and higher revving, than those they produced for industrial use (here’s the car testing at Snetterton with Calum Lockie at the wheel).
The ACO, sympathetic to Ian’s cause, accepted Taurus’ entry for Le Mans in 2004. Two entries, in fact, one for the diesel and one for his Judd engined Lola. “We had a lot of help from AER, but what a nightmare! I had stepped into something rather beyond me, with no backup, but Caterpillar stepped up, they were very good, and we got both cars to the race.”
Phil Andrews, Callum Lockie and Anthony Kumpen would drive the diesel, Christian Vann, Benjamin Lupberger and Didier André the Lola Judd. There were just two problems, though. The Volkswagen V10 diesel weighed-in at 500 kg, three-and-a-half times heavier than Aston Martin’s petrol V12, and it developed a whopping 750 Nm of torque (553 lb.ft) at 2,000 rpm. Result, it had a voracious appetite for clutch plates!
“AP were struggling with clutches. We had to change one clutch, then disabled the flat-shift, but the second one failed at midnight and we had to retire the car. We had another clutch but we needed to keep it for the Judd car, and sure enough its clutch failed at midday, when we were eighth, and we had to change it. We really needed a finish, and got to the finish in 18th place. There was one consolation, which Ian prizes, congratulations from Dr Wolfgang Ullrich for being the first to race a diesel powered LMP1 at Le Mans.
Taurus ran the Lola-VW diesel again, at Silverstone with Lockie and Richard Jones, but it suffered an overheating problem near the end. Taurus was out of money. Ian sold his premises in Norfolk, then “got involved with a couple of wrong people who said they would come in and help me, but didn’t. I needed to earn a living. I was vulnerable, and in that situation you tend to do things that you shouldn’t.” The chairman of D1 Oils threw Ian a new lifeline, asking him to run the diesel on Jatropha nut oil fuel blend for research purposes. The Lola covered a lot of laps at Snetterton using D1 oil made from nuts from India, fuel from Holland, different blends, “we carried on doing R&D which was great.”
The diesel story should have finished there, with a happy ending. But it didn’t. Ian got involved in renovating classic Group C cars in 2007, to keep his staff busy, and one of his customers said he wanted to drive the Lola diesel. He kept on, he insisted even, while Ian insisted that the Lola was too out of date, it would not be an interesting project. Eventually he went to Lola to negotiate an old MG LMP275, “found that Rupert Mainwaring was in another world with money”, and acquired instead monocoques and suspensions for two Radical SR9 LMP2 cars. “This is how I ended up with one complete car which we took to Sebring with the diesel engine in the back, but unfortunately Radical hadn’t got all the paperwork and it wasn’t homologated.” This had the makings of a fiasco, since the Radical was smaller and lighter than the old Lola and was even more disadvantaged by the 500 kg lump in the engine bay.
In yet another identity, one that brings us up to date, Ian registered himself the owner of Libra Racing (another star sign) in January 2008 and set to work updating the Radicals, improving the downforce and putting IES/Nissan engines into the back. “The IES engines were terrible, we had repeated failures in 2008, the chain came off the front six times” but still he entered a joint venture with Ginetta Cars for 2009. Lawrence Tomlinson would do the European Le Mans Series races, Libra the American Le Mans Series.
The agreement fell apart almost as soon as it began as the supposedly rectified engines failed after 12 laps of Sebring in a morning session, and its replacement after four laps in the afternoon. “I rang Lawrence and told him I would put the car on a plane and send the car back, which he agreed to. “
Finally, Ian called on his friendship with Roush Engineering to put a nice Ford V6 twin-turbo engine into the back of his Radical, the installation carried out in the Roush workshop in Charlotte . We have now fast-forwarded to 2011, the car tested well at North Carolina in the hands of Andrew Prendeville, and an announcement was made that the Libra Radical Ford would compete in the ALMS starting at Laguna Seca. “It ran really well but it was a bit off the pace, with low boost, then after four hours running third in class a guy in a GT car hit our Radical and damaged the nose. We repaired the car and finished the race fifth in class.
Libra then planned a full season in 2012 with a big sponsor lined up, “but we never received the first payment! We did a trade show in Las Vegas in the sponsor’s colours but they didn’t come up with the money. Then we found another sponsor, met them in Colorado, signed an agreement, they put out a press release, then we did due diligence and found a couple of nasties. The car was ready to go, and now the whole thing was a complete disaster. Difficult is an understatement to describe the situation we were in. I’ve lost a ton of money and I was back where I started. I’d had four years of lies and empty promises.”
Alongside the ill-fated Radical programme in LMP2, Ian also contracted with Lotus to run an Evora in the GTE class in North America. Paid a deposit, too, but with rapid changes of management it became clear that the agreement would not be honoured, or if it was, not on the terms which were put in writing. Alex Job got the Lotus Evora GTE programme instead, and spent the first half of the 2012 season working with Cosworth to get the Toyota based engines to work reliably. The only consolation there, for a lost season, was that Ian got his deposit back from Lotus and the car proved to be a failure so he got out of that one in one piece!
Ian Dawson’s career in motor racing has been akin to a game of snakes and ladders. His biggest successes were in the years when he was employed by reputable companies with properly funded programmes, yet in recent years he has suffered a series of costly disappointments often not due to his own doing , the four-year recession no doubt working as a deadweight.
Undaunted, Dawson sees a silver lining to every dark cloud.
Michael Cotton
