Bob Berridge has been around motorsport for a long time, involved as a Championship-winning racer, team owner, entrepreneur, championship organiser. He’s a ‘been there, done that’ sort of bloke.
Right now though he’s at the epicentre of a push for a totally new area of historic racing, in more ways than one.
That is to say that Bob has more than one iron in the fire, and the cars we are talking about are somewhat more contemporary than many followers of historic racing are perhaps used to!
“We’ll have to think of another name than historic because they’re not historic, Because historic according to the FIA cuts off at 1990, so we’ll call them post-historic cars.”
Berridge is referring to the GT and LMP cars that are now eligible for the Masters Endurance Legends Series with an envelope of eligibility that takes the LMP2 car right up to the end of the Pre-Gibson-era in 2016.
That encompasses the inventory of two very significant acquisitions by Bob and his colleagues, Berridge’s BBM Sport (Berridge, Briggs, Minassian) concern is home to a simply astonishing collection of cars, on our recent visit including no fewer than 19 LMP cars ranging from a gaggle of Peugeot 908s, of which more later, a pair of Creations, and the sole Nasamax DM139 and from the LMP2 ranks a Lotus T128, a storied LMP2 Zytek, a pair of ex Level 5 Motorsport Lolas and no fewer than five BRO1 LMP2 coupes.
That marks a seismic shift in the business core of BBM:
The last time I was in your old workshop, most of the cars on the shop floor were Group Cs, perhaps 7 or 8 of them.
Now there are a couple of (very special) Group Cs down there, but the workshop is now dominated by LMP1s and LMP2s?
“The thing is that the Group Cs are so much more difficult to run. They are challenging to drive, very challenging to drive in the case of a Mercedes C11. The MEL cars just aren’t?
“They are much, much easier to run for a preparer. They’re much, much easier to drive, the technology rather than being sophisticated working against you, actually works for you so running them is so much easier.”
And cheaper?
“There’s a number of factors. One is that yes, the cars are at the bottom of the value curve. Because Masters Endurance Legends is only at the beginning of a journey. And I’ve seen this before in historic Formula One – I set up Thoroughbred Grand Prix with the FIA. And I’ve seen it in Group C, where cars, new cars, depreciate linearly until there’s nowhere for them to race because the regulations change.
“They then hang around for a number of years. And in the case of historic Formula One it was around 10 years. And in the case of Group C, it was around 15 years.
“Somebody then has a bright idea that wouldn’t it be great to get all these cars out again. The value of the cars is at a nadir, and if you’re successful at building the championship, the cars appreciate dramatically.
“That can happen to such an extent that many Group C cars are now no longer considered race cars. They’re actually used as a store of value. And it’s similar with historic Formula One cars, Williams McLaren, Lotus, to name but three.
And in a car that everything that we know about the historic race car market place can only go up in value?
“Winston Churchill said a man who has one eye on the past is blind in one eye and a man who has both eyes on the future is blind in both eyes.
“History does not repeat itself. but it sure fire works the same way. So I can see MEL cars, in the course of the next five years, being a long term investment. I can see them appreciating significantly.
“I’ve experienced it with historic Formula One. When we first started that you could buy any car you want it for about £150-160k. Within 10 years, the same cars were a million quid.
“Group C you could buy any Porsche you wanted for £300-350k, any Nissan £400-450k. You could even buy a Sauber C9 for £750k – the current MEL LMP2 and LMP1 cars are at that sort of broad equivalency now.
“5 years later, Porsches are 800 grand, Nissan’s 1.2 million, C9s are 2.5 million.”
Some of the cars you have here are pretty iconic winning cars from the period, others are a little more left field, does that affect the value, and your ability to run them economically and at the pace that a historic racer, a gentleman driver can get from the cars?
“People will say that perhaps an ORECA is quicker than a Ligier which is quicker than a BR etc etc, In contemporary terms, you have this hierarchy of competitive cars.
“My experience in historic Formula One and Group C taught me quite the reverse. And that is that in post-historic racing with gentleman drivers, or patron drivers, because the patron drivers underpin sportscar racing, it wouldn’t happen without them, the Mike Newtons, the Patrice Lafargues we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about this.
“The reality is, though, that they’re only going to get 80-85% out of the car. Mainly because of seat time and lack of testing. They’ve only got an hour’s worth of qualifying practice. They’ve only got 2 x 40-minute races. They’ve been busy working in their business for the month before and they haven’t sat in the car for a month.
“Whereas in a contemporary team with a Pro driver, they’d be doing hours and hours and hours of practice. And it’s all they do. It’s all they think about. They’ve got time to go to the gym every day.
“So if you accept the notion that you’re only going to get 85% out of the car, that means all the cars are the same and some of the less successful cars in period are going to be absolutely competitive.
“Going back to the comparison with historic Formula One. In contemporary terms, The Williams was a great car. The McLaren was a great car, the Lotus, depending on which one, was a great car. But I had an Arrows A4 that was every bit as good as the Williams FW08.
“But in period, for various reasons: They didn’t have the good engines, they were on the wrong tyres, it was a non-competitive car.
“I got an Arrows A4 and won straight away with it. Just set it up exactly the same as the Williams!
“So if you drive in a car, any car, at 85% of its capability, it means two things. One, they’re all the same in terms of ultimate performance, and two, they’re easy to drive, because the car is performing well within its capabilities.
“As a further example, we put a young 18-year-old kid called Max Lynn (brother of Ex AMR factory driver Alex) in a LMP2 BR01. He has already driven Radicals, and Caterham Sevens and a 2 litre historic Porsche.
“Within half an hour of driving in his second 30-minute session, he was setting competitive post-historic times. It was just intuitive.
“We gave him a good car that was simply more capable than anything that he’d driven before and he could adapt.
“We had another historic race driver that we tested on the same day. The best he had driven before was a Lancia LC2 and he took to this like a duck to water too – it’s a simple car to progress to at a certain level.”
Is there a concern that these cars are too advanced for the historic racing scene?
“Basically, the guys stepping across are interested in the thrill of driving and these cars absolutely deliver that.
“People’s perception of these cars is either that they are too technical or too sophisticated. However, that’s not my experience.
“It’s an era of car, where the technical sophistication really works for you. It’s an era of the car where the traction control, for example, is highly calibrated. So it saves you from a ‘gotcha’ that you don’t have on a Group C car. Power steering, aerodynamics that makes the car stick to the ground. So you’ve got plenty of feel, plenty of grip. Tyre warmers, so you don’t have to drive on cold rubber. If you get a problem from a technical point of view, you open up your laptop, and, generally speaking, you can find whatever the issue is within a few minutes.
And what about the professional standards in the paddock required for these cars?
“What I would say to you is if you look at the average historic paddock now then there are plenty of teams that make some 1970s Formula One teams look amateur. Professionalism trickles down like technology and both that professionalism and technology have a real role to play in the experience and the cost.
“So what their customers are getting into is a better, more reliable, safer racecar than is probably available anywhere else for that budget?”
What about the experience in these paddocks, does it stack up with that of a Gentleman driver in a contemporary international race series?
“Masters have been very smart in constructing the championship around gentlemen, drivers, or patron drivers.
“Their ethos is an overtly customer-led ethos, where they treat their entrants as customers and realise that there’s an exchange of money for a service and an experience. That’s absolutely not the case in many contemporary paddocks.
“It’s a smart move to look after the guys that signed the cheques. Because you don’t want an arms race of gentlemen driver, bringing in a Pro. That forces us to bring in another Pro which ups the ante – and what does it do for the gentleman drive? It gives him less seat time and bigger bills.
“I’ve had experience with many historic organisers over the years. Masters have a really good philosophy of, it’s almost like an extended family in the paddock. Drivers from different formulae, mixing with other drivers, competitors mixing with each other, chatting about the race they’ve just had.
“Ron Maydon does an amazing job paddling the paddock all day. I don’t know where it gets his energy from but Ron will basically pop up in every garage at every preparer, every driver, talk to everybody throughout the weekend, which makes you feel part of something.
“A lot of other big organisers and promoters don’t do that.
“Masters have all also been smart, in recognising this issue of relevance, what was relevant to 30 year old who couldn’t afford to go racing and who is now 45 years old and has just sold his business.
“So that’s a moving feast. It’s constantly changing. For a healthy package, you need a good number of fresh faces coming into the sport, because you will have people who are no longer enthusiastic, because they’ve done it for three, four or five years, leaving the sport. So you need new people to come in.
“I think Masters have an amazing opportunity, looking in the long term because they’ve been brave enough to take that step and say that a 2016 car is a classic racer.
“I think that you will get a migration from people who are fed up with spending millions of pounds in contemporary racing and I think you’ll also get a significant number of people. guys in their 40s and 50s, who these cars are very relevant to, who stood track side at Le Mans watching these things go by, and who would have dreamed, 10 years later, that they could drive a Peugeot 908, or a Lola LMP1, an LMP3, a Ferrari 458 GTE in a good series?”
Part two of this interview takes a look at the cost of post-historic racing, and it’s another eye opener!
