In another brief amble through the memories of the Champion Racing team captured in the forthcoming book ‘Champion Racing – A Little Bot of Magic the DSC Ed caught up with Johnny Herbert:
Every other team I was with before, and every other team I was with after was a full-time professional team.
What was special about Dave’s team was that they were builders, plumbers, joiners who were pulled together just for a race weekend. I think there were only about two guys who worked full time in the workshop, including the truckie.
Everyone else flew in for the weekend, but what was really special about them was that they just didn’t make mistakes, absolutely incredible. These guys weren’t full time mechanics, but the job that they did, and more impressively still the understanding that they had amongst them, and the passion that they had in the environment that Dave gave them, gave them something pretty extraordinary.
It was a brilliant time, such nice guys to work with, a really very special atmosphere.
Dave was just great too, a really special guy, always there if you needed him but usually more than content to soak it all in, take a couple of steps back and let his guys do what needed to be done.
When I first joined the team, at Le Mans in 2001, Thierry Boutsen was helping them out. I gelled well with the team, though our Le Mans that year was pretty short, and that’s how I got involved going forward.
Dave asked me to do the rest of that year and then I came back for the ALMS
Everyone who got involved with the team always seemed to gel, right across the board.
When I was racing with them together with JJ of course we were racing against the works team and although in qualifying we often struggled, we always gave them a tough time in the races, even though we were 1, or even sometimes, two years behind them in evolutions for the cars.
I think the Joest boys, who as the works team were under pressure, were quite surprised by what we could do and it meant that from time to time mistakes crept in on their front and not on ours, yes we had problems from time to time, but never mistakes.
Beyond that though the competition encouraged and stimulated them, as well as us, to move onto the next level of preparation, and of competition – it carried all of us forward pretty quickly.
And, of course, when we finally beat them, at Road Atlanta, that was absolutely brilliant for us (above). For me and for JJ of course it was fantastic, but to see Dave’s beaming smile after the race, knowing that after all of that hard work we’d achieved something that huge, and that it had paid off for him, and in no small part his passion, his enjoyment, fed the effort as a whole. To follow that up with a Le Mans win was, well just fantastic.
