Jonny Kane could never have imagined that biofuel testing for the short-lived A1 Grand Prix World Cup of Motorsport might provide the origins of his favourite team-mate partnership. But a fruitful collaboration with Danny Watts that is best remembered for a famous Le Mans 24 Hours class victory with their Strakka Racing HPD in 2010 actually began several years before, when the duo had been team-mates of sorts pounding around away from the public eye.
Over the course of 35 race starts between 2010 and 2016 together with Strakka boss Nick Leventis, Kane and Watts also became the first LMP2 crew ever to win a Le Mans Series race outright at the Hungaroring in 2010, joined Audi on an outright World Endurance Championship podium in 2012 and led the unofficial privateers class at Le Mans in 2013.
What Kane describes as “a really good working relationship” that would yo-yo between the top and secondary classes of prototype racing only ended when Watts called time on his driving career after the 2016 edition of Le Mans.
“We never had an issue with sharing what we were doing,” he says. “We were both very open with techniques and doing corners certain ways. It made us a strong combination, because there was absolutely no secrets at all.”
The little-known story of how the elder brother to British Touring Car Championship race winner Steven first became acquainted with Watts in 2007 owes much to the late John Wickham. Kane had been given the opportunity to revive a single-seater career that had lain dormant since the end of a two-year Indy Lights foray in 2000 by Wickham in his role as A1GP general manager, technical and operations. He had previously been the team director of the Bentley Le Mans programme, to which Kane had been attached as reserve driver in 2003, and needed a safe pair of hands to handle its Lola-Zytek chassis.
As it transpired, the development was not straightforward. The 1997 British F3 champion’s services were frequently required for endurance testing.
“They were wanting me to do 1,000 kilometres a day to put miles on an engine, so it was fairly full on,” remembers Kane. “The first lot of fuel did something to the seals of the engine, or the fuel tank lining or something, so I had to keep repeating it. I ended up getting quite a lot of work out of it!
“Those cars were very physical to drive and if you're doing 70-lap runs of Snetterton over and over, you get fairly fatigued. So they actually got Danny in a couple of times to finish off a day if I had run out of steam. That was the first time we met.”
Watts was still a year away from making his own A1GP debut at the short-lived Chengdu track for Team Great Britain, but had already begun to focus his attentions on sportscars as the 2002 Formula Renault 2.0 UK champion’s single-seater career began to fizzle out. A driver who had won a British F3 race with the unfancied Lola against the Dallara hoards at Castle Combe in 2004 had sufficiently impressed aboard a Panoz Esperante to earn a prototype debut in the 2007 Silverstone LMS round aboard an LNT-run Zytek.
On his debut with Strakka in 2009, as amateur driver Leventis made the enormous leap from a GT1 Aston Martin to LMP1 with a Ginetta-Zytek, Watts underlined his growing reputation as a sportscar driver by taking pole for the LMS opening round at Barcelona. Kane’s arrival on the scene for 2010 from the Speedy/Sebah team, as Strakka stepped down to LMP2, along with the arrival of the HPD ARX-01 chassis that he labels “probably the best car I've driven throughout my whole career” constituted the final pieces of the puzzle needed for Strakka to become a real force.
"There was never any problems about him wanting to take the car in a totally different direction. We both liked the car that felt the same and knew what we were after" Jonny Kane
Both Kane and Watts were on the same page when it came to understanding the job expected of them up against fully-professional line-ups. The impetus would be on them, as Leventis would not be able to match their times, but the car would still need to be confidence-inspiring for him to drive. “We obviously knew the situation, we were up against it,” says Kane. But it helped that both drivers “generally always wanted a similar car” throughout their seven-year association at Strakka.
“There was never any problems about him wanting to take the car in a totally different direction,” recalls the Northern Irishman, who observed that Watts’s greatest strength lay in high-speed corners while he was more adept in slow and medium-speed technical sections. “We both liked the car that felt the same and knew what we were after.”
Kane says that while the two are “not too dissimilar in age” they are still “quite different people”, citing how Oxford United fan Watts is “massively into football and I'm not a football fan at all”. Yet Kane says “we just gelled”, a point he believes was helped by Strakka being a “family atmosphere” that featured many former members of the Embassy Racing team he’d driven for in 2008. Among them was crew chief Karl Patman, who had made the key introductions on his behalf.
“It was very close-knit team, quite small so everybody knew each other well,” says Kane. “Meals were always together and after an event we'd all go for a beer together. It was nice to be a part of.”
Things began in the best possible fashion in an eight-hour LMS contest at Paul Ricard in 2010. Despite losing four laps to repair a dislodged legality plate in the third hour, the team recovered to victory that set the tone for a memorable year that yielded three wins from five LMS races, including the history-making outright win with a P2 car in Hungary.
Watts even qualified on pole, and when the leading ORECA Peugeot 908 lost its three-lap lead to transmission woes Strakka headed an all-P2 top six. The best of the LMP1 contenders, Greg and Leo Mansell’s Beechdean Ginetta-Zytek, finished seven laps behind in seventh.
“The track layout obviously helped; we had a good downforce level and the engine was strong,” says Kane. “Danny got outright pole, which was a mega achievement.
“Staying in front of P1 cars into the first corner was always going to be a tough ask, so they swamped Danny as we expected. We were running around best of best of the P2s and then a lot of the P1 cars seemed to have little issues and we had a pretty trouble-free run.
“That was a huge thing for us to not only get pole there and show what the car could do over one lap, but to actually win an ELMS race outright in a P2 car, which had never been done before, was another feather in the cap for us that year along with Le Mans.”
Failure to see the finish at Spa after a second Leventis shunt of the day – the first in warmup causing the car to start two laps down – and transmission woes while leading at Portimao meant they ultimately missed out on the LMP2 title to the more consistent RML Lola/HPD of Tommy Erdos and Mike Newton by just six points. Yet that disappointment paled next to the big prize Strakka had already taken at Le Mans.
Placing fifth, then the highest-ever finish by an LMP2 crew after a near-faultless run, surpassed all expectations not least because fellow HPD squad Highcroft Racing had an all-pro line-up featuring defending outright Le Mans winner David Brabham, three-time winner Marco Werner and Marino Franchitti, himself no slouch. Strakka had more experience with the low-downforce Le Mans aero kit than its ALMS rival which also suffered myriad problems that had put Strakka in the pound seat even before a water leak for Highcroft spelt retirement. For Kane, the result was “just like a fairytale”.
“That year we ended up almost being the best petrol car,” remembers Kane. “We were only beaten by an LMP1 ORECA. On paper, we should never have been able to win the thing outright. But we had run the low downforce kit a few times already and had the car really well set-up.
“Danny and I were just really fast at Le Mans that year and we also had a trouble-free run. You don't do many Le Mans that you don't have little incidents and issues with the car in some way or other. It was one of those dream events where everything goes your way.”
The 2011 season didn’t hit the same heights, with two thirds its best LMS results at Paul Ricard and Spa, before Strakka switched its ARX-01 for an LMP1 ARX-03 for 2012 and the dawn of the WEC. That meant going up against the full works Audi effort and, from Le Mans, Toyota too. Strakka and fellow HPD customer JRM were feeding off scraps amid a healthy contingent of privateers that included Rebellion’s Lola-Toyotas and the OAK Racing Pescarolo that initially started out with Judd engines before switching to Honda power.
But Strakka did score the car’s only podium of the year in Bahrain where the single Toyota’s illuminated light panel failed while leading and it lost seven minutes to repairs. The unofficial privateer class winners trailed six laps behind the winning Audi, as Kane survived being hit by the recovering Toyota.
“To get on the podium there with the heat and everything, up against proper works outfits was amazing,” he remembers.
For Watts “it was probably more difficult in the Dome than it was for me”, Kane believes, because his high-speed corner strength was muted
Sixth at Le Mans as the best non-factory car, despite early problems with the water pressure in its 3.4-litre V8 engine, was the high point of a 2013 campaign curtailed after Le Mans as Strakka elected not to invest in necessary spares before embarking on a new LMP2 project with Dome for 2014. However the S103 chassis didn’t race all year after numerous setbacks and only made its belated debut in 2015 after Strakka “changed huge amounts of it”, with the whole rear bell housing and rear suspension fully redesigned.
When the unintended competition hiatus finally ended at Silverstone in 2015, its third place was unrepresentative of performance. Seven laps behind the winning OAK-run G-Drive Ligier, Strakka had only been elevated to the rostrum thanks to excessive wear on the Extreme Speed Motorsport HPD skidplank resulting in its disqualification. The high-speed Silverstone sweeps also underlined inherent flaws that set-up tweaks couldn’t resolve.
“The downforce figures seemed pretty good,” explains Kane. “But it was tricky once you started putting any sort of yaw into the car. It was quite unpredictable and inconsistent to drive, which meant it was then hard to put all your faith in it.”
For Watts “it was probably more difficult in the Dome than it was for me”, Kane believes, because his high-speed corner strength was muted. “He really wanted that high-speed feeling which we all struggled to get with the car, that car just didn't give him what he was looking for,” adds Kane.
After finishing five laps adrift at Spa, gearbox failure at Le Mans preceded a call driven by pragmatism to cut its losses. A switch from Michelin tyres to Dunlop, bringing it in line with every other team in the class, had made little tangible difference at La Sartre as the attractive car was shelved after just three races.
But the switch to an open-top Gibson (the company formerly known as Zytek having rebranded) didn’t transform Strakka’s competitive fortunes either. LMP2 diversity was arguably at its peak, with multiple manufacturers including ORECA, Morgan (nee Pescarolo) and the Paolo Catone-designed BR Engineering BR01 also in the mix.
There were no further podiums before Watts called time in 2016, although Strakka came close on his swansong; a slow puncture denied them third in class at the last Le Mans for which open-top cars would be eligible before the current LMP2 rules came into force for 2017.
Kane continued with Strakka following its switch to GT racing for 2017, but has spent the last few years focused on coaching. During 2024 his work with Ginetta racer Thomas Balfe in the British GT support paddock has meant he still regularly encounters Watts - the 1998 Formula First champion part of the Elite Motorsport GB3 coaching set-up.
“It's nice that those team-mate relationships are then carried on after we've all stopped driving, and we're still good mates even though we're not doing what we used to do,” he adds.
Kane admits it was “a very hard choice” to select Watts over Warren Hughes, another driver he frequently collaborated with across numerous sportscar programmes that included the works MG Lola team at Le Mans in 2001-02, multiple teams running TVR Tuscans in 2004-05 and Embassy Racing’s WF01 LMP2 in 2008. He also raced with Juan Pablo Montoya during his 1995 Formula Vauxhall title-winning campaign at Paul Stewart Racing, and recalls the Colombian watching cartoons to learn English.
“I’ve been fortunate to have some really fast team-mates over the years, but Warren and Danny are the two I’ve spent most time with so it was always going to be a choice between them,” says Kane.
He has to be reminded that he also enjoyed a brief but successful stint as a team-mate to Autosport’s WEC correspondent Gary Watkins. His trophy for finishing a hard-earned third alongside the enthusiastic VW Golf racer, in a media karting event at the Sandown Park track in Surrey prior to the 2010 Autosport 1000km, “might be in one my son's bedrooms..."
