Title success in any championship is always a special achievement for a team, but to come out on top of three national series during the same season is an exceptional feat. For Team Sellars Racing, the 2023 campaign could arguably not have gone any better.
It claimed a hat-trick of crowns in the 750 Motor Club’s Locost, Ma7da and F1000 championships, with Craig Land and Jonathan Lisseter completing back-to-back titles in the first two, while Tom Gadd came out on top of a fiercely competitive F1000 field. It was the culmination of nearly a decade of work, with TSR going from strength to strength to the point where it was responsible for running almost 20 cars full-time during the season.
“Although it’s a really good achievement, I think once you’ve been in motorsport so long you become a little bit numb to it sometimes, you’re just always focused on what we’re going to do next year to beat it,” reflects team boss Stuart Sellars.
“I didn’t come into 2023 with the expectation of winning three, but in 2022 we won the Ma7da and Locost championships and we came third in F1000, so we nearly did all three that year. It’s hard to replicate that year after year as well because obviously everyone else is trying to go faster, the same as we are.”
TSR’s success over several years in the Locost and Ma7da kit car championships is perhaps unsurprising given that’s where the team began life, Sellars himself racing Locosts in 2015, when he finished fourth in the standings. That same season coincided with the creation of TSR as Sellars, then 21 years old, began to move away from competing, which he’d done since starting out in karting during childhood. A future in the industry was always likely since his dad, Chris, has been involved with motorsport for almost 40 years, beginning with oval racing as well as Legends.
After studying motorsport engineering at university prior to 2015, Sellars embarked on an apprenticeship that included spells working in the British Touring Car Championship and British GT, as well as being involved with the development of the Bentley Continental GT3. He also had spells working in McLaren’s historic department and the Mini factory, all of which formed a solid foundation from which to build TSR. Sellars admits that he “tried to do as many different aspects of motorsport as I could get myself into”.
“I always say this to anyone standing near me when I’m watching a race: I’m more nervous watching my drivers than I ever was in a race car, which probably sounds quite weird to some people,” says the now 30-year-old. “I get just as excited about being a team manager and trying to win races from that side of things as I was in the driving seat.
“Don’t get me wrong, there’s times I would rather be out there, but you’ve got to earn a living somehow and I wouldn’t do it any other way than trying to be involved in motorsport.”
It didn’t take long for the team to taste championship success, with the first outright title coming in 2018 when Lee Emm took the Sport Specials Championship aboard a development Ma7da, which was the eventual foundation for the standalone series in 2021. A second championship came just a year later when Gadd took the Locost crown, receiving partial support from TSR during his campaign. After dropping to sixth in the points in 2020, Gadd made the move into F1000 with TSR for 2021, one year after the championship joined the 750MC’s ranks.
"I like being on the rolling road setting up carburettors – there’s much more enjoyment in that for me than there is sitting at a laptop doing mapping injections. It’s a little bit more raw"
Stuart Sellars
“When we came into F1000, the first two years were very much learning years,” recalls Sellars. “You go through all the phases of trying to make the things reliable, then it’s trying to make the things fast once they’re reliable and hitting that consistency of making the car fast for an entire race.
“There’s a whole building process to it, and I think the modern generation of stuff can almost take that reliability factor away a little bit and that’s probably why we like to use the old stuff still. It makes it more of a challenge.”
While Gadd came close to the crown in 2022, reliability and small errors cost him over the second half of the season before it all came together last term. The 26-year-old intends to defend his title this year with TSR, which he knows not only provides him with a car capable of fighting at the front but also in an environment where he can enjoy his racing.
“As we’ve spent time with them and got to know the people, I consider them all family now and it’s just a great atmosphere to be around,” enthuses Gadd. “Everyone gets on, everyone helps each other. Everyone in the Locost and Ma7da paddock knows him [Sellars], he’s sort of the go-to guy for everything to do with them. I think he wanted a bit of a challenge himself and we did too – it was just great we could work together to get that championship.”
With such success achieved in a relatively short space of time, Sellars is already looking ahead to other avenues of motorsport, including the historic side of racing such as Formula Junior.
“I’ve done GTs and touring cars in the past, but I think I much prefer the single-seater route, so that’s the direction we’re going to go in,” he says. “With working on old Locosts, we’ve got a lot of knowledge and experience in doing that era of car. We’ve got experience in modern stuff as well, but it kind of excites me a little bit more when it comes to working on the cars – the older stuff is nice.
“We have our own rolling road, and I like being on the rolling road setting up carburettors – there’s much more enjoyment in that for me than there is sitting at a laptop doing mapping injections. It’s a little bit more raw. It’s a little bit of a dying art to a certain extent. The teams that are in it now are all really established, so it’s going to be quite interesting to get into.”
For the immediate future at least, focus has switched to the 2024 season, which gets under way in April with TSR set to run cars in F1000 and Ma7da. One significant change, though, will be that the team will not run any cars in Locost, Sellars admitting that “the workload last year was just crazy”.
Regardless, the team is likely to be a frontrunner once again. And, based on its growing trophy cabinet, there’s every chance that TSR will achieve success in other categories of motorsport in the future.
“I suppose from the outside it looks a bit glamorous, but it really isn’t,” points out Sellars. “I think as a team owner and especially in club racing, we’re never going to earn a fortune, so it’s definitely for the passion of doing it.”
