British representation in sportscar racing is in a healthy place at the moment. For evidence of that, look no further than last weekend’s Spa World Endurance Championship round. Seven Britons featured in the top Hypercar class, split across five different manufacturers. And there was no shortage of noteworthy performances to be found.
United Autosports driver Tom Blomqvist stormed to LMP2 class pole in qualifying before pulling out a 45s lead in the first two stints of the race, Mike Conway got his title challenge back on track by leading a Toyota 1-2 from pole, and James Calado’s superb late charge was rewarded by recovering a podium finish for Ferrari on the final lap.
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But the WEC doesn’t have the monopoly on top British talents, a point that Ben Barnicoat is eager to prove when he takes on the series regulars at Le Mans next month with his AF Corse-run ORECA-Gibson 07 LMP2 entry.
Barnicoat says he’s in the form of his life, and it’s hard to argue with him. The 26-year-old has scored GTD Pro class podiums in all three IMSA SportsCar Championship race starts this season for Lexus factory squad Vasser Sullivan Racing alongside fellow Briton Jack Hawksworth. Victory last time out at Long Beach moved the duo into the points lead, and followed up respective third and second place finishes at the Daytona 24 Hours, where Conway joined them, and the Sebring 12 Hours, where IndyCar’s newest winner Kyle Kirkwood completed their crew.
But GT racing isn’t the only string to Barnicoat’s bow. Last month, his 100% podium record in 2023 was extended by taking third outright in Barcelona’s European Le Mans Series opener with AF Corse – despite being entered in the pro-am sub-division alongside Matthieu Vaxiviere and Francois Perrodo – on his first LMP2 outing in three years.
“It’s quite the start to the year,” Barnicoat says with some understatement. “The run of results I’m having at the minute is certainly the best form that I’ve been in.”
Barnicoat and ex-IndyCar racer Hawksworth are a well-established pair, now in their second year together at the squad co-owned by Jimmy Vasser and James Sullivan. “Extremely motivated guys with clear goals to be as successful as they can be,” is how Barnicoat describes his bosses, who he says “give us all the tools we need to go and do well”. Combined with support from Lexus – and “not only financially” as Barnicoat is keen to stress – he regards his position at VSR as “the best situation I’ve ever been in in my career”.
“They’re all extremely professional and probably the best group of individuals I’ve ever worked with,” he gushes. “I’m very fortunate to be in an amazing group of people.”
The GTD Pro class has only five full-season competitors, each from a different manufacturer with Porsche (with reigning champion Pfaff), Mercedes (the Proton-run WeatherTech Racing outfit), Aston Martin (the Heart of Racing squad which beat all the Pro outfits with its victorious GTD crew at Daytona) and Corvette’s factory team also represented. But its competitiveness is underlined by the fact that none can match the VSR pair’s perfect podium strike rate, with three different winners from as many rounds.
"Me and Jack get on so well as team-mates and we’re two guys who are probably in the primes of our career. I certainly am for sure" Ben Barnicoat
A key factor in their strong start, Barnicoat believes, is the mutual respect he has with Hawksworth, six years his senior. Each has an appreciation for the other's strengths, and operates “without any kind of ego” interference.
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“Me and Jack get on so well as team-mates and we’re two guys who are probably in the primes of our careers,” he says. “I certainly am for sure.
“Jack is an amazing driver, probably the best team-mate I’ve had in terms of driving ability and his off-track attitude towards the sport. I feel like he’s helped me become a better driver and raised my level. And I’ve probably helped him become a better driver and raise his level.
“I’m happy to let him go and qualify because I think he’s an amazing qualifier; he’s happy to let me finish the race because he knows I’m a good racer. We just all work really well together and we all want the same result, which is to win. There’s no kind of egos or anything getting in the way.”
Vasser’s well-tuned eye for detail is an additional plus point. Barnicoat cites an observation the 1996 IndyCar champion made upon arriving at Long Beach as an example of how he “really sees everything from a racer’s perspective”.
“Where you walked into the track at Turn 9 on the first day, there’s a little bit of tarmac,” Barnicoat recalls. “Straight away he says: ‘Did you guys see that new bit of tarmac? I think you might be able to put two wheels on that to open up the corner’.
“You go out and try it and yeah, it did help us a bit. That’s just the racer in him, he still has that little eye for details able to help us. Some weekends it will be big, some weekends it will be small, but it’s certainly a good thing to have there.”
All of this has helped Barnicoat and Hawksworth to maximise their results at every opportunity this year.
“We didn’t really have a car to win in Daytona,” he says, “but we got a P3 which was probably the best we could do. Same again in Sebring. We weren’t the fastest car, but we still did the best job as a team that we could and got a P2.
“And at Long Beach when we had all the right ingredients, the car was fast enough and Jack and I were on it and then we got the win. We’re all in top form and we’re really in a good place to take a good fight to the championship. But there’s a long way to go.”
A return to the West Coast for next weekend’s Laguna Seca round provides a very different setting to his most recent race outing, his long-awaited LMP2 return at F1 staple the Circuit de Catalunya-Barcelona. Barnicoat had longed for another shot at the secondary prototype class after racing Carlin’s unloved Dallara P217 against the hordes of ORECAs in the 2019 ELMS, and managing two Asian Le Mans Series wins in early 2020.
“They’re incredible bits of machinery,” he enthuses. “A lot of downforce, a lot of power, carbon-fibre brakes. To drive, they’re a real joy. Ever since I raced with Carlin, I’ve always kind of wanted to go back but the opportunity’s just not been there.”
That all changed as “a little bit unexpectedly” he landed a drive with long-time Ferrari affiliate AF Corse in the ELMS, where he’s competing against Hawksworth – who landed in a pro-am seat at Algarve Pro Racing.
“There’s not really a big back story to doing it,” he says. “There’s not a big particular reason other than that I really enjoyed racing LMP2 when I did it before and it’s something that I really wanted to do.
“Now racing the GT3 with Lexus full-time and LMP2 in Europe, I see myself in the perfect position that I’ve got a really good factory programme in America and still getting prototype opportunities in Europe. It broadens my skillset so people can see I’m doing a good job in the GTs, but I’m also a good prototype driver.
“The way the sport is right now with the top level of endurance racing, the LMDh and Hypercar being in such a strong place, it’s certainly good to have that whole skillset as a driver.”
Finally equipped with an ORECA, Barnicoat put it to good use in the season-opening four-hour race. Perrodo started 13th and had advanced into the top eight during his opening stint, before Vaxiviere continued to make progress. Barnicoat jumped aboard for the closing stages and claimed third after ambushing Job van Uitert’s Panis ORECA into the Turn 8 left-hander.
"Some guys will maybe be a little bit more dialled in than us, but I’m confident in the crew and I’ll be pulling as much information as I can from Norman to make sure I’m up to the job" Ben Barnicoat
He believes that there was little chance of matching the LMP2 pro-am and overall winning TF Sport-run Team Turkey entry in which Louis Deletraz overhauled Neel Jani’s Duqueine machine, but Barnicoat believes an outright rostrum “was an incredible achievement” in the stacked 18-car field.
His “awesome first weekend” got off to a decidedly difficult start however when the team suffered a garage fire on Thursday evening following the pre-event Prologue test. Its response to the adversity was a testament to a team that has won just about everything there is to win in sportscar racing.
“We arrived back there the next day and you’d never know it had happened,” says Barnicoat. “It was all completely cleaned up and they didn’t let it phase them at all. That would have affected a lot of teams, they would have been caught up in the stress of repairing the garage and all these kinds of things. But we carried on with our weekend as normal and were able to achieve a great result.”
The cancellation of Imola’s second round means Barnicoat will have to wait until Le Mans for his next outing in the ORECA, when 2020 LMP1 runner-up Norman Nato will sub for Alpine-contracted Vaxiviere. His third attempt at the race will be his first in LMP2 “so it’s going to be a very new experience and there’s going to be a lot of preparation to make sure I am ready for that”. But Barnicoat is optimistic that, in a race Perrodo has started on ten previous occasions and finished third in class in 2019, AF can figure at the sharp end against the WEC regulars.
“In ELMS we run the high downforce kit and in WEC they run the Le Mans aerokit all the time, so that plays into their advantage a little bit,” he says. “Some guys will maybe be a little bit more dialled in than us, but I’m confident in the crew and I’ll be pulling as much information as I can from Norman to make sure I’m up to the job.”
Given his recent vein of form, if there was ever a time for Barnicoat to extract a good result then it’s now.
“I’m wanting to keep my 100% podium record going!” he laughs. “I’ve got a couple of races before we arrive at Le Mans, but I believe strongly that we can achieve a podium result there.
“It’s not going to be easy to win, but that’s the target. We’ll do everything we can to do it.”
