John Wickham obituary: Spirit F1 boss who oversaw Bentley Le Mans win

Obituaries

John Wickham, who has died aged 73, won Le Mans with Bentley, as well as the BTCC title with Frank Biela and Audi, after running the 1980s Spirit F1 team

John Wickham during Motor Sport interview

Jakob Ebrey

John Wickham: 1949-2023

Few team managers have worked in so many different categories and arenas as John Wickham. A peripatetic career during which he co-owned and ran the Spirit Formula 1 team in the 1980s and oversaw Bentley’s 2003 Le Mans 24 Hours victory took him to every corner of the globe, and that was before he was in charge of the day-to-day running of the A1 Grand Prix World Cup of Motorsport.

Wickham, who has died aged 73, did a bit of everything over the course of his 50-plus years in motorsport, which only ended in 2018 when he fell ill with what was eventually diagnosed as Motor Neurone Disease. He had team management roles F1 and F2, touring cars in two distinct eras, and in sports car racing — both prototypes and GTs — in Europe, North America and Japan.

“I’d ring him before a race in a flap and say, ‘what about this or that?’. His reply was always the same: ‘It’s done!’”

Successes under his watch included Marc Surer’s 1979 European Formula 2 Championship triumph with March, Frank Biela’s British Touring Car Championship in Audi Sport UK’s debut season in 1996 and that famous day at Le Mans when Tom Kristensen, Rinaldo Capello and Guy Smith led home a Bentley 1-2 for the Speed 8 LM-GTP coupe.

The short-lived Spirit squad that raced in F1 from 1983 to ’85 wasn’t a success, though it played a crucial role in bringing the Japanese manufacturer back to grand prix racing. Wickham had set-up Spirit with designer Gordon Coppuck when Honda racing boss and future company CEO Nobuhiko Kawamoto had floated the idea of a team fully focused on its Formula 2 programme in the way that Ralt was not as it churned out Formula 3 and Formula Atlantic cars by the dozen.

Spirit should have won the 1982 European F2 title with Thierry Boutsen at the wheel of one of Coppuck’s beautiful Spirit-Honda 201s. A quirk of tyre supplier Bridgestone’s development programme meant its slicks were radials and its wets crossplies: a wet-dry race at the Misano finale did for Boutsen’s chances.

Gordon Coppuck and John Wickham at the 1983 British GP for Spirit Honda

Coppuck (left) and Wickham at Silverstone with Spirit F1 in 1983

Grand Prix Photo

But by then Spirit was already working on a Honda-powered F1 car, or rather a car powered by an Honda F1 engine. What started out as a development programme on the test track morphed into a race campaign. “We were a race team, so that’s what we wanted to do,” Wickham once told Motor Sport.

Honda made its F1 comeback after an absence of 15 years at the non-championship Race of Champions at Brands Hatch in April ’83 and continued through six of the final seven GPs. Big plans for 1984 with Goodyear tyres and sponsorship from Skoal Bandit chewing tobacco were derailed by Honda’s deal with Williams, which demanded exclusivity of supply. The team limped on with Hart turbo engines — and briefly a Cosworth V8 – for a season and a bit.

From the archive

Stefan Johansson, the quicker but less fortunate of the two Spirit F2 pilots when it came to reliability in ’82, was the driver of the test hack in ’83: the first car was built around a F2 monocoque, the second on a beefed up tub with increased fuel capacity to allow it to go a full GP distance.

Johansson would subsequently drive for the Footwork F1 team in 1991 when Wickham was running the show. A decade later he brought his former boss in to run the Johansson-Matthews Racing squad competing with a pair of Reynard prototypes in the American Le Mans Series and at Le Mans.

Wickham was an “unflappable, totally calm and probably the most organised person I’ve met in my life”, recalls the former Ferrari and McLaren F1 driver and Le Mans winner. “John was a brilliant team manager, just so organised.

“People at my team would often say, ‘but what does he do?, there isn’t a single piece of paper on his desk’. There didn’t need to be, because he was on top of everything.

“As the team owner, I’d sometimes ring him before a race in a flap and say, ‘what about this?’ or ‘what about that?’. His reply was always the same: ‘It’s done!’”

John Wickham

Wickham picked Bentley Le Mans win as his career highlight during 2020 Motor Sport interview

Jakob Ebrey

Wickham was for the most part a man of few words, and certainly never one to shout and scream. He could come across as dour and gruff, partly because he was so quietly-spoken.

Yet underneath a sometimes cold exterior there was a keen sense of humour. And, it should be added, a deep love of motorsport, and a knowledge and understanding of its history and traditions. First and foremost, Wickham was a motor sport fan.

“I loved working with John not just because he was so good at his job, but because he was a great person to be around,” continues Johnasson. “Yeah, he didn’t say a lot sometimes, but he did have a nice sense of humour. Just a top guy.”

From the archive

Wickham’s passion for motorsport developed as a child — his father had raced motorcycles before World War II — and he started volunteering at the Brands Hatch and Crystal Palace circuits while still at school. He became a marshal and, after a brief stint working in a bank, joined the British Automobile Racing Club as competitions manager.

It was the start of a career that can be described as unusual because it involved so many different forms of racing. His stints in F1 with Spirit and then Footwork, for which he had negotiated the purchase of Arrows ahead of the 1990 season, are well known. Less so are the year he spent working in the European Touring Car series (ETC) with the RAS Sport Volvo team in 1986 or the short-lived Spirit relaunch in Formula 3000 in 1988.

There were also a couple of brief returns to F1 for Wickham after he had turned 60. He was for a very short period involved in the fledgling HRT operation ahead of the 2011 season and again at the end of the year with the Lotus Renault GP incarnation of ‘Team Enstone’.

It was a relationship with British entrant Richard Lloyd that brought Wickham his greatest successes over the second half of his career. Lloyd brought him in to set up the Audi Sport UK team to mount a factory assault on the booming BTCC. Frank Biela raced to the title in year one of the programme in ’96 with the four-wheel-drive Audi A4 quattro.

John Wickham

Wickham on the pitwall at Le Mans 2003 when Bentley dominated and sealed a 1-2 finish

The pair were reunited late in 2000 at Team Bentley: Wickham was initially employed by Lloyd’s Apex Motorsport team, but subsequently moved onto Bentley’s books as team director for the final, successful year of the programme.

Mission accomplished with Le Mans victory, Bentley opted not to extend the programme. Wickham helped run a short programme of races for Zytek Engineering with its LMP1 contender in 2004, which resulted in a chance meeting with A1GP founder Sheikh Maktoum. He became employee number one of an organisation he set-up to run a series that blazed a trail around the world for four seasons in 2005-09.

It was back to Bentley in 2012. Wickham oversaw the British marque’s return to motorsport in the GT ranks with two generations of Continental GT3 racer. That included him performing the team manager role at the M-Sport factory team for its 2014 and ’15 Blancpain GT Series campaigns.

Wickham wasn’t done with motorsport when he left Bentley in 2017. He was planning to work as a weekend TM in the British GT Championship with one of its customers when he became ill.

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