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

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!’”

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.”

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.

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.