penske: ahead of the curve

Some of you reading this may have a dream car. And given that it’s the car of your dreams, it likely cost a princely sum. In January 2025, bidding on the Porsche 917 that Steve McQueen drove in his 1971 film Le Mans went to $25m (£18.5m) before seller Jerry Seinfeld decided that simply wasn’t enough. But what if money’s not your issue? What if the problem is that the only example of the car of your dreams burned to the ground over half a century ago, nothing surviving save a pair of flyaway glassfibre doors? What do you do then?

Well, if you’re California tech entrepreneur Bob Lee, whose motto is ‘Lord, give me patience and give it to me now’, you plunge headlong into an odyssey that will involve, in no particular order, a box of blueprints, a dead man’s hard-drive, Paul Newman, Holmesian powers of deduction, an argon purge chamber and a Baker’s Pride pizza oven. For some of us, it will serve as a cautionary tale. For others, pure inspiration. But the end result is a brand-spanking-new, savagely fast machine truer to 1970s racing in America than a great many so-called ‘original’ Can-Am cars. And if you have any gasoline in your veins and get to see and hear it in person, know this: it will make your toes curl.

Ilja Burkoff, on Ti22 MkII owner Bob Lee V8 — Ilja Burkoff, stepson of the Ti22 MkII owner Bob Lee, spins the oil pump on the aluminium-block V8.

Sherwin Eng

The Autocoast-sponsored Ti22 MkI was a sensation when it arrived on the scene during the 1969 Can-Am season. Papaya Orange McLarens, piloted by Denny Hulme and team founder Bruce, had come to dominate the no-holds-barred series. That year, they would collect their third straight title, sweeping all 11 races. Imagine the surprise, then, when at the last three a machine designed by a modestly educated non-engineer leading a tiny team — so small it couldn’t afford a back-up chassis — showed up and posed a credible threat to a juggernaut that had seen off challenges from Ford, Ferrari and Porsche.

It was the brainchild of 31-year-old London-born expat Peter Bryant. He’d been taken over to the US not long before by Mickey Thompson to work on the Californian’s star-crossed 1964 Indy 500 entries. He remained there as a mechanic for a variety of teams, including Shelby and Carl Haas – Lola’s US importer.

Ti22 in Can-Am’s 1969 at Riverside — The Ti22 appeared late in Can-Am’s 1969 season – here at Riverside.

Getty Images

Paul Newman in the MkII in 1971 — Paul Newman was filmed in the MkII in the 1971 doc Once Upon a Wheel

LAT Images

“He told me he wasn’t going to get anywhere in England,” says Bryant’s US-born widow Lois, “because if you aren’t from a social standing, you can’t really advance.”

The car Bryant had created stood out for two reasons. One, extensive use of strong, lightweight titanium: Ti22 is the atomic symbol and number for the precious metal referred to then in racing circles as ‘unobtainium’. TIMET, aka Titanium Metals Corporation, supplied all that Bryant required at a fraction of the cost. It meant the Ti22 MkI was stiffer and lighter than other Can-Am cars – a crucial advantage. The second thing was its approach to aerodynamics. Bryant integrated innovative ‘fences’ from the tops of the front fenders to the rear spoiler — something McLaren would copy in future models — and a sloped underbody to convert airflow into adhesion. “You could feel enormous downforce,” driver Jackie Oliver told Sports Car Digest, “like F1 cars 10 years later.”

“As the rise went over the top, the full force of the air got underneath the Ti22. It did a full 360”

If the Ti22 MkI’s three starts in 1969 raised eyebrows, at the first two of the ’70 season jaws dropped. At Mosport, Oliver qualified third, then proceeded to pick off both McLarens. Eventually American golden boy Dan Gurney, standing in for recently killed team leader Bruce, was able to slip back by. The Ti22 had to settle for second.

At St Jovite, Oliver again qualified just behind the McLarens and was in the process of passing them… when disaster struck. “I was chasing Denny on the opening lap,” says Oliver. “Got tucked up right behind him on the rise, and as the rise went over the top, the full force of the air got underneath the Ti22. It did a full 360 in the air, fortunately, and landed back on its wheels.”

Autocoast-sponsored Ti22 at Riverside in 1969, but Oliver’s race was over before the halfway point

Getty Images

The landing may have saved Oliver’s life. It killed the Ti22 MkI. Resurrecting it would be a massive undertaking, and Bryant was concerned it might always run second to the McLarens, so he decided to fast-track development of his intended 1971 challenger and the subject of this story, the Ti22 MkII.

The second-generation Ti fighter would enjoy three main upgrades: extending the wheelbase and widening the body; turning the engine into a stressed member and attaching the rear suspension to the transaxle to save weight and reduce flex; and developing new suspension at both ends to run stiffer springs and more anti-dive.

“The car was stiffer, the body was better, the geometry was better,” remembers Alex Groundsell, a fellow Londoner like Bryant who joined the team as a mechanic after big-league experience with Alan Mann and Ferrari privateer Ronnie Hoare.

Dan Gurney in the McLaren M8D trails Jackie Oliver’s Ti22 MkI at Mosport in 1970; Oliver would finish second – behind Gurney

Bryant had to form a new company, TRC, to build the new and improved Ti22 MkII, which was ready, if barely, for the two season-ending 1970 races, where it proved to be everything he hoped. At Laguna Seca, Oliver qualified fourth, 0.6sec behind polesitter Hulme, and finished second, just over 1sec behind the newly crowned series champion. The Ti22 set fastest lap. At Riverside in California, Oliver again finished a close second, and again set fastest lap. At a time when it was rare for others to finish on the same lap as the Orange Elephants, both Hulme and Oliver lapped the field in both races.

Burkoff, left, and Bob Lee reviewing original MkII blueprints

Actor Paul Newman, then starting his own racing career, was so taken with the MkII that he arranged to drive it at Ontario Motor Speedway for his 1971 documentary Once Upon a Wheel. The team hoped it might lead to an influx of cash. When that didn’t happen, Bryant was forced out of his own squad and what remained of the car was sold at a bankruptcy auction. Which makes what happened next an even more improbable part of the Ti22 MkII story.

“Hobbs proceeded to bully his way past the 27 cars ahead of him, passing 13 on the first lap alone”

In autumn 1971, T-G Racing, another small team, purchased the remains and decided to enter it in the final two Can-Ams of the season. The ‘car’ was very much in pieces and parts were missing, most notably sets of thicker-wall suspension components that had greatly improved the car’s reliability and safety the previous year. Mechanics Tom Jobe and Bob Skinner, who had revolutionised drag racing as ‘The Surfers’, were brought in to put it back together as best they could. They also made improvements. They reinforced the chassis, installed better brakes and, for Riverside, introduced a low-drag wing. Recently crowned F5000 champion David Hobbs was brought in to drive.

The recreation MkII was made from titanium, just like the original

At Laguna Seca, Hobbs qualified a stunning third behind the McLarens. Stunning because the underfunded, now one-and-a-half-year-old car qualified ahead of Formula 1 champion Jackie Stewart in the factory Lola T260, former Ti22 wheelman Oliver in the factory Shadow Mk II, World Sportscar Championship star Brian Redman in the factory BRM P167 and F1 and WSC winner Jo Siffert in the latest Porsche 917/10 “At one stage he was on the front row with [McLaren team-mate Peter Revson],” said an incredulous Hulme. “Hobbs is a nice guy, but I don’t like him that much.”

Riverside was even more shocking. The rear titanium crossmember failed in practice, forcing Hobbs to start the race from the back. People who witnessed what followed talk about it in hallowed terms. Hobbs proceeded to bully his way past the 27 cars ahead of him, passing 13 on the first lap alone.

“At one stage [we were] the fastest car on the track – I was really carving my way through the field,” says the Brit. “I was very impressed. With a few changes, I think it would have been right there [with the McLarens].”

On lap 17 he was about to overtake fourth-place man Sam Posey when a patch of oil caused the Ti22 to yaw slightly and strike a tyre marker. The team, so poor it had no spare nose, was forced to retire.

The following year, in the hands of club racer Nick Dioguardi, the Ti22 was leading the California Sports Car Club nationals at Riverside when it crashed through a steel guardrail and exploded. Dioguardi would recover, but the sole MkII that ever existed was consumed in the inferno.

And that’s where the story would have ended if not for Bob Lee.

Bill Drury, Frank Oroczo, Burkoff and Linda Burkoff-Lee – Drury and Oroczo make the body — From left, Bill Drury, Frank Oroczo, Burkoff and Linda Burkoff-Lee – Drury and Oroczo helped make the body buck while Burkoff-Lee provided moral support and helped rivet high-strength Jabroc (a densified wood laminate) on the nose

Its resurrection started, improbably, with a 427 Cobra. “I had been a workaholic,” says Lee. “My wife and I worked around the clock.” When Bob and Linda sold their company in 1987, they bought one of Carroll Shelby’s AC-Ford offspring. They thought about racing it until a fateful club event at Willow Springs where Bob nearly rolled the beast and Linda nearly did likewise — with her 18-year-old son Ilja Burkoff in the passenger seat. Chagrinned, Bob consulted some of his racer friends.

“Being a novice and not a car guy, I said, ‘What has horsepower and handles?’ And they said, ‘Well, a Can-Am car.’ So then I’m like, ‘OK, I gotta get a Can-Am car.’”

Thereafter, Bob began an improbable lifelong love of Can-Am cars, campaigning a series of them including the ex-Hollywood Sports Cars McLaren M6B, ex-Denny Hulme McLaren M20 and ex-David Hobbs Lola T310 ‘aircraft carrier’.

After reading Pete Lyons’ landmark book on the series, Can-Am (1995), he became fascinated by the Great-White-(and blue)-Hope of a car that had nearly toppled the McLarens and thought, “If I could buy the rights to it, it would be wonderful to recreate it.”

Bryant died in 2009, but in 2013, Lee heard his widow was selling the drawings for the MkII. First he purchased the rights to it, which still belonged to Dioguardi. “Then I called Cris Vandagriff [president of the Historic Motor Sports Association in the US] and asked, ‘If I recreate the MkII, will it be accepted at the Monterey historic races?’ Cris said yes – if I make it out of titanium.”

Ti22’s designer Peter Bryant in CAD drawings — Ti22’s designer Peter Bryant had started making CAD drawings, which Lee bought

At the Bryant house, Lee discovered a bonus. Not only did Lois have a box of drawings, but “Peter had started to put the car in CAD, because his dream was to rebuild the MkII. He hadn’t finished it. But he had done a lot of work. I told Lois I’d like to buy the drawings and files off his hard-drive.”

Even with the CAD files and blueprints, Bob realised that was only part of the battle.

“We had drawings but didn’t have a clear view of what the front and rear subframes looked like,” Lee explains. “And we were missing all the drawings of the tops of the fuel cells.” So Lee commenced a search for every period photo he could find, especially of details under the skin. He knew that even if he had full drawings, discrepancies might remain. In those days, if during a build a team ran into, say, a clearance issue, they’d fix it without necessarily updating the prints.

Pizza-Oven-in-Use — Heating up a titanium panel to 800°F in the infamous Baker’s Pride pizza oven

Eric Sedletzky hand-lettering the bodywork

He found much of the photography he needed at the Revs Institute in Florida. Karl Ludvigsen’s pictures were a treasure trove. “Wonderful photos of the front and rear suspension,” says Lee. “Close-ups. I could see the calipers. I could see that they used the monobloc Hurst/AirHeart caliper, not the two-piece caliper that they used on the MkI.” Crucially, Lee could also “see where they’d made changes to the drawings. I could see all the plumbing and everything they did in the rear of the car”.

“Bob did a tremendous amount of research,” remembers Burkoff, “because there’s big holes in the drawings. There were parts we didn’t have any drawings for. Then there would be others [where] we’d have three drawings with three different sets of notes that contradicted each other.”

Lee entrusted his stepson with the fabrication effort. He was a terrific choice. By day Burkoff was a general electrical contractor. But he also has experience in welding, machining, carpentry and antique restoration. And Lee put just as much thought into the rest of the team.

TI22 MKII Welding-Ti-rods — Argon purge chamber

Machinist Jordan Coonrad and Burkoff on riveting duty

“I wanted to make sure we would have no interference problems making the chassis,” says Lee, “so I hired a design engineer, Sandor Bota, to finish putting the chassis in CAD. This gave us files we could use to waterjet-cut the titanium panels. I engaged a titanium expert, Chuck Dohogne, plus a racing engineer, Peter Hansel, to specify shocks, springs and anti-sway bars.” Another key player was Jordan Coonrad. The San Francisco native answered a Craigslist ad for a machinist with aircraft experience. Coonrad remembers the reverse engineering involved in trying to reconcile things that appeared on the car that weren’t on the prints.

“There were parts we didn’t have drawings for. Others, we’d have three contradicting drawings”

“I spent hours studying photographs and figured out the scale dimensions from pictures, so when I did something, it was going to look like the original car,” says Coonrad. “One was a little switch box on the instrument panel, about 2in deep. It turns out Oliver couldn’t reach the switches the way the car was built, so they had to build a little box to bring the switches back to where he could reach them.”

They also consulted some of the original builders, including Groundsell and Al Willard, co-designer of the MkII. One of the first questions was safety.

Lee team members Alex Groundsell and Al Willard, and Burkoff, Sears Point, 2023 — From left, Lee with original team members Alex Groundsell and Al Willard, and Burkoff, Sears Point, 2023

TI22 MKII complete chassis — Complete chassis

“Ilja and I were concerned about the Ti part failures that Hobbs experienced at Riverside and what caused the Dioguardi crash in ’73,” says Lee. “We determined why the rear crossmember shock support failed and came up with a fix. I also learned from Jobe that the original thick-wall suspension used on the MkII had gone missing and they had had to run the thin-wall pieces, resulting in the lower front A-arm failure. So, we used the thick-wall Ti tubing called out in the drawings.”

The technical challenge was learning how to machine, weld and hot-form titanium. “Virtually everyone told me, ‘Don’t waste time on titanium, make it out of steel,’” Lee adds. “But it wouldn’t be the Ti22 if it was steel.”

TI22 MKII Rear lights — Rear lights had to be period accurate; these were sourced from the ‘Taillight King’ in Texas

“Titanium is an interesting metal to work with, in that it’s not a very good conductor,” says Coonrad. “You could hold a piece up to a grinder and actually have it white hot at one end and be holding it 2in away.

“Titanium was the only material I’ve ever worked with where you could drill a hole and after the bit came out, the hole was smaller than the bit. The material was so ductile it would expand around the bit, then cool back off to [where] the hole would be smaller than the drill bit that just came out of it.”

Burkoff, who’d worked on Can-Am cars, says using titanium was “exponentially harder. Just the fact that we had to hot-form all the bends.” Unlike steel or aluminium, you need to heat titanium to form the shapes you want. “To Bob’s credit, he found that pizza oven.”

Ah, yes, that Baker’s Pride pizza oven. At first the team tried heating just the areas of the parts that needed to be bent. No dice, says Lee, “because you end up warping the titanium. When it cools off it doesn’t assume its old shape. You’ve gotta heat the whole piece of Ti. Well, we had pieces 54in wide, and I’m looking at commercial ovens, which are $20,000-$30,000, and you still can’t get the size of the Ti [pieces] in the oven. Finally, on Ebay, I see a pizza oven for sale, and the dial goes to 800°F. And it’s wide enough to get the widest piece of Ti in.”

Welding posed additional challenges.

“We purchased an argon chamber to weld the sub-assemblies,” says Lee. “You have to weld titanium in a chamber purged of oxygen to prevent oxygen and nitrogen embrittlement and other contamination. I recruited a fantastic titanium welder, Jai Hardy-Flores.”

TI22 MKII dash — Dash is reproduced exactly as in 1970, down to the “PUMP OFF PLEASE SIR” on the steering wheel

Another issue was finding the period-correct parts for the things Lee, Burkoff and company couldn’t make themselves. The right period-correct Vertex Magneto. The right Lucas MacKay fuel injection system. The correct Gurney-style wheels. Bryant had used a number of AAR/Gurney parts for both Ti22s including wheels, uprights, steering wheel and shifter. Fellow Can-Am owner Dave Pozzi identified the Ti22’s unusual taillights as long-obsolete Grote 201 SAE side marker lights. Bob’s pursuit of them led to a guy in Texas known as — and we’re not making this up — the ‘Taillight King’.

Lee insisted even the parts they made themselves be as accurate to 1970 as possible. “Bob and I had constant discussions about keeping it original. I remember at one point, Bob was like, ‘Why are you making the shift linkage out of steel?’ Because in period photos, you can see it’s a black-painted piece, so we assume that’s steel because if [any part] was Ti, they kept it bare Ti.”

“The other issue we debated were the brakes,” says Burkoff. “The original Hurst/Airheart units were a problem. One of the reasons the car went quicker in Hobbs’ hands was because Skinner and Jobe had switched to far superior Lockheed brakes. I wanted to put Lockheeds on the car, but Bob wanted to keep the car as accurate as possible to the 1970 Riverside Can-Am. So Bob borrowed a Hurst/Airheart monobloc caliper from an AAR [Eagle] Indycar owner and had an engineer put it in CAD so we could recast the calipers.”

“At the 2018 Monterey Motorsports Reunion, fans were cheering as Ilja moved up the field”

One of Burkoff’s biggest triumphs was the bodywork. “First, I had to make a body buck. We had cross-section drawings for the MkI and a full-size side view, but the MkII was different. It was 2in longer and 4in wider. We put up the full-size MkI drawing on the shop wall and cut it in half at the cockpit and spaced the pieces 2in apart. Bob had acquired the original MkII door bucks and door moulds, and they were a great help in getting the buck right. It was a major thrill when I got the Ti22 nose [from the glassfibre shop] and it fit perfectly.”

Lee and Burkoff debuted the car at the 2017 Long Beach Grand Prix support race, which included a spectacular gathering of first-generation Can-Am McLarens, Shadows, Lolas and Porsches. There were still issues to be sorted — Burkoff had to back off halfway down the straights — but it looked fantastic and finished fourth. Dioguardi’s family came and were clearly moved.

Once sorted, the results were even more impressive. At the 2018 Monterey Motorsports Reunion, Burkoff beat every car in a 21-car field apart from Craig Bennett’s 1974 Can-Am champion Shadow DN4 — a landmark Tony Southgate design created four years later with four more seasons of technological evolution behind it. Burkoff set fastest lap in the process.

TI22 MKII at Laguna Seca, 2018. — Tearing up the field at Laguna Seca, 2018.

“Fans at the Reunion were cheering as Ilja moved up the field,” remembers Lee, “and many came by our pits to thank us for bringing back the car.” Among them Lois Bryant.

“That was a special thing for those people to see that car come to life,” says Burkoff.

Having driven a number of first-generation Can-Am cars, Burkoff can compare. “The [McLaren] M6 kinda rolls and talks to you a lot,” he says. “This car stays very flat. It’s more like a go-kart and a lot of fun.”

Critics point to the fact that the Ti22 MkII is a recreation, even though many so-called ‘original’ Can-Am cars have few if any original parts and deviate sharply from their original specifications. Perhaps the better question is, as long as they’re represented for what they are, are today’s enthusiasts better served by seeing an accurate recreation of an otherwise extinct car or should we never see them again?

Ti22 Monterey Motorsports Reunion chasing a McLaren — Lee’s Ti22 rolled back the years at the Monterey Motorsports Reunion in ’18, chasing a McLaren

Perhaps the last word should go to Groundsell, who was there with Bryant giving birth to the original Ti22 MkII back in 1970. “I had thought initially that [Bob] was quite silly and would never complete the project,” he says. “How wrong I was… and how determined Bob and Ilja were! They have made an amazing replica of the original car. Seeing it run in anger at Sears Point also made me sad for one reason: the memory of Peter [Bryant], Al [Willard], Mike [Lowman], Barry [Crowe] and I all working long, underfunded hours and came so very close to succeeding as a team.

“I think that if we’d finished the season and started to build a second car, if we’d had money, we would’ve been champions.”

Without the physical recreation of the ultimate Ti fighter to gaze upon, listen to and, yes, curl our toes, all of these emotions, all of this history would be lost in time, to quote a different sci-fi epic, like tears in the rain.

TI22 MKII

Engine 7-litre Chevrolet V8
Chassis 6Al-4V titanium aluminium monocoque
Power 800bhp
Transmission Hewland LG600 MkI 5-speed
Suspension Independent unequal A-arms with radius rods
Wheels Magnesium front 11in x 15in and rear 16in x 15in
Weight 775kg

penske: ahead of the curve

If you spend a couple of hours with Nick Fry – as I did recently – you quickly grasp two things. The first is that he is almost constitutionally incapable of self-aggrandisement. The second is that the modesty of the man makes the scale of his achievements sound faintly surreal when he finally does get around to describing them. He will talk animatedly about Ford and Aston Martin, about Prodrive and Subaru, about BAR–Honda and Honda and Brawn and Mercedes, but he will tell the stories as though they were showcasing the successes of someone else, or as though he had merely wandered through them, quietly holding a clipboard, generally trying to make things a little bit better.

Yet behind Fry’s chummy reserve sits a career that helped shape entire eras of both the global automotive industry and the strange, high-pressure, carbon-fibre-and-cojones world of Formula 1. He is one of the rare executives who learned to speak both languages fluently: the big-company dialect of budget cycles, capital expenditure and cautious governance, and the paddock patois of risk taking, engineering audacity, political dark arts and the occasional overnight miracle. Only a small number of men – and even fewer women – can walk comfortably in both worlds. Fry is one of them.

Nick Fry at Ford-owned Aston Martin workshop — Nick Fry took the helm at Ford-owned Aston Martin when he was 35 – with three months’ probation

Nick fry archive

But before the boardrooms and pitlanes, there was a semi-detached house in Surbiton. “I was born in 1956,” he begins, with that wry half-smile of his, “and I grew up with my dad, my mum and my two younger brothers in Surbiton, a commuter town between leafy Surrey and suburban south London, in a very happy but, by today’s standards, probably rather poor household.” He pauses, unwilling to make it sound Dickensian. “To be clear, we certainly weren’t destitute. We just lacked creature comforts. For instance, we didn’t have central heating. But we never felt poor, not at all, because everyone else seemed to be in the same boat.”

It is typical Fry: an acknowledgement of minor hardship, immediately qualified by perspective. His father was a circulation manager for Mirror Group Newspapers. His mother – a housewife by the time Nick was born – had previously been a senior PA to Major HN Robertson, a splendidly patrician figure who became Nick’s godfather. “I think it was Major Robertson who made me realise that there was a bigger, richer world out there,” Fry says, “but it was my mum who instilled in me the devotion to attention to detail that I’ve always brought to my work.” He smiles again. “She was a brilliantly rapid and accurate typist. She used to get me to proofread her stuff when I was a boy, and I’d get a roasting if I missed anything. She believed in hard work. She always said, ‘They call it work for a reason.’ She was ambitious for me.”

Yet you sense that that ambition was never oppressive. It was love expressed as drive – a thread that winds itself throughout Fry’s life. Even so, nothing in his childhood pointed directly towards motor sport. His father was a sports lover – football, cricket, golf – but no petrolhead. “I simply have no idea where my passion for cars and motor sport came from,” Nick says, shrugging. But there it was: the child who obsessively compared the trim levels of his dad’s company Vauxhalls, noting which one had a temperature gauge and which did not; the teenager standing at Brands Hatch in 1971 for the tragic World Championship Victory Race; the young man at snowy Silverstone for the International Trophy in 1973. “Dad would take us to events because he got freebie tickets through the sports desk, but he wasn’t an F1 fan. It was just luck, really.” Luck mixed with instinct, which describes a few of the pivotal turns in Fry’s life journey.

“I learned a lot at Ford. I worked out what makes engineers tick”

He went to a secondary modern school but “I wasn’t the best scholar”, he admits, his end-of-term reports often containing the dreaded phrase ‘could try harder’. That changed when he encountered a charismatic A-level economics teacher. “Ah, yes, Mr Still,” Fry says, chuckling. “There were only six of us in his class. He’d take us down the pub at lunchtimes. I loved it. And that’s why I chose economics at [Swansea] university.”

For a working-class lad from Surbiton, university in the 1970s was an exploration. “No one in my family had ever gone to uni before,” he explains. “Graduates were pretty rare in those days, so I never feared not getting a job, as today’s graduates sadly often have to.” He interviewed with Ford, Unilever and Procter & Gamble, and he chose Ford, which was “immensely successful in the mid-to-late ’70s,” as he puts it, when the Escort and Cortina ruled the UK’s roads.

Ford was where his education truly began. Sales, market research, customer service, then brand management: a steady, deliberate rotation around the engine room of a vast industrial organism. “Although I’m no engineer, I learned a lot,” he says. “From about 25 I was working closely with Ford’s design engineers on the specs of new models – Escorts, Cortinas, Capris and Granadas – and I worked out what makes engineers tick.”

That insight – the realisation that engineers require the rare combination of freedom and clarity – became one of Fry’s defining skills. He also developed the equally rare understanding that, if you want to manage complex organisations, you must learn about their shop-floor chores as well as their boardroom strategies. “I always felt I needed to understand the whole business,” he says. “So I volunteered to run Ford’s Dagenham factory.” Running a plant producing a new car every 50 seconds is “gruelling”, he says with characteristic understatement, but he did it. And when Ford needed someone to steady Aston Martin, it turned to Fry.

“Ford owned Aston Martin in those days,” he explains. “At first Victor Gauntlett was running it, then Walter Hayes took over as chairman.” Hayes was a legendary figure: the man behind Ford’s backing of the all-conquering Cosworth DFV engine, the man who helped create Jackie Stewart, the man who nudged the Ford GT40 to glory at Le Mans. Fry was just 35 when Hayes invited him to his plush London offices, just off Mayfair’s Berkeley Square. “He told me all about fathering the DFV, about mentoring Jackie Stewart, about winning at Le Mans, and I didn’t say a word. I just sat there, listening to this legend whom I’d only ever read about before. Then he said, ‘OK, I’ll offer you the job – boss of Aston Martin – but you’ll have to do three months’ probation, and if I don’t like you after that, I’ll fire you.’” Fry, with a new baby at home, said yes.

Aston Martin in the early 1990s was a glorious shambles. “A complete mess, yes,” Fry says. But with Tom Walkinshaw’s TWR handling the engineering, and Fry managing the brand and the business, the DB7 emerged and changed Aston’s fortunes. “We sold loads of them – 10 times as many cars as Aston had been selling before,” he says, permitting himself a demure grin. The car was as successful as it was beautiful.

Fry’s at Aston Martin in June 1993 with Adrian Reynard and Jackie Stewart — Fry’s tenure at Aston Martin was centred around the development of the DB7 – here at the car’s appraisal in June 1993 with Adrian Reynard and Jackie Stewart

Nick fry archive

Fry returned to Ford thereafter, to take charge of the Mondeo from a brand point of view – a big job – but the motor sport threads in his life were tightening. David Richards – the Prodrive owner and chief executive, the rally navigator turned team principal – had become something of a friend, for he had bought Astons as road cars, had run them as daily drivers and had loved them. Moreover, Ford wanted its Mondeos to deliver British Touring Car Championship glory, and Prodrive would run the programme. Alain Menu took the BTCC title in 2000, which was the last hurrah of the Super Touring era. Then, when Richards found himself busy with the complexities of the World Rally Championship at the turn of the millennium, he asked Fry to join Prodrive as managing director. Again, Fry said yes.

At Prodrive he witnessed the artistry of Richard Burns, who had been runner-up in the WRC in 1999 and 2000, and would be champion in 2001, Fry’s first year at Prodrive. “Richard Burns was brilliant,” Fry recalls. “He’d say, ‘Do this, do that, hire this person, fire that person.’ And I did it, and it worked.”

Because Prodrive’s Subaru WRC team was sponsored by BAT’s 555 brand – and because BAT owned the BAR F1 team – BAT’s senior executives soon spotted a solution to their F1 difficulties. Craig Pollock, BAR’s founding team principal, would be replaced by Richards, and Prodrive would run BAR. Richards would be supported by two capable lieutenants: Hugh Chambers for marketing; and Fry for operations. “The team was in a right old mess,” Fry remembers. It is becoming a refrain.

Honda was supplying the engines and Fry’s background with Ford made him the natural interpreter between manufacturer and race team. “Honda latched on to me as the car company man who understood them,” he says. “David was brilliant with the outward-facing stuff. Hugh handled marketing. I spent my time in the factory trying to get it to run well.” There were improvements; there were even breakthroughs; but there was also Jacques Villeneuve.

“The truth is that I found Jacques very difficult,” Fry says plainly. Villeneuve had arrived at BAR as its superstar signing. He was Pollock’s protégé, Pollock remained his manager and a shareholder in the team, and Villeneuve’s side of the garage – “the chosen few”, as Fry calls them – had grown accustomed to exceptionalism. “Jacques got miles better treatment and equipment than his team-mates,” Fry says. “The parts weren’t even interchangeable between the two cars.”

And the 1997 world champion could be abrasive, too. Fry recalls one particular exchange: “He said something very unpleasant to one of our engineers. I said, ‘Jacques, how do you think that guy feels after you’ve spoken to him like that?’ Jacques just stared at me. He didn’t even understand the question.”

Yet 2004, after Villeneuve’s departure and Jenson Button’s arrival, was a revelation. BAR finished second in the F1 constructors’ championship, behind only Ferrari. The team that had once been a punchline was gradually becoming a powerhouse. Better still, two years later, in 2006, Button won his first grand prix in a wet-dry-wet-dry-wet Budapest epic of the sort that makes or breaks the delicacy of a driver’s touch. “That’s the kind of situation in which Jenson used to come into his own,” Fry says. “He was always so sensitive in tricky, changeable conditions. He always understood what was going on in those kinds of races.”

“Ross is a truly outstanding engineer. We never had a cross word”

But 2007 brought the opposite of glory, for the RA107 was a car so off the pace that Button looked genuinely shellshocked when I interviewed him in the Melbourne paddock that March. “That was a terribly difficult year,” Fry admits. But that experience taught him a crucial lesson: “F1 is no place for beginners.”

So he went to see Charlie Whiting, F1’s unflappable and much -missed race director and paddock sage. “I said, ‘Charlie, who have I got to get to be successful?’ And he said, ‘Get Ross Brawn, Adrian Newey or Pat Symonds.’ So I set out to do just that.”

He spoke to Newey first – “but it was immediately clear that it wasn’t going to work”. Newey’s genius is matched only by the singularity of his working style, and Fry feared that Honda would be discomfited by it, so he quickly moved on to Brawn. The Honda hierarchy opposed the idea at first. “Not because of Ross personally,” Fry explains, “but because they thought the perception would be that they’d hired the guy who’d won everything for Ferrari. Any success wouldn’t be seen as Honda success therefore.”

Fry argued the opposite. If a Honda team won, the credit would go to Honda, he insisted: Brawn was merely a means to that end. He pursued Ross relentlessly. He called him repeatedly. “Eventually I persuaded him to come to my house in Woodstock [Oxfordshire] and we talked it all through. I’d prepared diligently. I showed him an org [organisation] chart, and we went through all the people on it, every single one, and he seemed relatively satisfied with that. Then I went through an inventory of all the new tech we’d invested in. Then I took him through the budgets. Finally, he nodded and said, ‘OK, I’ve heard it all from you, but now I need to hear it all from Honda.’ So, the following week, we boarded separate flights to Japan, so that we wouldn’t be spotted together, and we went to see Honda. And, after that, Ross said yes.”

Jacques Villeneuve, BAR star 1999-2003.

DPPI

Their partnership was seamless. “We never had a cross word,” says Fry. “It worked perfectly, and we’re still good mates now. Ross is a truly outstanding engineer and engineering manager, and he’s less interested in the commercial side, which I took care of.”

Their 2008 season was a building one. There were no signs of impending doom. Then the global financial crisis hit and, in December, Honda summoned Brawn and Fry to a Heathrow hotel and told them that they were pulling out. Tears ran down the faces of the Japanese executives as they imparted the news. Seventeen years later Fry recalls the moment with vivid clarity. “They instructed us to go back to Brackley and tell everyone to go home. I explained that, under UK employment law, you can’t just sack 700 people on the spot. And we had responsibilities to our suppliers, too. In the end we managed to persuade them that they’d have to help us try to sell the team.”

Fry sought buyers everywhere, but in a global financial crisis no one suitable was willing. So, on Boxing Day, in a modest hotel just off the M40 motorway, he sat down with his finance director Nigel Kerr, the M&A [mergers and acquisitions] expert Gordon Blair and a blank sheet of paper. Over sandwiches and coffees a management buyout plan began to form. When Brawn returned from his Christmas holiday, Fry explained it. “At first Ross wasn’t keen,” he remembers. “It was way out of his comfort zone.” But Fry knew that, paradoxically, taking the team off Honda’s hands would be cheaper for Honda than shutting it down.

Honda trio 2007, Christian Klien, Rubens Barrichello and Jenson Button — Honda trio 2007, from left: Christian Klien (third driver), Rubens Barrichello and Jenson Button.

Grand Prix Photo

The UK government concurred. High-profile job losses on that scale would be a PR nightmare; from a political perspective a management buyout was significantly preferable. But the price was brutal: 350 redundancies, half the staff gone; and research and development budgets slashed to less than a quarter of what Red Bull was spending. “Winning the world championship wasn’t even on our horizon,” Fry says quietly.

Also, they needed a new engine to replace the Honda unit. They considered Ferrari, but the Scuderia’s V8 would not fit their car. Besides, Ferrari would never allow a customer outfit to beat its works team. “By contrast, Ross and I believed that Mercedes would be honourable,” Fry says. “We thought they’d abide by ‘may the best man win’.”

2009 Australian Grand Prix Brawn 1-2 pitlane — For Fry, the 2009 Australian Grand Prix was a special moment; a Brawn 1-2 brought applause throughout the pitlane

Grand Prix Photo

Even so, Brawn and Fry still had to work out how to persuade the powers-that-be in Stuttgart to let them use their engines – not an easy task, on the face of it, since for many years Mercedes power had been harnessed exclusively by McLaren. Enter Martin Whitmarsh. The McLaren team principal, in one of the most surprising acts in 21st-century F1 history, secured Merc engines for Brawn GP – at very significant competitive cost to his own team. “Without Martin we’d have been done for,” Fry says. “But, amazingly, and to McLaren’s detriment, he gave the crown jewels to the enemy. It was bonkers really, but it saved us.”

“Winning the F1 world championship wasn’t even on our horizon”

It did indeed – and, in Melbourne, in 2009, the Brawn BGP 001, white, yellow and day-glo fluorescent green, rolled into the paddock like a ghost that had drifted in by mistake. Yet, from its first lap, it was obvious that it was the class of the field. Button duly won the Australian Grand Prix from pole position. Rubens Barrichello completed a Brawn 1-2. Then, as all the drivers ran their cars down the pitlane after the race, something extraordinary happened: every mechanic from every other team lined up to applaud them home. “Even now, 17 years later, I could almost cry about it,” Fry remembers. “It was off-the-scale special.”

Brawn kept winning, although Red Bull began inexorably to catch up. “Actually, they were faster than us pretty early,” Fry admits, but Brawn had accumulated enough early points to arrive in Brazil with Button still leading the F1 drivers’ championship. “Yes, we got to Brazil, for the penultimate race, and Sebastian [Vettel] had won last time out in Japan for Red Bull, whereas Jenson had finished only eighth there. Then, in Brazil, it rained in qualifying, and Sebastian ended up 16th, and in the race he battled through to fourth, but Jenson was fifth, and that was enough. We’d done it. He was F1 world champion.” Brawn had already secured the constructors’ crown. Together they had achieved the impossible.

Spanish Grand Prix 2009, with Jenson Button on a winning streak.

John Button and Jenson Button — John Button was a calming influence on son Jenson

I ask Fry how he views Button as a driver – and as a man. “Oh, Jenson was great,” he replies, “but I want to say something about John [Button, Jenson’s father], too, if I may, because John’s influence shouldn’t be underestimated. When Jenson came to us, in 2003, he was fast, but he was still young [23], he was good-looking, and he was a bit of a playboy. Behind the scenes he needed a bit of controlling and, even though John was a bit of a character himself, he did a lot of that work. John and I used to talk on the phone a lot, and that way we’d agree on a strategy to get Jenson to do the right thing. Don’t get me wrong: Jenson was never a tearaway but he needed management in that way when he was in his early twenties.

“All in all, I’d say that Jenson was a superb driver but in terms of one-lap pace and sheer bloody-minded resilience he was never quite in the same stellar category as your Michael Schumachers, your Fernando Alonsos and your Lewis Hamiltons in their prime, or your Max Verstappens now. Put it this way: by contrast to those four, if Jenson had a tricky Friday, you knew you were likely to be going to have a difficult weekend. But whenever he had a fast car that he was comfortable with, and that he could really lean on, he was brilliant.”

São Paulo in the penultimate F1 race of 2009 Brawn — A fifth place at São Paulo in the penultimate F1 race of 2009 was enough to bring Brawn’s Button his first and only world title

That memorable day at Interlagos, in October 2009, Button’s fifth place was enough. Relief flooded Fry as Button crossed the line. Pride, too. But then came the suitor they had been half-expecting: Mercedes. The German giant wanted to buy the team. “People sometimes say, ‘If you’d kept it, it’d be worth billions now,’” Fry says. “But lots of things could have gone wrong in the meantime. Besides, we never intended to be team owners, Ross and I. And the most likely outcome is that we’d have ended up like Williams, hobbling along, surviving but never winning.” So they sold. They made a lot of money, they gave the team a secure future, and Mercedes went on to dominate F1.

“Since leaving uni I’ve never been poor. I’m humbled by that”

Soon after Mercedes bought his and Ross’s team, Nick moved on. Today he is chairman of Motion Applied – which you will remember as McLaren Applied – and he remains at the cutting edge. “We’re doing the new standardised electronic system for F1, for the 2026 power units, and the equivalent for NASCAR, and plenty of other things, too.”

He is 69; he could pass for 15 years younger; and he is comfortable, successful and secure. I ask him if he ever expected to be so rich. “Well, since leaving uni, I’ve never been poor,” he says, after a pause. “I’m humbled by that. But I’ve done it myself – with the brilliant help of some fantastic colleagues.”

That last phrase is the closest he will come to boasting. But it is also the most accurate. His life has been one long partnership – with industrialists, with entrepreneurs, with engineers, with mechanics, with drivers, with risk and with opportunity. He is, at heart, a quiet and collaborative master of the improbable. He speaks of it all with no trace of regret. Well, almost none. If you ask him directly about regrets, as I do as I reach for my iPhone and stop our recording, he answers instantly: “Teams I ran [at Prodrive] finished second at Bathurst twice, and it really bugs me.” That’s Fry for you: the F1 world champion exec whose only real irritation is not quite cracking Mount Panorama.

2009 – Button is drivers’ champion with Brawn and team — History is made, 2009 – Button is drivers’ champion while Brawn became the first team to win the constructors’ title in its debut season

As our encounter draws to a close, I realise that what I admire most about Nick Fry is not the trophy cabinet that he helped build, nor even the F1 world championships that he helped win. It is the old-fashioned decency that underpins every chapter of his story. He is a man who rose from a humble house in Surbiton with no central heating to the summit of world motor sport – not by swagger, not by ruthlessness, not by guile, but by judgment, curiosity, hard graft and a sort of loyal, unshowy competence that F1 often undervalues. Perhaps that is why his story still feels so uplifting. F1 is a sport of sharp minds and sharper elbows, yet sometimes, just sometimes, every so often, a decent man wins. Nick Fry is proof.

Born: 29/06/1956, surbiton, surrey

1978 Joins Ford as a graduate trainee after gaining an economics degree.
1979-2001 Moves to Ford’s Product Development office as product planner, ultimately becoming business director.
1992-95 Shifts to Aston Martin as MD, overseeing development of DB7.
2001 Becomes managing director at Prodrive; doubles company turnover in three years; two WRC titles.
2002 Adds managing director of F1 team BAR Honda to his responsibilities.
2004 BAR Honda is runner-up in the F1 constructors’; Fry becomes CEO in 2005.
2006 Fry appointed Honda F1 CEO.
2007 Negotiates hire of Ross Brawn.
2008 Fry and Brawn lead a management buyout when Honda pulls out of F1, purchasing the team for £1.
2009 Brawn wins F1 drivers’ and constructors’ titles; team sold to Mercedes with Fry becoming CEO of the F1 team.
2013 Leaves F1; business interests include healthcare, artificial intelligence, esports and data security.
2021 Appointed non-executive chairman at McLaren Applied.

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