How a team owner got his mojo back with one-make racing

It started with a phone call from Andy Ackerley, the 1982 Champion of Brands. Before he knew it, Peter Briggs was taking tentative steps back into a world where he’d once operated at the pinnacle, as manager for the likes of Team Surtees and March.

Briggs had ended up running a pair of Renault and Honda dealerships for John Surtees, and recalls how Surtees one day stormed out of a meeting about the limited quota of Hondas he could have to sell, and declared he’d had enough. Briggs sensed an opportunity, bought the business, rented the premises from Surtees and never looked back.

“Then Andy Ackerley approached me about the Uniroyal Production Saloon Car Championship, and buying a Honda Civic,” says Briggs. “We didn’t get involved in running it – we were just the sponsor.”

One thing led to another, and the sales director of Honda pitched the idea of the CRX Challenge. It went down well, remembers Briggs. “It was brilliant. When it came out, I thought, ‘Yeah, we could do that, we’ll run it in-house with the lads from the workshop.’ The first season we ran Andy, Tim Lee-Davey, who’d raced at Le Mans, and Rick Shortle who was a Formula Ford champion, and we didn’t do that well.”

Ackerley suggested to Briggs that they give Paul Taft a run in a test session, and the CRX went faster. “Andy turned around and said, ‘Well, we know where the problem is…’”

The following year, Briggs and Edenbridge Honda ran Ackerley, Taft and Lisa Thackwell, and doubled down on set-up. Taft took the championship in 1989. The following year, Patrick Watts drove for Edenbridge Honda, and took the title.

He didn’t realise it, but thanks to what some may view as a humble one-make race series, Briggs’s bug for racing was back.

Briggs agrees that it was a golden time for one-make racing. But he reckons it was BMW that spoiled things. “Formula BMW had this huge hospitality, flash racing uniform, and they made these 15-year-olds think they were F1 drivers, and that was wrong. It annoyed me immensely.

“Vauxhall Lotus was fabulous; a cheap, sensible package you could go racing with. Forget all the bullshit, you’re going to race. All the bullshit comes later in life.”