How a racing driver puts a season together

This post is the second in my series of posts about how the world of motorsport works behind the scenes. The idea of this series of blog posts is to give you a bit of an insight in to the motorsport world away from the track, cameras and (occasional) glory.

For this post I went to see GT3 driver Julien Draper. Julien’s racing career started in Caterhams before moving to the G50 Cup and then on to GT racing in the G4 class and GT3. 2012 has seen Julien make the move to the Blancpain Endurance Series in one of the new McLaren MP4-12C GT3 cars prepared by Von Ryan Racing.

How a race team puts a season together

Every motorsport fan has a favorite team, championship, car or driver and in the motorsport world this can change on a regular basis depending on who is running what, where, and with which drivers. In other team sports such as football, rugby or cricket the only thing that really changes are the players, the team itself keeps the same shirt, the same badge and plays at the same place (well for at least half the season). Motorsport doesn’t.

This blog post is the first of what I hope will be a series of posts looking at how a motorsport team puts a season together, how they prep for a race, what a motorsport teams workshop looks like and a look at the racing world from a mechanics point of view. My aim with these posts is to cast light on an area of motorsport that most fans don’t even think about let alone see.

How is motorsport paid for?

This post is to answer a question that I get asked a lot, how is motorsport paid for? It maybe a bit of a dry read for some but I hope to throw a bit of light on the merky world of motorsport finances.

You may think that the team attracts sponsors, gets a share of the ticket sales and then pays the drivers. This is not the case (normally).

The simplest way to get paid as a team is to become a factory run or factory backed team. This is where a manufacturer sets up a team, or employs one, to race their cars. Famous examples of a factory team are Ferrari, Audi or Peugeot. A factory backed team would be a team like Oreca. However, even in the high flying world of Formula One this is not the norm.

Ecurie Ecosse car showing off it's sponsors for the Spa 24 hours