A tribute to Richard Lloyd | Thank Frankel it’s Friday

Back then, the motor industry was using the private airport a great deal so I clicked on the story to make sure no one I knew was involved. But despite this being a completely different Farnborough, on the other side of London, near Biggin Hill in fact, I did know two people on board. Which is how I discovered on the 30^th March 2008 that David Leslie and Richard Lloyd were dead.

David I did not know well, though two years earlier we’d shared a Mazda RX-8 in the Silverstone 24 Hours and I found him to be one of the most likeable and intelligent racing drivers I’d met. But Richard was different and the reason for writing this today, over 16 years after his untimely passing, is that he still regularly pops into my head at completely random times and for no apparent reason, like now.

I first met him in the 1980s when he owned and ran GTI Engineering. Because he became well known as a team manager – running Stirling Moss and a fresh-faced Martin Brundle in 1980 in Audis in the BTCC, then winning it in 1995 for Audi before spearheading Bentley’s return to endurance racing and Le Mans in 2001 – it’s easy to forget what an accomplished driver he was himself. A many times winner in touring cars, including a hat-trick of class titles in the British Saloon Car Championship, he also came second outright at Le Mans in 1985, sharing his own Porsche 956 with Jonathan Palmer and James Weaver.

And although Richard would have been (and was) first to say his employees did the bulk of the heavy lifting that weekend, it had been his decision to ask Nigel Stroud to design the car’s brand-new honeycomb chassis which was so much stiffer than the standard factory car. It was strong, too; weeks later at Spa, on the same race weekend that Stefan Bellof lost his life in another 956, Palmer had an appalling accident in the same car from which he emerged with a broken leg but mindful of how much worse it could have been.

I used to borrow cars from Richard in those early days – hotted up Golf GTIs mainly to test for Autocar. We then lost touch but were in contact again in 2001 when his Apex Motorsport team was asked to run the Bentley EXP Speed 8 on the company’s first works outing at Le Mans in 71 years. That was the year that, in the team’s first race in the car, in terrible conditions they had not encountered in testing and Dunlop wets for which they had no data, they still got a car home on the podium. I was there as part of the team, saw through my own the tears streaming down Richard’s face and who knows how many others’, and will tell you now that third place finish meant more to all involved than did winning it outright two years later.

Richard was not involved in that final effort, replaced by a crack Joest squad made temporarily available as the Audi LMP effort took a one-year sabbatical. And I know also that being sidelined like that hurt Richard, too.

We lost touch again, only to meet in a hotel bar on the Tour Britannia in 2007. We’d not seen each other for five years, so sat at the bar and drank too much red wine.

Somewhat tentatively I asked how the Jaguar XKR GT3 project he was running was going because the rumours had not been good. He was his usual frank self and said he’d entered the car for the Silverstone 24 hours that very weekend simply to get some much needed development miles under his belt. “Come and see for yourself,” he ventured. I declined, saying I didn’t want to go to the race as a spectator. “No, I mean come and drive the car.”

We finished the tour on Thursday, and I was qualifying by lunch on Friday. As ever with Richard, there was no paperwork, no hidden conditions, nothing other than a handshake and the hope that I enjoyed myself. Which I did, even though the car was completely undeveloped, needed vast amounts of set up work and lost three hours in the night for a gearbox change. I said my thanks at the end, looked forward to seeing him again, but never did. Six months later he was dead.

He may be gone, but I’ll never forget Richard Lloyd. He was the epitome of the British gentleman racer. He was modest, quiet most of the time but with a stone dry sense of humour. I can’t imagine him ever losing his cool, never heard anyone say a bad word about him. Most of all however, I’ll remember his kindness and I’m sure that’s why so many of the world’s best sports car drivers wanted to work for him. Even if they didn’t always have the quickest car, they’d know they were always on the best team.

Main image courtesy of Motorsport Images.