In the latest edition of our 'ace engineer' series, GreystoneGT chief engineer Gary Davies explains how his damper specialism led to a glittering career working in F1, F3000, IMSA, FormulaE and more. He shares his top tips with james_newbold 📝
When Autosport speaks to Gary Davies, the chief engineer of fast-growing sportscar outfit Greystone GT, he has just finished painting his office in the team’s new workshop.
His “handy mechanic” father Richard, who ran the fabrication shop at all of the bases he was posted to and later started fabrication company RAD Engineering, was a member of the go-kart team at RAF Cosford and began Davies’s motorsport craze by presenting his young son with a heavily-modified version of an adult kart that had been crashed.
The squad gave him his big break as a race engineer for 1998, running Warren Hughes, and Portman’s consultancy deal with Alan Mertens meant he spent several days each week at the 1992 Indianapolis 500-winning designer’s Galmer firm too. Hughes was fourth in the standings and put in a standout drive to charge from tenth to second in the British Grand Prix support race at Silverstone, but Davies notes “there wasn’t so much experience in the team there”.
Following a brief dalliance with the short-lived Brand Motorsport team “that ended in disaster” and folded after one race, he became self-employed and worked for several teams across Formula 3000, GP2, Formula Renault 3.5 and the Formula 3 Euroseries, dovetailing F3000 and F3 programmes in 2004 “out of necessity”.
After the 2011 American Le Mans Series season, Bennett tasked Brady with headhunting an individual to take charge of the team’s engineering set-up. He contacted Davies, who agreed to take the plunge despite his lack of endurance racing experience.Photo by: Dan R. Boyd /Davies duly ran Bennett and Colin Braun’s LMPC ORECA in 2012, the pair finishing second in the standings behind fellow Core driver Alex Popow.
When 2014 rolled around, Core came out of the traps flying as Nick Tandy, Patrick Pilet and Richard Lietz took victory first time out at Daytona. Davies classes it as the best of his career. “I’ve won a lot of races in the IMSA championship with Nick, Patrick, Richie and Fred [Makowiecki] and all those guys and they’re all exceptional drivers. Even though the grids in GTLM ended up being relatively small, you were still fighting with teams that put in maximum effort, in terms of car development, race strategy. Pratt & Miller with the Corvettes and Rahal with the BMW, all working as hard as Porsche, so when you win one of those races it’s quite special.
When Core’s IMSA programme concluded at the end of 2020, there followed a stint in Formula E with Dragon Penske as chief engineer. But Davies wasn’t enamoured with the “necessary evil” of aggressive wheel-bashing and its “gimmicky” elements, while Dragon’s limited resources didn’t help given that investment in energy management is crucial for success.
"If I can get the team set up from a technical point of view how I’ve been submerged in the past, especially with the Porsche factory team, it’s going to mean that Greystone will be ready from an organisational point of view, to take that next step"Among them at Greystone are the aforementioned boss McLoughlin and team manager Tim Mullen, both former racers.
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