MARTIN SHORT: THE MAN WHO WENT FROM KIT CARS TO LEADING LE MANS

There are some motorsport CVs that take you aback, and Martin Short’s is certainly one of them. His has been an extraordinary experience as a racer, team boss and engineer across a variety of categories. And he did it from not even having started in racing until the age of 26, and doing so in the British Racing and Sports Car Club’s Kitcar championship.

He won that title in his first year and within two decades – via a roving motorsport path – he with his Rollcentre outfit was a genuine Le Mans overall frontrunner as team boss and driver and even led the famous race in 2005, plus finished fourth overall there two years later.

As you may expect we got plenty of questions from you.And such is the range and richness of Short’s career there were plenty of areas we didn’t have time to explore, including his championship-winning British GT time, the Noble, Moslers, Bathurst, Malaysia, Daytona, Formula First, Metros and the Rover 216 GTi Challenge… It led us to speculate that Short could become the first in Motorsport News readers’Q&A history to be invited back for a sequel.

He attributes his success to “grit, determination, manic obsession”, but as we find out there was more going on too. So, with all this, let’s start with the overarching question.

Question: How cool was it to go from racing a kit car to running his own team in the top five at Le Mans?

Paul Lawrence Via Facebook

Question: From the Brands Hatch Formula First Winter Series to Le Mans, a pretty exclusive club no doubt?!

Wayne Pearson Via Facebook

Martin Short: “Oh God, you never would have imagined it, and when I think back to how I started as a car enthusiast who bought a kit car in London and drove it home and on the way home thought to myself ‘well I wonder if I can race it?’, at the age of 26, I’d never raced anything in my life. And then preparing it and naively going to Mallory Park for my first-ever race on my own, well with a mate following me in anAstra van just in case I broke down.And then arrived there and saw everybody else with cars on trailers and that was my first motorsport lesson!

“And then becoming obsessed with my new hobby, because that’s what it was. I had no girlfriend, I had nothing to do at the weekends and I thought ‘what am I going to do with myself?’ And I actually had signed up with a scuba diving club to try and find something to do.

“And then every year I went upwards from Formula First to Metro Turbos to Rover GTis to Rover Turbos to TVR Tuscans, and then to British GT.And in the whole of that time I always