JONATHAN LEWIS: I’VE ALWAYS THOUGHT ‘WHAT CAN WE IMPROVE?’
Over the last four decades it has been hard not to notice Jonathan Lewis in motorsport at home and abroad, and not only because you’ll struggle to meet a more colourful and engaging character.
Behind the wheel he has been a frontrunning fixture in highly competitive and popular Mini racing.
He sampled the car from an early age – indeed, as we find out, a very early age – and became Mini Se7en champion as a teenager.
Lewis though had many more strings to his bow and not only as a versatile driver, as he also was a successful and innovative team boss at several levels of single-seater racing, including for the famous Van Diemen Formula Ford works team. And Lewis’s skills took him right the way up to winning at the first attempt the championship in the direct Formula 1 feeder contest World Series by Renault 3.5, with Alx Danielsson driving for Lewis’s Comtec Racing team in 2006 beating many prestigious names. Lewis more broadly has worked with plenty of noteworthy drivers.
And he’s done much more besides on and off track including, as we discover, even an appearance on BBC’s famous Top Gear programme. He remains prominent today, mainly via his Snetterton Speed Shop concern running and building cars for customers, and he still occasionally gets into the driver’s seat himself.
Now he answers Motorsport News readers’ questions. And given all that we’ve said, it’s worth going back to the very beginning.
Question: When and where was your first race and what were you driving?
Stuart Bowes Via Facebook
Jonathan Lewis: “Strensall Autograss Club, which is still going, near York, and it was a Mini, my brother’s Mini because he raced in autograss racing and there was no such thing as Juniors back then. So they let me start at the back of the ladies’ races, just at the lunchtime. It was pre the ladies having the power they’ve got now to have their own series. I would start at the back but within a few weeks I was winning, and I think I’d have been about 14, 15, and in the end they just let me tag on with the men at the back.
“It was pre all the health and safety and danger. I mean, it was so crude compared to today’s autograss cars. You look at today’s cars and they’re incredible, aren’t they? The build of some of them, but these were cars with the windows just kicked out and a basic rollcage and that was it.
“That was my first ever motorsport event and then my first circuit race was Mallory Park in the Mini Se7en championship, when it was 850s. That’s where circuit racing started, if you like.”
MN: Any particular reason why it was Minis to begin with? Was that just what was available?
JL: “I suppose because I grew up with Minis, and my mum made the local paper the Yorkshire Post when I was six years old, because she had me sat on her lap driving in a Cooper S, an original, old, Mk 1, tartan red-and-black-roofed Cooper. And I was sat on her lap steering the car and we were driving on the back roads to the pub that I grew up in. We had a head-on with a Ford Anglia and mum got into a lot of trouble, even though I was driving.
“I was only six, you see, so they couldn’t really throw the book at me. I think she made the front cover of the papers for that and she was very frowned upon but if I was crashing Minis at six, I was inevitably going to race them, wasn’t I?
“I think that my brother was racing them in autograss when I was eight, nine, 10 and my uncle Ken gave me an MOT failure Mini,
