FROM DOLOMITES TO BMWs TO HYUNDAIS
He’s renowned as one of the most amiable, down-to-earth members of the British Touring Car Championship paddock, of which he’s been more or less ever-present over the past 20 years. And his lifespan in Britain’s premier tin-top series goes further back to the tune of two and a half decades to the mid-1970s.
Yet pinning down top team manager, former team principal and all-round good guy Marvin Humphries to chat about his career in motorsport isn’t easy. Why? Because he’s so modest and humble about it that he doesn’t see why anyone should make a fuss. The last thing he wants to do is blow his own trumpet.
So… we need to get some others to do that for us. Ask Tom Ingram, current lead driver for the Excelr8 Motorsport squad that Humphries joined as team manager prior to the 2019 season, and he enthuses: “One of the things about going to Excelr8 was working with someone like Marvin, whose experience of motorsport is enormous. It’s an honour and a privilege to work with someone with such a decorated career. I love him to pieces – as much as anything else, he’s such a passionate fan of the sport.”
BTCC race winner and latter-day ITV pundit Paul O’Neill, who drove for many years with the Tech-Speed Motorsport squad of Humphries and wife Sandra, adds: “I owe my life to him. If it wasn’t for Marvin and Sandra, I think I would have lasted probably two years in motorsport.”
Humphries’ career is long and varied, encompassing Formula 1, the world sportscar championship, IMSA and manufacturer-promoted one-make championships. But it all started with rollbars… From school, he found a job in 1968 with rollcage pioneer John Aley Racing, then went into an apprenticeship with British Leyland, before “I decided this maybe wasn’t what I wanted to do, so that’s when I saw a job advertised at Broadspeed”. This was 1973,
