CHRISTIAN DICK I AM DESPERATE TO LAND A BTCC TITLE

While many of the leading teams in the British Touring Car Championship can trace their heritage back over two decades, there is also a new breed of squad. Uppermost among them is the Speedworks Motorsport team.

It runs the Team Toyota GB-supported Corollas in the UK’s highest profile series and is headed up by husband-and-wife team Christian and Amy Dick.

Christian was an aspiring racer himself after putting a toe in the water in the highly competitive Mazda MX-5 one-make series in 2005. From there, he started running cars for customers alongside his own exploits behind the wheel.

He claimed a drivers’title triumph in British GT4 in 2010 but, as the workload of the team has ramped up, his crash helmet has been locked away as he focuses on masterminding operations from the pitwall.

And that work on the pitwall has come within a whisker of delivering him the British Touring Car Championship’s biggest spoils in 2018, although the team came up just short.

The potential and the promise were rewarded with a factory deal to build up and run the Team Toyota GB-backed Corolla in 2019. Speedworks has become a major player in the BTCC and was tasked with the development of the newfor-2022 hybrid systems that will be fitted to all machines this year.

From the small acorns, Speedworks has become a manufacturer team, an engineering-led squad at the cutting edge of the BTCC and a leading light in the British GT championship too. It is a wonder that Christian Dick found any time in his schedule to speak to us, but we are grateful that he did.

“I raced to show what the team could achieve”
Christian Dick

Question: What turned you from club racing driver into team owner? What were you doing before for work? It is quite a big step… Emma Facey Via email Christian Dick: “I started in Junior Ministox when I was 10 years old: I have always been around racing and racing cars. My stepfather Paul Sheard raced in National Hot Rods back in the day. I have always grown up around the sport and have been very hands on with the cars themselves.

“Before Speedworks Motorsport was created, I was a club racer in the Mazda MX-5 series and I was funding my sport through sponsorship and partly through my earnings. I did all sorts of menial jobs to raise money to enable be to compete from steel erecting