Sam Bird’s career has taken him to the very cusp of Formula 1.
The Surrey racer was one of the first young drivers to test for Mercedes on the edge of its era of dominance, but he was already au fait with grand prix machinery by that stage of his stellar early career.
Bird started out with a lot of determination, but without the deep pockets that underpin a lot of rising stars. Nevertheless, the now 35-year-old won races in every junior racing category that he tackled, which took him all the way to becoming a GP2 runner up in 2013. Sadly, even that wasn’t enough to unlock the gates to a grand prix drive.
Since then, he has forged a healthy and title-winning career in sportscars and has been a mainstay of the all-electric Formula E category since its inception in 2014. He is ready to go on the attack again as part of the Jaguar TCS squad as the series embraces its new Gen3 cars in 2023.
He kindly took time out of his busy schedule to tackle the MN readers’ questions, and we are grateful.
Question: What got you into motorsport in the first place? Was it something within your family, or something you found yourself?
Steven Nye
Via email
Sam Bird: “My mum’s ex-husband was a car and motorsport journalist, Clive Richardson. He knew the Formula 1 drivers back in the 1970s and early 1980s. So my mum was involved in the motorsport circle as such very loosely.
“But there was no history of racing in my background. Then mum met my dad and they had me. There was no great passion for going motor racing, but they used to enjoy watching F1 on the TV. Every other Sunday, after football practice, we would gather around the TV to watch. I think back then it was on Eurosport. It was the early 1990s. I used to absolutely love watching these individuals racing these incredible cars and I would tell my parents that it is what I wanted to do. I kept asking them how I could get involved and I used to write them letters and slip it under their bedroom door at night begging them to take me go karting.
“For my eighth birthday they took me to Silverstone and I had my first-ever go in a kart. Clearly I loved it. If my grades were good at the end of every school term – so three or four times a year – they would take me to Clapham or Streatham to the kart circuits there. I would be allowed to have a morning at Playscape, which ran the sessions there.
“One of the guys there told my parents that I had kind of outgrown that after a while. They could see I was quick and good and I had all the right lines and things. They asked my parents if they had thought of entering me into a championship. They mentioned Formula 6, which was based in the south of the UK and it wasn’t too expensive, and so they suggested I should see how I got on in that.
“They entered me in that and that is there the ball started rolling.”
MN: How did you get on in Formula 6?
SB: “After I had got off my novice plates, I won every race. I couldn’t win the championship because you have to do the first six races on novice plate and had to start from the back of the grid, so that meant I was too far behind in the points. I think I started at the back for my last novice race and I won it outright.
“Becoming a BMW scholar was the start for me”
Sam Bird
“Then I got into Super One, but the problem was, for me, was that I went to quite a prestigious school and then I went to boarding school. Because I was good at other sports, they weren’t very keen on me missing other school activities. So firstly there was a budget issue: I couldn’t afford the testing time that other kids could. But also, I couldn’t afford to miss time at school. So there were times during Super One where I would literally just turn up for morning warm-up without any practice or testing and then go and race, so that meant I never really competed at the level I wanted to in karting. So, when I was 16, I went
