There are many drivers who have clung on to a single-seater dream as long as they can, and 1980s and 1990s battler Phil Andrews has to be prime among them, showing a determination that is rare in racers even today.
Andrews came up in a fiercely competitive period for home-grown racers. The proud Brummie was up against the likes of Johnny Herbert, Eddie Irvine, David Coulthard and Damon Hill on his way to the top of the sport, and there was a phalanx of hot shoes from overseas to contend with too.
After a victorious career in junior single-seater racing and despite the odds, the now 56-year-old battled his way to Formula 3000 in 1989 and desperately attempted to carve into the points, without success. He came within a hair’s breadth of making a sensational return to single-seater racing in the Indy Racing League in 1999 but, once again, he was thwarted at the last moment.
Among many sportscar achievements, his CV includes two starts at Le Mans, which he includes among the highlights of his motorsport career. Andrews kindly took time out of his busy schedule to answer the Motorsport News readers’ questions, for which we are grateful.
Question: Where did the passion for motorsport come from for you? Was it in your family?
Steven Nye
Via email
Phil Andrews: “My father, David, raced. When I was a kid, he started off in the original Formula 4. This would have been in the early 1970s. He did Historic F3 too, and he won the championship in 1983 in a beautiful Brabham BT28 – which I always remembered I wanted to drive. He went on to do the World Sportscar Championship in the Group C2 division in Tigas mostly. He raced from 1984 through to about 1988. He drove for Roy Baker Racing in the car they dubbed Pink Panther.”
MN: So you were dragged to paddocks from a young age then?
PA: “My first memory of being at a race track was when I was a babe in arms, and it was Boxing Day at Mallory Park at the Plum Pudding meeting. But way before that, I had been watching Formula 1 on TV: I remember watching the 1973 British Grand Prix with Emerson Fittipaldi and Ronnie Peterson drifting around Woodcote corner. I remember having the thought ‘I won’t mind doing that’…and I would have been five years old.”
MN: From being interested to getting your bum into a kart is quite a journey… what happened?
PA: “I started karting in 1981 and it was literally myself, my dad and a godfather who helped run it. I was the one with the most experience with a spanner, that will give you a clue as to how we operated! For me, it was always about a route to get into Formula Ford 1600, which I was crazy about at the time. I took it reasonably seriously.
“One of the good teams that was around at the time was Christo Racing. It was started by Adam [Christodoulou] and Riki’s fathers, who were brothers. Adam’s father Peter was a very good karter and a good engine builder. I was won my first heat at this particular event and in the second heat our little TKM engine – which was an absolute flier so long as it stayed in one piece – decided to blow up. Peter Christodoulou had seen how
