Peter Windsor on Grand Prix Shootout

Peter Windsor was raised in Sydney, Australia, where at the age of 15 he became the youngest flag marshal at the Warwick Farm motor racing circuit – a superb facility modeled on the combined horse/car Aintree race track in Liverpool, England. Peter’s mentor was Geoff Sykes, the Farm’s designer and Secretary of the Australian Automobile Racing Club (AARC). Peter worked office jobs at the AARC during school holidays and joined the club full time at the age of 17.

The F1-based Tasman Series was at its zenith in the late 1960s, enabling Peter to see all the top F1 drivers compete during the Australian summer. He first met Jackie Stewart then and also had a long conversation with Jim Clark in March, 1968. “I think I was the last person in Australia to speak to Jim,” he says. “I met him at Sydney airport as he was flying off to the States to test at Indy. I remember him saying to me that I could achieve anything I wanted providing I never gave up and always believed in what I was doing. He was mesmorising. His words have remained with me ever since.” At this time Peter also began to write race reports and features and quickly attracted the attention of British-based magazines like Autosport and Motoring News.

Encouraged by David Phipps, the English photo-journalist, Peter flew to the UK via South Africa in March, 1972. He wrote a report of the 1972 South African GP for Autosport before working for Phipps in England through to the end of 1973. “I earned 100 pounds a month and lived in a tiny bed-sitter in Bromley, Kent, but it was all worthwhile as I managed to attend about five F1 races in my first year,” he remembers. “David was a wonderful teacher – a clean and precise journalist and a friend and confident of people like Colin Chapman and Bernie Ecclestone.”

In 1974 Peter joined Competition Car magazine, where he worked with the great Nigel Roebuck, and in 1975 he became the youngest writer ever to be appointed Sports Editor of Autocar, the world’s oldest motoring magazine. Over the next decade Peter would win five major awards for journalism.

He also worked beyond the typewriter and began to help Frank Williams raise money for his young F1 team and to assist the Argentine F1 star, Carlos Reutemann; with Peter’s help, Carlos would go on to drive for Ferrari, Lotus and Williams and to finish runner-up in the 1981 World Championship. In 1978, though, at a Formula Three race at Silverstone, Peter also saw Nigel Mansell drive for the first time. After watching the Englishman for only a couple of laps he became convinced that Mansell had the talent to make it right to the top.

So was born a close friendship and working relationship that lasted through to the early 1990s, when Mansell won the F1 World Championship in his Canon Williams-Renault. Peter helped Mansell raise an F3 budget, secured him a test contract with Team Lotus and was instrumental in enabling Mansell to race first for Lotus and then Williams.

For his part, Peter joined Williams full-time in 1985 as Manager of Sponsorship and Public Affairs. In 1988 he attempted for the first time to set up his own F1 team but the project failed when his Swiss “partner” broke a contract and sold out to a third party. Peter took the matter to court and won a clear victory.

Ferrari hired Peter in 1989 to replace John Barnard at GTO Ltd, the UK-based facility in which Ferrari Maranello built their F1 chassis. “John decided to leave Ferrari to go to Benetton, and Ferrari suspected that he would take a lot of personnel with him,” remembers Peter. “They were not wrong. When I took over, on November 1, 1989, there was one man still standing. In the space of three months I had to hire 50-odd people and produce four F1 cars. It was my first brush with the Skunk Works principles.”

Objectives achieved, Peter returned to Williams in 1991 as Race and Test team manager. Rising from a slump, Williams began to win races again in 1991 and won the championship, with Mansell, in 1992.

In the late 1990s Peter returned to journalism but added TV to his portfolio, working first for Fox Sports Net and subsequently for SpeedTV. He joined F1 Racing when that magazine was in its infancy and, together with Editor Matt Bishop and other highly-talented writers and photographers, grew the magazine into a world leader. Today, over one million copies of F1 Racing are published per month.

In 2003 Peter renewed a friendship and close working relationship with Rob Wilson, a talented New Zealander he first met during the Mansell F3 era (in the late 1970s). Although he still races successfully today, Rob had over the past 20 years also evolved a driver coaching system that seemed to be applicable to racing drivers of all levels – both amateurs and pros. Rob and Peter teamed up to form a company called 54.9 – so-named because of the lap time recorded by the wonderfully-talented Australian driver, Frank Matich, during his epic battle with Jim Clark in the 1965 Lakeside International – and today, thanks to Rob’s perception and lucidity, not to mention the logic of his principles, the pair work closely with several F1 teams and drivers.

On the subject of Grand Prix Shootout, Peter says:

"What I love about Grand Prix Shootout is that it is touching the element of what our sport is all about. It gives everybody an opportunity to come face-to-face with the world's best driver coach and for that driver coach to relate that young driver to a database of talent that includes Formula 1 World Champions.

"You can enter Grand Prix Shootout, basically, if you've got enthusiasm, talent and you've done a bit of racing and you can just see “Have I got exactly what Kimi Raikkonen had at this stage of his career?” and the database is there to be referred to.

"But beyond that, what I love about it is that anyone can enter. Whereas most driver scholarships are based on a grand committee and they decide who the short-list of drivers will be and that's fine but if you don't make that initial short-list it doesn't really help you.

"What I love about this is that anybody can be a part of it. You don't have to worry about are you going to make the short-list. You know you're going to be evaluated the same way as the winner will be evaluated at his preliminary stage and, if you do well enough, if you're prepared to learn and listen and be self-critical and you have the physical talent as well and the right attitude, almost certainly you will succeed and that's what this is going to reward and I believe it's unique in that sense and that's why we're a hundred percent behind it. Back to News & Features