The 2002 season was significant in Christian Horner’s rise to becoming Formula 1’s longest-serving team principal with Red Bull. That year, his Arden team rose to prominence in Formula 3000, then the premier F1 support series, with a driver line-up that proved an excellent match and delivered his previously winless squad five on-the-road victories from 12 rounds.
The ultra-experienced Tomas Enge delivered its breakthrough triumph at the A1-Ring, where he was capably backed up in second by German Formula 3 graduate Bjorn Wirdheim.
The tall Swede, who became F3000’s penultimate champion the following year, immediately identifies the genial Enge as his favourite team-mate from a career that encompassed 12 years of racing full-time in Japan and the European Le Mans Series title in 2015.
“He was just a perfect team-mate, I couldn't ask for anyone better,” says Wirdheim, now working as a coordinator with Porsche Carrera Cup Scandinavia since his racing career wound down in 2019. “He had the experience and he was willing to share all his knowledge and it made it so much easier for me in my debut season.
“Part of it, that he was able to behave like that, of course, is his personality. But also it was because he was so experienced, he was always willing to share information that certain other drivers would hold back on. It's one thing to have the information, but it's a completely other thing to be able to utilise it correctly. He had that self-confidence.”
Enge had already sampled F1, making three starts for the moribund Prost team at the end of 2001, before making a surprise F3000 return with Arden for the onset of its new B02/50 era.
Entering his fourth full season in a championship he’d first entered in 1998, Enge had proven himself as a winner first with the McLaren junior team in 2000 and again at Nordic as team-mate to eventual champion Justin Wilson in 2001. But there was no hint of a lack of motivation from the Czech upon his return to the junior ranks.
Wirdheim says Enge "definitely had an influence in how I was able to get the results and build on that for the next year as well”, citing how his development impetus over the winter helped Arden to start the year on the front foot. Victory in the Interlagos opener surely would have been Enge’s, had his car been filled with the full complement of fuel…
“Tomas did more testing than I did and when I joined the team, the car was pretty sorted out already,” Wirdheim remarks. “He was clearly good at helping the engineers and understanding what direction to take development of the set-up in.”
Wirdheim found Enge to be “a genuinely nice person” and describes his chirpy personality, that meant “he was very well-liked by the whole team”, as being fairly unique among drivers he encountered in his career. He admits that it took some time before he was comfortable enough in a series to be anywhere near as open with a team-mate as Enge had been with him.
“I became much more of his type of driver later on in my career, when I was established in Super GT"
Bjorn Wirdheim on Tomas Enge
“He is the only one I came across that behaved in that way,” he confirms. “And that's very unusual, especially when you are racing in a single-seater championship and you know how important it is to beat your team-mate.”
Reflecting on his time alongside Townsend Bell at Arden in 2003, he adds: “I wasn't as comfortable with sharing as much information with my team-mate. I'll be helpful and so on, but I'm definitely not a Tomas Enge-type. I was lucky to have him as a team-mate at the right time in my career.
“The fastest laps would usually be set on the first or the second lap of qualifying, because that's when there was still Formula 1 rubber from the practice session that had been held just before. Then the lap times would just drop off by a second and a half easily, and it would be impossible to improve. So all the help that he was able to give me was massively beneficial.
“I became much more of his type of driver later on in my career, when I was established in Super GT. You are relaxed in a completely different way in a championship when you have a few years under your belt and when you feel established; you know that you don't really have anything to prove because you've already proven yourself. And that was at the level he was already in F3000. He was always a good reference, someone that you would like to see yourself becoming eventually.”
Enge’s 2002 championship challenge gathered momentum with back-to-back wins at Silverstone and Magny-Cours, the latter coming under stern pressure from the season’s early pace-setter Sebastien Bourdais (Super Nova).
After Giorgio Pantano (Coloni) signalled that the title race would be a three-way affair at Hockenheim, Enge’s fourth win of the year in Hungary put him into the lead ahead of Bourdais. But testing positive for a banned substance in a random drugs test – Enge has always proclaimed his innocence – resulted in his disqualification from that event and a 10-point deduction that ultimately cost him the crown to Bourdais.
The news broke days ahead of the Monza finale, where Wirdheim staved off race-long pressure from Pantano to break his duck and secure fourth in the standings. That was vital in triggering a clause in Wirdheim’s contract which stipulated a top-four finish would allow him to stay on at Arden at a significant discount for 2003.
Wirdheim remembers well a hidden moment between the two team-mates before the crunch decider that offers a revealing insight into Enge’s mindset. Wirdheim found the best way of coping with his pre-race nerves was to take a kip in the team truck and, at Monza amid significant media attention, “Tomas had taken to going to relax in there as well”.
“Before we went to get ready, because I was on pole and he qualified third, the last thing I asked him was, ‘Who do you think will win?’” Wirdheim recalls. “And he said, 'I think you will win today' and I won the race and that made a huge difference to my opportunity to continue with the team for next year. So that's a good memory that I have of him.”
The pair didn’t spend much time together away from the track in 2002, as neither was based near to the team’s base in Banbury, “so we only really saw each other when we went testing or racing together”. And when both headed Stateside in 2005, they were on either side of US open-wheel racing’s costly split; Enge in IndyCar with Panther, and Wirdheim in Champ Car at the HVM team in what turned out to be “the most difficult year in my career”.
But 11 years after they had last shared a paddock – when Wirdheim spent 2004 as Jaguar’s third driver in F1 and Enge made a reluctant return to F3000 instead of pursuing opportunities in rallying – both were enthused when Enge made a Super GT guest appearance in 2015.
At Buriram’s overseas round, Enge was brought in to share a Reiter Vattana Motorsport Lamborghini Gallardo entered in the same GT300 class as Wirdheim’s Gainer Mercedes SLS. He finished fourth with Katsuyuki Hiranaka, while Enge and Chonsawat Asavahame placed 12th.
“That was great to see him because I had not seen him since probably 2004, so a long time had passed, and he was his old self, just as open and friendly,” says Wirdheim of their most recent meeting. “And he'd been looking forward, I think, to seeing me too as he realised that he was going to race in the same championship.”
For Wirdheim, “in my head [Enge] was always the champion in 2002”. He replies in the affirmative when Autosport asks if it only gave him extra motivation to deliver Arden its first F3000 title in 2003.
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