Richard Westbrook is no stranger to success at Watkins Glen. He won three IMSA SportsCar Championship races on the trot at the circuit between 2014 and 2016, including twice outright. But the Cadillac World Endurance Championship racer’s affiliation with the famed sportscar racing venue in upper New York state stretches back to a childhood sticker album.
“When I was a kid, I used to have this Panini magazine,” he tells Autosport in the Caddy hospitality at Spa. “They had a Formula 1 one, and like the football teams, you’d collect the drivers and stick them in. It had all the tracks, and one of them was Watkins Glen.”
Westbrook was sufficiently inspired by the circuit that hosted 20 consecutive US Grands Prix between 1961 and 1980 when it came to devising Scalextric layouts.
“I always made my Scalextric track into the shape of Watkins Glen!” he says. “Whenever I was doing that, my dad who used to race many years ago at club level, was always saying ‘Watkins Glen is an amazing track’. But I didn’t know what made it special until I got there for the first time.”
The story of Westbrook’s stop-start career is well-known. A rising star of the 1990s, who came close to nominating pre-chicane Imola and the Osterreichring he raced during the 1994 Formula Opel Lotus season, he made his comeback in one-make Porsche racing in the early 2000s and landed a works deal after winning back-to-back Supercup titles in 2006 and 2007.
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The second of those title campaigns featured a maiden visit to the 3.450-mile Glen, which would become a “happy hunting ground” over the years. Driving a GT class Porsche for Synergy Racing in the Grand-Am Series alongside Steve Johnson, he finished fourth.
“It obviously had no downforce,” he remembers. “It was on a Hoosier tyre, there wasn’t a lot of grip. But the track, I just instantly fell in love with it.
“The track is so special, it’s flowing and the tarmac they’ve used there when they re-paved it is just phenomenal grip. There’s so much load going on in the car and no deg at all. So when you’re double-stinting there, every lap is a qualifying lap and you’re just going bloody fast the whole lap. It’s rewarding in every sense.
“There’s overtaking opportunities and when you look back at the track, apart from adding the chicane it hasn’t changed at all. The armcos are the same colour as back in the ‘70s and it’s still very daunting. It’s a typical American track with some European characteristics. It’s got a bit of Spa in it as well, some undulation and a bit of Oulton Park as well, but just faster!”
Westbrook’s return with TRG in 2008 as a Porsche factory driver was rather forgettable. It would be another four years until his next Watkins Glen outing, which came with Spirit of Daytona’s Coyote Corvette Daytona Prototype after signing for the full 2012 Grand-Am season. He says the experience “reaffirmed it as my favourite place in the world to drive a car”, although Westbrook could only finish fifth in the six-hour race that between 1968 and 1981 featured on the world sportscar championship calendar.
He didn’t get to drive when Grand-Am made a second visit later that year for a two-hour race on the shorter 2.450-mile inner-loop, as diff problems put Antonio Garcia out on the opening lap, then finished ninth in the 2013 six-hours with Garcia and Ricky Taylor.
"Going into Watkins Glen after the race and having an American pizza and seeing all the memorabilia from James Hunt’s days there, it’s just incredible – I love it" Richard Westbrook
But for 2014, the first following Grand-Am’s merger with the American Le Mans Series, Westbrook’s luck at Watkins Glen turned around. In that year’s six-hour LMP2 finesse was pitched against DP brawn, and it was Westbrook and Michael Valiente’s Spirit of Daytona Coyote that came out on top against OAK Racing’s Morgan-Nissan.
A late caution allowed Westbrook to close on erstwhile leader Alex Brundle, who was hampered in his exit from the first corner after the restart when Burt Friselle forcibly unlapped himself. That, combined with the superior straightline speed of the DP allowed Westbrook to breeze past into the Bus Stop. His first Watkins Glen victory is for Westbrook an obvious favoured memory from the circuit.
“The P2s were really strong at places like the Glen, it really suited their car,” he recalls. “But we just executed so well, Michael was on it and we just were flat out every lap. We were fighting with the Oak LMP2 for that whole six hours and we pipped them with about five laps to go. That was so special.”
The outcome was the same 12 months later, Westbrook and Valiente on top once more albeit in very different circumstances in the wet after Ricky Taylor crashed out and Joey Hand had to make a quick splash and dash. “Troy Flis’s team opted to run a divergent strategy, but it was a flawless performance that counted the most,” wrote Jeremy Shaw in Autosport magazine’s report.
But Westbrook highlights as his favourite moment his pole lap in 2016, the year he completed his hattrick at the Glen together with Ryan Briscoe – albeit in the GTLM class rather than outright with the Ford GT. The imminent arrival of his Australian team-mate’s second child gave Westbrook the rare opportunity to get the car set-up attuned precisely to his wants and yielded the car’s first pole in IMSA.
“I got all the new tyres in practice because Ryan had to get to the hospital,” says Westbrook of his second win with the programme, after he and Briscoe had broken the car’s duck in a fuel mileage race at Laguna Seca. “I got the car how I liked it and the car was just so good in qualifying. I won’t say it was easy because nothing is easy at Watkins Glen but everything clicked. It’s a rare thing to have.
“Ryan came back for warmup and I think he went P1 straight away. Then we just checked out in the race, it was a really special moment.”
Westbrook hasn’t visited victory lane at Watkins Glen since, although he came close to making it four in a row together with Briscoe in 2017 in a narrow defeat to the Rahal Letterman Lanigan BMW M6. But the ambiance at the track makes every visit worthwhile despite the four hour-drive from New York, which he says is “the only thing I don’t like about it”.
“Going into Watkins Glen after the race and having an American pizza and seeing all the memorabilia from James Hunt’s days there, it’s just incredible – I love it,” beams Westbrook. “Beautiful countryside, it’s glorious.
“And there are a lot of very, old-school knowledgeable fans, that just know so much about motorsport who have seen it, done it and were there when Formula 1 was last there. It’s a lovely place to go to.”
