One of the British Touring Car Championship’s best-known driver-engineer double acts might not have happened if it hadn’t been for a seemingly random Facebook friend request.
“I got one from Shaun Hollamby,” recounts Craig Porley, the brains behind Jake Hill’s BTCC title-contending form with West Surrey Racing. “I didn’t know him really, but the rumours were, ‘hmm, they’re going to AmD’, so I’d better accept that.”
‘They’ were the FK2-model Honda Civic Type Rs that Porley had been engineering at Eurotech. That team was pulling out of the BTCC, the cars and equipment were indeed heading to Hollamby’s AmD squad, and the ball had started rolling…
At AmD, Porley ran Rory Butcher to the 2019 Independents’ title, before Hill shuffled over to take both car and techie for 2020. The rest is history, and together they have worked together at the Motorbase Ford Focus squad in 2021 before getting their hands on the BMW 330e M Sport for 2022.
All this was in addition to Porley’s ‘day’ job at the Red Bull Formula 1 team, meaning it’s been a busy time for a guy who began his career on university placement at Rollcentre Racing. “Being a tiny team, for them it was cheap labour essentially!” he laughs. It was a pretty cool placement to work at events including the Sebring 12 Hours and, after graduating in 2005, Porley went back to Rollcentre as a composites technician.
He left Rollcentre at the end of 2007: “That was the first year of the Pescarolo, and we got fourth at Le Mans, which was absolutely fantastic for a small privateer team. I worked with a chap who’s now at Red Bull, and every now and then we reminisce: just one more place and it would have been a podium. When you’re up against the might of Audi and Peugeot…”
During his next job, in A1GP, he met Team GBR’s Albert Lau: “He was a race engineer at West Surrey in the BTCC, and that’s how I got involved with them for 2008 as a data engineer. My first year was with Stephen Jelley, my second with Colin Turkington, and that was his first championship – that was a lovely place to be involved in, seeing all the prep that goes into it, building up to it.”
After a stint in the FIA GT1 World Championship as data engineer with the JRM Nissan squad, Porley went to work for gearbox specialist Xtrac, “and that allowed me to do the race engineering on the side”. He did that via a return to WSR in the BTCC, beginning with running Tom Onslow-Cole in 2012. While the tin-top work was going well, he began to get itchy feet at Xtrac.
“I did three and a half to four years at Xtrac in R&D,” Porley recalls. “I loved it but there’s a limit to what you can learn from transmissions. I looked around and that’s where Red Bull came up – I had two friends working there who I’d worked with at Rollcentre, and they put in a good word for me, and I got a job there as an engineer.”
"You’ve got to trust them when the chips are down, and they’ve got to trust you to make the car better when it’s not quite right"
Craig Porley
In F1 you’re a small cog in the process, especially when factory-based as Porley was. But, he admits, “when Max Verstappen won his first world championship, it meant the absolute world. I was surprised at how emotional it was because the reality is we were detached from it, back at the workshop. One thing Red Bull does very very well is to include the factory staff in that celebration. You’re made to feel a part of it. But the flipside is nothing can compare to when you’re doing it at the track.”
In the meantime, Porley was working in the BTCC with Eurotech, where he spent three years. For half of this time he was engineering Brett Smith, but also looked after Jack Goff, Dan Lloyd and Martin Depper. The move to Hollamby’s AmD equipe reminded him of where he’d started: “I really enjoyed working there. It was a small team, almost back to a Rollcentre-esque team, doing a lot with very little.”
He has loved working with Hill since 2020. “We’re in it to win as much as a driver or a team owner – that’s the same for any mechanic or data engineer or whatever,” Porley considers.
“The best way to do that is if you’re fortunate to end up working with a good driver. And we hit it off as friends as well – there’s got to be a form of friendship there, because there’s that ultimate trust. You’ve got to trust them when the chips are down, and they’ve got to trust you to make the car better when it’s not quite right.
“It takes a while to form that kind of relationship. You go through the highs and lows because you have to pick each other up. It’s the Team Hill unit – I’m friends with Simon [Hill’s father], Hannah [Hill’s fiancee] is lovely; we message in groups and individually.
“In terms of raw talent, Jake’s the best I’ve worked with. It’s no secret that he was a bit of a rough diamond. And we work closely with MB [the Mark Blundell-run management team that looks after Hill]. We needed to bring that level up for him, improving on the non-driving side.”
In February 2023, Porley departed Red Bull and says he’s now “more full-time than before” at WSR, while lecturing at London South Bank University. “I sort of semi took the position of Mark Ellis”, Porley says of another Red Bull luminary who, ironically, engineered Alain Menu to two BTCC titles in the Super Touring days. Small world…
“Any university is a big company – including the students it’s 10,000 people!” he exclaims of a role that also entails involvement with the establishment’s Formula Student team. “I was quite naive to that when I started.
“It’s really nice being there, trying to bridge those gaps between the obvious mistakes young students are going to make. It’s not a case of telling them how to do it – it’s explaining why not to do it that way and giving them a range of different options that they can pick themselves and hopefully come up with the right solution.”
Craig Porley’s three tips
Remember tyres
I ask the students what the most important thing is on any race car, and you get a range of different options, and I hope someone says tyres. At Red Bull there’s only a couple of people working full-time on tyres whereas there’s hundreds working on aero. People say aero’s king, but ultimately if there weren’t any tyres there wouldn’t be any aero. I try to drill that home to the young engineers. Everything goes through that – cornering, braking, traction. Learning how to read a tyre and interpret the tyre data is absolutely key.
Keep it simple
We’re just trying to go round in circles as fast as possible or travel the furthest distance in the shortest time. The problem is no more complicated than that. I always try and remind myself what we’re trying to achieve.
Never stop learning
You can always learn from any situation good or bad. You might start at a new team and regret it because they’re not doing it how you would do it, but there’s always something they’ll probably be doing better. And even if there’s not, you can still learn how you can improve it. A good example of that is when I was working out in TCR China last year – working with a good group of guys but there’s a language barrier, so you have to learn new ways of communicating and come up with solutions. It was amazing how that knocked on when I was communicating with people back in England.
