When I met Martin Plowman on a misty Saturday morning at Silverstone last year for the first round of the World Endurance Championship, he could have no idea where the year would take him. A sterling season with Oak Racing yielded victory after a titanic intra-team battle at Le Mans and the LMP2 class title at season's end and having now conquered that frontier, Plowman this weekend returns to the States for the Grand Prix of Indianapolis driving four-time winner AJ Foyt's no. 41 entry.
Ahead of his participation in the biggest race on the US open wheel calendar, the Indianapolis 500 later this month, I felt it prudent to revisit our conversation. On that day, we talked about his involvement with military charity Snowball Express, whom he continues to fundraise for today, the different mentality required for racing in the US and his motorsport bucket list. Enjoy!
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| Plowman en-route to second at Sao Paolo. (Credit: Oak Racing) |
Martin Plowman is not your typical racing driver.
Through his involvement with the Snowball Express, a charity dedicated to
helping the grieving families of military
servicemen, the 25 year old Briton has proven that there is more
to life than just racing.
“A few years ago I did the Indy 500 Centennial tour to
Iraq and the Middle East and that really opened my eyes up to what goes on over
there. I saw the sacrifices they make and working with this charity which deals
with the grieving families is something I wanted to be a part of. It’s not just
another PR coup; it’s something we really wanted to do because it’s the right
thing,” he says.
“The way I see it, in racing if you become the next
world champion then so what? There’s going to be another world champion the
year after and the year after. There’s always going to be someone faster and
better than you who’s going to win more races than you. What’s the point? When
you’re 62, no-one is going to remember who you were when you were winning races
and championships, so if you can make an impression on a small kid because you
helped make his day, then that’s more important than winning a load of trophies
that will only collect dust..”
Those aren’t words that you’ll hear from too many
racing drivers, but then ‘Plowey’ is not most racing drivers. Against the norm
for a young British racing driver, Plowman spent most of his early racing
career abroad and made his first steps in single-seater racing in Formula Renault
on the continent with Prema, before graduating to the F3 Euroseries with RC
Motorsport as an official VW junior driver in 2008. Astonishingly, he had never
raced at Silverstone, the home of British motorsport, before the WEC
season-opener in April.
“Sometimes feel like I missed out on the junior
formulae over here and some the iconic tracks that we have; I’ve never been to
Snetterton or Knockhill,” Plowman admits. “But on the flipside, I’ve been to
some pretty cool places and had some great experiences.”
A move stateside to the Indy Lights series with
Panther Racing followed for 2009, and it was there that Plowman started to
flourish under the wing of Dan Wheldon, then a Panther driver in the main game.
Taking on the challenge of oval racing, a new experience coming from the
European circuits, was all part of the learning curve.
“I really loved it. In the beginning, I was lucky that
Dan Wheldon really went out of his way to make sure I was ok with the team, he
would call people and invite us out for dinner and get people together so I
could make friends over there, so it was thanks to him that I started to find
my way,” he says.
“It’s obviously geared slightly more towards fan
entertainment, they like to use the safety car a lot more than we do over here;
so long as no-one’s hurt then we’ll just keep racing. In the US when you have a
nice healthy lead, it can be cut short at any moment by a caution, then off you
go again. It definitely keeps the racing extremely competitive and tight,
you’re always on your toes waiting for a crash to happen and the yellow flag to
come out.
“There are situations where some European drivers
don’t appreciate the skill level involved; they think it’s flat out and easy
going in circles. I think any driver that goes over there with that mentality,
that it’s easy, soon gets their ass handed to them, because they’re in the
middle of a twelve car pack three-wide and ten-deep. You’ve got to realise that
yes, you may be flat, but the car is on ice and you’re catching a slide every
two corners at 180 mph.”
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| (Credit: Martin Plowman) |
Plowman’s second season in Lights with Andretti
Autosport proved highly successful, overcoming Charlie Kimball in the
inter-team battle for third overall with a breakthrough win at Mid-Ohio and a
promising fifth in the Freedom 100 at the fabled Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
This level-headed approach led to a three-race stint at Sam Schmidt Motorsports
in the main game for 2011, with 11th in his final appearance on the
bumpy Baltimore street circuit his best result.
However a restricted number of engines available for
the new spec DW12, developed by the late Wheldon, meant that openings were
limited in IndyCar, so it was the American Le Mans Series that represented Plowman’s
best prospects of continuing racing for 2012. Signing up with Eric Bachelart’s
small Conquest Racing outfit in the P2 category alongside silver driver David
Heinemeier-Hansson, expectations were few and far between, but class wins at
Mosport and Road America showed that the potential was there to beat eventual
champions, Level5 pairing Scott Tucker and Christophe Bouchut.
“That came together extremely late because we were
trying to piece things together for IndyCar and we were really close before
things fell throw as you do, it’s the same old story,” Plowman says. “We were
in talks with Eric over the off-season and it was definitely an option and then
we went down to Sebring to watch the open test and I really liked what I saw in
the ALMS paddock. I realised that there is a world outside of IndyCar and there
is top-line racing elsewhere in the world, when you see the manufacturers there
with Audi, Ferrari and Porsche, it’s a very serious championship. So we just
thought we’d make a go of it, we had a good engineer, the car was proven, and
Conquest was a very good team in that situation. I feel that it was a learning
curve, but we did the best we could do.
“Every race we were there or there abouts and there
were many times when we should’ve won and ended up beating ourselves, we threw it
away. We didn’t lose it; we just gifted the race to the other teams. But that
came down to the learning curve, there were mistakes from the drivers, from the
team. Going into the season we had no expectations but we soon realised that we
could have done a lot better. I think having that time again we would have
doubled or tripled the win count.”
Plowman’s ability to quickly grasp the ins and outs of
driving a prototype certainly facilitated a stellar opening season in
sportscars and earned him a call-up from FIA World Endurance Championship
outfit OAK Racing, yet Plowman retains his diligent attitude, conscious that
there is still much to learn before he can reach the level of a McNish or a
Lotterer.
“The driving style is actually very similar, it
honestly didn’t take very long to get up to speed, less than 10 laps and it
felt like an open-wheel car. For me the hard challenge was learning traffic
management, dealing with slower cars and the Audis that come from nowhere and
dive-bomb you and scare the crap out of you. It’s just learning how to manage a
race because you can’t always be super aggressive, sometimes going into a
corner behind a GT car you have to sacrifice some speed on entry but then blitz
the exit and get them down the next straight, rather than charge in and loose
three seconds on the next straight.
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| Plowman blasts down the Mulsanne Straight. (Credit: Oak Racing) |
“It does take a while to adjust to night racing because
your points of references on the track in the day aren’t there in the dark, and
the headlights aren’t as great as they seem to be. You’re very low in the car,
P1’s flashing you, blinding you, and you don’t know whether they’re right
behind you or 200 feet behind you, you’re constantly on edge waiting for an
Audi to come by. You can’t really teach it, every situation is different and it
really does come down to experience. That’s why you’ll see some of the really
old guys in sportscars that may not be the fastest on an all-out qualifying lap
be fastest over a stint because they’ve got that experience.”
That same humility is reserved for Le Mans too.
Plowman is set to tackle the twice around the clock classic with OAK Racing in
the no. 35 LMP2 entry alongside his fellow ex-IndyCar racer Bertrand Baguette
and silver driver Ricardo Gonzalez in what will be his first appearance at Le
Sarthe and after a fourth and a third in the opening rounds, the British driver
is eager to build on that promise with a good finish in the year’s most
prestigious race, but knows it will be just as important to learn as much as possible
from the experience.
“For me it’s huge, there a couple of races on my
bucket list with the Indy 500 being of course one, and the Le Mans 24 Hours
being the other one,” he says. “I’m not sure what to expect, I’m going to watch
as many videos as I can and take on as much information as possible because
it’s such a big race and you don’t want to go there being overconfident because
then you can end up doing something really stupid, you’ve got to respect the
track and build up slowly. The scary thing is we do the 12 hours of Sebring or
the 10 at Petit Le Mans and you realise that’s not even half way yet. The teams
are exhausted, you’re aching, got bruises everywhere and there’s still 15 hours
to go.
“I do feel that the team is in a position where they
have what it takes to win. The car is one of the strongest, the competition is
very strong but I feel if we do our job and don’t make mistakes and don’t beat
ourselves then I’d like to think that we at least have a chance to fight for
the win.”
Plowey’s attitude to racing is a refreshing and
inspiring one at that. On the platform of the World Endurance Championship and
with a quick car worthy of his talents underneath him, we could well be hearing
a lot more from him soon.
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