OLIVER GAVIN THE CHEVY GT KING
Five wins at Le Mans is a pretty special achievement, but to complete them all with one manufacturer is something hard to accomplish. But then, Oliver Gavin’s CV has a raft of pretty special achievements.
The Bedfordshire racer has five American sportscar titles to his name too, and five wins in the Sebring 12 hours to boot. You can throw in an epic victory at Daytona in 2016 too. There are very few British racers who have a trophy cabinet quite like Gavin.
The six-foot-two-inch tall racer crammed his frame into single-seaters in the 1990s, and raced his way to the cusp of a grand prix career before the doors slammed shut. He decided to go and seek his fortune in the land of opportunity in the USA. It paid off handsomely and Gavin has spent almost two decades as a mainstay of Chevrolet’s GT programmes.
He announced recently that he was stepping aside from the Chevrolet factory team to concentrate on other future activities. It brings the curtain down on a hugely rewarding partnership for the 48-year-old driver and the grand old American marque. He spent some of his new-found spare time tackling the MN readers’questions
Question: Was there motor racing in your family? Where did the interest come from?
John Charles Via email
Oliver Gavin: “My brother Marcus and I started karting when I was 11 years old and he was 13. My father is an engineer and my grandfather owned and ran two garages in the local town in Bedford. My grandfather was a bit of a whiz with road cars in the 1950s and 1960s – back in those days, they used to go wrong a lot and he had a magic touch with fixing them. I suppose my interest in cars started there.
“My father was looking for an activity to do with my brother and I and we were living in the same village as James Rhodes [an active karter at the time who progressed through to Formula Renault]. His father was actually our family doctor. Dr Rhodes suggested to my dad that he brought us along to karting at Rye House and that was it. We were hooked and we loved it. In the car on the way home, my dad said we could buy a kart which we could use between us. We just ran that to see how we would get on. For the first six months or so, we just popped it onto the roof rack of the car and went wherever we could to drive it: car parks, big open spaces, anywhere. We didn’t even wear crash helmets. Sometimes we even went to a race track. It was nuts: no health and safety! We got the bug, then dad
