BTCC race winner Craig Porley

One of the most famous driver-engineer duos in the British Touring Car Championship might not have happened if it hadn’t been for a random friend request on Facebook.

“I got one from Shaun Hollamby,” says Craig Porley, the brains behind Jake Hill’s BTCC title-chasing form with West Surrey Racing. “I didn’t really know him but the rumours were, ‘hmm, they’re going to AmD’, so I guess I’ll just accept that.”

‘They’ were the FK2 model Honda Civic Type Rs that Porley had designed at Eurotech. That team withdrew from the BTCC, the cars and equipment indeed went to Hollamby’s AmD team, and the ball was rolling…

At AmD, Porley drove to the 2019 Independents title with Rory Butcher, before Hill stepped up to win both the car and the engineer for 2020. The rest is history and the two teamed up at the Motorbase Ford Focus team in 2021 before taking control of the BMW 330e M Sport for 2022.

All of this was alongside Porley’s ‘day’ job at the Red Bull Formula 1 team, meaning it was a busy time for a man who started his career on a university internship at Rollcentre Racing. “Because it was a small team, it was basically cheap labour for them!” he laughs. It was a pretty cool internship, working at events like the Sebring 12 Hours, and after graduating in 2005, Porley returned to Rollcentre as a composites technician.

He left Rollcentre at the end of 2007: “That was the first year of the Pescarolo and we finished fourth at Le Mans, which was absolutely fantastic for a small privateer team. I was working with a guy who’s now at Red Bull and every now and then we think: one more place and it would have been a podium. When you’re up against the might of Audi and Peugeot…”

Martin Short, Stuart Hall and Joao Barbosa came close to a notable podium at Le Mans in 2007 with their Rollcentre Pescarolo

Photo by: Elliot Patching / Motorsport Images

In his next job, at 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 in 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 great place to be involved, seeing all the preparation that goes into it, and working towards it.”

After a stint in the FIA ​​GT1 World Championship as a data engineer with the JRM Nissan team, Porley joined gearbox specialists Xtrac, “and that allowed me to do the race engineering on the side”. He did so via a return to WSR in the BTCC, starting with Tom Onslow-Cole’s drive in 2012. While the tin-top work was going well, he was beginning to get itchy feet at Xtrac.

“I worked at Xtrac for three-and-a-half to four years in R&D,” Porley recalls. “I loved it, but there’s a limit to what you can learn from transmissions. I was looking around and 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 have to trust them when it matters, and they have to trust you to make the car better if it’s not quite right.”
Craig Porley

In Formula 1, you are a small cog in the process, especially when you work in a factory like Porley. But, he admits, “when Max Verstappen won his first world championship, it meant the absolute world. I was surprised how emotional it was, because the reality is we were detached from it, back in the workshop. One thing Red Bull does really well is involve the factory staff in that celebration. You get the feeling that you are part of it. But the flip side is that nothing can beat when you do it on track.”

Meanwhile, Porley was working in the BTCC with Eurotech, where he spent three years. Half of that time was spent as an engineer with Brett Smith, but he also looked after Jack Goff, Dan Lloyd and Martin Depper. The move to Hollamby’s AmD team reminded him of where he had started: “I really enjoyed working there. It was a small team, almost back to a Rollcentre type team, doing a lot with very little.”

He has been thrilled to work with Hill since 2020. “We’re in it to win, just like drivers and team owners. It’s the same for any mechanic, data engineer or whatever,” Porley said.

“The best way to do that is if you’re lucky enough to work with a good driver. And we also get along well as friends – there has to be a kind of friendship, because there’s that ultimate trust. You have to trust them when it matters, and they have to trust you to make the car better when it’s not quite right.

Porley has been working with Hill since 2020 and the duo has gone from strength to strength over the years

Photo by: JEP

“It takes a while to form a relationship like that. You go through the highs and the lows because you have to pick each other up. It’s the Team Hill unit – I’m friends with Simon (Hill’s dad), Hannah (Hill’s fiancée) is lovely; we message in groups and individually.

“In terms of raw talent, Jake is the best I’ve ever worked with. It’s no secret that he was a bit of a diamond in the rough. And we work closely with MB (the Mark Blundell-run management team that manages Hill). We needed to raise that level for him, by improving him on the non-driving side.”

Porley left Red Bull in February 2023 and says he now works “more full-time than before” at WSR, while lecturing at London South Bank University. “I’ve kind of taken over from Mark Ellis,” Porley says of another Red Bull star who, ironically, helped Alain Menu to two BTCC titles back in the Super Touring days. Small world…

“Every university is a big business – including the students, it’s 10,000 people!” he exclaims of a role that also involves involvement in the institution’s Formula Student team. “I was quite naive about that when I started.

“It’s really nice to be there, to try and bridge the gap between the obvious mistakes that young students are going to make. It’s not that you’re telling them how to do it, but you’re explaining why they shouldn’t do it that way and giving them a range of different options that they can choose for themselves and hopefully come up with the right solution.”

Porley now teaches at London South Bank University alongside his duties as a race engineer at WSR

Photo by: JEP

Craig Porley’s Three Tips

Think about the tires
I ask the students what’s the most important thing in a race car, and you get a whole bunch of different options, and I hope someone says tires. At Red Bull, there are only a few people working full-time on tires, but there are hundreds working on aerodynamics. People say aerodynamics is king, but ultimately there would be no aerodynamics if there were no tires. I try to instill that in the young engineers. Everything goes through that – cornering, braking, traction. Learning how to read a tire and interpret tire data is absolutely essential.

Keep it simple
We’re just trying to go around as fast as we can or travel as far as we can in as little time as possible. The problem isn’t any more complicated than that. I always try to remind myself of what we’re trying to achieve.

Keep learning
You can always learn from any situation, good or bad. You can join a new team and regret it because they don’t do it the way you would, but there’s always something they can probably do better. And even if they don’t, you can still learn how to make it better. A good example of that is when I was working 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 coming up with solutions. It was amazing how that resonated when I was communicating with people in England.

Porley says engineers should always be open to learning new tricks and ways to improve

Photo by: JEP