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.
Source: Autosport