By comparison with his earlier career in touring cars that yielded titles in four consecutive seasons, the four World Endurance Championship GTE Pro wins Andy Priaulx scored as part of the Ford GT programme appear small fry. Yet the Guernseyman regards his first three-and-a-bit years of his ongoing relationship with Multimatic as one of the most enjoyable periods of his career. And that goes some way to explaining Priaulx’s choice of Harry Tincknell as his favourite team-mate.
A hat-trick of World Touring Car Championship titles with BMW, coming after he’d won the 2004 European crown, established Priaulx as one of the world’s best drivers, rated at number nine in Autosport’s 2005 top 50. It was “definitely one of the most successful parts of my career,” Priaulx acknowledges, before adding “it wasn’t one of the most enjoyable” as he was still building his name and “had an awful lot of pressure from BMW” to keep performing.
Priaulx had spent over a decade at the Munich marque and knew “the longest part of the career was behind me” when he joined Larry Holt’s Multimatic organisation for 2016. By this time, he had a different approach to team-mates.
“It was only towards the end of my career that I’ve become very friendly with several,” Priaulx says, citing long-time BMW team-mate Augusto Farfus as one driver he’s become friendly with “since we stopped racing together”.
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But it's Tincknell, who he partnered for the 26-race duration of the Ford GT in the WEC, that Priaulx picks as his favourite. In contrast with racing in single-driver tin-top series where “you are having to be totally selfish and relentlessly determined to even find a tenth to make or break your weekend”, his time at Ford “was more an enjoyable pressure” where he relished working in “a non-political environment”.
To Priaulx, who remains a Multimatic driver after stepping away from his last full-time racing programme with the Cyan Racing WTCR squad in 2020, Tincknell was “an absolute pleasure” to race with.
“I don’t think I could have been with a better team-mate,” Priaulx says. “He was on the up, he was a well-established sportscar racer with a big future ahead. I was in my early 40s and still at a high level.
Source: Autosport