Title success in any championship is always a special achievement for a team, but to come out on top of three national series during the same season is an exceptional feat. For Team Sellars Racing, the 2023 campaign could arguably not have gone any better.
It claimed a hat-trick of crowns in the 750 Motor Club’s Locost, Ma7da and F1000 championships, with Craig Land and Jonathan Lisseter completing back-to-back titles in the first two, while Tom Gadd came out on top of a fiercely competitive F1000 field. It was the culmination of nearly a decade of work, with TSR going from strength to strength to the point where it was responsible for running almost 20 cars full-time during the season.
“Although it’s a really good achievement, I think once you’ve been in motorsport so long you become a little bit numb to it sometimes, you’re just always focused on what we’re going to do next year to beat it,” reflects team boss Stuart Sellars.
“I didn’t come into 2023 with the expectation of winning three, but in 2022 we won the Ma7da and Locost championships and we came third in F1000, so we nearly did all three that year. It’s hard to replicate that year after year as well because obviously everyone else is trying to go faster, the same as we are.”
TSR’s success over several years in the Locost and Ma7da kit car championships is perhaps unsurprising given that’s where the team began life, Sellars himself racing Locosts in 2015, when he finished fourth in the standings. That same season coincided with the creation of TSR as Sellars, then 21 years old, began to move away from competing, which he’d done since starting out in karting during childhood. A future in the industry was always likely since his dad, Chris, has been involved with motorsport for almost 40 years, beginning with oval racing as well as Legends.
After studying motorsport engineering at university prior to 2015, Sellars embarked on an apprenticeship that included spells working in the British Touring Car Championship and British GT, as well as being involved with the development of the Bentley Continental GT3. He also had spells working in McLaren’s historic department and the Mini factory, all of which formed a solid foundation from which to build TSR. Sellars admits that he “tried to do as many different aspects of motorsport as I could get myself into”.
Source: Autosport