An interview with… Patrick Watts Racing

After excelling during the 80s and 90s in a range of single-make categories, most notably the British Touring Car Championship, these days Patrick Watts scratches his competitive itch on the historics scene and, most recently at the Citroen C1 Challenge’s 24-Hour blue-riband event at Silverstone.

Designed to provide a low-cost route into endurance racing, the category is centred around the first-generation C1 model, equalised centrally to provide a level playing field and put the drivers – in teams of up to six in some cases – front and centre in the quest for success.

We recently visited the ‘Home of British Motorsport’ to have a catch up with Patrick, one of our Motul Ambassadors, and his daughter Aimee, about his latest on-track programme and the role Motul’s products have played in the race for every tenth of a second in such a highly competitive field.

So, Patrick, we’re here at Silverstone for the Citroen C1 Challenge 24-Hour race, can you tell us a little bit about the series and how you got into it?

We’re currently doing the Citroen C1 Championship with Aimee this year. At Patrick Watts Racing, we prepare a few cars for historic racing, including a few classic cars I’ve got. It’s a bit of a hobby business.

The C1 racing was brought about by a fantastic weekend I had up here [at Silverstone] with an old team-mate of mine from when I was doing touring cars, Simon Harrison.

He said ‘come up and do this Citroen C1 championship’ and I wondered what it was. He said ‘it’s a 24-hour race, come up and do it with us’, so I did. It’s fantastic racing, the C1 is tremendous fun to race.

We’ve been around the paddock today to have a look around, it’s quite a competitive series, isn’t it?

When you’ve got so many cars on the grid that are identical, it doesn’t matter where you are on the grid, whether it’s towards the back or the front, you are going to have a race, and you have plenty of time down the straights to think about your tactics coming into each corner.

It’s a little bit like a game of chess. You haven’t got to be too proactive on what you’re going to do next, you have a lot of time to plan things. If you slipstream and you have a guy alongside you, you can look across at them, make eye contact, give them a little bit the evil eyes down the straight.

Come the next corner, all hell breaks loose as you brake late and force your way down the inside through the corner, then it all goes quiet again as you wait for the next corner to come up. It’s great fun.

So for those who haven’t come across a race with this format before, can you guide us through it?

This weekend, it’s a collection of people that want to go out and win a race. It’s held over 24 hours, unlike a 20-minute sprint race which a lot of people are very familiar with. It’s all about team-mates and working with two, three or even four other people. Some teams have six people taking it in relay to race.

The pit stops are around every two hours and ten minutes, which is how long it takes a tank of fuel to empty, so you’re out there for that length of time and it’s quite a long time racing, but one thing I will say – it feels like an hour. You just don’t realise you’re coming to the end of your stint until they give you an ‘in’ board. That’s how much fun you’re having.

There are boring parts to this racing because when a car goes off in the dark, they will invariably put out a safety car and you have to follow it around at about 40 miles an hour. But that’s where the C1 comes into its own, you can tune in to Radio 2 or Radio 4!

What competitive edge does using Motul’s products provide?

The thing about this championship, it’s very restricted on what you can do to the car, but one thing they do say is you can use any oil. So I will go for the best oil, not only to make the car last the duration of 24 hours, but also I want to go for thin oil. So we’re using very thin racing oils, which means less friction in the engine, but also less chance of it wearing out or getting damaged within a 24-hour race.

It’s the little details, we use a special grease of Motul’s in the wheel bearings, and that’s a thinner grease than a garage would normally put into the wheel bearings on a road car, but it’s got higher impact properties, the wheel just whizzes round and round when you spin it on an axle stand. That little bit less friction helps us down the straights.

We use Motul for the gearbox oil, again a high-impact, thin racing gearbox to again reduce friction on that component of the car. If that all adds up to 1 mile an hour, in this championship, it means you won’t be overtaken on the straight and you might have a chance of overtaking the person in front.

We’ve even got their cleaning products, which we use on the wheels and windscreen to stop it misting up, get all the rubbish off from the other cars when they come in for a pit stop and makes everything crystal clear, that’s a really nice addition to the oil.

The race itself was ended prematurely for Watts and his team-mates on board the #506 after an early incident left their C1 too damaged to continue. Nevertheless, we look forward to seeing Patrick and co. back out on track in the near future!

We’re proud to support and work with a number of race drivers, teams and garages. To read more about our partnership with Motul, see our product range and explore who uses Motul oils, please click here.