People

John Bracey

John Bracey started out as a car dealer from Ilford in Essex. He moved around London a fair bit but eventually ended up as the manager of a Ford dealership in the London suburb of Wimbledon - which is better known for tennis than for motor racing. At the time, however, the garage owner decided to sponsor a racing driver called Nick May, in an attempt to drum up some more business for the company. May was racing in the British Formula Atlantic series, his car being prepared by a mechanic from another Ford dealership Dave Price.

As a result Bracey found himself going along to race meetings around England, initially as a spectator but then as a van driver, tea-maker and wheel-polisher. It might only have been a curious interlude in his life if his dealership had not gone out of business soon afterwards. At the same time Price also found himself out of work when his dealership closed and so the two got together. Bracey rented a small garage/workshop in Twickenham and while the company made its money from tune-ups and Ministry of Transport roadworthiness tests, Price used the premises to prepare racing cars. He started out with Formula Atlantics but then graduated to Formula 5000 and ultimately to the British Formula 1 Championship which was running at the time. As a sideline they ran a car accessory business as well.

Not long afterwards Price decided to prepare cars for the British Formula 3 series and the team got its big break in 1978 when it landed a deal to run Triumph Dolomite engines and found sponsorship from Unipart. Its drivers included a young Nigel Mansell. In 1980 the team signed up to be the works March Formula 3 team in Britain and a deal was struck with Austin Rover for the team to prepare the Rover Vitesse from the British Touring Car Championship. Neither project was very successful but during that year Bracey ran a hospitality unit for Austin Rover. He realized that there was money to made from catering and so he and Price invested in a delicatessen in Bookham, Surrey, and a transit van from which Bracey supplied catering. Meridian Services Limited was born. It was agreed that MSL and Dave Price Racing would be run separately but Bracey and Price were co-owners of both businesses. MSL began to grow rapidly and DPR won the French F3 title in 1983 and then the British title in 1984.

As MSL grew it was decided to sell the delicatessen and invest the money in the construction of a purpose-built 40-foot hospitality unit, complete with kitchen. Before long the company was feeding teams and sponsors in rallying, sportscars and touring car racing. An even bigger unit followed and it was not long before Bracey had done a deal to feed a selection of the F1 teams at Grands Prix.

By 1993 Price had diversified into composites and Bracey had started a second company offering hospitality services to Toyota and Lexus dealers in England. It was agreed that the two empires should be split and Price and Bracey exchanged shares. The catering business now has six 40-foot catering trucks and caters for Jaguar Racing, all the Formula 3000 teams and several of the TV crews at each Grands Prix. It also designs and operates hospitality units for racing teams.