People

Graeme Glew

Yorshireman Graeme Glew did not come from a wealthy background and so had to build his first racing car, a Formula Ford 1600 machine which appeared for the first time in 1977 when Glew was 22. It was called a Touraco, after a kind of bird found in Africa, and it was not competitive. The following year he scraped together enough money to buy an old Hawke DL19 chassis and for the 1979 season he managed to wheel and deal his way to a new Lola T540E.

Having bought the car he found he did not have sufficient funds to run it properly and in the mid-season offered the car for hire. He was overwhelmed with responses and realized that he had stumbled on a business opportunity. The business started with the one car which was worked on in a converted pig sty at a farm in Goole, near Hull. As the operation grew it moved to a chicken shed at the Mallory Park racing circuit near Leicester and finally to a factory in Long Eaton, not far from the Donington Park racing circuit.

Glew concentrated on running FF1600 in the novice formulae so that complete newcomers could see if they were any good at racing and one of his early clients was Julian Bailey, who went on to drive for Lotus and Tyrrell in Formula 1.

Glew quickly realized that it wiser to give the new boys some instruction before they started racing and so established a racing school at Cadwell Park, a small racing circuit in Lincolnshire known as Britain's mini-Nurburgring. Initially Glew instructed himself but eventually was too busy with his other businesses.

The mid-1980s were a period of boom for Britain but Glew found that this meant that there were fewer clients who wanted to hire racing machinery and so in 1989 he closed down Team Touraco and started Professional Sports Management, specializing in finding, placing and servicing sponsors in Formula 1 racing.

There are quite a few sponsor-hunters on the fringes of F1 but Glew has made a point of concentrating on the same sponsor - food flavoring supplier Quest International - for the last four years.

Quest was initially involved with the abortive Pacific Grand Prix - Keith Wiggins and Glew having known each other since they were both racing in the late 1970s - but when that closed down Glew recommended a switch to Tom Walkinshaw's Arrows team.