Blundell’s journey from Formula 1 and IndyCar to touring car team captain

To RACER readers, Mark Blundell is perhaps best known for his five-year stint in CART IndyCar racing where he won three times and took a further two podiums. For others, it might be his time in Formula 1 where he stood on the podium three times, or even Le Mans where he tasted victory in 1992 with Peugeot.

Today, though, he runs a successful marketing business which has spawned an equally successful team in the British Touring Car Championship. Evolving from his time as driver in the series back in 2019, MB Motorsport is now in its seventh season, having gone through various iterations along the way.

“I've always been a fan of the British Touring Car Championship,” Blundell tells RACER. “Always felt that it's a great platform. It's always had competitive racing, it's had good parity where you could come in and actually have an opportunity to actually get a result.

“And I think for me also, the fact that it's got access for fans, it's got real, true engagement is an attraction, and today it’s the UK's premier motorsport platform.

Blundell's victory for PacWest over Gil de Ferran by 0.027s at Portland in 1997 was among the highlights of his single-seater career. David Taylor/Allsport/Getty Images

While MB Motorsport got its start with Blundell behind the wheel, that wasn’t the plan initially.

“It wasn't anticipated,” he admits. “It was driven off the back of getting commercial relationships secure with HP and at that point, HP only wanted me to drive and basically come out retirement to do so.

“Fundamentally, it was a wrong decision. It was amplified by the fact that I was going to be driving a rear-wheel-drive car, and if that would have been the case, it would have been a bit easier for me, because I've never driven anything compared to front-wheel drive.

“Unfortunately, that didn't work out, because the team that we were in discussions with couldn't go racing the season after so I basically had this funding, and I had to do something with it. The upside of that is that we still have HP as a partner.”

Blundell’s only season as a driver brought a best result of 13th in the third race on Silverstone's National circuit and a championship position of 27th out of 32. While the results don’t match the Briton’s pedigree, it wasn’t a total waste, with it informing him of the nuances of the championship where he’d go on to become a team owner.

“It's good insight for me to understand being behind the wheel of a British Touring Car, to understand what the fundamental differences are of single-seaters and saloon car racing,” he says. “It's good for me to understand the insight of the weekend's pressures and what's required by the drivers and the team. So in reflection, it's all upside.”

MB Motorsport takes a different approach to the "find a sponsor and go racing" norm. MB Motorsport photo

Following on from Blundell’s sole season in an Audi S3 Saloon run by AmD Tuning, both sides realigned their partnership for the 2020 season, with the Essex-based operation running a pair of Honda Civic Type Rs for Sam Osborne and Jake Hill under the MB Motorsport banner.

AmD merged with Motorbase the following season, taking MB with it for one more season before MB partnered with West Surrey Racing for what would become its most fruitful period. It’s an intriguing way of going racing. Teams typically chase sponsorship in order to go racing, but MB Motorsport – at its heart a marketing agency – goes racing to further its existing relationships with its clients. Almost the reverse of the norm.

“Our concept of doing what we do is, ‘We are MB Motorsport,' and that is the brand,” Blundell says. “It's a team, because there's a whole team of people. We are not a racing team that goes to find funding; these are our partnerships. How do we actually drive value through them? And the value we drive through is driven off the back of a motorsport platform.

“So at that point we also then go, ‘OK, what's the most effective and efficient way to do this?’ It’s to contract with an operating team, and where we're slightly different is there's an operating team that has the cars and the kit and an element of personnel that can fundamentally operate the cars, then we have our own engineers and data engineers and team manager that are on our payroll that then give us the classification of being an independent team, and that's how we operate.”