At the Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez this weekend, the F1 world will celebrate 400 races for Fernando Alonso at the Mexican Grand Prix.
It’s an impressive achievement for the double World Champion, as he becomes the first driver in the history of the sport to notch up the quad ton.
And while 400 races will be celebrated with all the pomp and pageantry you would expect of the occasion, you’d have to wonder just how much celebration is required when someone reaches an even more impressive number.
For Aston Martin Sporting Director Andy Stevenson, it’s something he will find out at the Las Vegas Grand Prix next month, as the race will be his 600th he has been involved in.
But when The Roar asked him in Austin ahead of the US Grand Prix how he felt about the achievement and how he will celebrate, the Englishman gave a somewhat surprising answer.
“To be honest if someone hadn’t raised it, I wouldn’t have known it,” Stevenson said. ”I haven’t really been counting. For me it’s just a normal year and a normal race.”
While he may see it is just another day at the office, there is no doubting that it is an impressive milestone for the man who might just be the most loyal employee in the paddock.
Every single one of the 597 races he has been involved in up until the US Grand Prix have been with the same team, with only the colours and names of the team changing throughout his epic F1 journey which began at the 1991 US Grand Prix in Phoenix.
This loyalty to “Team Silverstone”, as it has effectively been known as through all the name changes, reaches beyond even Formula 1, with Stevenson first joining the team in the late 1980s when it was still racing in the junior categories of British motorsport.
Stevenson explained that he was working as a mechanic for British Formula 3 team Magnum Motorsport when he soon found himself on the radar of Eddie Jordan Racing, run by the flamboyant Irishman Eddie Jordan, with his introduction to the team and his new boss not exactly a positive one.
“I met a chap called Bosco Quinn, who had worked for Eddie, had gone to work for Magnum, and then went back to Eddie and gave me a call and offered me a job,” Stevenson explained. “I had to go for an interview, and whilst Bosco was interviewing me, Eddie came into the room and said ‘Bosco, who's this c**t? Don't hire him, he looks like a wanker.”
“Anyway, I got the job…I turned up for my first day at work and Eddie arrived…and he says ’what do you want?’ and said ‘I start work today’ and he said ‘I told you, you're a c***, I don't want to employ you, f**k off.”
“He then has me doing all sorts of crap jobs…and was always on my case…I was working some wizardry in the ECUs to make them work to be compatible with different engines, and Eddie comes up to me and he said ‘I don't like you…in three weeks’ time I guarantee you'll be gone.
“I've learned since this was Eddie's way of motivating me…he just wanted more and more and more from you and he got it.
“It was a brilliant way of motivating me, because he set me a challenge.
“It was like, no, f**k you, I will be here in three weeks. And here I am 37 years later.”
(Photo by Getty Images)
Jordan entered Formula 1 after several years of success in the junior formula which included stints in British Formula Three and the International F3000 series, with drivers such as Martin Brundle, Johnny Herbert and Jean Alesi all driving for the team.
“We won the (F3000) Championship with Alesi and that was when Eddie took the decision to gamble in taking the team into Formula One,” Stevenson said. “At the time there was maybe 12 of us that were working for him, and he sat us down and said this is a risk. Who wants to come with us?
“A few of us put our hands up and others said, no we don’t want to go and do Formula One. So then we built the car at the end of 1990, the Gary Anderson-designed car, started running it and then we went racing in 1991.”
1991 brought immediate success, with the team scoring an impressive 13 points to finish fifth in the Constructors’ Championship and most notably gave Michael Schumacher his Formula 1 debut at the Belgian Grand Prix.
The team would then go on to a variety of success over the next 14 years, winning four races and even fighting for the Drivers Championship with Heinz-Harald Frentzen in 1999.
Their first win famously came in the form of a 1-2, with Damon Hill beating Ralf Schumacher at the 1998 Belgian Grand Prix, a race that Stevenson still holds very dear to his heart.
“It was phenomenal and made even better by the fact that that weekend we had bussed the whole factory out to the track,” he said. “So they were all up on the hills getting absolutely drenched.
“When it came to the podium ceremony we had the whole factory there. It was just amazing.”
Jordan’s time in the sport would come to an end at the end of 2005, with the team being sold to Russian organisation the Midland Group.
Two further sales occurred at the end of 2006 and 2007, with the team changing from Midland to Spyker to Force India between 2006 and 2008.
During this period, Stevenson went from Chief Mechanic at the team to the role of Sporting Director, a position he still holds to this day.
He remained with the team over the Force India years until it was eventually sold once again, this time to current owner Canadian billionaire Lawrence Stroll in 2018, with the team rebranding as Racing Point in 2019 and then to its current guise as Aston Martin in 2021.
Stroll’s arrival has seen a rapid increase in investment and development at the team, with a brand new factory being built, a rapid increase in both staff and facilities as well as the massive coup in landing arguably the greatest F1 designer of all time in Adrian Newey.
A fifth win for Team Silverstone came in 2020, with Sergio Perez winning the Sakhir Grand Prix in Bahrain. After the victory, Stevenson was rewarded for his loyalty to the team by being invited on the podium to accept the trophy for the winning Constructor.
“We’d had a torrid time and we’d come through it, and Lawrence was building the project he said to us I’m going to turn this into a race winning team,” Stevenson remembers.
(Photo by Getty Images)
“It happened sooner than we expected. For me it was probably the only time I’ll ever get to go on the podium because we like to share it.
“Everyone was wearing masks! The only picture I’ve got of me on the podium is wearing a mask. But that’s still obviously a special moment.”
Stevenson said he could’ve never imagined the team he first joined in the 1980s reaching the highs it currently finds itself in.
“Back then (30 years ago) for a top works team, you were looking at 200 people,” he explained. “We built what I called up until very recently ‘the new factory’, which we moved to in 1992 and it was always sort of future-proofed to say when we get bigger and better we’re going to need to put 200 people in this building.
“I think when we moved out of it we were trying to squeeze nearly 600 people. It was not very comfortable. There’s a lot of work we’ve still got to do. Formula One itself has progressed so much over the years.
“In 1991 we thought it was technical and super advanced. Where we are now is obviously at a very different level, but our preparations into being in the right place and becoming a Championship-winning team is phenomenal to be part of.”
This article was originally written for The Roar. You can read the published version here
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