Whatever happens at the Las Vegas Grand Prix this weekend, Aston Martin will be celebrating a remarkable achievement. It’s viva Las Vegas for Andy Stevenson, Aston’s sporting director who will mark his 600th grand prix here, a feat of longevity made all the more striking by the fact he has not missed a single race since he joined the team as a callow youth in 1987.
Such was his childhood ambition to work in F1 that he committed to it in writing. “My mother recently found the paperwork from my first visit to the careers office which said I wanted to work with fast cars and travel the world,” he says with a smile.
“I was always interested in anything mechanical and F1 cars are the best machines on the planet. I love competition and I love travel, so it seemed like the perfect job for me.”
Stevenson, who left school at 17 and immediately set about learning his skills as a mechanic with a racing team, is a personable character, his sharp mind allied to a warm, self-deprecating wit. It was the dream job for him as he contemplated the 599 races that have led to here, under the neon glare of one of F1’s grandest events.
He is at the same team, albeit now under the Aston Martin name, that had started from humble beginnings and where Stevenson had to really knuckle down to prove his worth. After working for a friend’s father’s Formula 3000 team, Stevenson went for a job at Eddie Jordan’s F3 outfit, then riding high in 1987 with Johnny Herbert having taken the British title.
“During the interview, which I thought was going quite well, Eddie Jordan looked in and said: “Don’t hire this guy, he looks like a wanker,’,” says Stevenson, laughing. He got the job but Jordan continued to antagonise him, testing the young man’s determination.
“I don’t know why you are here, I’m going to fire you, you’ll be gone in three weeks,” was Jordan’s greeting during his opening days but Stevenson used it as motivation and stuck it out. “I am going to prove this guy wrong, I thought, and I have said to him many times since, I’m still here, Eddie,” Stevenson says.
At that point Jordan’s team was 12 people in its small premises at Silverstone. When the Irishman set his sights on F1, in 1989, Stevenson could not wait to join the adventure. By the time they were ready to go for the 1991 season they had expanded to the “giddy heights” of a whopping 50 personnel but by F1 standards of the time were still very much a plucky, ambitious privateer outfit.
At their first race, the US GP in Phoenix, they had a crew of 18 to run two cars and were learning on the go. “The weekend went in a flash,” Stevenson says. “We had never practised a live pit stop until the race and I don’t recall it being particularly quick.”
How he and they adapted speaks volumes as to why the team, who took their first win with Damon Hill behind the wheel at Spa in 1998, has enjoyed such a rich history and long punched above their weight. “We learned quickly,” says Stevenson.
“Everyone there were pure racers. We were there because we wanted to be in F1 and wanted to be competitive. It’s the people we have always attracted, who want to go racing and want to compete, the attitude we still instil with everybody. No matter what situation we find ourselves in, we just keep pushing.”
The road from those early steps has been long and with no little drama. Since Jordan sold up in 2005, recognising he could no longer meet the financial demands required by an ever-advancing F1, his racing team evolved into Midland, Spyker, Force India, Racing Point and now Aston Martin, occasionally coming close to dissolution along the way.
Today, however, they are on a sounder footing than ever before. At Aston Martin, the double world champion Fernando Alonso and Lance Stroll are backed by 900 people in a state-of-the-art complex at Silverstone, having signed the former Red Bull designer Adrian Newey for 2025, all enabled by the largesse of their billionaire owner, Lawrence Stroll.
Stevenson, who is convinced the team’s target of winning world championships is within their grasp, has worked his way up. By 2004, he was team manager and since 2008 has been sporting director, watching the sport evolve over the past 33 years.
“The competition has improved, the quality of the teams has improved massively, the whole sport is so much more professional than it used to be,” he says. “I didn’t think it could get any more popular than it was in the 90s but the size of the audiences and the atmosphere trackside is phenomenal now.”
So what comes next, after a quiet drink in Vegas? “Another 600? Maybe I can get to a thousand, but I won’t be counting,” he says. “I just want to keep doing this for as long as they will have me. I have no intention of stopping. As long as I get up every morning loving the sport and the race team I work for there is no reason for me to stop.
“Eddie Jordan used to say I was only still there because: ‘No one else would f**king have me’. I’ve had offers from other teams but never been able to bring myself to sign them because this is personal.” – Guardian
