Career
10 Questions With… Gary Ekerold
by Raceteq
6min read
Gary Ekerold is the general manager of the Jaguar TCS Racing Formula E team and has played an integral role since it entered the world’s only all-electric world championship in 2016. Now, he takes on Raceteq’s 10 Questions.
Sign up for a newsletter and we'll make sure you're fully up-to-date in the world of race technology
What is your greatest career success?
But also, just getting to work with Frank Williams and the Williams Formula 1 team for 10 years is an achievement because, as a young boy, I always looked at Williams Formula 1 and thought ‘there's a company I want to go and work for’, and I achieved that.
What advice would you give to someone who wants to build a career in motorsport, just as you have?
The Jaguar Formula E cars at 2026 pre-season testing in Valencia, Spain
What is the day-to-day of your job now?
Jaguar’s Mitch Evans celebrates the team’s Formula E victory in Monaco in 2024
What’s one example of a time when you made a mistake and bounced back?
There are mistakes without question, but mistakes have to be taken into context, because you decide based on the information you have at that moment in time.Maybe six months later you look back on it with hindsight, and everyone can be the chairman of the hindsight society. So, you can call it a mistake, or you can describe it as, “we made that decision at that moment in time, but it didn't work out.”
We've signed some drivers that haven’t worked out in the past.
Some of them just didn't work out, but you can't dwell on those things, and you just have to fix them, and you've got to change quickly because if you stick with a decision that you know is wrong for too long, that's when it starts to hurt.
Everyone makes mistakes; there's nothing wrong with making a mistake; the problem is not correcting it or making it again.
The second seat alongside Mitch (Evans), who always just did enough and was always two or three-tenths quicker than the guy sitting next to him, was very difficult for us to fill for a long time.
When we got Nick (Cassidy) in from 2023-25, that was the result of learning from things that had happened before, so you learn and adapt.
Antonio Felix da Costa is Mitch Evans’s team-mate at the Jaguar Formula E team
What’s your favourite motorsport innovation, and your favourite motorsport vehicle?
The motorcycle is my favourite innovation. Simple as that. People talk about factory machinery being absolutely exquisite today, and yet they don't recognise that factory machinery in the 60s and 70s was too.
My favourite vehicle is the MV Augusta: the three-cylinder 500 MV Augusta that ‘Ago’ Giacomo Agostini and Phil Reed and all those guys rode in the late ‘60s. They were using magnesium casings and were proper pieces of artwork back then.”
| Career timeline | |
|
2003 - 2007 |
Team Principal of Nokia Ekerold Honda in WSB and BSB series |
| 2007 - 2011 |
Finance Manager at Williams Racing |
| 2011 - 2013 |
Project Co-Ordinator of Jaguar CX75 project |
| 2013 - 2016 |
Operations Manager at Fortescue (nee Williams Advanced Engineering) |
| 2016 - 2024 | Sporting manager at Jaguar TCS Racing |
| 2024 - present | General manager at Jaguar TCS Racing |
Who is one motorsport personality that you would love to have dinner with, and why?
Damon Hill. I'll tell you why. The children of successful parents are very rarely successful themselves. The reason being that the parents are so focused on their own careers that their children don't get the kind of attention they need. Some parents live vicariously through their own children and then push those children to success.
So, to meet somebody successful who is the son of a very successful father, I take my hat off to him. That’s because I know some of the struggles that I've faced in my life, trying to live up to the expectations of a world champion father. So, I'd really like to unpick Damon's brain and try to understand how he dealt with what he dealt with at an early age with his dad’s (Graham Hill’s) success and the tragedy of his death too.
1996 Formula 1 world champion Damon Hill is Gary Ekerold’s chosen dinner guest
If you wanted every motorsport fan to understand one facet of motorsport, what would it be?
That motorsport is genuinely a team sport. Yes, the racing drivers are clearly the heroes. But - this is something that's lost on some people - even the best racing drivers need a great team behind them.
Likewise, picture the best team in the world: if they haven't got the right driver in the car, then they can't win anything. So, the best people, if they don't have the right equipment and if they don’t have the right support, they aren’t going anywhere.
At NASA, to get somebody to the moon requires somebody who even sweeps the floors to be part of the programme. That's how I approach everything we do. The young person who looks after our schedule and our development schedule and our procurement is as super important in delivering success as the guy who sets up the car.
What’s one racing circuit you’d urge every motorsport fan to visit (at least) once in their life?
The Nurburgring Nordschleife. I have a personal connection to the Nordschleife because my dad is actually the last man ever to win an official grand prix there, either bikes or cars. They stopped racing GPs there in 1980, and that was the last year.
On August 24, 1980, he won the 350cc race. His lap time in the 350cc race would have put him second in the 500cc race behind Marco Lucchinelli. The Nordschleife is a challenge that most people, some who are even involved in racing today, just don't appreciate.
What’s one big change you’d make to the regulations in Formula E?
I’d make the cars look different, and I would differentiate from manufacturer to manufacturer. They would be very small styling cues within the aero but without an aero performance impact.
I think that's something that we do suffer from a little bit: the fans not being able to distinguish between the cars apart from the livery. I think that would make quite a change to the general public's perspective of Formula E.
