Twenty-year old Erik Evans, the Atlanta-born, UK-based surprise winner of the 2023 British GT4 Championship, recently signed back on for another year in the British GT4 Series, and also announced that he would be in an Academy Motorsports new-generation S650 Mustang GT4 in this year’s GT4 European Series Powered by RAFA Racing Club.
The first American driver to nail down such an accolade, Evans, hopes, with Ford Performance’s support, to become the first driver ever to defend the British GT crown.
“It has been awesome with Ford,” said Evans. “We did it last year with Ford when we won the championship, and we are ready to race the new generation Ford S650 Mustang. We’re excited to see what it is able to do.”
Last week, Evans put the No. 61 Multimatic Motorsports-built Ford Mustang GT4 through its paces at Donington Park, getting both himself and the Ford in fighting trim.
“I’m racing in the British GT4 Championship and the European GT4 Championship this year,” said Evans. “There is a lot going on. I’m trying to repeat my championship from last year in the British championship, and then I want to try and leave a mark on Europe and show that Americans can come over here and beat them. Last season was my rookie year in GT racing. It was pretty crazy because I didn’t know any of the tracks and had never done any racing in GT cars before. I think it was a little unexpected, but completely welcomed.”
Evans set out on his motor racing journey in 2017 when he attended AMP Karting School. By 2021 he was lining up in the Road to Indy categories, but long the way was introduced to VRD Racing’s Dan Mitchell, who found him a ride in the final British GT4 race of 2022. It was at Donington Park where he caught the gaze of the Academy Motorsports outfit.
“Basically, I did F4 and then the following year I did USF2000,” he said. “Reality set in a little bit and you start looking at the bigger picture of schemes and open wheel racing is very, very, very, very, very expensive and very, very talented and very hard to get a spot because there are so few spots available. Basically, what happened was that I was racing for this team called Velocity Racing Development out of Atlanta and the team owner actually grew up five minutes away from Donington Park here in England and basically I started looking at the big picture. I said, ‘Hey, as much as I’d like to go do Formula 1 or IndyCar, that’s an unrealistic situation for me.’ I turned to Dan Mitchell and said, ‘Hey man, big picture, if I really, really want to make a carer driving race cars, what would I do?’ He said, ‘Go GT racing.’
“So from there, we looked at the IMSA championships and we really looked into that. I started to see a status quo with things going on in IndyCar and in IMSA. I could see that all the guys that were winning everything are Europeans. There are a couple of Americans that can hang up in there, but most of the time it’s these European kids that are trying to make it to F1 or to F2 or stuff like that. They were coming over here and kicking ass in America, so I said, ‘I want to be the best. Why not go where the best come from and learn their way of doing it?’ That’s what I’m doing over here.’”
Shortly after impressing Academy Motorsports team owner Matt Nicoll-Jones at Donington, Evans began considering a full GT4 season in 2023.
“Dan Mitchell and myself were looking at the bigger picture of making a career out of it all, because I would give everything to drive race cars for the rest of my life,” he said. “So, Dan said to me, ‘If you want the best opportunity to get paid to drive cars, go GT. There are so many opportunities for everyone. There are multiple drivers per car, long races and it all just opens up the opportunities. There are so many different championships. There’s no there’s no learning curve. The GT3 and the GT4 cars are the same anywhere you go in the world no matter championships are doing.’
“Going into the 2023 season, I knew that Ford was working on a new GT program. The Ford GT car had been long gone for a couple of years and no-one knew if Ford was going to come back. However, I’d been told that they’re developing a GT3 and a GT4 car and so I was like, ‘Okay, well, I think that’d be really cool with an American brand with an American driver who wants to go and conquer Europe and Le Mans and all this other stuff.’
It all came down to the final race of the year and it took something of a racing miracle, but Evans and teammate Matt Crowley showed up at the 2023 British GT4 Championship finale at Donington Park and managed to claim the series title.
“I started the race and everyone was just kind of stagnant except for our car and I worked myself all the way up to third,” said Evans of his Donington race. “I almost made it up to second position as well as first overall in GT4. Then the safety car came out. And then the biggest miracle happened in our favor. The championship-leading Optimum Motorsport car, which basically just had to finish in the top 10 to win the title, had a battery issue in the pitstop and they couldn’t restart the car and they lost a lap. At the same time, our car was absolutely on rails. We went from about 11th place all the way up to the lead and then gapped everyone by the time the checkered flag fell. So it was just something that was completely unexpected.”
Evans’ story drew a lot of fan support.
“The fans were great to me and took notice, but I think there’s more hype on the car,” he said. “We’re racing against Aston Martins and McLarens and BMWs and all these like cars that, I hate to even say it, your average person can’t afford. I think that’s why people love the Mustang so much. It’s a car that people can relate with. They can go buy one. And it just it sounds so different to everything else out there, and it looks so different to anything else out there. You have these sleek sportscars and supercars and then you just have this big old broody Mustang that’s just out there making the V8 sound that only a naturally aspirated 5.2 liter V8 can create.”
About to fight a two front war come 2024 GT4 competition, Evans firmly believes that both he and his racing allies – Academy Motorsports, Multimatic Motorsports and Ford Performance – are certainly armed for battle.
“This year Ford and Multimatic have taken on a whole new level. With the testing that we just did at the Paul Ricard circuit the other week, we had five engineers from Ford Performance just for our two cars. They’re really ramping up to support and they really want this car to do well in Europe and they really want my teammate Marco Signoretti, who is also a Multimatic development driver, to excel. They really want us to go to go out and just conquer everything. Ford and Multimatic are really excited to see what we’re going to do for the Ford brand over in Europe.
“And the new car is pretty freaking cool. Essentially, it’s an evolution rather than a revolution. It’s like having an EVO kit. They’ve changed so many little things that it just feels completely different. But, I mean, it’s a pretty exciting car. They’ve made it a lot more ergonomical for the driver. It’s got the square steering wheel, like an F1 car. It’s really slick and nice.
“We were talking to Jeff Ripley directly. Jeff is the guy Multimatic who basically designed the car. That car is his baby and his imagination. The ethos behind the car is different from the last car. It’s more set up to for a worldwide scale. They’ve spent lots of money researching and developing this car and it’s a pretty crazy piece of kit. I think, by far, it is the most race car out of any GT4 car out there.”
So what will come next as part of Evans’ motor racing master plan?
“My goal is next year to move up to GT3,:” he said. “I actually wanted to move up to GT3 this year. However, with the delayed production of the GT3 cars, our team was not available to get one until about August. So, I said, ‘I’ll step up to the plate. We’ll go run British and European GT in 2024. And it’s also good because I’ll get to go learn the European tracks before stepping up to GT3.’ That was kind of my decision behind that.
“The long-term dream at the end a day is to just have fun for the rest of my life driving race cars. I don’t really care about making big bucks or anything like that. If I could just break even try and race cars my life, I’d be happy. I think it’s the coolest thing ever and the coolest job on the planet. Every little boy when there wants to be a race car driver at some point. That’s really what I want to do. I want to go win the biggest races in the world in the premier class. I want to win in the Hypercar class. I want to win the overall at the Daytona 24 Hours. That’s the stuff I want to do.”
So now Evans will look to Oulton Park circuit and the curtain-raising round of the 2024 British GT4 Championship.
“On Easter weekend, we have the first race at Oulton Park,” he said. “It’s the first race of the British GT Championship. It’s a sprint race weekend which means it is two one-hour races arnd you have to do a pit stop at about the halfway mark to change drivers. No fuel, no tires and just driver change. And that’s an exciting track because it’s really narrow and it’s barely two GT4 cars wide, and then you have the GT3 class out there with you, which is even wider and it just makes it chaotic and awesome.
“From our driver standpoint it can be really stressful, but for sure from a viewership standpoint, looks awesome. It’s the perfect time of year in England. You have no idea what the weather’s going to be. It will be 60 degrees and sunny, and then the next minute, it’s just chucking it down rain. You don’t know and I think that’s what makes it exciting. I’m really looking forward to that. And then the next week after that we have the first race in the European GT season at Paul Ricard in France. I’m excited and we’re getting thrown into the deep end, I’ve never done anything in the European GT series. I have no idea where it’s going be like, but I am just super excited for it.”