Peter Kox On Hans Reiter: “I’ve Got To Tip My Cap”
It’s going to take a while before you see Reiter Engineering on an entry list ahead of an event without the assumption that Peter Kox will also be listed, as for so long he’d been partnered with Hans Reiter before he left the organisation last month. When DSC sat down with Kox back at this year’s Blancpain Test at Paul Ricard for a long chat about his history with the team, little did we know that the partnership was nearing its end.
My first memory of Kox driving for Reiter was pretty recently to be honest. Sitting on the Mercedes grandstand at the 2010 round of the FIA GT1 World Championship at the Nürburgring, watching what was then a competitive field of cars fight through changeable conditions in the Saturday Qualifying Race, I remember being amazed.
Kox and his teammate back then, Christophe Hasse, didn’t win that day, Stefan Mücke and Darren Turner did, but they finished on the podium in their immaculately turned out matt black Murciélago LP670 R-SV. Needless to say, it was still a notable achievement in that car, as it looked like a handful on the greasy circuit.
‘The car is not quite there yet,’ I later learnt that he told DSC that weekend. ‘But we are working on it and improving it.’ As it turns out, that meeting in Germany summed up his time with the team almost perfectly. Despite being so talented behind the wheel, Peter Kox only won one championship with Hans’ team, but it doesn’t matter. In what turned into a mainly developmental role towards the end, he piloted so many cars which turned out to be fan-favourites, all the while helping put the German GT specialists on the map.
Much of the sportscar faithful will know that his time with Reiter dates back further than that damp weekend at the ‘Ring, though it may come as a surprise just how much.
‘I met Hans actually in 1994, and I got a works contract with BMW in 1995 during the super touring car era,’ says Kox. ‘It turned out that he would be my engineer while I was at Schnitzer. We worked together for three years, and that’s where our relationship started.’
The pair moved on after that brief stint with the German marque, but after an excursion into the British Touring Car Championship and a few other series, the then budding Dutchman ended up back with Hans Reiter, and almost from that point would become an integral part of the operation.
‘I remember getting back together with Hans for a one-off race in the FIA GT Championship as part of the Lamborghini Diabolo project, I drove at Estoril with Oliver Gavin under very difficult circumstances and came fifth. It was an unbelievable result actually, and it started something, after that Hans got the deal to develop the Murciélago for Audi then as they’d just bought Lamborghini, and from the word go I was in that car,’ he recalls.
It wasn’t an easy inception for Reiter’s hand in developing a GT car though. The project with the Murciélago was tough, and initially had to be postponed. The end of the 2003 FIA GT season saw the car’s debut, but without the original lineup of Kox and Gavin behind the wheel. Instead, the team tackled Monza with a none other than Tom Kristensen and Rinaldo Capello, and withdrew the entry before the race.
‘They struggled mightily. It was hard for them, I had commitments with Prodrive so I was in its Ferrari, and Gavin was in a Corvette at that race at Monza. We were really happy we were not in it!’ he chuckles. ‘But after that I was much more involved, and I remember scoring a podium at Valencia on my first race in the car. After that the relationship intensified.’
The decision to continue helping Reiter Engineering develop and race cars for such a long time meant he often found himself jumping from series to series, and constantly going back to the drawing board, trying out new machinery. That in itself has its pros and cons, especially for any driver who has goals, or likes to move up a ladder.
When Kox was at Ricard for instance, he was testing the latest of Reiter’s Lamborghini GT3 cars, without knowing if he’d be racing in it. Bumping into him at Zolder at the tail end of last season’s Blancpain Sprint Series, I remember speaking about this very subject: he was there to help a customer of Reiter Engineering, he wasn’t there for himself. Being a ‘gun for hire’ for a team like that, which has ambitions much larger than its internal infrastructure, is a demanding task and requires a lot of patience and skill.
‘You start from scratch, that makes it interesting for me as a driver,’ explains Kox. ‘There’s so many problems, for most teams they buy a car, and if it doesn’t work they go back to the manufacturer for a new part. But Reiter does everything in-house, from the gearbox, to the chassis. When I’m trying a new car, I just drive as fast as I can, and monitor it.’
‘The GT3 concept has really helped Reiter grow, because the Gallardo has been so successful. But it’s been total chaos, Hans is a loose water cannon, and that makes it difficult! He demands so much of his people, but he also expects so much from himself. I’ve hopped between Reiter and Prodrive, and it couldn’t be any more different.’
‘When I was with George Howard-Chappell and Hans at the same time I could see the difference in mentality. I must say that Hans gets the job done with a lot fewer people, and it’s controversial. Back in 2010 for instance we sold 22 Gallardos I think, as well I raced in GT1 and a bit of GT3. It’s times like that which made me laugh when I heard Prodrive mechanics complaining, because if they spent a month with Reiter they’d go crawling back to the Island on their knees!
‘It has its charm, but it’s on a shoestring budget, he’s not a manufacturer who can just put in three million: look at the Camaro for instance.’
It would be easy to mistake Hans Reiter’s operation for a factory one, however, like that of Olaf Manthey in the World Endurance Championship, and that’s a huge compliment. A specialist in racing the much-loved Italian brand Lamborghini, it’s safe to say that many people who watch GT racing closely will miss the interest and excitement Peter Kox always brought with him when he drove for the German team. But all good things must come to an end.
‘On one hand, we are very close, but it’s difficult because we have a working relationship,’ he says on reflection. ‘He’s not a manufacturer, and people forget that. He runs a small operation, and takes a lot of risks. Personally I’ve got to tip my cap to him because he’s a real racer, and that’s why I’ve always been happy to be involved. We got results, but we worked harder than most, it was a big, big challenge.
‘It looks very unlikely I’ll be doing a GT programme with him this year,’ Kox said in parting that day.
And as it turns out, he was right.
by Stephen Kilbey, dailysportscar.com
