When to quit and what to do with the rest of your life: those are the two biggest, most daunting questions for any professional sportsperson. You’ve dedicated yourself from childhood to the pursuit of excellence, you’re still relatively young, perhaps only halfway through your lifespan – and you still love what you do. But what now?
“It’s a bigger deal than most people outside of professional sport realise,” says Johnny Mowlem, who spent 20 years being paid to race sports cars around the world, then finally called time on his professional career in 2017. “I found it tough. I was fortunate to reach the level of racing internationally but it involved so much travel that for the last five or six years I was thinking about an exit strategy, while not really doing a lot about it.
“In my last year and a bit I noticed I was probably clinging on tighter in terms of my performances. I was still delivering on track – for example, even in my last season I was fortunate enough to get the overall prototype challenge pole position at the Daytona 24 Hours in the wet – but I could sense deep inside I was having to dig deeper to get to a level that had felt relatively effortless before.”
Mowlem always has been a bright chap. Unlike most of his racing driver breed, he went to university and gained a degree in Spanish and economics, before dedicating himself to racing. Promising in Formula 3, he only fell off the single-seater ladder because of money, then reinvented himself as a GT driver. Winning a remarkable 17 races out of 17 in the 1997 UK Porsche Carrera Cup put him on the map, launching him into a career than earned him 10 starts and a class podium at the Le Mans 24 Hours, other overall podiums and class victories at Daytona and Sebring and a European Le Mans Series GT title.
“Then by chance I was with a friend who I used to coach, Ivor Dunbar,” says Mowlem. “He had got a bit more spare time and said to me ‘I’d love to get to Le Mans’. So I suggested we set up a company, not only designed to help him along the motorsport road towards Le Mans, but help others too. That’s when it all started crystallising for me.”
He and Dunbar set up Red River Sport, a management agency with a specific personal touch, catering for amateurs of a certain age and means who need guidance through the shark-infested motorsport waters. “I’ll never forget what [McLaren CEO] Zak Brown said to me years ago when he was my team-mate in F3,” says Mowlem. “He stopped driving because it was evident to him that he wasn’t good enough. He said: ‘The problem you’ve got is you’re going to all these potential sponsors and telling them they need to be supporting you to help you become a professional racing driver. What I’m going to do is set up a company, work out where the best place for each company is within motorsport to suit their needs, and then take them there.’ Look how that turned out for him! I’m now doing something similar for my clients: I work out what could work best for them given their budget and how much time they want to give to their adventure. I then outline to them all their best options, and once they’ve made a decision then I broker the best deal possible for them. Everything is completely transparent. That’s very important to me to make sure no one is being taken advantage of.”
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