Anthony Davidson on his racing rollercoaster: ‘I wasn’t nasty enough for F1’

“Justin Wilson was lined up, but he couldn’t fit in the car, so I guess they looked at the other extreme and went for the shortest driver they could!” he says laughing. “My manager and I paid them £250,000 for two races.

“I was so underprepared: different car, different tyres, I didn’t realise that it had some very limited power steering – I just wasn’t physically prepared for it.”

Davidson was ultimately overcome by the car and ended up spinning into both the Hungaroring and Spa kitty litter mid-race, but still considers it as a valiant attempt in the circumstances.

“I felt like I had the speed,” he says. “Jumping in the car and only being 0.4sec off Mark Webber in Budapest, at one of the hardest circuits, halfway through the season, with an additional 10 kilos of fuel in the car because there was a fuel pickup problem. With experienced eyes you think: ‘You know what you did? I actually did a bloody good job!’”

Apart from a solo appearance to stand-in for the unwell Takuma Sato at Sepang ‘05, which ended when his Honda engine expired after two laps, Davidson would spend the next five years testing, racking up 15,000km per year pounding round tracks – not that he seemed to mind at the time.

“I absolutely loved it,” he says. “I couldn’t wait to get in car. Every time I drove it, I saw it as an audition – and I was good at it. The engineers loved my feedback and the test team was more relaxed than the race one. You knew the car like the back of your hand.”

Many felt that Davidson’s considerable talents were wasted in a test team though, and his career course almost changed with a visit to Williams’s Grove base in late 2004 – with the team intent on signing him for 2005.

“I even went to the factory and they made a seat,” he says. “But BAR suddenly got cold feet and thought ‘We don’t want to lose him.’ So they offered me a longer-term deal on better money. I took that decision to stay with the hope one day I’d get a drive there. It’s hard to know when you’re young trying to know where to place yourself. Nobody’s got a crystal ball.”

That race seat did finally come about, in a manner of speaking…

“I wanted F1 so badly, and it didn’t materialise, so I had about another year of testing.”

Just when it seemed like all was lost for his racing career, there was suddenly light at the end of the tunnel.

“I had driven the Peugeot 908 LMP1 car at Paul Ricard in 2008 and loved it,” he says.

“I knew from that moment, that’s what I wanted to do. It suited my style and was a great team with manufacturer support. I just felt like that was the closest thing to an F1 car I had driven.

“Sébastien Loeb had decided that he wasn’t ultimately going to do sports cars, so I’d then had a meeting with Peugeot, but thought there must be loads of drivers who want that seat.

“Then on my way back home from the test, they called me and said they wanted to take me on.

“So from one of my lowest moments, to get that phone call – I was so excited! It was an absolute revelation, a big turning point in my career. The first race was in Sebring, and we won! It was awesome.”

The emotion being let out all at once, Davidson can be seen releasing a scream of sheer joy as Alex Wurz sails over the line in footage of the 2010 12 Hours of Sebring. Finally a top-line drive, finally a winner again.

His new target was a Le Mans victory, but the first of several heartbreaks would arrive immediately, as his LMP1 machine broke down whilst leading in 2010.

“I was grieving – every time I go to Le Mans now, it hurts”

He exited the race in even more dramatic fashion two years later. During his first season with Toyota, Davidson tripped up over a GT car, flipped his car and crashed heavily into the tyre barrier at Mulsanne Corner, breaking two vertebrae.

But he was back again in 2013, chalking up a runner-up place at La Sarthe before arguably his career’s greatest achievement – winning the 2014 World Endurance Championship.

Partnered with Sébastien Buemi, the pair dominated the season, winning four out of eight races and taking another two podiums.

For Davidson, after a lifetime of hard work moving up to this moment, it was almost too much.

“I went through grieving really,” he says, the emotion clear in his voice. “That loss, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. I can completely empathise with the WRT [LMP2] team this year when it happened to them. It’s an awful experience for anyone, let alone when it’s the ultimate win that you’re going for. You couldn’t write it.

“As it happened, I told myself ‘You’ve got to be really kind to yourself, mentally, over the next few days’, because it was such a shock.

“And every time I go there now, it hurts. It’s the one race I really wanted. I can never love the race like I used to.”

Things were about to get worse. In 2018, Toyota announced that Fernando Alonso would be attempting the La Sarthe part of the Triple Crown with the Japanese marque – and it was Davidson, who had just signed a new three-year deal, who would get the shove.

“The way it ended wasn’t the way I wanted it to,” he says. “Although there was always respect there, it was a bit of a messy ending. I would say that for any young driver, and I think it’s more talked about these days, mental health is a big issue. It’s something that any sports person needs to be on top of. There were other factors involved, but I don’t want to go into detail about, it’s too personal.”

Davidson was of course in demand though, and a new lease of life in LMP2 on his racing swansong now sees him in contention for the WEC title with JOTA with Antonio Felix Da Costa and Roberto González this weekend, albeit as an outsider.

“I’ve never wanted it more badly than I do now,” he says. “It’s a bit of a long shot, but in an eight-hour race, anything can happen.

“There’d be nothing better than to walk away as champions at the end of this year.”

There’s been an outpouring of positivity for Davidson since he announced his retirement, even though part of him was hoping to do his talking on the track and slink off without notice.

“In the end, I couldn’t just stop and not say anything, which would have been very much my character, but my wife bullied me into saying something being the press officer she is!”

He’ll still carry on with the simulator work for Mercedes though – “I really do love that job” – as well remaining on our screens with Sky, but it’s his incredible racing talent, which he used solely to put himself on the box in the first place, for which he’ll be remembered by many.

“I really didn’t come from a wealthy background by any stretch of the imagination,” he says. “For little old me from Hemel Hempstead to get through to F1 without any money behind me – I’m very proud of that achievement.”