TRUCK RACING
Truck & Driver July 2019^79
ran his business so he could go
racing. He would have wanted to
see me race a truck.”
Luke’s first truck was bought
from Trevor Martin, having
originally been owned by Rick
Collett. Luke stripped down the
ERF ES6-cabbed racer to its
subframe and fully rebuilt it,
adding fresh MAN cab panels.
The truck was competitive
from the outset, Luke scooping a
number of podium finishes,
including some first places, and
ending the season as the
Division 2 runner-up. “I was over
the moon with how the first
season went, but I ended up
trying to jump ahead too quickly
and bought a Division 1 truck
from Europe for the 2016
season... I went to France to get
it and it turned out to be an
absolute dog,” he grimaces.
With a new cab on it, his
original race truck is still
competing today in the hands of
Paul Rivett, testimony to how
well the original build was done.
The “dog” reportedly had a
racing engine in it, but when
Luke discovered he was well off
the pace, investigations revealed
it was just a normal truck engine;A pair of new manual XF 530s are on the way soonRoss Garrett
Transport
On the business side, the
transport company runs
eight trucks in total, with
Luke generally out driving a
couple of times a week. The
fleet consists of Mercedes,
Daf and Renault.
Luke’s personal favourite is
the 95XF 530, which sounds
fantastic through a Dynex
Euro 4-spec exhaust. Two
brand-new XF 530s are on
the way too, complete with
every option ticked and, most
pleasingly, 16-speed manual
gearboxes.Luke finally came good in last year’s BTRC Division 2 seasonthere was nothing wrong with it
as such, it just wasn’t giving the
ultimate grunt required for
Division 1. After a year of being a
back-marker, Luke decided to
sell it and, on the final day of the
season, a German race team
came to check it out. They looked
it over and offered €55,000,
which Luke was delighted to
accept. There was just the small
matter of the final race.
“My mum said to me, ‘Luke, if
I were you, I’d park that in the
paddock and sit this race out.’ But
I didn’t think that was the right
thing to do; I had a responsibilityto the Championship and the
fans who come to watch, so I
went and raced.”
You really couldn’t make up
what happened next. Luke was
involved in a serious accident
during the race, which saw the
truck rolled on its side and
written-off – €55,000 (about
£47,000) lost in the blink of an
eye. “It didn’t just put an end to
the racing, it nearly broke me full-
stop,” he recalls. But not one to
be beaten, Luke made the tough
decision to sell his fully-decked-
out race truck transporter for
£15,000 and bought an MANTGA rolling chassis for the same
price from Ben Horne.Cummins, goings
Money was tight, but he was able
to source a good Cummins
14-litre engine from Kent,
plumbed it in, wired it up and
managed to compete for
three-quarters of the 2017
Division 2 season. The truck ran
okay and Luke could score
podium finishes, but as good as
those old mechanical Cummins
engines were back in the
day, it was never going to
be super-competitive.