Team Spotlight: Terry Stott
Racing for the 2021 Australian F3 Championship may have only consisted of one official round, but it didn’t mean that work was put on hold for Ben Taylor and Tim Macrow Racing for the rest of the year. The year started with Taylor impressing on debut with a pole position and the feature race win at the opening Sydney Motorsport Park event in March, and then managed to maintain his personal best times at various testing days held at Winton Motor Raceway outside of his home state’s extensive lockdowns.
While the spotlight has mostly been placed on Ben and team owner Tim Macrow, one member of the experienced Melbourne team is his engineer, Terry Stott.
Stott started his motorsport journey in 2002 after completing his mechanic apprenticeship with Mercedes Benz, achieving a few “apprentice of the year” accolades as well.
The Melbournian began working with current team owner Macrow in 2008 in the Australian F3 Championship where Macrow finished third outright, and then runner-up in 2009.
In 2010, Stott moved to the UK working with FORTEC Motorsport in the British F3 Championship for 12 months before returning to Australia in 2011. He contracted to various teams in Australian Formula Ford and set up his own team in AusF3, and for five years ran a Mygale F3 car in AusF3 under Harvest Motorsport.
From 2014 to 2019 Stott focussed on race engineering in Asia, mostly with Asian Formula Renault and the Chinese LMP3 series both with S&D Motorsport where Macrow was one of the drivers. His outfit also worked with many drivers from F1, WTCC, European LeMans Cup while racing against such drivers as well as those from WEC, IndyCar and Formula E. During this overseas sojourn Stott also worked with teams in the Asia LeMans Series LMP3, Asian Formula Masters, China GT, China Endurance Series and returned to Australia for the Bathurst 12 Hour as well.
In 2021, Stott met Ben for the first time which is where his father Grant Taylor is extremely grateful for the partnership despite the lack of racing this year.
“Terry is a very modest person but his experience is phenomenal,” said Grant Taylor, father of Ben. “He’s so calm and supportive of Ben and even on the radio he’s such a reassuring voice. He is also extremely clear and concise with his instructions and always listens to Ben on the balance and performance of the car. He really has been a huge asset and Ben’s learned so much from both Terry and Tim. I couldn’t ask for a better team to look after Ben’s racing.”
Ben will return to Tim Macrow Racing in 2022 to compete for the Australian F3 Championship title.