We all like an underdog, and Swiss driver and team owner ‘Walti’ was a best of breed. He tells Robert Weber about his fast-paced youth, his Schnitzer years and beating Porsche at its own game

PAUL-HENRI CAHIER/GETTY IMAGES

Joest, Kremer, Richard Lloyd, John Fitzpatrick… where would Group C have been without the great Porsche customer teams who were let off the leash to race, and sometimes beat, the factory 956s and 962s? Among the colourful throng, Swiss-based Brun Motorsport quickly established itself among the best in those heady days – and in 1986 even upstaged the works Rothmans cars, Joest and Jaguar to snatch a teams’ World Sportscar Championship crown.

Founder Walter Brun has rarely been interviewed, especially for English publications, but now, age 80, he granted Motor Sport an audience to tell us how it all began for him first as a racing driver and then also as an entrant, why Stefan Bellof preferred racing for his team than the factory and how his short, ill-fated dalliance with Formula 1 almost sank him.

Motor Sport: Walti, you were a racing driver before you were a team entrant. How did it all start for you?

Walter Brun: “Well, I was a farmer’s son. We had a farm with a shop and a post office. We had farmhands and milkers who I always helped. I was already driving a tractor at the age of eight and thus gained my first driving experience. When I was 12, I drove to school in my father’s car. I parked right next to the police station and he didn’t report me. He knew I was driving and I knew he was having an affair with one of our waitresses. Live and let live. That was the way it was in the country in the 1950s.

“Later I bought a Lotus Cortina from a dealer in the village. I drove it quite fast. There were no speed limits in our village. The other mothers said, ‘Walti, you’d better go racing. We always have to get the children off the road when you drive around here.’ So that’s what I did and I went hillclimbing in a Lotus Cortina. But it soon became too slow for me.”

You first made your name in BMWs.

“Yes, I went to BMW Schnitzer and said, ‘Give me a proper car.’ I got one of their hot BMW 2002s. Until 1970 I only drove hillclimbs or slaloms. And then at some point the Schnitzers said, ‘Walti, come out on the race track.’ At first I had to get used to the fact that there was someone on the right, on the left, in the back and in the front.”