The eldest son of renowned driver and Bathurst 1000-winning team owner Tom Walkinshaw will team up with brother Sean in a four-hour Fun Cup race at Silverstone.
It will mark his debut car race and a return to competition since a brief stint in karting while still at school.
Since then Ryan Walkinshaw’s career has been vastly different to that of Sean, who is an accomplished professional GT racer.
The elder Walkinshaw brother has instead been focussed on the family business empire which includes co-ownership of Walkinshaw TWG Racing in Supercars.
That, he says, was at the direction of his late father, with Ryan only now feeling the business is in a position where he can indulge his desire to go racing.
“I did a little bit of karting when I was younger,” Walkinshaw told Speedcafe.
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“My dad banned me from doing it because I was good in school and obviously you’ve got to sacrifice studies if you want to go and do racing properly, so he banned me from doing that.
“I was quite fast when I was younger and wanted to do more of it, but I was told I had to focus on school and not get distracted by spending every Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday going karting.
“Maybe [Sean] wasn’t as good as me [at school], or maybe he was better at negotiating with my dad about allowing him to race.
“I always said, I wanted to start racing once I’ve got a bit more time to do things and I’ve got some time at the moment because the business is going well.
“Sean booked us in to do the 4 hours of Silverstone in September in Fun Cup in the UK just for a bit of fun.
“We’ve been doing some testing and we’ll do Silverstone and probably another few races, we’ll see if we can do Daytona at the end of the year, depending on how Silverstone goes.”
The Fun Cup is a single-make, tube-frame series not dissimilar to Aussie Racing Cars, with all cars fitted with a Volkswagen Beetle body shape.
Ryan Walkinshaw has enlisted former British Touring Car regular Paul O’Neill as a driver coach in the lead-up to the event.
“It’s been really, really fun,” said Walkinshaw of the preparation so far.
“I’ve got a really good driver coach who has managed to get me up to speed pretty well.
“At Silverstone I was pretty close on lap times to Sean by the end of the second test day, so that was good and encouraging that I’m not incredibly slow.
“I’ve got some pace already initially, so I’ll just keep working on it, try to be consistent and try not to fuck it up during the race so that Sean can bring it home for a decent result.
“So we’ll do Silverstone, have a bit of fun and then I’ll see how I go. I might look at doing some GT4 next year as well.”
Even if Walkinshaw does catch the racing bug, he is adamant he’ll stop short of sampling one of his team’s Toyota Supra Supercars in the future.
“I’ll leave that to Chaz and Woody,” he said. “I need someone to blame if it hits a wall.”
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