In May 2014 Graves announced his retirement via social media. His frankness was moving: I have been screwed over by two different teams in the past six months, I now feel I cannot trust anybody in this sport. I can’t drive for anybody if I don’t trust them. Since I have very little support here in Thailand, I have decided to end the struggle [rather than] to carry on.

Graves did drive in the Rolex 24 at Daytona last year but now his retirement looks to be well and truly on the back-burner. He has faith in Manor and is happy to join them in their new venture in LM P2: I’ve known John Booth [co-founder of the team] for nearly 20 years. I’ve known the team since 1998 so when they decided to leave Formula One, we got talking and it didn’t take long at all for everything to move forward.

Having drivern for ADR-Delta at the 2012 and 2013 Le Mans 24 Hour, Graves is pleased to be coming back.

Does it feel good to be with a team you know?

Yes. It’s like coming home. There are still many familiar faces. It’s good to be working with people you can trust and the car is obviously a proven product so I think we’ve got everything ready to go.

In terms of driver expertise, Manor has got what it takes, with Will Stevens, Roberto Merhi and Richard Bradley, LM P2 class-winner at Le Mans last year. However, the team is new to endurance. They’ve been in Formula One for six years but they don’t pretend to know everything. They ask for my opinion and feedback they just want to know everything about endurance racing because it’s something they are not used to. They are willing to learn and I give them as much information as I can. Hopefully it won’t take the team that long to find our feet.

Should we expect to see the Oreca 05 LM P2 among the frontrunners at the 6 Hours of Silverstone this weekend? Graves thinks so. Manor motorsport has been going for nearly thirty years. The in depth knowledge and expertise of the team is so great that I would be very surprised if it took them a long time to learn the ropes.

 

A very happy birthday to @TorGraves, we presented a cake to him at the autograph session pic.twitter.com/8oS0kh6Clf

— ManorWEC (@ManorWEC) March 26, 2016

 

And can Tor Graves be the first Thai driver to win the LM P2 class this season? Yeah (laughs) I think I’ve got every reason to be optimistic. The driver line-up is very, very exciting. All the ingredients are there to make a success of this year.

Geoffroy Barre - Translated from French by Emma Paulay

Photo: Tor Graves at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in 2012. As an experienced driver who has already competed at Le Mans twice, he will be one of the leaders of the Manor team, which is just starting out in endurance.