Clatterham Racing

Clatterham Racing is a motor racing team founded by Sri Lankan tea magnate Tony Fernando to take part in Touring Car series around the world.

Background

The following is the official publicocrap issued by Tony Fernando's press officer as the team was founded:

On the small island of Sri Lanka was born a boy, poor and miserable, on a tea plantation. His father was a tea packer. His mother was a tea picker. But who could have foreseen this combination of picker and packer would produce such a wonderful story? Plucked from obscurity as the poor wages of the tea plantation forced the parents to give up their child to an orphanage, where he was raised and given a basic education. But the boy wanted more. Somehow scraping enough rupees together by busking on the streets to buy a second-hand wallpapering table, a kettle and a stove by his 17th birthday, the boy realised his future lay in making tea. Initially grabbing whatever tea he could get his hands on, the small, improvised tea stall on the streets of Colombo soon won itself a reputation for the excellence of its tea, regardless of which leaf was used and where it had come from. At the age of 19, this young entrepreneur turned his hand to growing his own tea in the grounds of the orphanage he had grown up in, never forgetting his parental roots on the tea plantation. His reputation went through the roof. Soon, he had expanded from the wallpapering table to a proper stall, which became a small shop opposite the Sinhalese Sports Club, supplying the very best tea to thirsty cricket fans who flocked to the ground to cheer on their heroes. He guaranteed jobs for the children of the orphanage that he once called home. His tea plantations expanded, as did his businesses, and eventually - at the age of 32 - he had bought the tea plantation he was born on, and built a house for his biological parents who never had to work again. His tea became the most iconic brand in Sri Lanka, having dedicated every aspect of his life to it.

You have just met Tony Fernando, and you have drunk that first refreshing cup of Fernando's Green Leaf Tea.

This was then followed by a statement from Mr Fernando himself, describing his aims for the team:

I have given my life to tea, I have become the greatest tea maker in the world, even better than that Mrs Doyle somewhere in Ireland who is a huge fan of my tea. But life cannot be all about tea forever. I am going motor racing, and with my team, fuelled by the finest tea on earth, we aim to conquer the track as I have conquered the teapots of the world. I would like to introduce you to Clatterham Racing. We will enter Touring Car Series, we will try the BTCC, DTM, ETCC, WTCC, STCC, anything we can get out hands on, because you need "T" to spell all of these. Maybe we might try the REECCS one day, even though there is no "T" in it. This new Warped Touring Car Series is a perfect vehicle for our first foray into the world of racing. And so we will enter with a couple of Mercedes 190E saloons, known for their durability in Albania, where 104% of all cars are old, indestructible Mercs, and where my tea is very popular with the locals.

P.S.: TEA POWER!

Drivers

Tony Fernando has a whole stable of favoured drivers, ensuring the team is always ready to enter any series at any point in time.

Yrjö Perkelainen

Born 8 July 1976, Vantaa, Finland. Yrjö Perkelainen says nothing unless he has to, and when he does, it is usually an explosion of Finnish expletives quite unbecoming for someone of his country's usually-reserved disposition. It is said that this is how he gained his interesting surname, being descended from a long line of Perkelainens who have all shared a similar characteristic. It is also said that he resembles Darkthrone frontman Nocturno Culto after an accident involving his hair, a lawnmower, and a bottle of nuclear-strength bleach. It is also said that he was born with an innate ability to drive fast on loose surfaces, due to being Finnish.

Tarmo Mõõk

Born 10 November 1977, Kuressaare, Saaremaa, Estonia (then: Soviet Union). Tarmo Mõõk is not known for being the sharpest tool in the box but who can wrestle a bear to the ground in five seconds flat. He usually communicated with long pauses in the middle of a sentence, and some say he looks like former Derby County goalkeeper Mart Poom after several years eating nothing but anabolic steroids. In reality he grabs birds out of trees and eats them whole, bones, feathers and all, and also has a fondness for roadkill, having been brought up on it during the dreadful years of communism when Estonia was still enslaved by the Soviet Union and butcher's queues were seven hours long for a couple of cubes of rotting rabbit. He did not learn to race as such, just sat behind the wheel of an old Moskvich, floored the throttle and drove past everyone he could as fast as possible.

Jason van Drunen

Born 29 September 1973, Prince George, British Columbia, Canada. Jason van Drunen is from the other side of the Atlantic, of distant Dutch ancestry but as his New World immigrant ancestors moved ever further north and west with each passing generation, he has lived most of his life in a log cabin, hidden in the forests of the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia. When occasionally bored of his life as a lumberjack and occasional backwoods chef, he would race his pickup truck against any passing traffic, sometimes up to three cars a day. A brief foray in Vancouver to kickstart a proper motorsport career scared him half to death but he recovered to win the inaugural "Across The Bay, Eh" race. Also with a famous (at least to those who know) lookalike, this time Dave Hunt of Anaal Nathrakh, Mistress, Benediction and other bands. But Dave can't make Jase's excellent moose stew with maple syrup.

Anthrax Raisins

Born 19 April 1984, Bristol, England. Andrew Reynolds was never going to amount to much - a D-grade student at his local comprehensive in St. Paul's, all he hoped for was a career in football. Signed as a goalkeeper for Bristol Rovers' youth team at the age of 14, this was abruptly ended when he got into a fight with one of his own defenders. He fell in with the wrong crowd, and when he wasn't blind drunk on cheap scrumpy he would race an old Citroën Saxo down the A4 with some local chavs. One particular memorable incident (that he had no memory of himself) resulted in him getting so drunk he agreed to change his name by deed poll to Anthrax Raisins. At least his street racing served him well; he was eventually given gainful employment by a local scrap dealer who wanted a capable driver for his banger racing team, in a strange parallel to Þorvaldur Einarsson's rise to the top of F1RMGP. It has been alleged that he is actually Maggot (from Goldie Lookin' Chain), but nobody has ever been able to prove anything.

Frankenstein Wunderbar

Born 17 January 1966, Vaduz, Liechtenstein. Frankenstein Wunderbar was never destined to be a racer. Raised by a wealthy family in a picture-perfect tax haven in the Swiss Alps (or, at least, the bit that isn't Swiss), this minor noble wished for nothing in his youth but would usually get it anyway, and would spend most of his time in the winter months skiing, and in summer, crossing into Austria to remind the locals they didn't have as much money as him. His interest in motorsport stems from an annual hillclimb event from Vaduz to Malbun organised by his family every year since 1922, which he has competed in 13 times and never won, possibly due to potential corruption charges against the Wunderbar family. He is said to have a rather effeminate demeanour, causing some to believe he may have been retrospectively named after Frank N. Furter from The Rocky Horror Show, and those who see him shuffling through the streets of Vaduz like a Teutonic Charlie Chaplin says he looks a bit like Terry Jenkins' hair and moustache has been photoshopped onto Ian Hislop's face.