David Soares on cult racing and the carbon fiber railroad earth of Laguna Seca As a lifetime adherent of the cult of sportscar racing I was more than happy to make a pilgrimage this past May Day to my personal Lourdes, Mazda Raceway at Laguna Seca, for the arrival of the latest sportscar reformation, the Grand American Road Racing Rolex Sports Car Series Road and Track 250. GARRA hadn’t made the trek to my part of the world yet and I haven’t been in a position to travel to theirs. There’s been a lot of controversy among the bench-racing crowd about this series and I wanted to be able to make my own heretical judgments about the Daytona Prototypes and their supporting classes. Drivin' and pilotin' the following fer ya are… Many of the greatest names in sportscar racing would be pedaling DP’s around the May Pole, including Le Mans stalwarts Hurley Haywood, Guy Smith, Stefan Johansson, Andy Wallace, David Murry, and Butch Leitzinger. Solid new-wave sportscar men Jorg Bergmeister, Cort Wagner, Ralf Kelleners, Matteo Bobbi, and Fabrizio Gollin joined oldtimers like Elliot Forbes-Robinson and Wayne Taylor. Young hot shoes Memo Gidley, Luis Diaz, Stephan Gregoire, and Alex Gurney (accompanied by dashing dad Daniel Sexton) were there plus “Mad Max” Papis, Terry Borcheller, Max Angelleli, and Shane Lewis. What’s not to like? The Quiet Earth The first sign that this was going to be a different kind of sportscar experience was on the highway coming down from my home monastery in Beserkeley-by-the- Beach. The familiar “Race Traffic” signs were nowhere to be seen along Highway 1. Where were the “Welcome Race Fans” banners on the fruit stands and bars? Maybe I got the date wrong. It got even weirder at the track. By Sunday morning the Grand Am Cup teams had pulled up stakes to head back East and the paddock was three-quarters empty. The Vendor Village had only five tents up. One of the regular model-and- book dealers told me that he was supposed to share his tent but the other guy had pulled out. The “Marque Madness” car club promotion that had seemed like a great way to fill the seats failed to draw more than a few dozen cars (possibly because it had priced itself out of contention). Even the Golden Gate BMWCCA chapter could only muster a couple of dozen cars to watch the Prototype Technology Group M3’s in the GT class. Everybody walking around the track seemed to have a team credential. So where were the fans? It certainly wasn’t a problem with the racing. Spec chassis and spec motors make for close competition. Fifty-three cars lined up on separate grids for the DP and GT classes in the Rolex Series main. When it was over the top ten had finished on the same lap. The inability of Daytona Prototype front clips to stay attached after contact caused an unfortunate finish under yellow, but the gap would have been a half second even without the safety car. Beat Farmers While one sportscar series touts itself as being “For the Fans” the GARRA fashions itself under the banner “A Driving Passion: It’s What Moves Us.” It makes a lot of sense to me as a model for a race series, sort of like the SCCA Runoffs but with a professional feel, faster cars, and a simpler class structure. When 54 entries show up for the Rolex main and another 70 for the Grand Am Cup support series with crews, wives, girlfriends and hangers-on in tow you start wondering if you even want fans to show up and compete for hotel rooms and tables at the local watering holes. Unlike the folks who think that the only reason that GARRA came into being was to siphon manufacturer and team investment away from the American Le Mans Series and into NASCAR’s coffers, I think that the Rolex Series can and should serve a very useful purpose in the smorgasbord of American racing. There has always been a need for an outlet for the “gentleman racer,” or to put it more crassly, the rich guy who can afford big toys. By the time they get to the point that they have amassed a sufficient fortune to live out their racing fantasies their reflexes and stamina aren’t what they once may have been. These guys are often pretty decent drivers, but in a top-rank series they’re at best moving chicanes and at worst a serious accident waiting to happen. Still, they want to get out there and feel like they’re racing drivers. Many of these “gentleman racers” have participated in sportscar racing over the years. When the ALMS began to attract factory teams and international drivers, a lot of these guys have been turning to what we euphemistically refer to as “historic racing.” It seems like a good way to go racing in sexy cars just like their heroes drove. Some of the sanctioning bodies encourage “racing series” for historic cars and wealthy sportsmen. This has been a dangerous trend that has caused a small but alarming number of deaths in the past few years, most notably that of Bob Akin. Those old cars were to be taken seriously when they were new and a quarter century hasn’t done anything but attenuate that tendency. Historic “racing” should be nothing more than a rolling museum. The inventor of the American branch of historic racing, Monterey Historics founder Steve Earle, didn’t have the slightest hesitation banning Sir Stirling Moss when he started “racing” in a priceless Aston Martin DBR1 and pranged it up against a Lister at his race. People who want to “race” in that manner have no business there. No waiting in the waiting room… The Daytona Prototype was made for the wealthy entrepreneur who wants to go racing. The cars are giant cages of chrome-moly steel and carbon-fiber centered around a crash cell an insurance actuary could love. The cars don’t just look like tanks, they’re built like tanks; despite some pretty heavy contact among the 51 starters at Laguna there was only one DP DNF. Their performance was bench- marked to the Porsche 911 GT3 RS, fast but a hefty seven seconds a lap slower than ALMS prototypes around a circuit like Laguna. The series only allows a limited number of approved chassis and engines and tests the motors regularly to make sure that no one has a performance advantage. Their chassis designs are fixed, so the initial investment is good for an indefinite future except for wear and tear. Next year you can but a bigger luxury bus or a fancier pit setup. I’ve always thought that this was the natural niche for Grand Am and I welcomed the DP concept when it was introduced. No more being humiliated by some factory hot-shoe from Monaco. Because sportscar racing has traditionally divided into Prototype and GT ranks, and because for the first couple of seasons there weren’t going to be enough DP chassis completed to fill the grids, Grand Am has supported an active GT class. There has been adjustment, especially after Kevin Buckler won Daytona in a Porsche GT3 RS in 2003. The benchmark car for the class is now the Porsche GT3 Cup. Some questioned this “dumbing down” of the class but in the context of giving the wealthy hobbyist an opportunity to step-up to a professional series it made good sense. The GT3 Cup is a known quantity with a reasonable acquisition cost, good parts support, plenty of wrenching support, and while it’s a turnkey racer it’s tunable in the right hands. Twenty of the twenty-nine GT entries for the Road and Track 250 at Laguna Seca were GT3 Cups. White salmon or pink ? Unfortunately there’s an old saying that goes, “If things sound too good to be true, they probably are.” There’s a serpent in this gentleman racer’s paradise: those big name drivers I mentioned earlier and the professional teams who employ them. When the series started it wasn’t uncommon for a team principal to split driving chores with a hired shoe. Not a bad idea and still sporting in the scheme of things, it’s been done in sportscar racing since the Fifties. Then last season Chip Ganassi Racing showed up with fully professional driver pairings, Toyota power, and Mexican telecom backing. The championship went down to the last race but it was never really in doubt that Ganassi’s team would take home all the marbles and so they did. I haven’t had the chance to sit down with Roger Edmundson or John Bishop and their staff, but I have to wonder whether they fell into the old car count panic endemic to race series in this country. In the 21st Century nobody is anybody if they’re not on TV and even a series aimed at wealthy sportsmen needs a TV package so that they can be somebody. Such a package is a whole lot cheaper if you can convince the network that they can sell a few commercials or that you’ve pre-sold a few yourself. GARRA needed a flash pro team to pick the series up from its Amateur Hour image. It’s never been acknowledged, but my surmise is that Toyota came into the picture as one of the pre-conditions for their future participation in NASCAR. Their Lexus brand isn’t exactly a natural marketing tie-in with sportscar racing. I have yet to see a Lexus corral at Laguna. The car counts are way up this year, but it’s unclear if that is due to the exposure brought by the Ganassi/Toyota tie-in or whether the chassis builders just caught up with demand. Most of the cars have brightly-colored sponsor graphics but the name on the graphics is more often than not stitched on the overalls of the owner- driver. Lutz O' Luck Now that the Toyota snake is in the garden General Motors has stepped up the participation of their Pontiac brand in the series. GM’s marketing in the past few years has been driven by Bob Lutz. Lutz is best known for Chrysler’s marketing- led turnaround in the Nineties, but before that he cut his teeth with Ford Europe and BMW. Back in the Seventies Lutz had “win on Sunday, sell on Monday” drilled into his head by the turnarounds of those two companies. In a few short years “BMW sports-sedan” was transformed from a contradiction in terms into an oxymoron. Lutz wants to take his brands road racing. However, recent events regarding his position at GM may put a hold on any further expenditure. While Cosworth-Ford on the cam covers was common in Formula 1 throughout the Seventies, the real market bounce came from cars with recognizable trade- dress like CSL’s and Capris. Lutz and company want to sprinkle GM’s brands with road racing fairy dust. Chevrolet is in the ALMS and Cadillac has moved down-market into Speed World Challenge after a mis-cue at Le Mans and so they don’t want to make the mistake of eating their own. With Toyota in Grand Am it probably made perfect sense to throw a few million dollars of Pontiac’s marketing budget into the series. Rewrite, remake, buy the title rights… Manufacturer/distributor money may have an even bigger impact on the Rolex GT class. BMW North America realized that their customer base doesn’t care about the Williams Walrus and wants to see BMW’s in GT racing. Their Prototype Technology Group partners tested the waters in SWC in 2003 but realized that the same kind of funny-cars that got them spanked out of the ALMS were going to be dominating that series. They’ve come to Grand Am where the M3’s that were barely competitive against the Alex Job RSR’s can clean-up on Cups. They finished a dominant 1-2-3 at Laguna this year and would have had fourth as well if not for writing a car off in practice. The Porsche brigade has dealt with BMW sedans before, but there are even darker clouds on the horizon. Now the sanctioning body has decided for whatever reason that 29 GT entrants and close racing weren’t good enough and scrapped the GT rules for the umpteenth time, announcing a new “Prep-2” GT category of tube-frame NASCAR- style stockers. So far the only serious car developed for the new class is a Pontiac GTO, and GM’s marketing effort is about as subtle as the message Harry Truman sent to the Emperor of Japan in the bomb-bay of the Enola Gay. The car was developed by Pratt and Miller of Le Mans class-winning Corvette fame. The lead drivers are Jan Magnussen and American F3 phenom Paul Edwards. GM liked the way Kevin Buckler runs his operation so they dangled big money and took him over lock, stock, and barrel to run their operation. Becoming a factory squad was never Buckler’s plan when he changed over to Grand Am. Buckler made the move to Grand Am because his customers were tired of being schooled by the factory teams and the young shoes who file Monegasque tax returns. If you recall, he originally announced Crawford chassis and Infiniti power. It was only after he announced that he would be focusing on the series – where his customers would be more willing to spend money on rides that felt more competitive – that GM and Bob Lutz’ desperation move to Win on Sunday and Sell on Monday sought him out. Do goats eat tin cans ? Buckler can’t be faulted for not turning away millions, but the arrival of the GTO is really going to be a crying shame. It’s also hard to fault the series for not turning away the factory money. The original plan for Grand Am was to attire the DP’s in manufacturer trade dress. The idea never took off and Porsche even sent their lawyers over to slap tape over the Brumos Fabcar’s headlights. There was a good reason that the manufacturers were initially cold to the Daytona Prototype concept. While they appeal to people who want to go racing on less than an international budget, the cars lack fan appeal, and without fan appeal they make no sense from a marketing standpoint. You don’t get a lot of heat out of having your name on a carbon-fiber carrot, as my biggest critic and editor Kerry Morse pointed out when I misidentified a Jim Bamber statuette wearing Honda/Marlboro coveralls as Ayrton Senna. How was I supposed to remember that Penske was running Honda power when Gil de Ferran won Indy? Cosworth, Offy, Mercedes, Honda, Toyota, who-knows-what next year? And I actually follow this stuff! The appearance of General Motors’ Pontiac brand on the scene with their Pratt and Miller funny car can do the series no good. The Daytona Prototypes will never be a self-supporting championship. The series only makes sense to a promoter when a big field shows up with a lot of entry fees and dumps a bunch of money into the local economy to make up for non-existent ticket sales. The supporting GT class, and especially its 20-odd supporting Porsches are a big deal to this turn-out. International series of mystery While the rules promise that “The GT class for 2005 will be comprised of two distinct preparation methods, all designed to have cars at a similar competition level for GT class racing,” I’m having a hard time believing that the Prep 2 GTO isn’t going to walk over everybody. BMW is going to pull up their tent stakes again – they’ve got the 6-series homologated for international GT1 competition and a V- 10 engine for it in production and a V-8 M3 in the pipeline that will allow them to be competitive again in GT2. Porsche has signaled that they intend to support the ALMS with their partnership with Roger Penske in P2 as well as by co-sponsoring a GT3 Cup ALMS support series with tire giant Michelin. The loss of the Porsches and BMW’s can only hurt GT car counts and the viability of the series at non-ISC tracks. The huge fields we saw at Laguna are indicative that Grand Am has got something right. This is not a series that’s going to draw huge crowds of spectators. It doesn’t need to be. It’s about giving people who want to go racing a show where they don’t have to get their clocks cleaned by big-money factory teams. While the Ganassi, Howard-Boss and SunTrust cars are always at the top of the order at the end of the weekend, there’s always a new guy like Oswaldo Negri Jr. on the pole in the Michael Shank Racing Riley Lexus and Alex Gurney in the Blackhawk Racing Riley Pontiac to tell a story about during practice and qualifying. Around the paddock it was clear that even if a “level playing field” is a fantasy there are a lot of guys (and gals) who buy into it. The Red Desert I sincerely wish that people would just set aside their egos and let GARRA be GARRA. The event at Laguna wasn’t about the crowds, it was about racing for racers. The promoter didn’t lose money and the car club tie-in can be refined to fill more seats next year. This series ought to be club-racing at its best, but only if the sanctioning body forgets about being dazzled by Detroit’s lame attempt to flog lumpy pushrod front-drive Pontiacs. The enormous entry Grand Am is experiencing, even away from their East Coast base, is clear evidence of the demand for a low-key venue a few steps above amateur racing but below the expense and drama of a full-blown international championship. It’s why it was no big deal that nobody (and I mean nobody) showed up to watch at Laguna. But if I owned one of the 20 Porsches that showed up for the GT race or the 20 Porsches in the Grand Am Cup race, I’d be taking a hard look at the IMSA Porsche Cup presented by Michelin instead of trying to rub fenders with Jan Magnussen next season. |
David Soares |
