Power Touring and Doing the Right Thing
I’ve just finished reading a biography of industrialist and powerboat racer Gar
Wood (Gar Wood Boats: Power Classics of a Golden Era, Anthony Mollica, MBI
Publishing 1999). Wood grew up in the 1880’s stoking his father’s ferryboat on
the lakes of Minnesota, caught the engineering bug at the turn of the century, and
invented and patented the hydraulic dump truck. He then spent over thirty years
funneling his profits into winning Gold Cups, Harmsworth Trophies, and
international speed records in Liberty-engined hydroplanes. At the same time he
also built sleek and powerful gentlemen’s speedboats in varnished mahogany at
a state of the art factory. Gar Wood built his industrial empire with his own labor
and had little interest for Wall Street or high finance. When the New York
financiers who controlled the American Power Boat Association re-wrote the rules
to squeeze Wood out after he won 5 Gold Cups from 1915 through 1921, he went
into international racing and feats of record-setting, such as beating the Twentieth
Century Limited from Albany to New York City by 21 minutes in Baby Gar IV in
1925 and exceeding 100 mph on the water in Miss America IX in 1931. Wood
hated debt and financial wheeling and dealing and personally owned all but 3
percent of his companies’ 800,000 shares of common stock. Unlike his rivals he
thrived throughout the Great Depression and was able to continue to spend
lavishly on his version of motorsport.
Gar Wood’s story is a classic American success story, the story of a great
American sportsman. It reminded me immediately of the two leading sportsman
of American racing, who will do battle head-to-head in this year’s American Le
Mans Series. Like Gar Wood seventy-five years ago, Roger Penske is based in
Detroit. In many ways, Penske is Detroit’s last great self-made man. First and
foremost a racer, Penske won championships in his own Zerex Special and in
Jim Hall’s Chaparrals forty years back, but then retired to make his fortune in the
auto biz. He turned a Pennsylvania Chevy dealership into the revival of Detroit
Diesel, into Penske Leasing, and ultimately into United Auto Group, one of the
biggest auto sales conglomerates on the planet, while winning the Indianapolis
500 fourteen times as a team owner. Along the way Penske helped create the
Can-Am champion Porsches, the Trans-Am Camaros and Javelins, and his own
Formula 1 chassis and team (where racing partner Mark Donohue met his
untimely demise in the Summer of 1975), as well as making his mark in NASCAR
starting with the AMC Matador through the current Nextel Cup series. At the end of
the 2005 ALMS season he debuted the Porsche RS Sypder P2 car and after many
public teething troubles won the 2006 P2 championship with a two-car effort.
For the 2007 season Penske will be racing against at least one other Porsche P2
team, the new two-car equipe of Rob and son Chris Dyson’s Dyson Racing Team.
Rob Dyson is unlike self-made men Gar Wood and Roger Penske in that he is the
steward of a family fortune accumulated by a previous generation. However, in my
mind he also recalls a great American sportsman, yachtsman, and sportscar
racer: Briggs Swift Cunningham. Cunningham was the beneficiary of the Swift
meatpacking fortune but he wasn’t simply some silver-spoon country clubber
smacking polo and golf balls around the lawns of the family estate. Cunningham
won an America’s Cup at the helm of Columbia in 1958 and spent over a decade
in pursuit of victory at Le Mans and Sebring, several times in cars of his own
manufacture. Briggs Cunningham’s love of cars was more hot-rodder than
dilettante, and I fondly remember the museum in Costa Mesa where he proudly
displayed his Bu-Merc and Le Monstre amongst the detritus of forty years of
messing around with cars. Rob Dyson may be wealthy beyond the economy of
one or two small European countries, but like Briggs Cunningham he is a car guy
through-and-through. While I can’t claim to know the man, the image of him I’ll
always carry is of a conversation I had with him in the paddock at Laguna a few
years ago. As we talked he meticulously wielded a push-broom around his
team’s work area, tidying up at six in the evening long after the bought-ride crowd
had retired to the local eateries. Dyson’s investment in developing the 2006 Lola
B06/10/AER package last season didn’t bear fruit. Rob didn’t whine about the
rules. When Porsche announced their $1.5 million asking price plus mandatory
spares package for the RS Spyder, he opted for the deuce.
The History Channel looks at Top of the Pops
Why all the history? Regular readers of this site know what I’m talking about. The
American Le Mans Series has become the home of American individualists,
Roger Penske and Rob Dyson being at the head of the class, but also those like
the Fields, Andretti, Bobby Rahal, Mike Peterson, Giuseppe Risi, Duncan Dayton,
Bryan Willman, or the man himself, Don Panoz. Corporate types like Chip
Ganassi and his partner Carlos Slim or mercenaries like Kevin Buckler can play
elsewhere.
As I was sitting by the fire reading the story of Gar Wood the news was coming
over the ether of Big John Hindhaugh’s interview with Audi Director of Motorsport,
Dr. Wolfgang Ullrich. The good doktor has made a not-so-subtle threat to pull
Audi’s diesel Koenigstiger out of the ALMS after Sebring if Tim Mayer and Doug
Robinson don’t rescind the restrictor break IMSA has granted to the P2’s, allowing
them to run under last year’s rules. I have to say that Ullrich had a familiar look of
a smart-assed witness on the ropes about him at the season ending post-race
PC at Laguna this past October. I wasn’t surprised by Henri Pescarolo’s letter
complaining that Ullrich and the Peugeot people had been heavily lobbying the
ACO technical committee to screw the petrol-heads in favor of oil-burners. Audi’s
seven year hammerlock on sportscar racing is finally being faced with some
serious competition and the good folks at VAG can’t handle it.
IMSA wants to have a race series. When it became clear that the best teams were
going the P2 route in 2007, Competitor Bulletin 07-06 allowed P2 cars to avoid the
5% restrictor reduction in their class conceded to Audi and Peugeot for the 24
Hours. It seemed like a no-brainer to me. Like Audi and Peugeot, manufacturers
Porsche, Acura, and Mazda are engaging in a marketing exercise. Unlike Audi
and Peugeot however, Porsche, Acura and Mazda aren’t in the business of
flogging oil-burners. Still, the politics of marketing automobiles in 2007 are about
fuel efficiency. Some may lament that these manufacturers aren’t competing in
the “top” P1 class, but it makes good marketing sense to position one’s gasoline
racer in the “efficient” class and then to show that your “little” machines can
compete with the “big guys.”
Like Marie Antoinette as shot by Yousuf Karsh
Let the P2’s run with less intake air in France this summer, but Dr. Ullrich just
proves himself to be the antithesis of a sportsman when he threatens to pull out of
the ALMS over a rules package against which his R10 was undefeated in 2006.
My dear wife was a regular business traveler to Germany throughout the eighties
and early nineties, and many of our German friends warned us of a cultural
change after the Wall came down in ’89. I always considered the laid-back
Germans to be the most honest and hard-working people on the planet. Now I
fear that there are no Germans left like “uncle” Norbert Singer and his band of
Smurfs in brown overalls. Welcome to the new land of Schumi and winner-take-
all corporate types. I find myself wondering whether Lucas Luhr’s late race spin
while teasing the R10 at Laguna this past October was calculated to please his
soon-to-be employers – a sportscar version of Michael Schumacher’s shameful
2006 Monaco qualifying game. It saddens me to think this way.
Porsche, BMW, and even Daimler-Benz have an enormous profit center in North
America, but VAG and their Audi brand haven’t been able to figure us out since the
“Think Small” days. Audi’s profile as a purveyor of luxury goods remains pathetic,
and the brilliant R10 could go a long way toward changing the way Americans see
them. I’ve said before that the ALMS will not thrive as a vorsprung durch Technik
demonstration run. It’s silly not to race, and the 2006 P2 rules don’t suggest a
walkover by the P2 teams. While Audi has offered financial support to the series,
it’s not been of the make-or-break variety. They need the ALMS to market their Le
Mans-winning technology to Americans.
Gas, Food and Lodging
I am not tying to suggest that Americans of the 21st century have come to stand on
some sort of higher moral ground than Germans (far from it), but it’s clear that
Audi (and BMW and Daimler Benz) have lost touch with the history and traditions of
American racing and even though their executives speak in unaccented and
idiomatic English they have lost touch with our market. GM’s efforts with Corvette
Racing, Ford’s with ChampCar, and the pre-“merger of equals” Viper program are
proof that NASCAR occupies the national stage only by default.
It’s high time companies like VAG realize that there are benefits from playing in the
American market. The Automobile Club de l’Ouest has tolerated competitive
variations in the American version of their formula and their fields have benefited
from strong American entries throughout the new century. Dr. Ullrich’s corporate
winner-take-all thinking does not honor great gentlemen like Briggs Cunningham,
Roger Penske, and Rob Dyson. One can only imagine what Gar Wood would
have done. When the Gold Cup rules committee fell into corporate-think, he
simply bought a carload of surplus Liberty aircraft engines and beat the world.
Tim Mayer and Doug Robinson have done the right thing for American racing.
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