Hey everyone!

Sorry for the lack of updates, we’ve been really busy over the last few weeks, preparing for last weekend’s race at Brands Hatch. Things went much more smoothly this weekend than they did at Oulton Park!

-The Brands Hatch Indy Circuit is relatively simple 

The weekend really began a week before. We went to Brands Hatch to test the weekend before the race, and this constituted our weekend practice session, since the Friday of race weekend we would go straight into qualifying and race 1. The test was vital, since we learned that after getting the bodywork re-painted and repaired, none of it fit together correctly. A sidepod top flew off in testing and most of the rest of it was held together with duct tape. We had a steering rod bent as well, and discovered two bent screws in the steering column from Oulton Park that needed to be replaced. All of these issued were sorted out after the test, the weekend before the event.

-Our new livery got a lot of compliments

If we had a traditional weekend with a day of practice before qualifying, I would have been quite confident of our chances, but going straight into qualifying threw a bit of a wrench into things, as we also replaced the front brake pads for qualifying. As my mechanic Jack said, “full-on qualifying isn’t the ideal way to bed new brake pads.”

I was disappointed to qualify second-to-last for all 3 races, but qualifying was a victory for the team as it was our first completely problem-free session. Our plan was to run 5 laps to scrub the tires and bed the brakes, let things cool off for a few minutes and then run the rest of the session. Everything went according to plan and we were able to run the entire session without any glitches, although we all would have preferred to go a bit quicker. Since we were the first ones on track in the morning, and the last ones on track for our race, it was a long, long wait for race 1. However, it was totally worth it.

-Pre-race engine checks

Before the race, the weather had been extremely cloudy and dark, and as we lined up for pre-grid a fine mist was falling onto the circuit. The paddock looked like it was getting quite wet, and minutes before we were scheduled to roll off, every team started a rush to put rain tires on. Knowing this might be an issue, we practiced quick tire changes during our downtime, and we were able to change all 4 tires without any power tools quicker than some of the other teams that had some. I told the guys to only change the roll bars to a semi-wet setting, in case the track wasn’t as wet as it looked or if it dried up during the race. While the paddock looked wet, the track seemed to still be in decent condition so a full wet setup wouldn’t be necessary.

Rolling onto the track for the warmup laps, it was immediately obvious that the track wasn’t ready for a wet setup and wasn’t even ready for wet tires. Every car had wets on, so it wasn’t a disadvantage, but if we had gambled and kept dries on, it would have been a significant advantage. It’s also worth noting that the race was going to be significantly shorter than intended, since delays throughout the day had pushed us right up against the circuit’s curfew time.

In Oulton Park, my 5 years of non-driving manifested themselves during the race in the form of timidity. I wasn’t as aggressive during the race as I had been in the past, and was somewhat afraid to take any risks, even when a good chance presented itself. This weighed heavily on me all day, and I knew I had to push myself to not be content just to finish the race. I had to make passes and I had to take risks.

-More pre-race checks

I got a poor start, the only car starting behind me beat me easily into Paddock Hill bend, a fast, blind down-hill sweeping corner. I noticed in the middle of the corner that even though I was off the racing line, I was well under the limit and, in the pack of cars, I gunned it going down and up the hill to Druids hairpin. Again, the pack was traveling much slower than possible, partly because of the natural concertina effect, and partly because of the unknown weather conditions. I took the outside and managed to drive around two cars. Over the next few laps, I swapped places with Australian Olly Rae. I got a better exit out of Clark Curve and made a move into Paddock Hill. He immediately responded with a solid move into Druids. I stayed behind for a lap, analyzing our speed difference and where I could take him. After following for 3 laps, I made a move into Clark Curve, outbraking him from 2 car lengths behind and decisively beating him to the apex. From there I was able to pull away, and began catching leaders Fabian Welter and Mat Rao. Behind them were a gaggle of EcoBoost cars, which are usually considerably faster than us and very difficult to pass.

-Working away at a podium finish!

Unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to try since the race ended just as I had caught onto the end of that pack. I was very satisfied with how I had driven, and had no idea where I had finished. When I pulled into the pits, I saw all the guys waving at me excitedly. Thinking they were just very pleased with my drive, I gave them a thumbs up. It didn’t hit me that we were on the podium until one of the stewards pointed me into the spot where podium finishers parked their cars. My eyes must have filled up my entire helmet as I realized what happened. I got out of the car slowly to allow the guys to run over and we all had a big group hug. After being distraught with my poor result in qualifying, it felt really good to finally show everyone what we are capable of. We’ve still got a bit of work to do to put up these results consistently, but the constant mechanical issues that plagued us at Oulton Park seemed to all be weeded out, and now we could focus on going fast. Also importantly, my racecraft was coming back to me and I had proved to myself that I’m still capable of taking opportunities that come to me, and being aggressive when I need to create an opportunity myself.

-“I’m not sure what to do with my hands.”

Plenty more drama unfolded over the weekend, but you’ll have to wait for part 2, as this post is getting a bit long! 

Some highlights (and lowlights) of our first race at Oulton Park!

Racing as a sport presents an interesting dichotomy. On the racetrack, it’s a cutthroat, every-man-for-himself brawl. You’re on your own. Having a problem? Tough luck, figure it out. You won’t get help from anyone else.

Off the track, each driver has a crew backing him up, and it’s very much a team sport. The engineers help figure out how to make the car go fast, the mechanics make sure it stays together, and teammates look at squiggly lines on computer screens, figuring out where the other is going faster and how they can match them.

As the season approaches, I keep telling myself that there’s nothing coming up that I’ve never done before. I’ve competed at levels equivalent to Formula Ford, and indeed even higher. It’s possible, despite my 4 year sabbatical, that I may even be one of the most experienced drivers on the grid. But there are several challenges that I am facing that are unique in my career.

When I raced in the Skip Barber Race Series, they would place instructors at each corner. During every session, whether it’s practice, qualifying or race, they would take notes on each driver’s performance. After the session was over, we would get out of our cars and meet with each instructor and go over ways to improve. I was always impressed with the instructors’ ability to diagnose even very subtle mistakes from ~30 yards away, and it was a surprisingly effective way to learn how to drive. 

In Star Mazda, we had even more coaching tools. While my engineer looked at hieroglyphics like shock histograms, oversteer/understeer graphs and what-is-this-I-don’t-even graphs, there were several tools that I used regularly to diagnose driving mistakes and make myself faster. The most important tools were my teammates, speed trace, throttle position, video, and C-time. 

After each session, data from the cars would be uploaded to wireless servers and subsequently downloaded into our engineer’s computers. After writing session notes on a track map, all the drivers and engineers would get together, and we would overlay the speed and throttle position traces from our best laps. This would give us a visual representation of how we were driving compared to each other, and which technique was faster. For example, in a particularly fast corner, driver X may be lifting off the throttle later, but that causes the car to be unstable and they can’t get back to power until well after driver X. Although driver X has the higher minimum corner speed, he loses momentum and driver Y makes up that time and more down the straight. That sort of thing is very easy to see, especially with C-time. C-time (comparative time) is a graph that uses one driver’s time (let’s say driver X) as X=0 , and traces driver Y’s time along the X-Axis, with the Y axis being the time difference between each driver at any point on the track (Look at me using all these math terms! My high school pre-calc teacher would be so proud!). This may sound complex but it gives us a very simple visual comparison of our technique in each corner. In the example described above, you would see driver Y’s graph bend up as he “overslows” the corner, but then as his momentum continues, it would slope down. This would suggest that in that particular corner, driver X should lift sooner and work on carrying more momentum. We then dissect each corner of the track in a similar way. Despite my life-long hatred for math, these tools are extremely helpful and actually a lot of fun to play with.

But guess what! This year I won’t have any of it. No coach. Extremely limited data. No throttle position sensor and no speed sensor. I won’t have a teammate to compare to anyways. We’re kickin’ it old-school. So, as a driver, the biggest challenge I’m facing this year is to self-diagnose my mistakes, and the only tool I’ll have is in-car video. I’m not sure what the solutions are, but I know they’ll come. I’ll have to watch the video very carefully. I’ll have to observe what other drivers are doing when I’m behind them. It’ll be difficult, but it should definitely make my mind sharper and a better driver. The owner of the Star Mazda team I used to drive for said once, “it seems you like to be really busy when you’re driving.” It may sound like a paradox, but the more I have to think about, the less I over-think things. So maybe driving without the crutches of data and teammates and coaches will keep my mind from thinking too much. 

“Was it oversteer, or was it like Juan Manuel Fangio OVERSTEER? –Austin Brauser

At the end of part 1, Charlie was just leaving the pits at the start of session two. We had him run another install lap to make sure everything in the gearbox was fixed. About 150 seconds later he rolled into the pit box and verified that the gearing was ok, so we sent him out for his first flying laps. It was extremely exciting the first time we saw him fly by us on the pit wall and I could tell that Adam was having a blast with the radio system. After 5 laps Charlie returned to the pits; we checked tire pressures and temperatures, and then noticed the smell of burning plastic. We looked around and located the source as one of our Formula One spec heat stickers. The fiberglass was fine, but despite not showing its maximum temperature reading the sticker was cooked. All things considered, not such a bad loss. Charlie then mentioned that he was experiencing a lot of oversteer. I think some of this can be attributed to the almost freezing temperatures and newly paved track, but nonetheless we began our attempts to dial it out. After a few minor suspension adjustments, Charlie headed back out on track and got some valuable seat time throughout the rest of the session.

Once Charlie was out of the car and had some time to collect his thoughts we had a debrief in which he explained the behavior of the car in each section of track. We then prioritized the issues and set about with a development plan.  The car still had a large amount of oversteer so we replaced the rear anti-roll bar with a softer one. We also reduced tire pressures by about 2 psi after gaining some valuable new setup information from some of the other teams in the paddock.

 I think at around this time we may have run off to the Silverstone café and grabbed our lunch. I will say that aside from Lime Rock’s Chilidog, Silverstone has some of the best race track food that I have ever had. This time I went with the chicken stew. When we headed back to the garage Louise Goodman from ITV was grabbing a spot of tea, so Adam and I made sure to say hello and introduce ourselves and the team and hopefully get on her good side. Unfortinately we had to cut the conversation a bit short to get Charlie out for session 3, but she was very understanding.

“We’ve got ourselves a bloody driver!” –Adam Painter

Session 3 and session 4 were much less eventful than the morning sessions, but they were just as productive. According to Charlie the changes we made to the roll bar improved the handling issues quite a bit, we tried softening up the rear a bit more and that helped, but also introduced some unwanted body roll on portions of the track. We stiffened the rear back up a bit, but countered that by stiffening the front a bit too. These changes seemed to get us back on track and we got in as many laps as possible in the final 2 sessions, the only small issue being the camera coming out of its mount. Since I mounted the camera upside down (It’s a cylinder - cylinders are quite symmetrical!) and since Silverstone won’t let us publish any onboard video anyways it actually wasn’t that much of a problem.

At one point in the afternoon session Charlie was running nose to tail with one of the new, more powerful Ecoboost cars for 3 or 4 laps, as well as outpacing some of the other Duratec Formula Fords. Ultimately numbers are what matter in racing, and we can say that between tweaking the car’s setup, Charlie knocking off his rust (Some of which may have been offset by his lunch), and slightly improving track conditions average laptimes between sessions 2 and 4 were reduced by 20%. We’ve still got a ways to go in terms of improving the car for Charlie. I have quite a good idea of what we need to do, but for now the next big challenge for us is to find a more permanent garage so that I can make all of these changes, and to hook up the data system so that it can provide us with some valuable data for the future. We’ve got a lot to do in the next month before round 1, but based on what we have accomplished in the past 4 weeks I am more than confident in our abilities to bring a competitive car to Oulton Park on Easter Weekend.

Hey Folks! Austin reporting again- we took delivery of our car this past Friday and spent the weekend preparing it for our first test this upcoming Friday. Overall I think we are in pretty decent shape; there are a few small things we need to work on but the car is pretty much ready to go. I’ll take you through the trials and tribulations we went through this weekend.

Charlie and I took delivery of the car and trailer at around 9am on Friday morning. The previous owners dropped it off at my workplace and gave us a brief rundown of how it worked and what they were giving us. We had to cram everything (mostly parts for our ridiculously huge awning) that was in their van into the trailer before they set off. The car sat in my parking lot all day and I showed it off a bit to some coworkers at lunch. As this was happening Charlie was in Birmingham to pick up the rental car to tow the trailer to Oxford. He arrived back at my office just after 5; we hooked up the trailer and after topping up a few of the tyres with air from our trusty new pump and jiggling the wires so all the lights worked (damned English electrics!) we were off to the workshop. We met Adam at the workshop on Friday night, created a plan of attack for the next day, and we began preliminary disassembly. After checking the car for fluids we also fired up the engine for the first time to get that bug out of our systems!

We were up early on Saturday for a full day of car rebuilding action. We started off taking a quick inventory only to find out that we were missing the car’s dash. We’ll have it by Thursday, but this has caused a bit of an issue in installing the data system. After this initial bump in the road, things started to go much more smoothly. We bled the clutch system quite quickly before removing a steering sensor that is not ours. Adam and I then went through and rebuilt all of the corners, torquing all of the bolts to specification. At this point a few more helpers showed up and we removed the sidepods and floors. When we took the floors off we found quite a bit of dirt and debris from some past off course excursions. I also used this opportunity to inspect the chassis for cracks. Once that was all cleaned out we flushed the coolant system and refilled it before adjusting the throttle cable and running through the gears.

Moving forward we installed the radio, made a lower seat (had some issues with the upper part but modified the insert that came with the car to fit Charlie, and adjusted the steering wheel to Charlie’s liking before replacing the cockpit shroud, which we have affectionately started referring to as “the fairing.” We discovered that we do in fact have more boxes of tent than race car. Our tent is massive- 6 x 9 meters, and with it our paddock space is definitely going to be in-tents. If you’d like to rent it out for parties please let us know! We rounded out the evening by taking corner weights and posing for a group picture that is quite nice if I say so myself.

On Sunday we packed up, but before loading the car on the trailer, we re-purged the coolant system due to potential freezing weather conditions in our area this week. In doing so we played a fun game with water pressure and I ended up getting drenched.  It was quite humorous, so much so that we filmed a re-enactment, but we didn’t quite capture the magic of the original.

Overall it was a great weekend in terms of knowledge gained and prep work done. Come Thursday when we set up shop at Silverstone we should be in a good position to get some valuable testing in.

Things are kicking off and I’ve got a busy week ahead! We’re taking delivery of our car later this week, and sometime before Friday I need to sort out insurance and buy another car that can tow our trailer. I also need to finalize my registration for the championship! As I mentioned last week, we’re taking the car down to Oxford Brookes where Austin and our newest recruit, Adam Painter, will do their engineering magic to make the car super fast and reliable for our next test. Since he knows what we need to do better than I do, I asked Austin to write a bit about what we’ll be doing to get the car ready for Silverstone on March 2:

With car delivery slated to happen over the next few days, and our first test only 10 days away, we have quite a bit of work to do. We need to take a car that Charlie’s never driven, and that I’ve never even seen and ensure it is ready for the twists and turns of Silverstone on March 2nd. Once we have the car in our possession we will perform an inventory of the parts we have available and figure out what equipment we still need to purchase, to ensure we are adequately equipped to handle a variety of situations that may happen at the track. We bought some zip ties, duct tape, and a hammer yesterday so that should get us most of the way, but we should probably have a few more things, just in case.

Once inventory is complete, we will strip down and rebuild of the car to ensure all of the nuts, bolts, and fittings are properly torqued and secured. On a side note, now is a good time to tell you that despite the fact that blue Loctite tastes like candy (Note from the editor: ಠ_ಠ ), you probably shouldn’t eat too much of it. Another benefit of this strip down will be to help us familiarize ourselves with the car itself; even if we were buying the car brand new and assembled from the factory, I would do the exact same thing. Once I am satisfied that the car isn’t going to fall apart we’ll put on a suitable set of springs and a usable gear ratio based on the data we can scrounge from past events. We’ll then fill it up with fluids (engine oil, gearbox oil, coolant, brake fluid, and petrol).

After a systems check we’ll fire the engine up and verify the functionality of the sensors and data logging unit; At this point the car will be drivable but there are still a few more things to do in order to prepare the car for Charlie. We’ll mold a seat using two part foam and we’ll adjust the pedals to his liking. When this is finished I may definitely will push the car around the parking lot and make race car noises before setting corner weights and packing the car in the trailer for the first test. We’re currently working on a test plan; once we determine what exactly that is I will be sure to give you another update very soon.

Cheers!

Hello everyone!

Well I mentioned when I started this blog that I’m terrible with keeping diaries/journals/etc. I’m terribly sorry I haven’t updated in more than 2 months. Part of it is because nothing interesting happened, and part of it was because big things were happening and I didn’t want to talk about them prematurely.

But, I’m totally stoked to announce that I have sold my racing car in the U.S. and on Monday I will be transferring funds in payment of a 2009 Duratec Formula Ford! Yes, we did it! With a month and a half before the first race of the season, and 2 weeks before the first official Formula Ford test day, we’ve gotten a hold of a very competitive car! Right now I’m swamped with registration and licensing forms and other bureaucratic nonsense to make our entry official. It’s really tough to keep track of all the things I need to do when I’m bouncing off the walls with excitement!

So the plan for the next month is this: We take delivery of the car early next week, and the weekend of the 21st-22^nd we’ll take it down to Austin’s Alma Mater Oxford Brookes. They have facilities where we can do set-down, look through the car to make sure all the bolts are tight, make sure the engine starts, and other diagnostic checks to make sure everything is in top shape. It will also give us a chance to mould the seat! For those who aren’t familiar, al modern formula cars and prototypes (and probably most sports cars), from F1 to IndyCars, all the way down to Formula Ford and Skip Barber, have seats that are molded to the driver’s back. This helps keep the driver from having to brace himself in the car through the corners, as well as insuring maximum comfort and increasing safety in a crash.

Another exciting thing is that the car we bought is a lot less than I expected. So, barring unforeseen costs (read: crashes), we’re able to do at least the first 3-4 races of the season! So now we have a chance to put up some results and hopefully gain some momentum, which could immensely help the sponsorship hunt.

So after a long, cold off season, things are starting to thaw! Next week I’ll get Austin to write up what he’s going to do with the car to prep it for the test, and we’ll start putting up some videos, pictures, and other other more exciting stuff!

First race is April 7-8, with the next race more than a month later. This gives us about 3.5 months to sell my old car, buy a new one and get at least two test days in. Wish us luck!!

Hey everyone! I came down with a pretty gnarly cold this weekend, and it’s been a while since a real update so I figured now was a good time.

As of now, there are two major tasks standing between where I am presently and getting onto the grid for the first round of the 2012 Formula Ford Championship. The first, as I mentioned in my last post, is selling my old race car. That’ll get us the money to get the Formula Ford and all the stuff we need to race it. 

The second, and much more difficult part, is finding a job. With nothing but doom and gloom in the news about how the world economy is going to kill us all, I knew that it wouldn’t be simple. Since I moved here I’ve sent out tons of applications and spent hours writing cover letters. So far it’s been good enough for a single phone interview, and a few recruiters saying they *might* have something that fits. It’s been tedious and frustrating, and last week I got an email from the one interview I got saying they went with someone else. 

It’s not really a big deal, just brush it off and send out more applications. But it did get me to start thinking; what if this doesn’t work? What if I get all the way to April, June, August with nothing to show for it? Is there some other way to get my career off the ground? Will I be condemned to the horrors of the real world for the rest of my life? I’m not really sure what I would do.

But then I started thinking about what I opened this post with. I’m SO close to getting there. All I need are these two things. Job hunting is frustrating because there are so many variables I have zero control over, but it’s something I would need to do anyways. So it’s not worth stressing over. Over the last year or so I’ve been having a dream that recurs every two months or so. The details are always different but I’m always at a race track, either in the paddock getting into the car, or even on the starting grid waiting for the pace lap. But something always comes up and the session gets delayed, and I always wake up before it can get started. I’m not an expert on interpreting dreams but I don’t think this one requires much interpretation. I’ve been trying to figure out how to get back to professional competition since I was forced to quit in 2007. A lot of my ideas have been somewhat outrageous, and the constant downward spiral of IndyCar racing has always made it seem like an increasingly unrealistic goal. 

But all that stands in my way now are these two things. SO close. Selling my old car, and getting a job. Both are very achievable. After years of frustration it’s slightly difficult to understand that there’s finally a very real chance I’ll be getting back on track in just an off-season’s time. But it needs to be at the forefront of my mind as I fight through the always-frustrating task of getting a job. 

Hello fans!

I’d like to apologize for not updating for a few weeks, but there really hasn’t been much to update with. I’m trying to sell my old race car to pay for the Formula Ford, and trying to get a job so we can pay for a garage, sales associate, etc. These things all take time, and as soon as things progress I’ll post an update.

However, not leaving anybody wanting, I thought I would take this time to explain how I am approaching this project, my career, and the business of motor racing in general.

Many who know me have heard me rant about it before, but for those who havent, and those wondering why I think I can resurrect my career without $20million burning a hole in my pocket, here you are.

I’d like to start by discussing the myth that car racing is an absurdly expensive sport. While that may be true in amateur motorsport, once you get into the professional ranks, it’s absolutely false. In fact, it’s actually the cheapest of all professional sports. And that is including Formula One. You may be wondering, “how could that possibly be?! Didn’t you just now say you need $20million to get to Formula One?!” Well, let’s start by dissecting what you would spend that $20million on. I’m far more familiar with the racing ladder in the U.S., so I’ll use that as an example. The Road To Indy is, frankly, a pretty awesome concept created by INDYCAR to nurture and develop future talent. After karting, one starts in USF2000, moves on to Star Mazda, Indy Lights and then they start making millions in INDYCAR and become world famous. So what is the toll fare for taking the Road To Indy? Below are rough estimates for a single car budget in each series:

Season in USF2000- $200,000

Season in Star Mazda- $300,000

Indy Lights- $750,000

So to get from karts to Indycars, if a hotshot driver whizzed up through the ranks he would need to have started with $1,250,000. Let’s say he’s only slightly superhuman and takes two years in each series, which would bring the bill to $2.5million. I know what you’re thinking, that’s a lot of money. Football players, basketball players, baseball players don’t have to spend that kind of money on their careers to make it to the professional leagues. Indeed they don’t, but only because someone else is.

Below is an estimated budget for three different levels of minor league baseball teams. This was taken from an economic impact survey used by a city council in the midwest U.S., to decide on funding for a local team. So the numbers are reliable enough for the sake of argument. 

Take a look at the second to last line, “Total Expenses.” A single-A minor league baseball team burns through $3.4million a year!! Even if you ran 2 cars and spent another $1million on sponsorship and marketing, a USF2000 team would still come in $1,000,000 less than a baseball team at the same competitive level. It’s a better investment as well, although I will acknowledge that any investment in professional sports is one of passion, rather than solid financial savvy. If the business went belly-up and you had to sell your baseball team, what do you have? You don’t have the ballpark, or the land it’s on. All of that is owned by the city. If you had good lawyers writing your players’ contracts you might be able to sell them to other teams, but aside from that all you’re left with are some bats and dirty uniforms. If you had a racing team you’d have at least 2 race cars you could sell to club racers, one or two trucks to sell to shipping companies or other racing teams, and perhaps even a shop to sell or lease. 

“Ok, it may be like that at the bottom, but Formula One teams have the most outrageous budgets in the entire world! Surely it’s ludicrous to suggest that they are a “good deal.” Really? Ask Dietrich Mateschitz. According to this article, he spent $690million from when he bought Jaguar F1 to 2009, the year before Red Bull Racing won the World Championship. That’s half as much as it would cost just to buy an NFL franchise. And again, Red Bull Racing trumps any NFL team in terms of hard assets. He has a fleet of awesome cars and trucks, a jaw dropping mobile hospitality suite, and a factory he could surely sell if he ever wanted to liquidate his team. Just like the single-A baseball team, most NFL franchises don’t own their only hard asset, the stadium. 

Obviously, the reason single-A baseball teams can spend that much is because they have ways to generate revenue. They sell tickets, they sell hot dogs, and beer, and jerseys, and oversized novelty foam hands. As an industry, we need to get over ourselves about how much it costs to go racing. For far too long we’ve been so distracted by cutting costs that we’ve never even thought to turn our heads around and look at ways to generate revenue. Of course, since teams don’t own a racetrack they can’t sell tickets, or charge for parking or food or any other things the baseball team does. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t any ways for a team to make money. Sponsorship is the most obvious, but in all of my years studying motorsports business, I’ve never heard of a junior formula team that had a sponsorship department (and no, a “PR” rep is not a sponsorship department). Sponsorship doesn’t just happen, and it’s not something that can be wrangled together by a team owner who has a lot of heart but no background beyond mechanical engineering. I’ve seen it tried. It takes a rather large team of sales experts and marketing professionals.

It can be done, even for teams in USF2000 and Star Mazda, who aren’t on TV. I once had a professor who was the president of a sports marketing company. For one class, he brought in a year-end review of one of the deals he did with a Major League Soccer team. As I read through it I very carefully considered each key part in the deal and how it could be applied to a racing team. I finished reading the document convinced a racing team could actually do a better job. As it was almost entirely a business-to-business deal, it didn’t rely on massive exposure, and a racing team, with events in markets across the entire country, has much better reach than a team anchored to one city. This deal was worth mid 7-figures over 3 years.

So if racing is such a good deal, and the sport is actually well positioned for marketing, why doesn’t it happen? This is because, as I previously stated, teams aren’t prepared for it. Across all genres of professional motorsport, from F1, INDYCAR, NASCAR, rally racing, boat racing, etc., I suspect I could count on my fingers and toes all the teams who are equipped to seek, find, and secure sponsorship. Certainly in the junior ranks of open wheel racing there are none. From USF2000 to Indy Lights, from the British Formula Ford Championship to GP2, I have never seen a team with a fully staffed sponsorship department, and a management that takes revenue generation as seriously as it does winning races.

The end result of this is that the burden of finding funding falls on the driver. It’s then no wonder why sponsorship is so difficult, when as an industry we are relying on teenagers and early 20-somethings to put together six-figure sponsorship deals entirely on their own. Kids who either haven’t finished college or aren’t attending, who have no sales experience, no marketing credentials, and no credibility when making a presentation to a company CMO and asking for large sums of money. Racing drivers by definition are smart, ambitious, and competitive. But sports marketing is an extremely complicated business that is way over the head of most aspring drivers. I’ve been studying it for the last decade and I still can’t make sense of all of it. 

So that is my opinion on the current state of junior open wheel racing. In my next post I’ll explain how I’m trying to change the business model, and what I’ll be doing differently next season. 

Cheers!