All along the way, I worked very closely with Greg, Rich and Bill and came to respect each for their intellect and laser focus on elevating the quality of fan experience. I'm certain I learned far more from them than any of them ever learned from me.
The Pfanner Communications team of Donna Chamberlain (Pfanner), Steve Nickless, Keith May, Ree Tucker and Molly Binks worked tirelessly to keep up with the tsunami of projects related to the California Speedway launch. Thankfully, our marketing and promotions collaboration with the team at California Speedway worked and the ironically-named inaugural "California 500" NASCAR Winston Cup race and the Marlboro 500 CART PPG World Series event were sellouts in a market that had not had a major league permanent race track since 1988.
After the successful 1997 running of the California 500, Roger and Greg met with me in late June to float the idea Penske Motorsports acquiring our company with the intention of having us do similar work for all of Penske Motorsports' racetracks. After only a moment's reflection, I declined the opportunity to sell our company but I was sure there were other ways we could work together. Roger and Greg didn't miss a beat and we quickly worked out a plan to provide creative and publishing services to all of Penske Motorsports which we did for the next several years.
This was not the first or the last time RACER would be approached regarding potential acquisition. One year later, Haymarket Media, LTD, Publishers of Autosport magazine reached out to me and began a conversation that eventually resulted in us selling the majority of our company to them in early 2001. As fate would have it, the man who later sat along side me during a key meeting with Haymarket would be Rich Peters. Rich offered his considerable skills and experience out of friendship stemming from the work we had done together in launching California Speedway. I remain forever grateful for his kindness and as proof of Rich's amazing intuition, he also accurately predicted that I would eventually re-acquire RACER from Haymarket – which happened in March 2012.


In late 1998, Greg Penske transitioned back to focusing on growing his burgeoning Penske Auto Group business. My friend Scott Atherton, whom I'd first met when he was General Manager of Laguna Seca, moved from the presidency of Nazareth Speedway to lead California Speedway into the new millennium. He was a worthy successor to Greg and I remain very proud of our work together.
By May of 1999, the International Speedway Corporation purchased Penske Motorsport and within a year our role soon was reduced to providing creative services to California Speedway. Scott Atherton left California Speedway in mid 2000 to lead the American Le Mans Series and our friendship and business relationship continues to this day.
Upon Atherton's departure to the ALMS, Bill Miller, who had been serving as ISC's director of consumer marketing, made a welcome return to California Speedway and we began to grapple with the sport's growing headwinds and the fallout from the ongoing CART/IRL split which had decimated open-wheel ticket sales. Overall, tickets and suites were becoming harder to sell in a facility that had seen a significant increase in both, built to satisfy Wall Street. By 2004 a second NASCAR Cup race was added and the battle to sell out the two NASCAR races became all but impossible. This eventually spelled the end of Miller's remarkable and crucial involvement in California Speedway. Today he serves as the senior VP of operations for SEMA and also oversees the Performance Racing Trade Show and magazine.
Our agency relationship with the California Speedway continued through 2005 and during that latter period our team began to work with the team at ISC on a global brand study for all of ISC's tracks and Pfanner Communications was later retained to create the logo architecture for the Daytona 500 in 2005, 2006 and 2007.
It was during our latter years of our involvement with California Speedway that I first came to know current president Dave Allen, who came to the track in a marketing capacity in 1999. He impressed me from the start. He had the same bright spark of passion tempered by a the same focus on the customer experience I saw in California Speedway's founding team.
In late 2005, California Speedway's new president, Gillian Zucker, wanted to go a new direction with creative services and she hired another agency to try to reverse the flagging fortunes of one of American racing's crown jewels. Ticket sales plummeted initially and in all fairness, it had little to do with marketing direction or creative executions. The market was changing and NASCAR was suffering from over-exposure. In a game-changing moment, Zucker and Allen scored a landmark naming rights deal with Southern California's AAA to rename the facility "Auto Club Speedway" in 2008. They also tried novel approaches to bringing the buzz and the fans back and slowly, over time it began to work but it was not enough to save the second NASCAR Cup date, which was lost in the schedule re-alignment of 2011.
Approximately 12,000 seats were removed from Turn 1 in 2014 and the space allocated for each individual seat was expanded so the speedway's seating capacity fell from 92,000 to 68,000.
When Zucker left the speedway in late 2014 to take on the top business development role with the L.A. Clippers, Dave Allen was elevated to president of Auto Club Speedway and he has continued to focus on improving attendance and guest's experience.