How massive Daytona effort paid off for Black Swan

Image by Michael Levitt/LAT
61 shares
share
tweet
emailBy: Marshall Pruett | 53 minutes ago

As Wright and the rest of IMSA’s GTD teams continued to practice and qualify for the big race, and the Black Swan team readied itself for the almighty task of building a new car, Pappas also had to take Estep’s post-crash mindset into consideration, and whether the young talent was better off sitting on the sidelines after the costly incident.
Tim Pappas. Image by Richard Dole/LAT

“When you think back in the history of Black Swan Racing, I started my own team in 2008, and we did a few programs that people think about us for, like the back-to-back championships that we won in the American Le Mans Series, in the GT Challenge class, which was driving me and Jeroen Bleekemolen,” he said.

“At the time, nobody knew who Jeroen Bleekemolen was. I remember after I hired him, I’d said like to give somebody an opportunity, and I think blazing a trail with new talent is one of the identifying features of some of the best and most successful teams. That crosses every single sport, not just auto racing. I think altruistically, giving a young American kid like Trenton a shot feels like the right thing to do, if you’re me. If you’re fortunate enough to be able to go racing and do what I do, why not give a young guy who’s done well, and just hasn’t had that one big shot, an opportunity to go forward? That’s how we got there.”

Pappas chose to use Estep’s error as a teaching moment.

“When we were standing there on Thursday with the car in shambles, and Trenton was just beside himself, I just said to him, ‘Hey, every one of us wakes up every day, with the plan of going out into the world and being completely perfect and infallible, and not making any mistakes, and executing to the nth degree every goal that we have. But it doesn’t go that way and it never will. This is not the first setback that you’re going to have in your career. We need you. We need your mind. We need your body. We need you to get focused. Nobody at Black Swan racing has a bullseye on your head. Everybody knows that we’re all human and we all make mistakes. In fact, as a team, we made a big mistake at Bathurst, the car got put together unfortunately, and had a mechanical failure that really costs me pretty mightily,’” he continued.

“I’ve never blamed or looked back or thought that I should have done something differently than I did. It’s just the way things go. It never occurred to me that that was the right thing to do, although certainly for a couple of brief moments, the thought crossed my mind just out of sheer panic of, ‘Boy, if we get it going, is he going to be mentally prepared?’ The three of us — Sven, Jeroen and I — chatted on it, and they were both in agreement that Trenton was going to get his act together, that he’d done a great job at the Roar. He had done driver pit stop practices with us, and he was really ingrained in the team. It was the right thing to do to stick with him. I’m glad we did because I think he did a fantastic job in the race. I mean, I’m so proud of the effort every single person on the team put forth — their maximum, maximum effort.”
Fifth place felt almost as good as a victory for the Black Swan crew after their epic weekend. Image by Barry Cantrell/LAT

By Sunday afternoon, after 24 hours of racing that was more like 48 hours of anguish with Thursday’s dramas factored in, placing fifth in class and second among the Porsches — behind, fittingly, Wright Motorsports — Pappas knew that maximum effort was justified.

“Fifth place feels like a win for us,” he said. “I mean, yeah, it would have been amazing to cap off all of the drama with a win, and we had some really nice coverage. I was getting text messages from family and friends who were like, ‘Dale Jr. is talking about you guys and Paul Tracy is talking about you guys.’ It was a good story for everyone, and so I wish that we had done a little bit better but only just for pure pride.

“Otherwise, we all got together and had dinner Sunday night, and everyone was incredibly satisfied with where we finished. I think that it was a victorious weekend for us in many ways, being in the race in the first place, on the grid, taking the start, I thought, ‘Yeah, we’re already on borrowed time.’”