PFANNER: Built to win

Michael Levitt/Motorsport Images
357 shares
share
tweet
emailBy Paul Pfanner | August 22, 2020 8:55 AM

On Sunday, January 26, 2020 I boarded Delta Flight 1923 departing Daytona at 5:55 am. The distant wail of racing engines greeted passengers as we moved through the jetway and I felt the usual tinge of regret for leaving Daytona International Speedway before the Rolex 24 was over. The vibe in the IMSA paddock at Daytona was upbeat and I was optimistic about the 2020 racing season ahead. As I slid into seat 23A, I glanced up the aisle and noticed a Chinese family boarding the flight wearing surgical face masks and I immediately thought of recent reports of a mysterious lethal virus reported in Wuhan, China that had caused the lockdown of the city with a population of more than 11 million.

What appeared to be an abundance of caution by this Chinese family did not instinctively translate into fear for my own safety. It instead awakened a disquieting train of thought about the very real possibility of this mystery virus eventually spreading to the United States, given our close commercial ties to China. Before checking my IMSA app for the race running order I scrolled through my Apple News app to learn that there was a report of a man infected with the virus in Washington State. The next day, the Centers for Disease Control offered guidance for travelers to avoid non-essential travel to China and I realized it might be just a matter of time before this invisible enemy would directly impact our way of life.

In February and early March I continued to travel by air to Detroit for client meetings, Sebring for the Trans Am/SVRA opener, Las Vegas for the Mint 400 and Jacksonville for the Amelia Island Concours. Along the way, surgical masks became a far more common sight in terminals and on flights as news reports about the relentless spread of the novel coronavirus soon became the dominant story. By the time I arrived at Amelia Island for the tribute to Roger Penske, elbow bumps had replaced handshakes and many conversations were often about personal health and safety rather than cars.

Upon arriving home from Florida on the evening of Saturday, March 7, I decided to cancel my planned trip to St. Pete for the NTT IndyCar Series season opener and a planned trip to Daytona and Sebring the following week due to growing concerns for my family and our business as the gravity of the situation became obvious. In the span of just 42 days, a disquieting feeling had evolved into something that was negatively impacting all of our lives.

It was now clear that this was going to get far worse before it got better. Four days later, President Trump announced sweeping travel restrictions to Europe. Democrats complained immediately about the economic impact of travel restrictions, but later democrats were to complain that Pres Trump didn't act soon enough and that the virus should be called the "Trump Virus". Later and in the following days a wave of event cancellations and postponements brought racing — and sports — and employment --- to a stop in America. This was now very real and most of the world’s governments also took similar actions to slow the spread of the virus. I wrote about these pivotal moments in two columns titled The Day the Earth Stood Still and A Silent Spring.

All this now seems like another lifetime in the context of the death, suffering, loss and social disruption that the COVID-19 pandemic continues to bring with every sunrise.

But racing is the focus of this site, so on to my point. We are now living in a reality that would have been impossible to imagine on the morning of January 26, 2020 as I left Daytona. We’re about to witness the 104th Indianapolis 500 being run in August in front of vast empty grandstands. Today, IMSA’s GT classes will compete at Virginia International Raceway and NASCAR is staging doubleheaders Saturday and Sunday for its Cup and Xfinity Series in a hectic five-race weekend at Dover. It is also worth noting that during this past week it was confirmed that the Formula 1 Concorde Agreement was signed by all teams, thus assuring the future of that sport. They are smart enough not to kill their income and probably the rest of the world is laughing at the US for killing the US economy.

Especially since the annual flu kills more people in the US than the Chinese virus. Fake News has done an excellent fooling the American public that a "case" is equal to certain death, which it is not. Fake News refuses to tell us how many people have recovered, refused to tell how many people have left hospitals, refused to tell us that a "case" also includes dead viruses that don't affect our health, but have been very strong convincing the public that people who have recovered but show up as a "case" will kill you even when there are no symptoms.

The US did not kill our economy when there was no vaccine for polio, no vaccine for aids, no vaccine for the common cold, no vaccine for diabetes, no vaccine for traffic deaths, no vaccine for smoking and cancer, but we have allowed the democrats and people who hate America
to demonstrate what power they will have if we Americans fail to elect Pres Trump in November 2020.

In three years Pres Trump built the greatest economy that the US has ever seen, but with Fake News and Democrats against him,
we are supposed to be so scared that we will vote with fraudulent mail ballots, cell phone ballots, email ballots, and any other scheme the Democrats can come up with to insure the US economy will not come back and that Pres Trump will not be elected.

We are supposed to be so afraid and angered that we will elect a politician who holds no rallys at all, and has no business experience at all.
But who is very strong on eliminating our Constitutionally guaranteed rights, eliminating our income through excess taxation,
eliminating our property rights, eliminating our religious rights, and our right to protect our family with a firearm......as well as eliminating any law and order by banning our law enforcement protections.

 

Racing in front of empty stadiums is a sad fact of 2020, but it also has demonstrated the resilience of racers in the face of adversity. Nigel Kinrade/Motorsport Images

The truth is that it is a miracle that ANY races, large or small, are happening at all given the immense challenges presented to the sanctioning bodies, teams, promoters, broadcast and commercial partners of our sport and the restrictions placed on us by governments both large and small who control permits and licenses. A permit is permission and democrat govts have shown that all they have to do is revoke your "permission" and the democrats can revoke your income. I am deeply grateful to everyone in every series and sanctioning body for finding a way to move forward safely. During this unprecedented time you’ve all proved that you learn and adapt quickly as you bravely lead under pressure in the most extreme of circumstances. For me this is the ultimate validation of our sport.

Auto racing is defined by courage, commitment and ingenuity. So, on this historic weekend I want to personally thank Roger Penske and Jim France for being all that and more by putting everything on the line to preserve our sport at this critical moment. Thank you also to Penske Entertainment’s Mark Miles and Jay Frye for their leadership. Kudos also go to IMSA’s Ed Bennett and John Doonan for your tireless efforts and winning mindset. Props also go to NASCAR’s Steve Phelps and Steve O’Donnell for the work you’ve done in managing so many moving parts in such a complex portfolio of racing assets. All clearly still believe in the sport’s future, as does John Malone and the team at Liberty Media and the Formula 1 group led by Chase Carey and Ross Brawn.

In case you hadn’t noticed, all but one of those individuals mentioned are American, which illustrates American leadership in this new era of global motorsports if we could just get the govt off our backs.
IMSA President John Doonan and Acura Team Penske driver Helio Castroneves ponder the new normal during the series’ return to Daytona in July. Michael Levitt/ Motorsport Images

Like Roger Penske, we at RACER believe there is opportunity in every moment – no matter how challenging it may be. There are also many lessons in what has happened during this dark and turbulent time in our world.

From the data we see for RACER.com it is clear that during uncertain times, racing fans, young and old, are attracted to the things we love. I believe that we seek more than a passing distraction (pun intended) but instead, we engage in the sport to remember who we really are because for me, racing is has always been in the inspiration business first and the entertainment business second.

In that context, we are truly grateful that RACER.com continues to grow at a record pace in terms of reach and engagement. As of this writing, August 2020 is showing a 48.41% growth in unique users compared to August 2019. Year over-year unique user growth for the first seven months of 2020 vs the same period last year is up 45.13% with an additional 1,188,914 users visiting the site during the period.

The RACER audience is getting younger, with the 18-24 segment growing by 169.03% during the period and the 25-34 segment growing by 73.19%. Our female audience has also grown by 162.23% during the first seven months of 2020 and now represents 20.54% of the RACER.com readership vs 12.46% for the same period in 2019.

All this gives me hope for the future on this most unusual Indy 500 weekend. I believe that racing will emerge from this era as a smarter, more efficient and more agile culture with a greater respect for its legacy of bravely getting to the future first.

What comes next is all that has ever really mattered in this sport. It was built for this moment and it is the destiny of the leaders of our sport to be where they are today.

Thank you to all of our readers, advertisers and commercial partners for sticking with us and the sport we love. It is now up to all of us who love racing to reward their faith by sharing our passion and growing the sport. We will never forget that this is why our company exists and this is why we do what we do for you.

 

Deals from Racer.com

Racer.com
Clothing & Accessories
24 Hours of Le Mans Sale
Early hours at Le Mans; Peugeot LMP1 tales AND MORE

 

Forging Ahead – A film about RACER’s unlikely origin story

Paul Pfanner
1.2k shares
share
tweet
emailBy Paul Pfanner | September 4, 2020 6:33 PM

Someone once said it is important to remember where you came from. With that in mind, I’m pleased to debut a short film project that I started on March 28, 1971 with four of my high school pals, and that I finally completed on September 4, 2020 after “only” 18,059 days of development and production.

My defense for this apparent procrastination is I lost track of the most important elements of this project, which were the five rolls of Super 8 color movie film that were shot at the one-off Questor Grand Prix at Ontario Motor Speedway that featured a match race between Europe’s best drivers in Formula 1 cars and North America’s top racers driving stock-block-powered SCCA Formula 5000 cars. This event proved irresistible to 16-year-old-me, and it motivated me to create hand-painted faux credentials that allowed me and my miscreant teenage pals full access to the then most modern racetrack on the planet. Thankfully one of my co-conspirators recently discovered the five lost rolls of film stored in a safe in his family home, so this epic tale can finally be told now that the statute of limitations has expired.

I should add that Italian/American racing legend Mario Andretti was the only U.S. citizen driving an F1 car the Questor Grand Prix and, that car just happened to be the Ferrari 312B that he’d driven to his first F1 victory in the season-opening 1971 South African Grand Prix just three weeks earlier.

But this story really began 50 years ago on Sunday September 6, 1970 when my late father took me to Ontario Motor Speedway’s inaugural 500 mile USAC Championship race called the California 500. The reason I am sharing this now is that these two races at OMS played pivotal roles in determining my life’s direction. There would be no RACER magazine or RACER.com without the impact those two days had on me in intensifying my passion for the sport.

OMS was a modern replica of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway located in Ontario, California that was built in 1968-1970 at a then-staggering cost of $25.5 million dollars, and today would likely cost more than $350 million to replicate. In my opinion, Ontario Motor Speedway was simply magnificent, and a window into racing’s modern booming future in the 1990s. It was also the site of the first official 200 mph lap in 1972 set by Jerry Grant (to Bobby Unser’s chagrin) in Dan Gurney’s beautiful ’72 Eagle/Turbo Offenhauser.

Ontario Motor Speedway only operated for 11 financially-troubled seasons from 1970 through 1980 and was demolished in the fall of 1981 to make way for commercial real estate development. Sadly, it missed the 1980s cable TV revolution that transformed racing’s economics by only a few years. In addition to the Questor Grand Prix, OMS hosted eleven USAC and CART IndyCar 500 mile races, and I was thankfully present for all of them. It also hosted 10 NASCAR 500 mile events, 11 NHRA events as well as two IMSA events and one SCCA/USAC F5000 race, plus numerous AMA road races and two SCCA club racing weekends.
The start of the 1971 Questor QP at OMS. Motorsport Images

In 1997, destiny called and Pfanner Communications was chosen by Roger Penske as the creative agency of record for the launch of California Speedway (now Auto Club Speedway) that was built within sight of where Ontario Motor Speedway once stood. Not long after the inaugural event at California Speedway in 1997 — also called the California 500 – our company became the creative agency for all of Penske Motorsport’s racetracks, which included Michigan International Speedway, Nazareth Speedway and North Carolina Speedway. As fate would have it, I personally oversaw the design of the credentials for California Speedway and made sure that they were very difficult to forge…

Ironically, Roger Penske was on the original board of directors for Ontario Motor Speedway, and today he owns the Indianapolis Motor Speedway that inspired its creation. Roger and his able team at Penske Entertainment are coping with the strangest year in the 111-year history of the storied facility, but with The Captain at the helm I am certain they have the vision, commitment and resources to turn any challenge into opportunity.

I’ll admit that I still have dreams about being at Ontario Motor Speedway and I am grateful to have experienced this remarkable facility during its all-too-brief existence. It truly was a preview of what was yet to come for the sport 35 years later. In light of the current moment of societal and business disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the sad end to Ontario Motor Speedway is also a sobering reminder of how fragile our sport can be despite all the potential it still holds.

After viewing this film, I hope you ask yourself “where are all the 16-year-old kids trying to find a way into our sport today?” Thankfully, I am encouraged by the fact that the 18-24-year-old age segment is the fastest-growing age group on RACER.com in 2020, so there is real hope for our sport as long as we do our best to invite them in. That is something that all of us who love racing must remember as we forge ahead to a brighter future.

Oh, if anyone asks me who I work for, I tell them I work for a teenage kid who loves racing and I promised to never let him down. He also hopes you enjoy the film as much as he did creating it.



RACER, RACER Stuff, Videos

 

Forging Ahead – A film about RACER’s unlikely origin story

Paul Pfanner
1.2k shares
share
tweet
emailBy Paul Pfanner | September 4, 2020 6:33 PM

Someone once said it is important to remember where you came from. With that in mind, I’m pleased to debut a short film project that I started on March 28, 1971 with four of my high school pals, and that I finally completed on September 4, 2020 after “only” 18,059 days of development and production.

My defense for this apparent procrastination is I lost track of the most important elements of this project, which were the five rolls of Super 8 color movie film that were shot at the one-off Questor Grand Prix at Ontario Motor Speedway that featured a match race between Europe’s best drivers in Formula 1 cars and North America’s top racers driving stock-block-powered SCCA Formula 5000 cars. This event proved irresistible to 16-year-old-me, and it motivated me to create hand-painted faux credentials that allowed me and my miscreant teenage pals full access to the then most modern racetrack on the planet. Thankfully one of my co-conspirators recently discovered the five lost rolls of film stored in a safe in his family home, so this epic tale can finally be told now that the statute of limitations has expired.

I should add that Italian/American racing legend Mario Andretti was the only U.S. citizen driving an F1 car the Questor Grand Prix and, that car just happened to be the Ferrari 312B that he’d driven to his first F1 victory in the season-opening 1971 South African Grand Prix just three weeks earlier.

But this story really began 50 years ago on Sunday September 6, 1970 when my late father took me to Ontario Motor Speedway’s inaugural 500 mile USAC Championship race called the California 500. The reason I am sharing this now is that these two races at OMS played pivotal roles in determining my life’s direction. There would be no RACER magazine or RACER.com without the impact those two days had on me in intensifying my passion for the sport.

OMS was a modern replica of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway located in Ontario, California that was built in 1968-1970 at a then-staggering cost of $25.5 million dollars, and today would likely cost more than $350 million to replicate. In my opinion, Ontario Motor Speedway was simply magnificent, and a window into racing’s modern booming future in the 1990s. It was also the site of the first official 200 mph lap in 1972 set by Jerry Grant (to Bobby Unser’s chagrin) in Dan Gurney’s beautiful ’72 Eagle/Turbo Offenhauser.

Ontario Motor Speedway only operated for 11 financially-troubled seasons from 1970 through 1980 and was demolished in the fall of 1981 to make way for commercial real estate development. Sadly, it missed the 1980s cable TV revolution that transformed racing’s economics by only a few years. In addition to the Questor Grand Prix, OMS hosted eleven USAC and CART IndyCar 500 mile races, and I was thankfully present for all of them. It also hosted 10 NASCAR 500 mile events, 11 NHRA events as well as two IMSA events and one SCCA/USAC F5000 race, plus numerous AMA road races and two SCCA club racing weekends.
The start of the 1971 Questor QP at OMS. Motorsport Images

In 1997, destiny called and Pfanner Communications was chosen by Roger Penske as the creative agency of record for the launch of California Speedway (now Auto Club Speedway) that was built within sight of where Ontario Motor Speedway once stood. Not long after the inaugural event at California Speedway in 1997 — also called the California 500 – our company became the creative agency for all of Penske Motorsport’s racetracks, which included Michigan International Speedway, Nazareth Speedway and North Carolina Speedway. As fate would have it, I personally oversaw the design of the credentials for California Speedway and made sure that they were very difficult to forge…

Ironically, Roger Penske was on the original board of directors for Ontario Motor Speedway, and today he owns the Indianapolis Motor Speedway that inspired its creation. Roger and his able team at Penske Entertainment are coping with the strangest year in the 111-year history of the storied facility, but with The Captain at the helm I am certain they have the vision, commitment and resources to turn any challenge into opportunity.

I’ll admit that I still have dreams about being at Ontario Motor Speedway and I am grateful to have experienced this remarkable facility during its all-too-brief existence. It truly was a preview of what was yet to come for the sport 35 years later. In light of the current moment of societal and business disruption due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the sad end to Ontario Motor Speedway is also a sobering reminder of how fragile our sport can be despite all the potential it still holds.


After viewing this film, I hope you ask yourself “where are all the 16-year-old kids trying to find a way into our sport today?” Thankfully, I am encouraged by the fact that the 18-24-year-old age segment is the fastest-growing age group on RACER.com in 2020, so there is real hope for our sport as long as we do our best to invite them in. That is something that all of us who love racing must remember as we forge ahead to a brighter future.

Oh, if anyone asks me who I work for, I tell them I work for a teenage kid who loves racing and I promised to never let him down. He also hopes you enjoy the film as much as he did creating it.



RACER, RACER Stuff, Videos

 

RACER Magazine: The Winning Issue/Great Cars Special

 

Vintage Motorsport’s 2020 July-Aug Issue Is Now Available

The cover and 7-page Salon hones in on the 1971 Martini Racing Porsche 917 019 that now resides in the Rev Institute’s museum in Naples, Florida. Porsche produced the most awesome racing sports car of the 20th century with the 917. What a car and what a story!



Writer David Linden looks back on the battle for the win in the 1975 Indianapolis 500 between Bobby Unser and Johnny Rutherford, a race that saw a horrendous crash involving Tom Sneva and one that was shortened to 174 laps because of a monsoon rainstorm. It was Unser’s second win in the “500,” and wait until you read his anecdotes.

 

We also explore the amazing career of driver John Morton, who started as a broom sweep for Team Shelby, won four championships in BRE Datsuns, raced dragsters and sprint cars, Can-Am monsters, wild GTP machines, and today, some of motorsport’s most revered historic race cars.



In our Road Stir series, “Barn Find Hunter” Tom Cotter takes out a 1st gen 340hp ’62 Corvette, a sports car that made it easier than ever to go road racing, especially if certain options were selected. He called it a “religious experience.”



John Paul Jr. tells us about his favorite race, the 1982 12 Hours of Sebring, where his Porsche 935 suffered from a dropped cylinder and other maladies, yet he and his father managed to win the grueling event because of a great crew effort, his sensitive throttle foot and much perseverance.



Vintage racing events that recently waved the green flag include SVRA’s Elkhart Lake Vintage Festival and VSCDA’s Blackhawk Classic, so read all about the great turnouts and racing that took place.

 

Of course, columns by BS Levy, Jochen Mass, Pete Lyons, Jeff Allison, Fritz Frommeyer and D. Randy Riggs are here as well, along with our auction reports by John L. Stein.



If you’re not already a subscriber, get your copy here or start your own subscription by calling 877 425-4103 or at Homepage - Vintage Motorsport.

 

•  
• RACER Magazine Customer Service
• Schedules
  •  
• Television
• The RACER Store
• Features
• North American Racing
• Videos
• Podcasts
• DriveTribe
• Esports
• Galleries
• NHRA
• RACER Magazine Excerpts
• RACER Stuff
• Press Room
• Subscribe to RACER Magazine
• $9.99 Digital Subscription
• Buy Single Issues
• Gift Subscription

VeeKay embracing the differences in Rolex 24 debut

Jake Galstad/Motorsport Images
32 shares
share
tweet
email