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A conversation about cars, trucks, tugs and other machines of transport that flows like an ADHD fever dream, hosted by Hoonigan co-founder and 321 Action Action director Brian Scotto. Enjoy, it’s gonna be a bizarre ride.
S2 E13 Audio
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What's up everybody? Welcome back to yet another episode of Very Vehicular and I am your host, Brian Scotto. Today we are joined by none other than JR Hildebrand. You may know him best from the racing he has done specifically in Indy, but I like to think of him as potentially one of the smartest race car drivers I've ever met.
And today we focus on how to save motorsports. Both of us have recognized that in the past two decades there has been a major decline in this thing that we love. And the question now is how do we reverse it? It might be our job. It might be your job, but either way it's gotta happen. Anyway, buckle up.
This is a long episode, a contender for one of our longest, and it gets deep, so enjoy it. I certainly did one of the best conversations I've had yet. Oh, and lastly, this may be one of the episodes I talked the least in, that's how much JR has to say. One thing I love about the team at Vyper is that they're just like us.
They can't leave anything stock, otherwise they'd only make red and black stools. Instead, they are constantly releasing limited edition colorways. Two of my favorites, they've done the gul, which is Glow in the Dark and the Voodoo, which is this really rad deep purple and black. And if you like camo, you can get a Vyper stool trimmed in official real tray.
They've even done really cool collabs with friends of ours like Roadster Shop and The Drift hq. Maybe one day they'll do a Scotto edition, although they keep telling me no one wants a stool that's missing half of its parts and doesn't ever roll. Anyway, check 'em out@Vyperindustrial.com. That's Vyper with a Y.
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Jerry Hildebrand, welcome to the show. I I, I wanna start by saying this is a show I am really excited about because you came out here. I don't know. I guess it was for Indie in Long Beach. We caught up for breakfast and we talked for like two and a half hours. Yeah. And I ended saying this should have been a podcast because we had this really great conference.
So we're basically gonna try to repeat that conversation. Yeah. But here, and I'm sure there'll be, be new stuff that comes out of it, but um, as we joke before the show, you're like pre-internet, so you had your big moments.
It makes me feel old. It's just 'cause I
started than doing what I was doing when I young, younger, younger, younger.
But like, you were like you, you were at your like peak moment in racing in 2010, 2011, right?
Yeah. But my rookie year in IndyCar, so I got like made it pro in 2011. Yeah. So that was kind of like, yeah. When, when things got got real.
Yeah. 'cause I was gonna say, I feel like we have to do like just a quick little rapid fire question so that the audience kind of, you know, knows a little bit more about you.
So you, you already said you're an IndyCar racer. I, I don't wanna start with this, but what are you most famously known for?
Most famously known for crashing on the final lap of the 2011 Indianapolis five.
That's my lap. But the final corner.
Final corner, yeah.
You slid through the finish line in from, went from first place to second place.
Yeah. Yeah. It was a, a crazy kind of end of race fuel strategy situation that I basically, I came upon, I was saving fuel to try to make it to the end of the race. Yeah. We, we were running kind of fifth, sixth or something coming into the final stanza of the race. Yeah. So we were like, if I had just stayed out and we'd stayed on strategy.
You're rookie of the year and whatever anyway.
Right.
But we took a gamble to take a, take a pit stop when nobody else was going to, we were gonna just stay out and save fuel all the way until the end. Dario Franki and I pitted together, he was in the lead. Um, you know, the laps like clicked down and then just all of a sudden you're in the lead of the race.
Like Dario was my bogey, basically. Like I know I'm racing him 'cause we're on the same strategy past him with a few to go and, but, but 'cause we're both just like looking at the ticker on the steering wheel to figure out, or have I saved enough? Right. You know, you're not really, you're not even really racing, you're just kind of managing it's point, this whole thing.
Yeah. And you don't know what is going on around you at all. Basically you're like, maybe you glance up at the pile on, but you're still going, you know, you're saving fuel doing two 15 or something. Like, so you don't have like a lot of time to think about anything that's happening. Um, and I was a rookie, like I don't, you know, you really don't know what's going on at that point, at the end.
Like, you know, you're coming from racing in championships where you don't even make pit stops. Right. You know, up to that point. So yeah. End of the race, uh, get into just assume the lead 'cause cars are pit peeling off to make their pit stops right. Until the end of the race. Um,
so you were leading at this point for only five laps or something,
right?
Couple laps. Yeah. I think, um, and just again, like I'm just trying to hit my number to make sure I make it to the end and. Final lap. You know, take the white, you know, I obviously, I know I'm in the lead of the race at that point, but still I've got guys that have come outta the pits that are 20 car lengths back, but moving like a freight train, you're kind of guys coming in and out of the pits on the back, straight, whatever.
Uh, ended up basically catching a car that I assumed was coming out of the pits, getting back up to speed. What, what was in fact running out of fuel. Mm. Coming in into turn four. And by the time I realized what was going on, it was like, well, you got two options. One is park it behind this guy going 30, 40 miles an hour slower.
Mm-hmm.
Never felt like I was like at risk of crashing into him, but you're gonna have to really stop. Right. And you're losing a lot of momentum. Or just try to skate around the outside. Like, people ask me this all the time.
Oh, I know. And I'm sorry that we start with this. Like, but it is for the audience that's listening who's not aware.
This is unfortunately. Yeah, yeah. What you are infamous for.
So the, uh, it's so funny 'cause it's like, it's so not on my mind ever. Of course, of course. You know, but the, so yeah, I caught up to the 83 and, you know, in, in, in hindsight, like the thing that, the thing that I would've needed to do different was just recognize that this was all going on sooner and back off sooner and like catch 'em later through the corner.
But I didn't
because you're a rookie.
Yeah, you're just, yeah. I mean, it's not like I'm thinking about having won the race at that point. You're just, you're just kind of like locked in in the moment. Yeah. You know, you're not aware of what's going on. You know, didn't ha didn't have anybody over the radio.
Your spotters are mostly telling you what's going on kind of behind you. Like they're not, you're the one that's supposed to be responsible for what's going on in front of you. Mm-hmm. Basically. And I had some, you know, this, my turn three spotter was like, you know, a little questionable whether he, that was like the right job for that dude.
Yeah. At that time anyway. But, um, yeah, so tried to go around the outside, you know, your thirties, whatever, laps under green. There's indie is a one lane track that's a low odds move, but to me it was the only move at that time. Mm-hmm. And just got in the marble. I tried to get as close as I could to the car that I was getting around and not be up in the gray, but got up in the gray, crashed and then, I mean, you're immediately, I mean, I remember this all like it was yesterday.
You're just like, while I'm still on the lead of the race and I just gotta get to the finish line, you know, so I wooded it.
So you were on throttle at this point, like the
full throttle, the
car front right corner is co
completely destroyed. I mean, the right side of the car is smoked.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Um,
like if, like the control arms and everything were
disconnected point, I mean, the right front actually wasn't that bad, but I mean,
yeah.
Car's not doing what it would normally be doing at that point.
Um, and you hit, I mean, how fast were you going when you hit?
Uh, probably. You know, 200 ish.
I love how you just so casually drop 200 miles. I mean Yeah,
that
is a,
I mean GI mean, maybe not quite 200.
What kind of GS is that?
That one's like a hit, like that, a glancing kind of Right.
It's situation's. Isn't that, and I've had some, you wanna talk about big G accidents? Like we talk about that, but, um, you know, that's a, that's one you don't even think about basically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so, 'cause it was late in the corner too, and I come almost to the straightaway, basically by the time I actually, you know, hit the wall, make contact, um, car came out into like the middle of the track.
But is, and so I tried to just go to throttle, like that car is like all over the place. So I steered it back into the wall and, you know, drove it as I ended up hitting the turn one wall too, which was,
yeah, yeah.
Which sucked. Um, basically because I had like, was still going 180, you know, with two wheels on it, like across the finish line.
But at that point, yeah, Dan Weldon had, had, uh, he was, had passed among the cars that had pitted and was on fresh tires and was chasing us down or whatever. So
I'm sure you've been asked this a thousand times. I'm, I probably have watched interviews. You being asked this. Do you think if you had parked it behind that lap traffic, Dan would've still passed you?
Or do you think that like it was, it was gonna happen like second place was gonna happen? Either way. I don't know. You either crash out, I mean. I'm assuming you've thought about
this. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I, I mean, i's it's like, it's neither here nor there, really. It just in that like, I've not gone back and done like a super deep dive in the data by Reddit
has
Oh,
sick.
There's like really deep Reddi threads about this.
So this, this gives you the, this gives you a little bit of the insight of like the mindset of pro of a professional racer in this and like, versus the internet, the fans or whatever. Like, to me, it just doesn't really matter. Yeah. The, I think it's in all likelihood, well, I'd say this, like I said earlier for sure, if I had just been eyes up and recognized what was coming at me sooner and just reacted sooner to it, um, I for sure would've been able to just wait long, you know, get out of it.
Mm-hmm. Wait longer, catch that car later in the corner so you're not getting like, screwed up by the slipstream and Yeah. You know, arrow wash and all that kind of stuff. Like, that was the risk that I felt like I was gonna take.
Yeah.
By the time I realized what was going on, like it was a big closing rate.
So it's kind of like the cars are not meant to slow down behind another car in the middle of the corner at 200 miles an hour. Right. Like that, that's, that's recipe for just getting in your own accent, like losing it and getting your own accident.
Mm-hmm.
Anyway, so I think the, the muscle memory for me was like, that's just not an option at this point.
Yeah. Yeah. Like I'm for sure gonna crash if I. Drive it down into the corner right behind the sky, regardless of whatever the math is for. If I can re-accelerate, it's a little bit in the back of your mind. Like I've spent, I've now spent 30 something laps, taking it super easy to sit, to not be at full throttle if I don't have to be right.
To not be asking too much of the car if I don't have to. 'cause I'm on smoked tires and at the end of a fuel stint. So my mindset was like, I gotta maintain momentum here basically. And, and stopping and having to restart. I don't, I don't know exactly how far the cars are behind me. You know, you, you have some sense of it, but
Yeah.
You know your mirrors, like, I don't, I'm not seeing them. Yeah. I'm not paying attention to that. Um,
so do, do your spotters give you splits and stuff or
They do, yeah. But at that point it's just mayhem at the end of the race. So it's like I knew what my, I knew what my splits were coming across the start finish line.
Like I knew I had a, I knew I had plenty, if nothing goes wrong, I knew I had plenty of gap. Yeah. Like that I could run a really slow final lap if I had to from a fuel economy perspective and would get to the end. Yeah. Um, but once something like that happens, it kind of all goes out the window. You're like, I don't, you know, I don't know.
And there was definitely, I mean, there was a part of me, Marco Andretti, five or six years prior to that 2006, I think lost the race, was leading the race final lap, um, got passed down the front straightaway by Star, by Sam Ho, Jr. To lose. And I, there, there was just that, so totally watching that happen was just like, I am just not ever gonna be that guy.
Like yeah. Not, not to to single out Marco. No, no. But just not Marco. But like, I just don't, that's so not why I am here.
Right.
To, to end up losing because I, you know, piled on the brakes in a situation where maybe that wasn't, you know, my only option.
Right.
Um, so yeah, it's, it, it's definitely, so
you, you went the, when endow go flat out
Yeah.
I went the, like, you know, at whatever,
what's the worst that happens?
I end
up
in second. Like, I, I was kind of Yeah, totally. At that point I was like, you know, people talk to me about this all the time. Like, like that happens to so many guys and it just happens in the middle of the race. Yeah. And you don't even, like, we're not sitting here talking about, because they finished like 30th.
You know, I, and I think, and, and look, this is, this is part of the setup for this episode and I I, so I didn't ask you this question because I just wanted to sit here and be like, Hey, let's talk about your most humiliating moment in racing, which really shouldn't be. 'cause you were a rookie who finished second in the Indy 500.
Yeah. Which is one of the highest things you can do in Motorsport, but. I think the reason that stands out is because it was good entertainment. Like this is the kind of things that people watch racing for. Yeah, right? They, they want, no one wants to watch cars get into position and then just watch the laps count, count up.
Right. Like, that's not what people want. People want sit there and say, oh, this could all change in the last lap. This could all, like, you could have these big changes. And I think that's like where certain racing is really successful. Because I think it's one of the, one of the reasons people like nascar, and I'm not a big NASCAR person, but like there's always a big wreck in the last three laps.
It just happened to Daytona, right? And it's like where everything can change. And I think that those are those things that, you know, we need to talk about of like, how is ra not that we want drivers to wreck, but that like things can change quickly and it's like, this is one of the reasons I brought you on is talk about that.
But, but I wanna, I wanna hit a few, a few things first and we, we don't have to talk about the crash anymore, that's not behind us, but how, what was your road up to Indy? 'cause I, I, it's actually something you and I have never talked about. Yeah. Like where did you come up the standard route of carting? Like how did that, you get into that?
Did you have, were you in a family of motorsport? Like how, how did you end up there?
No, I think, I mean, so much of what has informed, just my perspective, definitely my, my road and becoming a race car driver in the first place or whatever was my upbringing. It was not, you know, from a ra, a family of racers.
Um, my dad had a vintage race car from when I was a kid, so he was a CPI grew up in the Bay Area. Um, and, but he had a 68 Camaro that was a, what had been a race car from when it was new. It was not a TransAm car, but it ran in that mm-hmm. Of that spec. Basically it was an a sedan car, hill climb, SECA hill climb car, that kind of stuff.
Um, so he raced that with, still has this car, uh, raced that. In the TransAm group in like the vintage TransAm group for a long time up until that group mean, we know that group now as being like all of the heavy hitting real deal cars, like the West Coast TransAm group is, you know, the real deal, like Bud Moore, Penske cars, all that kind of stuff.
Back in the nineties it was just kind of like,
copy,
whatever. If it's a car that is period Correct. Of this spec, you go run 'em in that group. It wasn't all, these weren't all like million dollar
Right.
Things at that time. Um,
wasn't cars that were running Goodwood, so you
remember this meeting and so, so like, he raced six or eight times a year, uh, vintage races, mostly just on the West Coast.
And growing up in Marin, like you were 45 minutes from Sears Point and an hour and some change from Laguna. We had season passes to both places. So I, I mean, wait,
there's season passes for racetracks. I, that was a thing.
This, or this used to be a thing at least for sure. Yeah.
When I was like, how like, like you have a season pass to like, go to like the ski.
Yeah,
yeah. Just any event. You, you know, and you look at it the exact same way. Like how many events am I think I'm gonna go to and Yeah. You know, whatever. Um, the epic pass of racing this, this, this used to be a, a real thing. Um,
now it's like member, it's like now it's memberships and it costs, you know, it costs hundreds of thousands of
it's of dollars and you have to, it cross my mind
and you
have to belong to it.
The, so, so we, I just grew up. I grew up a, a real hardcore fan. Mm-hmm. Basically. And had, you know, I played baseball really competitively for a long time, but if you'd got in my room when I was 10, I had hundreds of Hot Wheels cars and no baseball cars anywhere, right? Mm-hmm. Like bracing and cars and whatever was just my thing.
That was so, in a general sense, that was definitely, you know, bred in me by my dad and my uncle. And, you know, they worked on, they were like, you know, in Sausalito, California, two o'clock in the morning, setting the timing on the, you know, Camaro in the middle of the night while they're trying to get back up to Sonoma.
It a very kind of blue collar thing in the middle of, you know, an affluent, you know, part of, uh, part of Northern California. But, uh, you know, that was what I grew up on. And so, I mean, I think when I was really young, you could, you could have offered me any path into motorsport and I would've been into it.
Mm-hmm. Or even automotive. Like, I liked the idea of being a designer, uh, when I was a kid, but they opened up a go-kart. I'd driven go-karts a few times, was always good at it. Like was, was, you know, and kind of raced mountain bikes and BMX and so speed and. That racing and Yep. Competition was always, you know, definitely my thing.
Did all the early sim racing, you know, way back like, you know, people who are sim racers would know Sports Car GT and Grand Prix Legends, and some of these, the really early games that were Grand
Prix legends,
like hyper realistic, you know, where it's like hard just to make it around for a lap. Mm-hmm. Um, and uh, and so every time I got into Go-kart, it was like boom, just right on pace and I fell in love.
Um, go-karting is is like a localized thing though. Like, if, if you don't wanna spend a ton of money on it, it's, it's not like the basketball court down the street or something. So, uh, I really, it, the, my Path really all started when they opened the go-kart track at Sears Point, and that was 2002, 2003 or something.
So I was 13 going on 14, started racing, then, uh, came up through the Jim Russell Driver's School program there.
I forgot about
the school, which no longer exists. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, was the,
was one of the few Open wheel
courses
too. Right. Honestly,
without that, I don't think I'd be here. Yeah, like it, 'cause I won, I won one of the carting championships.
You got a three day school for free. Once you did the three day school, you got automatic entry into the grand, the graduate runoffs. Yeah. Which was just like a shootout at the end of the year. Every year I won that shootout. Got a free season in the big car, you know, they were rotary powered, like mm-hmm.
The old star Mazda car basically. Yep. But wings and slicks, like a real open wheel car, won that championship. So with, so I, I, there was a, there was another year of race and shifter carts, like go-karting and all of that. But basically followed the Jim Russell scholarship trajectory transition, that transition to me basically for free from carts to cars and, and then you got.
Some budget to go do whatever with. Mm-hmm. So I raced Formula four in 2000, won the national championship the following year in 2006. Uh, champ Carla at that point, champ Car, right. Car was separate. Still
Separat. Yeah. I went to Champ Car and d
uh, so I was on the Champ car side of it to start with. So I raced Atlantics for a year and then switched to Indie Lights.
Yep.
Super last minute. Um, that ended up being the year that the, that Chacar and IndyCar converged. Uh, so, so that was for sure the right call. Right. That was like
2008
because like Yeah. All the guys, all, most of the drivers that stayed on the Atlantic stayed on like the Champ car. 'cause Atlantic still ran that following year, got kind of hung out to dry.
Mm-hmm.
So, so I kind of jumped ship to Indy Lights, not necessarily racing for one of the best teams, but basically got a year under my belt of just racing ovals and, and doing all that kind of stuff. 'cause Indy Lights, Indy car at that time was still a lot of, you know, 50 50 almost ovals and road courses.
Mm-hmm. It's turned much more into like a o or a road course street course centric thing by now. Mm-hmm. But following year, you know, did well enough basically to work my way into the, what was then the championship, the outgoing champions ride. Um Yep. At Andre Green. So, you know, came into Indie lights that year just.
If we didn't, if we didn't stick it on the pole and win a race, we were pissed. Mm. Like it was one of those kind of seasons, you just, you knew that you had all the tools to go out and crush. And I had had a year under my belt in the championship, so I knew all the tracks and, you know, knew what I was up against.
The car was just bad, fast. And so we, you know, I locked up the championship with like two to go and, uh, and then interestingly, basically was what I at the time, liked to call being a free agent for a year. I was just totally unemployed, race car driver for a season. After that, after winning the Indy Lights Championship, I didn't think it made any sense to go back and do it again, just because there weren't
right
openings in IndyCar.
There was talk of, you know, at that time I got my F1 test with Force India. There was talk of racing GP two for the year and that maybe that would circle back to IndyCar or, or maybe I would just stay in Europe or whatever. Um, ended up through that season doing some sports, car racing and then filling in for Mike Conway.
He got hurt at the 500 that year. So at the tail end of the IndyCar season, made my IndyCar debut just as a fill in. Mm-hmm. Um, did well, got hired full-time the following season by, by Panther racing with the National Guard sponsorship. Yeah. And I had kind of been. I knew that that seat was gonna be come, was gonna open up.
Mm-hmm. Basically, so I was, I kind of had pushed my eggs into that basket from, from early on. Like, I'm just gonna try to get positioned to be the guy for that seat. 'cause I'm a young American guy that seems to make, that makes sense. They had, they had not yet had an American driver with the National Guard sponsorship, um, which was kind of funny at the time.
Uh, had to audition for it. So we did a test at Phoenix on the, on the short oval there. And, you know, halfway through the test they just like told all the other guys to go home.
Sweet.
So that was, that was my like, entry point to the, the series.
So that your rookie year.
Yeah.
And then after, so then re rookie year, how many more years did you spend in Indy afterwards?
I mean, I've raced 12 Indy five hundreds.
Okay.
Um, not racing full time in the series. Yeah. Through that whole period. Just, you know, you kind of bounce around a little bit on sponsorship stuff and, and whatever. I mean, you know, I think I am in, in one respect super fortunate to have been able to make like a pretty good living for the last 15 years now just being a hired gun.
Yeah. Like, I've made an okay living. Yeah. It's
not a bad way to
lose showing up just to do one race a year at Indianapolis, you know, like it, that that event still has enough gravity that like that's possible to do. Yeah. And, and I kind of, you know, it's funny you bring up 2011. You know, for, there was a period of time where that, where I felt like there was this, like I had to redeem myself or something, you know, I mean, you, you naturally maybe feel that way about this kind of stuff.
Um, but it's funny because you start getting, you, people start talking to you about, you know, oh, well, you know, how different do you think your career would be if you'd have won the race instead of this or that? And, you know, I, I can think of, I can think of a bunch of times during my racing career, during my IndyCar career that I made a mistake or something happened that, that I wish I could kind of undo.
Right? Because, because I think it would've been like, if I'd have done that right that day, instead of making that mistake, that would've showcased to the people who are gonna pay me to come back and do this again. That Right. That I was better than I was or something. Mm-hmm. You know, that moment in 2011 for, I think, you know, partially 'cause I was a rookie, but, and so just knowing the circumstance of the whole thing, like, you know, if I'd have won the race to me, that at this point now, like that would not have been expressive of having more skill, having more whatever.
It would've just been like, I don't know, you just make a different choice in the moment or something. Right.
It would've been a strategy conversation,
you know? And so, uh, it's an interesting one because. Just because you get asked these questions all the time. Yeah, yeah. You sort of, not, not like this, but just people ask you about stuff like that, you know, oh, you know, this or that.
Like, what the, what ifs? And I'm like, you know, I just don't, I don't dabble in the what ifs of this stuff anyway. But I think at the end of the day, what matters to me is, was I, was I actually just good enough to get the next ride Right. And like, continue to be able to do it. And, you know, looking back to then, like, I mean, at least at that time I did.
Right? Yeah. Like I was, I was, I was able to do it, you know, 11 more times and I'm still like waiting on a phone call right now for this year. Like maybe I still just get plugged in because somebody needs a, a vet Right, right. That they can just know is gonna show up and do the job. So,
so for me, it's interesting because I, I was thinking last night as I was making notes for the show of like, where did we first meet?
And I, I could be wrong, so you may know better, but I, I think I actually met you through Formula drift.
That sounds right. '
cause I think you were, 'cause you were driving, you drove one year.
Yeah. Right. I did a couple of events, uh, with Tyler. Right. In 2013.
Yeah. Yeah. Okay. That's probably makes sense. I think that's where I first met you.
Yeah. Was through that and. That's where I first met you, but when I think I realized that you and I connected was you came to Hoonigan and you were like, this is when we were in the 6 21 building. And you said, I had this idea and I wanna talk to you about it. And it was the concept of Rufus and I don't know how much you wanna talk about it.
How much Talk about it. Talk about it. Yeah. And I actually want to pin that, we'll talk about it later because I wanna get to another thing first. But I walked outta that meeting one and, and you know, take this as you will, that you were smarter than most race car drivers because I've spent a lot of time around race car drivers and not all of them are, they're very focused.
And I think there is like a very, um, specific, like essentially for road racing. I think there's like a very specific type of like archetype of the race car driver. Yeah. And you had, you were thinking about stuff that I think most drivers don't ever think about. 'cause I spent a lot of my time talking to race car drivers saying, you need to think about this.
Like, this is what people are looking at. But I walked away from that going all right, Jr's definitely an ally in this. I grew up loving motors sports, but something has changed in motor sports that it's just not as interesting. And I, I said in a couple episodes ago that I feel like Motorsports has an entertainment problem.
Like, it's just not as entertaining as it was when I was a kid. Right. I grew up, my father's, uh, birthday. On the 30th of May. So we would always watch the 500 as like part of his birthday, whether it was the day after, the day before, whatever, like that's what my dad wanted to do. We would sit there, we'd watch the 500 together and you know, I just as a, from a little kid, like, I remember sitting there, you know, rooting for, you know, like all these different drivers through, and it was always exciting.
There was always something going on. And, you know, I then grew interest in rally racing, DTM, um, like a lot of touring car stuff is like, really, I always liked production car stuff. And then started watching Formula One. Um, I started watching Formula One sort of in the, probably like the middle of the Schumacher kind of era, right?
Sure. And like really exciting.
Late nineties.
Yeah. Yeah, late nineties. And, um, you know, and, and watch through till like, I don't know, probably like 2009 and then stops watching. So like, it now, like f one's huge and like, I'm not paying attention to it, but like, I was there for like Lewis's like, you know, rookie year and that was really exciting.
Um, I was there for Jensen Buttons year, which was like, which was so unexpected. Yeah. And like, and, but. Even then I felt like Motorsport was losing it. Like I remember going to IMSA races at like Lime Rock and just being like, this is just not like who's here? Like why, why, why does this matter? Why does this matter?
Yeah.
Other than it's a good picnic with like your family, like, well, like why? Like where is the excitement here? And then I got to see it firsthand in WRC as like, you know, Ken and I were trying to tell good stories and the actual organization was our biggest hurdle, right? Like dealing with the FIA was a hurdle.
They tried to find us once for not sending out a press release. I'm like, why do we have to put a press release like I posted on Facebook and this was like kind of pre-Instagram, like, like, trust me, more people saw it on Facebook than a press release. And like, well that's because that's what you're supposed to do.
I have a million
stories like that. It's, it's like, why? So this is where I sort of wanna, you know, I I, I'd love to have this conversation with you 'cause you and I have talked about it in a lot of different places, but you know, right here it's like, how one, can we fix where we are? Right. Um, I think Formula One has seen a, a shift because they started to invest more in the story of the people and they realized that that worked.
Right? I think no one can deny that the Netflix show like was, was a huge piece for them. But you look at all these other places in motor sports and it's like everyone's trying to figure out how do we go, how do we go tell a story? How do we do something different? But I don't think. Everyone sees all the hurdles that are in the background.
Right. And, and I don't even know where you wanna start. 'cause we could start on the, the cars, the tracks, the, the, the way drivers approach it. Um, but like you and I in talking about Rufus and, and we'll get into Rufus later, but basically your concept for Rufus, um, and, and I'll just tell it and you can correct me, it was like almost was building like a point system around all these other races.
And, and the idea was like, let's build out a way where someone could be a Baja racer, but also compete in these four other events and all of their points kind of create this like, you know, big point system and this idea of like a real like sort of like race of champions. Right. And, you know, and by the way, uh, Rufus is Parnelli Jones' middle name, which I always thought
it's actually his real first name.
Parelli is his middle name.
Oh, okay. Okay. Interesting.
Parnell is his middle name. Parnell. Parnell is like a
nickname. It was the nickname. Right? So it was Rufus Parnell Jones, right?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah. By the way, my wife is really good friends with his cousin. Oh, no way. She's really into mid-century modern bathrooms.
And I, which is really random, but I went to this guy's house, which is real tangent. I went to this guy's house, middle of the pandemic. We had just bought the Don, but like had it modified yet
because it was up in, uh, like Torrance.
Yeah, yeah. Or down in this area. So, um, I, we had just bought the Donk, right.
Which was a. If I remember it was 71, uh, and it was stock, but it was really nice. Like we bought this like, kind of like perfect car. And I drove, I was like, oh. I was like, I might as well drive this up. I can, he had this like toilet bowl, this like vintage toilet bowl that my wife wanted. So I drive all the way up to I, I, the guy like lives up in like, I think like Hollywood Hills, maybe Pasadena.
It's Pasadena. So I drive all the way up there and he comes out and he is like, man, I haven't seen one of those in like forever. And we start talking and he starts talking. He's like, yeah, you know, I was really into cars, so on and so on. You might've heard of my cousin. I was like, oh, who's your cousin? He is like, you've heard of a race car driver named Parnelli Jones?
I was like, you gotta be kidding me. Yeah. I was like, his name. I was like, and I actually said to him, he didn't correct me. I was like, his middle name was Rufus. Right. He is like, how do you know that long story? Well, there's this guy. There's this guy. But I, I think that. You know, you have this whole story as a race car driver, but the, the thing that I find really interesting about you is you, you think a lot about how do we make racing better?
And I think you think a lot about it from the car side. And I think where you and I meet is that I look at it from the storytelling side, right? Yeah. Like, like how do we put all those together? And the last I think phone call I had with you is I called you and I said, I wanna make a documentary called like, like motorsports sucks and we wanna fix it.
Right. Like, like literally just go right at it and you were like, sign me up. 'cause I think that's also something that's interesting is that a lot of race car drivers are afraid to talk about this. Yeah. Because they know it's broken, they know the system's broken, but they don't wanna upset anyone and, and not get a future ride.
Yeah. You're you're beholden to it.
Yeah.
You know, to a degree. And, and there is definitely still, you know, Instagram and, and all of these things, social has definitely put some power of influence back in the hands of the athlete. But Motorsport is such a vertically integrated, like value chain from a commercial perspective.
Mm-hmm. That. You're still, you still gotta get somebody to come up with several million dollars to just even go do the thing. Right? Like, you're still just, this is, this is not BMX or something where you can just go buy a bike and show up at the X Games if you're great.
Right. Right.
Um, so I, I think where I want start Yeah.
Like if you're asking, if you're asking me what the, where do you wanna start? What the thing is here, so
how do,
it's,
how does Brian Scotto and JR Hildebrand fix Motorsport in this podcast?
So for, for me, it's, it's not that motorsport needs saving mm-hmm. Because there's a lot of motorsport that's still great.
And I also want, like, I think you and I are both on the same page here, but for the benefit of the audience, like, we're here talking about this, I'm definitely here talking about this. I know you're in the same boat. Like, because we love this shit and, but we know that there are aspects of it that are broken and we wanna see it be better.
Like, this is, this is like, we are not gonna gentle parent motorsport here. Yeah. Like, you know, we, I have really, I've done this thing for so long, I've cared about it longer than most of the people that are doing about it from growing up. You, you mentioned kind of your entry points into what made you passionate about Motorsport.
Mm-hmm. What're into, I mean, growing up in the ni I mentioned earlier, like between Sears Point and Laguna Seka through the nineties, you saw everything. You got cart, you, you know, cart, which was the, for predecessor to IndyCar, right?
CART carts,
uh, yeah. C Championship Auto Racing teams. Um. You know, you've got thousand horsepower car cars coming down the, from the course root Laguna Seka.
Mm-hmm. Like never getting straight. 'cause they are just like struggling to get the power down till they're halfway down the front straightaway. Dale Earnhardt peak, Dale Earnhardt, Jeff Gordon era. Mm-hmm. At Sears Point pounding that turn three apex curb every lap. Like I was that guy, that kid with his dad sitting there just like, damn, you know, like watching that John Force half pass Oh yeah.
Burnouts, you know, like even, even drag racing has gotten sanitized. Oh yeah. Since, since like that time back then.
Then it was the English town crass and they cut it down a thousand feet. Yeah.
And so, you know, you're, when, when you've seen a mo, like a contemporary version of motorsports be that be this totally radical, raw thing, you just like, I grew up expecting that by the time that, that I'm gonna race go cars, I'm gonna do this thing if I make it to being able to participate in this thing, whether that's as a driver, an engineer, a whatever, it's gonna be at least that awesome mm-hmm.
To be a part of. And it's just not the mainstream, the mainstream motorsports. It just, it just straight up objectively isn't so to me it's the, you know, an object in motion will stay in motion. Right. Like these things will continue to happen.
Mm-hmm.
To me, it's not motorsport itself that needs saving, it's the soul of Motorsport in a mainstream sense that needs saving.
So to me, like if I'm to try to define that it's the soul of Motorsport broadly is rooted in human expression. And we can think about that as both technical expression, creativity of innovators, like being able to see the way that people think, this group of people, that group of people doing in their approach to a technical, you know, task that side of motorsport.
Um, but that really, when Motorsport is at its best, the car should not only be a platform for that, but an amplifier of the human being in the cockpit.
Mm-hmm.
Like. I've been lucky to experience this. We all, we've all had these experience. If you're a driver, e even in street cars, you've had this experience.
You know, I listen to you guys talk about, you know, the right canyon car and it's, there's a, there's a part of it that's even built into that, like the ultimate joy that you have racing and, uh, you know, I've just been able to experience this, I guess at, at a really high level is when you do get in that state of flow and your mind and body are totally aligned and everything else just kind of goes out the window and you're totally in the moment just feeling this thing happen, you feel like you can kind of sense things happening a little before they do.
You're just totally, you know, lined up.
Wait, so you're telling me that the Sena I see myself from above the car thing is real in racing?
Yeah.
That's like a famous line of Yeah, he said that like at a certain point he watches from above.
Well, and I think it's, it's just you can, I don't know that I've ever had a complete out of body experience.
I'm also not air in sna, so I can't say that he didn't fair. Um, but, but what really makes Motorsport special, that's the thing that you hear, you hear that feeling get described the same way by athletes, you know? Yeah. It's
flow state. Yeah. I mean, I think, yeah.
But the thing that really makes Motorsport special is that then you've got this.
You know, piece of machinery that is an extension of you as another whole piece of that and allows you to do these things that as just a regular dude standing here, like you wouldn't be able to do. Like, it's this amplifier of everything about you kind of flows into the machine. And the more radical, the more excessive, the more visceral the machine is, the height, the more heightened that experience is.
But then also from the outside, like looking at this from the perspective of race fans, the more excessive and radical and visceral the machine is, the more apparent it is that that special thing is going on. And what we've, we've like traded the ability for all any of that to be legible to the audience for predictable outcomes and manufactured entertainment and like corporate approval across mainstream.
And I wanna say that I think that, as far as I'm concerned, that's just like an objective fact. Like we, right, that's what, if you looked at the rules for any of the mainstream things, NASCAR, formula One, indie car sports, car racing, even. That those things are what the rules are defined around, they're defined around keeping OEMs happy and like those people engaged in what's going on and making the racing as close as possible.
Mm-hmm.
Basically, and, and, and all the rest of the shit has like gone out the window. Like we're, they're, it is not open for creative thinkers to apply their unique point of view to what's going on. Mm-hmm. It is, they do not, they are not, like the vehicle formulas are not built for driver X, Y, or Z to be able to truly showcase greatness and for that to be visible with the naked eye, you know, to the fan.
This is not, we are, we are a long ways away from like a and Sena in the early nineties, let alone Ronnie Peterson and Jill Vnu and Right. You know, that kind of vibe back in the day. And so I think the thing that, one of the things that I think is really worth mentioning, and it's one of the things that I've spent a lot of time thinking about, it's like, why?
Like, why does it, why has it been like this? And I think we can point to a real specific point in time and a thing that happened that within the industry, and I, I think this is going on in the automotive industry also. Like there's an adjacency here with supercars and speed and all of this stuff. That we're just like not in the main, in mainstream motor sports, we are just not acknowledging that this has occurred, which is that early two thousands.
I mean, I could in, in my neck of the woods in, you know, open wheel racing in North America, you could point to a very specific point in time. 2001 that year we set at Fontana, Jill, Jill defer closed course track record, 241 miles an hour average speed at Fontana. That year, that same year, the champ car cart race at Texas Motor Speedway got canceled two hours before the race because guys were Gene out in the middle of the corner.
Mm-hmm. Like black blacking out from too many G Wow. Through a corner. Um, guys basically like that, that error that the cars being that fast, it butted up against like the physical, like the physics based limitations for what a human could po not just safely do, but like physically sustain. Right. Without Gs I mean that race at TMS, they had, they were in Texas, so they had, they had like flight specialists from NASA come and look at the data.
Hmm. And they were like, no, like this is, these guys should be wearing G suits. Like there's, there's basically, there's no possible way that these drivers will last. You know, any more than a handful of laps at a time doing this and these kinds of, like, you're just, the blood is Yeah. You know, rushing outta your head basically.
And that's 'cause it's, it's banked. But the other factor there was guys, you know, there were crashes where guys died that year. Like just a regular cra. We, you know, we talk a lot about risk and, and all this kind of stuff in the context in racing, in the context of how do you manage like the crazy multi-car accidents and, and all this kind of stuff.
That's one part of the problem. This was a period in time where guys were having like career ending injuries from just the basic mess up and single car accident at a bunch of tracks during the year. You know, like, and so there was this in, in open wheels terms, there was this really specific point in time for everything else.
Maybe it's a little fuzzier exactly when that was, but it was all, this all occurred at the same general moment, which was that speed. Was rather than being sort of the solution for what made motor sports great. Up until then, you've just got this, yeah, there's constraints and there's rules and all this stuff, but you've got this ascent of performance.
Like there's a clear north star for what all of these different championships are all about. It's like, well, we're just Chis like about the pursuit of speed. Right. That's what we're here to do. And
let, let me ask you a quick question there. Do you think the pursuit of speed was the right pursuit for motorsports through that period?
I think in any form of motor sports, if you can't, if, if you can look at it as a horizon that you can continue to chase mm-hmm. As opposed to a ceiling that you're gonna get to a point where it's just like no longer feasible than, than I do. Like, I think Bonneville, Pikes Peak Right? Places where it's like, yo, this is just about how fast you get from point B to point A to point B.
Do it however you want.
Yeah.
You know, and, and maybe, you know, there's, there's like a cultural element of like, how much do we tolerate unnecessary risk, I think, I think that gets less and less every year or something. But, but when you're talking about these kinds of mainstream championships, there's, you get to a point literally where it just can't be done anymore.
You can't continue to pursue it.
If, if I, I, the thing I think about with this a lot though, 'cause for me, I, I think that the speed thing. And we may be saying the same thing, but I think we get to a point where the speed is no longer relatable or it doesn't really matter. Right. Like the difference between you doing 200 on an oval and two 40 is not noticeable to the eye.
Like it, it doesn't, I mean, maybe to you, but I think to the
200, 2 40 is a lot, but
yeah, like maybe 2, 2
20 and two 30 or something.
Two. Yeah,
yeah.
Like those small little sides. Like I just don't know if the regular viewer or the audience that is watching this understands on that level. And one of the things I go back to is why do we have this nostalgia for a slower time, right?
Like, like for example, group B it gets talked about all the time, right? From rally group B, group B, the modern rally car is so much faster. Especially the era, the arrow era of the modern WRC car is so much faster than group B cars. Yeah. I mean, it's not even close, but there is this mindset that people think that the group B cars were so much faster.
And it's like they're not, they, they were like, they, they were beasts and they were scary in the time 'cause they didn't have the technology to match the power they had, but they're nowhere near as close to what a, a modern WRC car is. But there is something about group B that just felt better and I, and I, and just was more exciting.
And I think that there's this like, it's, it's a ratio of power to the other parts.
I totally agree with that. And I, and I think we, I think we are saying the same thing. I'll, I'll try to wrap the point. Yeah. So we can sort of unpack it, which is. I think that motorsport, the point that I'm really making about this kind of 2001, you know, era is basically just that up until then, you know, the speeds were hap they were tailing off anyway at that point.
Like this was a thing that was gonna inevitably occur one way. I mean, NASCAR had already started restrictor plate racing, all that kind of stuff. Mm-hmm. 'cause they went two 11 at Daytona in like the late eighties. Right. And they haven't even touched it since then. You know, they were, they got to the point way earlier.
It was like, oh my God. Like these things are gonna be, I mean, this is like,
yeah, and they're running like steel wheels
insane. Like
fiberglass bodies insane.
People look at those cars, they're like, holy shit. Like I can't believe those guys are doing,
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So the, the point basically is just that, like to try to talk about why is it the way that it is today?
I think we have to, we have to acknowledge that up until this point in the early two thousands where everything, you know, you and I, I think would both objectively sit there and go, if you just looked at most of the racing that was going on through like the late nineties, you think this is pretty badass.
Like this is cool stuff. They just didn't have to think about it. Like the rules were, you know, if, if you're, if you're ascending the ladder of speed, then it's just naturally kind of raw and unrefined if you're doing that. Mm-hmm. Right. And uh. But then it was like, oh no, wait, like we gotta back this thing down.
Like this has gotten outta control. Right. And that there was, there was not at that time, nor is there still today this, this is, this is the uncomfortable part. Nor is there still today really any mechanism for making that any more safe. Like there's not, you know, u up through that point in time, safety, innovation was kind of following along with cars getting faster in a way that continued to enable it.
Now it's like, well what, so are we actually just gonna wear G suits? So then what happens when every crash is a hundred Gs?
Right.
You know, I mean, that's, that's like every time gets somebody gets in an accident, it's concussion and broken back. You know? I mean that's, that's the kind of Formula one is in the same, all of the major championships are in the same boat.
Mm-hmm. Whether it's oval racing or, you know, road course racing. And so I think what to, to just tie a bow on this part. What I think has happened, like why racing is where it's at now and why like you and I both look at it and go like, what is this even, you know, like, what, what am I supposed to get out of this?
And it's, and, and we're, again, we're talking about the mainstream stuff. There's still trophy trucks and there's all kinds of other shit going on. Mm-hmm. That, that doesn't fit in this category, I think. But the mainstream things, they've had to like suck down control to figure out, alright, well we have to back it down without that, without that preexisting north star that just kind of makes everything work.
It's just like, well, whatever, whatever we decide the rules are, if we're still on this trajectory, then like, whatever they are basically was always pretty cool, you know, no matter what direction they kind of, you know, bent it off into, now you gotta make some actual proactive choices about why the thing is whatever it is.
And at that time, and I think for the last 25 years, basically we've chosen a path to try to create entertainment in the form of racing that's as close as possible all the time. Right. Like it's taking, it's taking. The idea that restrictor plate racing in NASCAR is successful, is successful Motorsport entertainment, and it's kind of applying that general ethos to everything.
And the,
just to pause you real quick, 'cause I'm curious, what do you think entertainment is in racing like? Like, because I hear this a lot, which is like close racing as entertainment, and I think there's elements of that. But as someone who, my, my favorite racing is actually solo. Yeah. Like I look, I love touring car like that.
Like to me, DTM, British Touring car, like cars hitting each other like that, like Nigel Mantle era, like that stuff was just fantastic. Right. That's probably one of like the peak ones for me. But I like rally racing. I like hill climb. Like a lot of things I like is just the car. And for me, um, and not to answer this before I'm giving to you, no, but for me, it, it, it, it's not always about like the door to door element of it.
Um, I think it's like the characteristics of how the car moves is, is a big part of it for me,
I think to me. So that gets back to what we've, we've sort of traded, we've bought ourselves really close racing where there's a lot of cars that are really evenly matched that are really close together. We've traded that for being able to tell why whatever's going on is going on.
So, so Guy X wins the race like. Is that because he did a really good job? Is that because he was driving better than the other guys? Like when they all just look like slot cars going around the racetrack, you can't tell.
Right.
And so I think that's, we're we're on, we're, we're sort of circling around the same thing here, which, which for me just goes back to the, the fact that this whole thing matters.
If it can be an expression of human greatness, if you can actually tell what's going on here, if you can tell that there's a person there doing something remarkable, right. That's what makes it matter. Like that's why rally even in a high arrow state is still great. Yeah. Because you're kind of like, well this is, there's, I, I watch that.
Like my, my feed, my Instagram feed is just full of trophy trucks and rally cars basically. 'cause I'm kind of like, like I watch the rally stuff and they're just like, I'd love to do that, but there's no fucking way you'd put me in that car and I'd be as good as those guys. Yeah. That have like, it's just apparent to me.
Whereas I think you watch a lot of other stuff and you'd kind of be like, what makes this hard to do? Right. Like, I don't even, you watch a lot of mainstream racing and I can tell you without question, all the tech in the cars, all of you watch the F1 guys, all of that stuff, all of that is just making it harder for those guys to actually just get into their flow state to go drive the car for one bet.
Like it's taking away from the actual experience that the drivers are having.
I, I listened to
in-car this is the same, same thing for your streetcar.
Like I listen to in-car radios today. And versus years ago where like no one's talking to the driver. Yeah. And that's like the way Kimmy like tells the driver to tells shut the fuck up alone, lemme drive, leave.
I know what I'm doing. And like, I, I love that because that's what I think racing was back in the day where now there's so much data, there's so much sta there's all these things
Yeah.
To try to get that little edge and everyone's like looking for the edge. And I get that part in Motorsports. Right. But it also seems that there's, it's, and look, and you know, you've driven these cars, but it seems like we've moved to a point where it's more about the technology of the car than it is the driver.
Yeah. And that's a major shift. Um, and I, I would imagine, and I'd love your your opinion on this, but I would imagine that is created by the people who are paying for this.
Yeah. It's, it's just one of these things that we've just ended with it without any North star. Like, so I guess the point here I'm making is like we need to define a new North star.
Mm-hmm. Because it's not gonna be just the outright pursuit of speed that ship sailed.
So what is it?
And so for me it's that we have to showcase like it's, it's the same as any sports basically. Like you have to showcase human greatness. Like you have to be able to tell when somebody's doing something really incredible in a race car.
You have to create a platform for that to be able to be, be witnessed, to be seen. And. In, in the absence of looking at it that way, we've, that was a thing that was just like naturally occurring for a long time. Mm-hmm. Like, we didn't have to design for it. Now we do, like we've got all of these because we've ended up in this spot where there is no North star.
We've got all of these vehicle formulas across mainstream motorsport that are stagnant. Like, they basically just stay the same for a long time. There's, there's no change really. Um, they're aimless, like they kind of ping pong, like, oh, we'll do it a little more this way. We'll do it a little more that way.
But there's not, there's no through, through line to like why they are whatever they are over like a 10 year span. Um, they're watered down in terms of what the actual thing is. Like, that's just the, what is it now compared to what it was in like the late nineties and they're way over-engineered kind of to your point mm-hmm.
About all of this other stuff.
Do you think the over-engineering comes from the manufacturers like that? That is, that it validates the spend to say, we're gonna go here, we're gonna create this amazing tech, and this is the story as to why we race.
I mean, man, it's, it's, I think that that just comes from, it's a competitive thing if you let it be open in those places, right.
Technology is gonna find its way in. This is, but we've, we've reached this, uh, again, I, I think the same is true for like road cars. We've reached this state of abundance where, like in my daily life, I'm sitting here every day just trying to figure out like. Do I actually, should I be peeling that layer back actually, rather than piling on more tech, more stuff?
Mm-hmm. More, you know, whatever. And the same is true here. Like at the end of the day, what I'm calling for here is, look, we need to just acknowledge that this is the case, that we are where we are, that speed there is a ceiling to how fast we can basically allow the cars to go. There is like a physics based human limit to how fast the cars can go.
If we wanna keep, if we don't wanna have to redesign every track on the planet,
or just turn it into a gladi, a gladiator sport where race car drivers die every week like it was
in the
fifties
and sixties, and that's just not a thing, right? Like, we're not, we're never gonna go back to that. Nobody will let that happen.
Nobody's gonna be able to take out insurance policies on the tracks, on the sanctioning bodies. Like this is enough of a business at this point now that like, we're just, so, those things to me are like, forget it. Like why don't, don't even think about it. The basic formula here is just appreciate that this is what it is.
Appreciate this can't be about speed. So stop trying to be performative about the fact that this is still mm-hmm. Like that by keeping the cars kinda looking and feeling and maybe sounding the way that they did when everybody thought it was great, and start from first principles and say, what's actually the best way for this to work?
Part of that is defining what the entertainment value is to me. I'm, I'm like, how do we get. How do we get back to having Michael Jordan, tiger Woods kind of moments here. Agreed. Like where is that part of this? Yeah. And that comes from get rid of the fucking downforce.
Yep.
Add power, add some more and figure the rest of it out so that you've got a package that can't be watered down, that can't be easy to drive that, that like, if you are great, you will unquestion that.
It doesn't really matter what team you're on or like who has the best engineer or whatever by as much make it so the base thing to do is super excessive, so bring
back canam racing
and, but, but give it like a modern fluff. Like I think that's, that's the part of this that we don't even know what that looks like anymore.
Right.
You know, we don't know. We don't know what it's been so long since that would, because the other, the other piece of this now is that just because the cars slowed down, technology kept going like this.
Yeah.
And so now the gap between, you know, in, in the late nineties, early two thousands, like, you know, formula One cars, IndyCar, those two in particular, they were probably pretty close.
Like if you just, if you just said no rules, those cars that were actually racing were probably pretty close to like the no rules version of those cards. Yeah. In terms of how fast they went. Now. That gap is enormous. And so there's this huge white space between where the cars are and what they could be in any particular facet.
Tire tech, engine tech, chassis, tech. Mm-hmm. Aerotech, all of this stuff. There's this big white space to say, well, we could kind of twist all of these knobs in any variety of directions. And it doesn't really change the, doesn't change the cost of doing this doesn't change. The access to resources doesn't change any of that stuff.
And we could just make the baseline form. I mean, WRCI think about this with that too. To your point, they're in the same boat. WRC to start with is like definitely just a more excessive and kind of radical thing. Mm-hmm. To, to c being done. But why not have like a group B? Why not take the arrow off?
Yeah.
And give the cars another 200. Get rid of the fucking hybrid units. Like give, like that's all, that's all corporate approval performance. That's all manufactured performance. Created performance. Because they're like performance. That's, that's not a thing.
It's how they spend money
outta buckets. The number, the number of cars, the number of professional race cars out there that are getting worse.
Gas mileage going slower, less efficient because they've got a hybrid because they've been electrified is like mind numbing to me.
But that's all. 'cause some executive said, the only way we can spend money on this this year
right.
Is if you make it. Green or friendly or whatever.
And so to, I think what, what I'm asking for of Motors sports is, and, and to, you know, we'll talk about this I'm sure, but like, I'm starting to just take this into my own hands, but what I, what I want from Motors sports is honesty about what are we doing and why are we doing it?
Yeah. And so what should the baseline thing, what is the best version of that as like the first principles thing in each of these areas? Um, and let's, let's move back in the direction of this being about human expression. Mm-hmm. That's what makes sports great. Mm-hmm. You know, and, and that in, in the form of motor like Motorsport is at its best when we also get to see that on the technical side, which is not a thing that happens anymore either because the rules are so heavily constrained.
You know, it's an interesting thing again, on the rally side, I, I, I got into rally in the nineties mostly because Speed Vision aired WRC and I was in college and I had speed vision, so the Colin McCray's and things like that, like, you know, Petter Solberg, like this was sort of that era, like coming into early two thousands.
And I loved Rally and it just seemed so cool to me. Right. I like production, car based stuff, and then went and worked in the WRC and Sebastian Loeb was this, you know, was this really interesting thing because I'll argue most people that Sebastian Loeb was the greatest race car driver to ever live. I mean, he, he was unbeatable unless there was snow, but he was unbeatable.
It was like you showed up to WRC to finish second when Loeb was there. Yeah. And then he went and raced Lamonts and he did all this other stuff and it's like, he probably would've been successful in open wheel and all these other things if he gave it the try. He just really loved rally, but his driving style was the most entertaining driving style.
Yeah. Because he realized that he could under steer into a corner, set the car up, and then drive out and be faster than all the drivers who came before him, which was totally sideways. Big
Huck.
Yeah. And it's a, it's a weird thing to sit there and say, this man is probably one of the greatest drivers to ever be in the sport.
But his driving style in some ways for me, like, I don't wanna say ruined the sport, but it was definitely a demotion of what it was because other drivers started driving that way's a little bit of buzz go. And I remember at one point, like, we're at a test and Ken was trying to underst steer into corners.
I'm like, what are you doing? Like, don't
you, this is so bad for our YouTube views kid.
Yeah. Don't you realize that why people love you is because you're, you might be in eighth place, but you are backwards into the spectator area. And like, that's what makes it exciting, where watching someone push into a corner and then drive out of it is, is not exciting.
Right. Yeah. And, and this is this interesting thing because I think it's similar to your point of, okay, there's only so much speed we can go to, but we also get to a point where it's like, if you're always trying to be faster. Sometimes the fastest way is tidy and clean. Yeah. And that doesn't look as good.
Yeah.
So then you get into these other questions of like, okay, well can we make the tires not as good? Which is what I think you see in indie, you see in F1 where they're basically driving on horrible rubber that like, I, it's always funny to me 'cause I think about this from the tire companies where it's like, we're gonna ask you to make a shitty tire.
Yeah. To promote, make a
shittier
to make, can
you make
a shittier? Yes. You are a premium tire company. Pelli, Michelin, whoever. We want you to make the worst tire possible. And then we're gonna throw so much arrow on it to try to hold the car to the car. Well,
and that's why I think it's so backwards. 'cause it's like even in, even in the context of, of rally cars, I mean, and this, and this is universally basically the same for everything, which is that risk and danger and crash.
E Yeah. They come from crash energy. Right. Like, so if I'm thinking about circuit racing stuff, we'll keep it. Yeah,
yeah, yeah.
You know, contained in that, what keeps, what keeps the speed from being able to go up? Uh, it just, I'm, I think we're on the same page here, that that's a little bit of a red herring mm-hmm.
As a global thing. But the, the, the thing that keeps you from being able to twist the knob in that direction is that. You crash in a corner, like yeah, you could crash on a straightaway. It's possible that that happens, but that's not what anybody's indexing on. Right. In terms of, you know, when we're figuring if you crash on a straightaway, it's not gonna be a big G hit 'cause it's not a high angle hit and all the rest of this stuff you crash in a corner.
The more downforce a car has, the faster it goes through the corner. Like that's the place that it goes faster. So it's, it's actually, it's kind of like this inverse thing mm-hmm. To being able to figure out how, how to do it any differently. My, my, my call here is like, well, why don't we, what's wrong with trimming the downforce way back so that you just can't go any faster in the corner?
And then you have the ability to like turn the wick up in a bunch of other places. You end up with a situation where the cornering may be slower
mm-hmm.
But on the limit way earlier.
Right.
Give the car some of that mechanical advantage back so that rather than being on shitty tires with a thing that as soon as, I mean, driving an Indy car, driving any high downforce car, I mean, sports cars are like this these days too, but except that they've got trash control and a b, s and all the other stuff, which is like a whole other conversation.
You know, any of the open wheel cars, it's like either it's stuck or it's unstuck. Yeah. And, and that's kind of that, you know, like maybe you get a chance to, to catch the wiggle, but it, it's, it's a thing that is impossible to tell what's going on. I think it, personally, I think it makes the drivers. Look worse than
Right.
They are. Because you're just like, oh, that guy just completely lost it.
Well, look, I, I, I constantly,
that was that. Yeah. Whereas the a a a different version of this is you give the car a really good tire, you take away an so much down force that you are still like a, at a lower peak, high speed grip level.
Yeah. Through the corner. So you're still at a lower peak speed, but the cars move around and, and all this kind of stuff. I mean, I've, I've seen like regional rally cars that they're just like, okay, well we can do whatever we want. So, you know, I've saw this guy that had like an X Hyundai WRC car that mm-hmm.
Has like 800 horsepower and, but kind of doesn't have all the shit hanging off of it. And I'm just like, it probably sign me up. It's probably a blast to drive that. It's so badass because the things just 'cause it's traction limited everywhere. Yeah. So it's kind of like, well it's not gonna, it, it's probably just slower, like everywhere.
Yeah, yeah. You know, like there's nothing that's, there's nothing wrong with that.
And, and this goes, like, I say this all the time, I just think slow cars fast is way more fun than fast cars. Slow. Yeah. And obviously I think in the racing world, you're driving fast cars fast, but there's something about this nostalgia around and we, you know, we keep going back to the nineties and I don't know if it's our age or maybe that's just the end.
Right. And because we also talk about it from like a. From like a production car side, I would say like 2005 is sort of the end of like really good driver's car, right? Like Vinny's whole driver's era. Yeah. Is based on this idea that the mid two thousands is when we start to see the fall off, we start to see way too much traction control that can't be defeated.
We st we see with the removal of manual transmissions, we see all the things that to your point, makes the driver the important part of the equation disappear. Yeah. Right. And I think we've seen that go from production to racing or maybe it went the other way, maybe it went from racing to production. But we're, we're seeing this world of like, it's more about the machine than it is about the person.
I only drive old cars 'cause I enjoy that, that piece. And I enjoy, I, I went out, we did this track day thing and I got to drive a TCR, which was like super fun, but it was on slicks. I don't have much experience on slicks and I would've rather have driven the car on street tires or like, you know, an R compound type thing because I enjoy the progressive like, you know, like wall of like I could slide this car out and then and hold it and then keep going.
Versus like the minute I went too hard I spun.
Yeah.
Because I wasn't used to that. And obviously, you know, it's something I would learn. But like, I think there's something in just general motorsport where like we've made the cars be perfect and when they're not perfect, you are so beyond the limit of what that car should be doing that it's off and this is why.
Every single week in Angelo's Crest, someone crashes a, a GT three rss. Yeah. Because that car is amazing. But the minute you lose it, you are now well beyond the point of ever being able to bring the car back. And I think that that is this, like you're leaning on the, the car so much that it's not as much the driver.
And I, and, and I, I don't know, maybe I stand, I don't think I stand alone, but I go back and I watch vintage racing. Right. Whether, you know, it's like old touring car stuff, old open wheel stuff, whatever. And it just seemed more visceral
it because it
was, it looked like the drivers were hanging on for dear life, and I don't know why we left that.
Right. And, and they were going slower. I think you could take the modern safety that we've learned because I think we've, we've really learned how to, to put a driver through a bad crash and have them walk away. Yeah. I think that's super important that you could take the safety part, but remove some of the, you know, whether it's the arrow grip or the track control or all the other things where the cars do feel a little bit looser and the cars move around, tracked a little bit more, and it looks like the driver's working because I, I, you know, and I.
I, I wanna say like, I haven't really thought about this until this podcast, because to me, I so much have the view through the camera lens, right? Like, what does that car look like? Like I wanna see the car do cool stuff. I wanna see the car feel aggressive. I, I miss the days of watching cars go up, you know, Mercedes one nineties on two wheels through the curb.
Ah, like, yeah, like that. There's just something so cool about that, right? And I think it's why Instagram accounts like patina research in Japan, California, all have so much success because people are like, Ooh, like, that looks so exciting. You know, how slow that E 30 was going. That thing was not moving.
Like, but it, but it looks like it's moving. Yeah. And I, I think this is one of those things that like, how do we, how do we all agree that that may actually be a better formula than this new formula, which is all about math, right? Yeah. Like, oh, it can go this fast. It's this many Gs, but if you have to tell the audience why it's cool,
you've lost
already.
You've lost them already.
Yeah,
totally. Right. And I think that this is my dad, by the way. Uh, huge op. Both, both my mom and my dad were, were into open racing when I was a kid. My, my mom, I think had a crush on Mario and drag when she was younger, and that just like, kind of like connected this thing.
Understandable. But yeah. But my mom just, my mom loved indie, my dad loved indie. So like, we watched a lot of races as a kid. But my dad doesn't watch indie anymore. He watches nascar and the reason he watches NASCAR is because there's a little bit more of it. He's retired now. Sure. Um, I never thought my dad would watch nascar.
I, it just wasn't something that he was into. It wasn't something I was into, but he enjoys it because there's more, like he, he uh, like there's more explanation of the tech. He, he enjoys the driver's stories more. There's just more of a story to follow. Um, and I think NASCAR's in an interesting place right now because I have sat in multiple meetings with NASCAR of like, how do we fix nascar?
How do we fix nascar? And this year it seems like they've been doing a bunch of things. I dunno if you saw Cleetus McFarland race the event. Yeah. Uh, past weekend.
Travis and Cleetus.
Yeah. Travis and Cleetus. And look Travis. Like, it's cool to see Travis there, but Travis has done this before. He's pushed for it before.
Cleetus was interesting. I was looking at some of the stats, like they're, you know, he's in an ARC race and like the, the, um, you know, the viewership is like through the roof. Yeah. Because they're bringing in a person that people like want to go see. Did he do well? No, but like that, like, it was an interesting thing.
They're trying different things to get there. But it was actually, what it was interesting was, was we're all talking about a lower level of racing for them, right? Yeah. We're not talking about Cup, we're talking about the lower levels. Because there was an interesting story there that we wanna see. And I, so for me, and I'm tangenting a bit, but I think, like, I think the pieces that are important for me are.
There has to be story. Right? And this is why I opened this podcast asking you about your moment, because the reason it is remembered and the reason people wanna talk about it's 'cause it feels like something out of a movie.
Yeah.
Right? It feels like the way a movie would end you. You unfortunately. Yeah.
No, it's, you would've been the villain.
It's a drama.
Yeah. You would've been the villain and it would've been from Dan's perspective, but like, it, it was, it was definitely a drama. Like it was like, that's high stakes. Like it, you were, you know, or it would've been your first race. And then you go and, you know, you redeem yourself later and Right.
You know, and the right coach comes in. You have this moment. But I think that there's a human piece of that that we buy into. Um, I think that that part's really important. I think the visual's really important. I think we lost the visuals. Like, I don't understand how we have the best cameras in the world now and we have all this stuff.
And motorsport, like the way we cover motorsports just feels lacking.
Yeah.
Right. And then lastly, which is a part that I never really thought about as much because I'm not a driver and maybe I don't think about it from that way, is that it needs to be driver first and car second, because I do agree.
People buy into the person and I think for the past 20 years we have been putting way too much stock in the performance of the cars. It makes a thousand horsepower. It, it does this, it, it can do 200 and whatever miles an hour. Like you think about all like the series wants to sell the stock in. The, in the machine.
Yeah.
That would be the equivalent of basketball, talking about the balls and the hoops or baseball being like, you see this Louisville, it's one of the greatest wooden bats ever. Like, we don't care about that as much. Yeah. And even in even cycling, like I'm a, I I love cycling and I care about the bikes.
Yeah, same.
But like Tour de France isn't talking about how great this new chassis, you know, like how, like, look at this frame carbon, they'll mention it, but it's about the rider.
Yeah,
right. There's something about motor sports where, because I think there is a general attraction to the sheet metal that is the car that we now talk too much about the car and we've lost the, the, the purp, the people story.
And just to finish real quick. Yeah. And I think that's why F one's working again, because drive to survive made people care about the people and now you start to pay a little bit more attention to that. But imagine putting them in a car where you can actually visually see the differences of the drivers more.
Well, I think that's the part, that's the thing here is. Like from the one I was actually looking at the Liberty deck.
Yep.
Uh, like a month ago or something. And, and it, and it's talking about, it was basically f framing a bunch of things about F1 like that they've done over the last eight or 10 years or whatever it's been.
And so that they could talk about what they're gonna do with Mo gp. So it was interesting.
Mm-hmm.
So they're, they're sort of even talking about the things that they've done with F1 in a slightly different way because they're, they're trying to like, make sense of how they're gonna apply this model to Mobi Mojib.
Awesome.
Do you think Liberty is doing a good job of promoting the series?
Well, look what I think Liberty is doing an incredible job of, and, and that's what the deck sort of showcases is they're basically not messing with the OnTrack product pretty much at all. Mm-hmm. So they're not, they're sort of not doing any of the things that we're talking about here.
Right. But they're, and so this is, this is to illustrate, I think, sort of the same point, which is they're bringing in, they're, that's not keeping them from bringing in these storytelling elements. And so they're showcasing that there are all of these other things that I, I think about more as like business factors, you know, in terms of what's going on here, but towards fandom that elevate the thing and create these stories and showcase that this is like a thing that's worth spending your time on.
Like, and, and in their case, spending money on. The really interesting part of the deck is that. Sort of in order to make the point that they are increasing the valuation of all of these things that the teams are like, have three XD over the last 10 years. The, you know, sport itself has three XD in its valuation for the last 10 years.
They sort of have to point to the fact that in essence, the core television distribution is the same.
Right.
That it's not because more people really more, it's not because there are more people that really deeply care about it, that are watching it. Mm-hmm. That have become attracted to it. There's just an incredible increase in their ability to monetize the people that are there and get this peripheral audience that like wants to be a part of Formula One
and it's hype.
Right. And so I think that's one of the big things about it. It's hype right now. You've got rappers showing up and being in the paddock
walk you Yeah. It's the cool thing to go be a part of. And I think that's, that's where I think that motorsport doesn't need saving. 'cause it's gonna have that going for it.
You know, it's a cool thing to be a part of and do whatever the version of it is. But if we're going back to the expectations that you and I have of it, of, and, and there's millions upon millions of other people that are in this boat, it's it, we are the people that they depend on to show up and
Yeah.
Pay to watch it on TV because they need people who really care about it to sit down and watch it for three hours.
And that's still their primary income source for all of these sanctioning bodies like. Okay, well get down to it and make the core thing super compelling. Also, you know, like you've shown that you can package all of this other stuff using new media and these kind of different strategies. Great. Now make the thing so that this max for stop and, you know, v Lewis or what, you know, whatever that mm-hmm.
Combo of people ends up being is like, can't take your eyes off of it. Blockbuster television, just having one car on track and qualifying at a time. Mm-hmm. Like if FF one could be, that could be that in the next regulatory cycle.
Mm-hmm.
IndyCar could be that in two years from now, NASCAR could be that, you know, like it doesn't take long to make that shift to get back to that kind of thing.
And from, like, that's my, and I wrote about this for Road and Track when Ken passed away, like. That was always my takeaway from Gymkhana was Gymkhana is like going back to the very beginning, my thesis for what defines the soul of Motorsport being rooted in human expression, gym kana is that to 11. You know, like you can just, there's no, and it's artistic.
It's creative, it's creative on the car side, it's the driving is style, personality, perform, you know, skill, all of these things, all of these things that you wanna get from regular motor sports. You could find it in Gym Kana. And it pisses me off that, like Motorsports didn't take anything away from that.
You know, they just, they look at that, they look at Formula D, they look at these things going on. It's like, well that's just, that's something completely different. Yeah. You know, like we, there's nothing for us here.
I, I, I mean, look, I, I had this conversation with, you know, will Rogate. Yeah. Um, we just had this conversation last night about how I, I went to go have a lot of meetings and consulting with NASCAR on things they could do and stuff.
And, and I will tell you, not only was I never. A NASCAR fan. Like I had a t-shirt that said boring in the NASCAR font that Ken bought me, um, when I first met him. Um, 'cause I just, it wasn't my kind of motor sports. I was a, I was a Euro snob and I enjoyed the Euro. You know, I enjoy that. I've learned to appreciate NASCAR more as my father has.
'cause it's forced me to sit and watch whole races with him. And you, you know, you just, you start to pay more attention to it. But getting someone to sit down and watch something is like the hardest part, right. With the, I think for us, with the Gymkhana stuff and, um, you know, everything we were doing there, it was like, hey, um, this is something that is from people who came to motorsports, from outside of Motorsports.
Like, the realization that Motorsport isn't fun was really upsetting for Ken. Yeah. He's like, wait, you're telling me I can't, like, 'cause he was doing donuts and they told him not to.
Yeah.
Because, you know, well we're, we have to do like a tread depth test on at tires and that's gonna off, you know, like, like, like some, it's all these,
some, I mean, we, we went through this.
I had GoPro as a sponsor. Yeah, yeah. I remember. And you couldn't ever get. GoPro is on the car. It was either some media rights thing that they wanted GoPro to spend. And I'm like, guys, just let them put this on their It's practice. Yeah. Let them put a lap on their YouTube page.
Look
this, or, or the team.
Like, Nope. Can't put a GoPro there. Nope. Can't put a GoPro there. Like, that's screwing up the arrow on the car. You know?
But where I was originally going with this, I kind of forgot my own, was that Will, and I had this conversation of like, I went and I had all these meetings with nascar, and I think there were some people who really got it right.
Yeah. And I think some of them in there, like Ben, like a few of the guys I think really get it. But there were other people who were still living off the success in the laurels of the nineties and hadn't realized that the party was over. Like no one realized that the lights had been turned on. They're no longer pouring drinks.
Yeah. Go home. And like they, and because of that, they're not changing because like, they live in this, they all live in the same fucking town in nascar, which is so weird. Yeah. Like they all live there. Everything is this way though. And that whole world is so, you know, I I, if you're living in it, it's successful.
Everyone's making money. Like, you know, or mostly like drivers are surviving. Um, but they weren't realizing that they were losing that exciting era of the, you know, of the nineties. Yeah. Like, you think about how that was for nascar and, and then. While I wasn't into nascar, I'm certainly aware, I mean the jackets were cool.
Like kids were wearing the tie jacket, like in the DuPont jacket in New York City on the street. Yeah. Like there was like, it was a cultural element in the way that I think F1 has become a cultural element element right now. But the thing that I think one of the number one things to get out of the way is that there is a group of people who work in all of these organizations who just either have blinders on or they're just so in the business that they don't see what's happening outside and they don't wanna make those changes.
And I think when you saw, 'cause I saw this firsthand 'cause everybody brought us in. Yeah. You guys are the Juka guys. How do you do this? Yeah. And when we would start to explain to them what they needed to do, they're like, no, no, no. That's too much work.
Right?
And you're like, no, but you don't understand, like you need to peel back all these pieces and fix the core problem.
Like we, they thought we would just come on and we would do a gym Kana event in the middle of the race and now all of a sudden everybody's gonna love it. And you're like, no, that's not like it's gonna take more than that. Like you gotta think about these other pieces and you also have to think about the way people are, are consuming content and all of this.
And it made me walk away and this is where I wanted to land from this. It made me walk away thinking, I don't know if you can fix, I do that with air quotes, the current sanctioning bodies, or if it's almost easier to create a new one. Yeah. Because if you think about motorsport. Motorsport started as a way to, 'cause it's, let's, let's be honest, Motorsports is a business of entertainment and I think that a lot of people don't understand that.
And you get into it and it becomes like the Olympics, which is also a business of entertainment. But I think you get into this idea of like, we have to win because winning is important versus realizing that if people stop watching sponsors stop paying and the business goes away. So like job one is that you have, it has to be entertaining,
right?
It has to be great for fans, it has to be great.
Period.
Yeah. To begin with, it was to put butts in seats. Yep. Like that was job one. Racetracks were built. They wanted to be able to do that. Then the television came and now it was, okay, now the money model is we're going to get viewers and we're gonna sell advertising to the viewers.
Yep.
That was already an adaptation of the buts and seats model. Like they didn't really change much from butts and seats. They're like, okay, we're now just going to film what is happening here and tell in away. No one sat there with motorsport and said, we're gonna make motorsports for television. I think there's some stuff that like maybe was, was somewhat modeled around it, but in general, most of the motorsports we talk about today all predate television.
Right? Yeah. Like at least in the level that they, they became in the seventies, eighties, and nineties, which was like peak television sort of era.
I'd only just add to that super quick. Yeah. That I think that the. You're a hundred percent right. And that the things that are mainstream now, like mainstream TV stuff.
Mm-hmm. I would honestly argue that those were just the things that happened to fit like a primetime TV window, the best. Right. On the weekend, like in the sixties, there was not this crazy stratification of, you know, f one's like way up here. Right. And all this other stuff is way down here. It
was Well, and that was sort of the Rufus concept.
It was much more like event based that it was just like, well, what are the things you're just mad the most? Those are the things that people care about the most. 'cause it's all like print media and how many people show up to the event that dictate how much people care. So yeah. I, I'm, so
that's a good point.
So you're
saying I'm fully on board with
that, that like Yeah. Right. Drag racing, uh, F1 Indie, uh, nascar. Right. Most of, I mean, rally touring, all of this stuff existed before television.
Yeah.
And then it gets televised. They don't, no real sports knew come up during that, that at least still existed today.
Obviously there's like Stadium Super Truck, which I thought like, you know, the original version of that, which was Mickey Thompson's, right? Yeah. Mickey Thompson. Like that was something that was more focused on TV and was really entertaining and fun to watch. Obviously it, it fell apart for different reasons.
Um. Which is a whole side point, but I, I wanna do a documentary on Mickey Thompson as a person. Oh God. And then, I mean,
amazing.
He was like executed outside of his house with his wife, like a gangland style shooting. No one talks about this, like, am I just like, am I crazy? I don't know how
He's one of the like forgotten figures of motorsport
like that.
He, he would show up to meetings with like really big execs, order a well done steak, cover it in ketchup, and then put ice cream on top of it. This man was insane but insanely beautiful. Anyway, total tangent. Side note, at some point I just, I would love to tell, I think a Mickey Thompson buyout blah, or like movie would be, he's just an enc.
I mean, he was an engineer or he was Everything created events. He did everything. He was doing everything. Yeah. He was doing, anyway, so I point on that, but I then we go from television into early social media.
Yeah,
right. Which like we all forget about now, but the blog era where we magazines weren't working.
Yeah, yeah. Like we're all trying to figure it out and now we're in the social media world and there's really not been a sport that has really, I think, looked at that and said, how do we create, how do we create something to live in the modern world of, of consumable content? And when we were
not in its core structure for
sure.
Its core tructure. And when Ken and I were looking at gym Kana grid, right? So Gym, Kana, grid, um, I dunno if you know the quick story, but the quick history was. Gymkhana, USA was an event that they brought over from Japan, this Gymkhana event, and they ran it here in California. Ken had an extra STI that me and him did one lap with, and he said, oh, I'm gonna go race this event.
I think this will be really fun. He went, he did one event, it was fun, and then he threw a ton of money to go do the second event. Second event was canceled, and that's how Gymkhana practiced. That's how the whole video series started, was because Ken just was trying to do more driving while he wasn't racing rally.
I mean, that was like, it was such a simple, basic concept. And then, but his issue was with it was that it wasn't fast enough and it like, wasn't exciting enough. So the first gym, Kana practice was like his reinterpretation of what? This gym, Kana sport, which was basically autocross with sliding, right, yeah, right.
Traditional. Traditional Gymkhana. Very
tight.
Yeah.
Yeah. Like,
which has been around since, you know, the fifties. I mean, I, I have old, you know, car and drivers from the seventies that are like advertising the Corvette with Gymkhana, which Jim Suspension. You still
see guys doing this in like, you know, K sevens and
all that kind stuff.
Yeah, of course. Big over there like auto park in the uk. Yeah, and it was, it was big. Obviously, you know, in Japan it's obviously comes from a horse obstacle course style thing. But in, in creating that, um, when, when we first started building the sport the first time around, it was really an. It was an answer to the Juka films have gotten so big, other people want to do it.
Let's like, sort of revive this. And then we came to a moment where we realized we didn't want to be event organizers or a sanctioning body. And it was way more work than we had initially taken on. So we kind of took the ip, we gave it to Monster Energy, they ran it in Europe for a bunch of years and, and with, with quite success and actually developed like a whole sort of subset of drivers who were drift guys who wanted to be more competitive against time and ended up there.
But one of the things that never came to fruition was as Ken started to realize he was gonna retire, we started talking about like, okay, what's next? Right? And I mean, honestly, if Ken would've won the last, um, the last uh, a RA championship, which like he lost by like a point or two, um, that probably would've been his retirement.
Like he just was trying to get that and like to your redemption point, he had always been like, he had always been the bridesmaid. Never the bride. Yeah. And like had like, was always like missed it by like a couple points and he just wanted to get that championship in his belt. Yeah. Like I think he would've, I think that would've been retirement for him.
And you know, we would've just focused on maybe a couple more films. And even that, we handed those over to Travis 'cause he was kind of done doing that as well. And we talked about, hey, what's next? What should we do? And the Gymkhana grid thing was this thing. I was like, I think this would be really fun.
And I think it would be. As two people who always talked about how do we make Rally bigger in America, the biggest issue is that there's not a good feeder series for Rally. One of the reasons is that in Rally Your Car is a consumable. So like, like so how could you do a feeder series in something that's not as brutal on the car where, and it's
not a matter of if,
it's a matter
of when.
Right. So we were like, could we, could Jim Khanna grid actually be a feeder series into like an a RA? And that's what we started talking about. We started programming it. And as I started to like get this moment to be like, okay, I want to build this, I really started thinking about like attention common, like the current attention span.
And I'm like, okay, our course, our courses need to be 60 seconds long because that's a, that's a reel.
Yeah.
And then, then you literally break the event up into every single match and then they just go out as reels and the ones that are good do well and they go to the top and the ones that are boring fall away.
And that's just the math of how that goes. And while I was making that, I was thinking about, and that's just one of the many ideas that we had, but as you start thinking about that, you're like, no current motorsport has that luxury to sit there and say, we're gonna build something for the way people consume today.
And I think that the way people consume today is like this like. Totally polar thing. It's either sub 60 seconds or two plus hours. Mm-hmm. Like people either want a ton of it or very little and, but you need the very little to get them entertained to the other side. And I, and I think that you, you mentioned this before, this is a Formula One's current problem, which is maybe they don't really have that much more viewership, but man, they got a lot more of the people who are consuming 30 seconds to 60 seconds of content on whatever social platform it is.
So I say this because, and I'm kind of wanna throw this back to you, is like, do you think it's possible to take a current series and steer that ship in a new direction? Or is this something that just starts from scratch? And, and, and I may be setting you up to talk about your current project. Yeah.
Because, and I don't know how much you wanna talk about
it,
but
Yeah, I'm happy to talk about it,
all of it. But I think that this is really interesting to me because. We have now watched these legacy motorsport go through television. They did very well. And, and to your point, which is something I never thought about before, some of them may have fallen to the wayside 'cause they just didn't do well in a televised format.
Right. It's motocross for a Supercross, right? Yeah. Motocross fell away because Supercross was easier to film and easier to sell seats. And you know, you have your paint bucket full of Coca-Cola and it was easier to watch. Right. But I think we all thought that for the longest time, that like, stadium is where we want to be at and everything moved into the stadium, but stadium does not translate well to television and does not translate well to like, good storytelling and, and all of those.
Because like if I, if you were to say right now, like pick three races, you wanna tell a story about I a man super exciting Baja or Dakar interchangeable. Right. Or you know, like Bergen 24, which is another race that's like really hard or Pikes Peak, which is like really hard to tell a story with like two cameras to capture.
Yeah. Like, and part of what makes it great is because it is, it doesn't fit into a cookie cutter type format. Right. So I, I'm gonna slow down talking for a second, but I think that, I think like what I'm curious from your point, 'cause you lived in it. I, I am, I, I worked in Motorsport on a. On the media side, obviously on the management side from like stuff I did with Ken, but I, I was never there as a driver.
Uh, you've been in it way more and then you've been in it in I think, sort of a different level than I was. We were always the outsiders, like when we showed up to WRC, they knew we were the outsiders. Yeah. We were problematic. Like, I got my media, you know, tablet taken away from me multiple times because they said like, I shouldn't have, like, I, like, I have to hire the, like the, the sanctioned media.
I couldn't cover our, like I was in a constant fight with the FIA and it made me leave just being annoyed because I thought, we're here helping you. Like, there's a ton of Americans who didn't even know what world rally, you know, rally championship was until we started talking about it. Like, and why are you pushing up against us so much.
So in all of my conversations, I feel like, you know, with all the different, you know, motorsports that I've worked with or worked around or been around and, and I've had conversations with Indy too, like yeah. Indy has called me and said, Hey, what can we do? And the minute you start to tell them they don't call you back.
Yeah. 'cause it's like, that's just too much of a change. That's just not possible. Or people aren't gonna buy that. Right. So like, from your perspective, do you think we can write the ship or do you think it like, it's like no, blow the whole thing up and, and start from a new, I guess, is that even possible?
Yeah, it's, I think that the ship can be righted for, well, I'd put it this way. I think what people want is for. The historical sanctioning bodies like IndyCar and nascar, formula one w whatever. Just whatever you think fits into this as a, as a listener, like what whatever is resonating with you is the thing of choice that like fits into this category.
NHRA. Yeah, whatever.
I think that people, the, the best version of motor sports in the future is that those things just sort themselves out and become great, right? Because they've got the, they've got the historical currency, they've got the events. They're are, they're like structured to do the thing that they're doing and what a lot I, what I think a lot of people just want to see is those things be the, the rad, the super rad version of those things that we all know they can be.
I'll only mention one other thing on those grounds, just 'cause you mentioned it, you said it earlier, like just kind of applying a different lens to mod, like including all the modern safety and doing all that kind of stuff. Like we're, I'm a hundred percent with you there. It's basically just like take a, we're gonna proactively use all of the modern contemporary tools that we've got to design this purposefully to be a certain way so that the cars behave a certain way, be so that they sound a certain way, whatever.
Like that's the, that's the step that nobody's taken.
Mm-hmm.
I think, you know, again, I think you wanna see, you wanna see IndyCar and NASCAR and F1 just do that. You know, the fans that want these things want that to happen. Um, I, I don't personally think it's not gonna be my move here. Mm-hmm. I'll say this.
Yeah,
yeah, yeah, yeah. To try to stand something up that like, if I think there's a better way, I do think there's a better way of doing this. I do think it can exist independent of the existing sanctioning bodies. I'm not trying to go toe to toe with all of these, you know, existing entities. Yeah. Nor would I suggest to anybody else, no matter how much funding you have to do the same thing, have a 20 race calendar that you're taking the traveling circus all over the place to do it like that.
Yeah. I mean, look, Robbie Gordon's tried. Tony Stewart's tried. Other
people tried it. I think it's, I think it's like it. This is, and so this is where from a, from a, you know, sporting property perspective, it gets more into what you're talking about, which is there is an opportunity here to just completely rethink the core structure of what this is, what the business model is, how it works.
All of these things are a legacy. Structure, like in terms of what they are, where they race, how they race teams o how all of the pieces fit together. They've all been that way. However, they are, they've all, they're all a little different, but they've all been that way forever basically. And haven't really, they've just layered on top, okay, we got tv, boom.
How does that fit in? Okay, now we've got social, how does that layer on top? Mm-hmm. Like, it doesn't, they haven't messed with the basic thing. They, they then all still retain the TV as the primary mechanism for distribution and also for, uh, you know, revenue basically. Right? Like that's the main thing. All the other stuff is just meant to try to funnel you towards watching it on tv.
Right.
Hey, if the one thing that's preventing you from joining my Patreon is that it costs money. I get it. Everything costs money these days. So I set up an entire section that's free, some free content, a free chat to talk about this podcast, and look, you might dip your toe in and eventually decide, come in for a swim.
Water's warm
funnel you towards watching it on tv. Right. And that's how the teams make money. That's is a broken
model, but yeah,
that's what I mean. So, so I would not, I think it would be kind of silly just on the principle of it to choose to just do all of that just because that's what everybody else does.
Right. I think the opportunity is to sit here and go. Alright, well, what do we think would really be the coolest thing to exist here? And how can we, if we were just gonna start from scratch, how could you leverage the fact that actually the media landscape, the technology landscape, the way that people consume stuff, has completely changed since 1979?
Yeah.
And, and what could that look like? And the only thing that I think I would, you know, why maybe you and I would be the right people to, to like, you know, jump in on this, is I think it's ultra critical that whatever the thing is is. Hyper authentic to, like, I think in terms of what, what mainstream motor, it still has to fill this void of what mainstream motorsports is missing.
Mm-hmm.
And that's like, that's the Pikes Peak, the Dakar, the Reen 24. The thing about the, the commonality between all those things is that they're really fucking hard to win at.
Right.
Like, and they're, and it's obvious that they're really hard. Like you don't watch Yeah. You don't watch any of those things and sit there and wonder whether the winner, it was like a Gim or something.
Right.
You know, you're like, those guys, whatever the hell happened during the race, whether they got a good break at some point, or somebody crashed or somebody broke or whatever. However the winners or the podium finishers ended up there.
Yeah.
They just, you, you just, I mean, I, as a racer, I'm just like, I don't even need to see what happened.
Those guys are badasses. Yeah. Guys are gals or whatever. Yeah. You know, Bathurst, same way. There's, there's these tracks, there's these places, there's these things that they're sort of from the. OG world of Motorsport, but they've maintained this singularity of this is just really hard to do. Mm-hmm. And so the authenticity of the challenge is clear, it's obvious when you see all the 62nd clips, this is a thing that's going on over two weeks, but it's also still full of 62nd clips that are just this crazy shit that's going on.
Yep. That if you pay enough attention to it, you can. I mean, those are all examples of things that I don't watch on tv. 'cause it's like, I don't know, where is it on TV mean, I don't even have cable anymore, or whatever. Right. So, but they're accessible because a lot of it's streaming or it's wherever. Mm-hmm.
That'll only continue to happen more. Um, and, and you can basically know what's going on by just paying attention to it on Instagram or whatever every day. Mm-hmm. So I think, I think it's kind of trying to mash those things together. I'm also, I also think there, there's a couple of other pieces here that, that I think are interesting to start to try to fit into the puzzle, which is like the, the big events still in motor sports, the centralized events at least are still the ones that operate like a gathering.
Mm-hmm. Like a convening of
Yeah.
Rad parts and pieces and that that still draws. So there is this in person element to things that. You know, we, I feel like we, we've tried to convince ourselves for a long time that it like doesn't matter or that we shouldn't be indexing on it or something that it shouldn't be a part of the core business.
Right.
Because the digital numbers are so big that when you say a hundred thousand people show up to a race, it seems small,
but it's, the
reality is it's a completely different experience.
You know, the big part of the reason that Indianapolis is still a big deal is because 350,000 people pack that place every year.
Yeah. And it is, it creates an energy Yeah. Around the thing that's going on that is completely insane.
And to me,
and that, that proliferates beyond like just whatever those numbers end up being for the track on an attendance and revenue on that
Yeah.
Perspective.
And it's, it's, I mean, experiential just has so much value in that.
You talk about like core memories for people? Yeah. Like I have core memories of being at tracks, even for events that I didn't think were that exciting. Like IMSA at Lime Rock.
Yeah.
Like watching the R eights come through some of those sections and you're just like, wow. Or like being at, you know, Lamonts in the middle of the night on the mosan and just hearing like, those are these things that you can't create in television, so they are super valuable.
Um, you, but that's like, that's the bottom of the funnel for sure, because like first you need them to be interested in it. Yeah, yeah. Before they decide to go to go there. I, I'm hundred percent, but, but as a, it shouldn't go away,
but as a thing, it's kind of like, it creates, uh, it creates a sense of like, oh, this is a, this must be a thing that kind of matters.
It's like a, you know, any, any big show, right? Yeah. Like, you know, Coachella or of course those kinds of things. It's like, it becomes a, there, there's something to like the in-person energy that that creates by it being a thing that even when it's on TV or it's, you know, through digital, like that sort of comes through.
Um, I guess the, the other piece of this is, you know, we talked about tv, we've talked about kind of the media model. One of the things that I think is ripe for disruption here in, in the mainstream sense, so if we're talking about, I, I think we're, I think I wanna see is something that exists at the tier of motor sports that is mainstream motor sports, like.
Cars, event, whatever that are up here. Not something that, to your point, like not something that's in a stadium. Like I wanna see the baddest dudes on the planet driving the baddest ass shit at one of the historic epic venues. Mm-hmm. Like, I think without that, you're just automatically talking about something that's kind of, that, that has risk of failure due to not being authentic to the challenge enough.
Right. You know, there's been a lot of things that are really great that the guys all still show up to. Mm-hmm. You know, like there's a lot of, there's a lot of data points out there and evidence that like, race car drivers are just race car drivers. Like, they'll show up to do cool stuff.
Mm-hmm.
Um, even if it, like, doesn't seem like it should work within their contracts or, you know, whatever, like they just figure out how to do it.
Um, elevate that up to a tier that's like, oh, and now it feels like it really matters. Like there's some, there's real stakes here. There's something to prove. This is not like a Mickey Mouse thing that's going on. Mm-hmm. Um, I, I, for me, the, the big thing to, to disrupt here is from the moment that these things all be that TV came into play, like let's say in the seventies that created this.
Packaging of mm-hmm. Events within a championship like that was the commer the commercial value then immediately became associated with the package of events. Mm-hmm. Not like any one event, you know, whatever you, you know, you had some peaks or whatever, like you still had Monaco, you still had whatever.
But the, the value proposition of being involved in Formula One was your company being associated with this thing that's just auto, that's got massive viewership every other weekend for like this big chunk of time during the year. That's also how the TV rights, like the whole thing works based on that being the deal.
Right. I think now, I mean, man, you look at, you look at these Jake Paul fights. You look at, you look, there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of other stuff. Fight sports, I think is like the obvious place to look like there's all of this stuff that is just event by event. Maybe they've got, maybe they've got one title event per year, maybe they've got four title events per year, whatever.
Yeah. But it's, it's built around a more of a standalone, you know, kind of thing. Which I just think
wasn't this kind of though the inspiration behind the Rufus concept? Because for you if, and it was your idea, so you should talk through it, but like, yeah. How I remember it was, these are really important events and if you compete in any of these important events, then you get points on the board.
Right. And it's sort of a collection of those legendary things, right? Yeah. And I mean, so we, we did tell the audience we were gonna talk about roofers. So just a quick on what it was for you and like, and do you feel like that's maybe sort of where the direction is going? Is that the one-offs, there's a reason that these one-offs exist, right?
Yeah. I mean, whether they exist as part of a series, but like, I got to experience not the full race, but I got to experience the getting ready for the race of Bathhurst. Like being there, like Bathhurst is now on the top of my list. Like I plan to go back to Australia next year just to watch that race, even though I was there for testing and qualifying, but I had to leave.
But I was, it's such an amazing track. It's such an amazing location. Like, it's so cool. I, I want to go, I want to go experience that. I don't know if I'd be as interested in going to all the other events, but like there, there are those ones that stand out. So just quick for the audience. And are you still trying to do Rufus, or is it sort of like a, is it an idea that you've parked?
Uh, yeah. I'll, I'll tell you. Yeah. Which is basically, so the, the, the core concept was. Yeah. Throw a blanket over all of motorsport.
Mm-hmm.
And just say, what are the, what are all of as, as independent events, what are the things that actually matter most through the lens of a race car driver mm-hmm. As racers.
Mm-hmm. And, but you know, the racer and the fan are the most closely connected mm-hmm. Components of like the,
of course,
you know, value chain in Motorsport. Yeah. I think like, they're the ones that have the most aligned incentives for like, what they care about and why. So, so I certainly look at it that way.
And, and much of what I do at this point is just as a fan who has been informed by being a professional racer for like 20 years. Right. Right. You know, so it's, it's kind of less the other way around. It's just, it's just given me a lot of insight and like, I know all these guys. Yep. You know, so the idea basically was back in Parnelli's era, you know, Rufus kind of started out as like a code word.
Mm-hmm. But it just stuck because it was like a good deep cut that look, the, those guys did everything right. And that part of that was, it was a pre television era. So they actually, they just made more money by going and doing more different stuff. Like they were kind of, no pun intended, they were like the vehicle, they were the, they were the sponsorship platform.
Right.
So if you're Mario Andretti, like it was worth it to sponsor Mario because he was gonna get hired to go do all of the biggest events, like sponsoring the entire USAC championship. Yeah, there wasn't, there wasn't like, that was a really diminished value proposition. 'cause you're gonna go to like 30 events during, or you know, 20 events that basically only a very small regional audience cares about.
Mm-hmm. Whereas Mario was so, so sponsoring a guy that was just doing the USAC championship, like, okay, you get the Indy 500, you get a couple other big races, but Mario was gonna go do LA Mall, he was gonna do Sebring, he was gonna race in the Daytona 500. Like, you know, that was, that was how you got,
this is how we structured Ken's plan
publicity.
Yeah. Was like, Hey, Ken's gonna race these rounds in this, but he's also gonna do these other five things. And we always used to call it the calendar release, which was like,
yeah,
this is all the stuff we're doing this year. Yes. And it's gonna go across all these things. And it worked.
Yeah. And so the, the thesis for all of this was basically that not only that connect, just so, just from a perspective of like, I wanna see motor sports be better for race car drivers and fans.
Mm-hmm.
That was the pure motivation for doing this. Um, Motorsport was more connected, there was more connective tissue across all of Motorsport because this is how it worked. And that from a driver's perspective, you ended up with these guys who by proving it are all time greats that nobody has held a candle to in that way.
Since then, Mario, AJ Foyt, Dan Gurney, Jim Clark, Jackie Stewart. Parnelli.
The legends. Yeah.
They're guys that PE that every race car driver. Now, when you throw out those guys' name, they're like royalty in a way that even Sena Schumacher, Earnhardt Petty like.
Right.
They're are different. They're sort of in different categories, you know,
and they were multi-talented because they would race Baja one weekend, they would race PIs
and, and they sh and they showed up and just kicked ass at everything.
It
would also show up to like a random SECA race.
Yeah. They'd show up and be like, yeah, I'm just gotta do this dirt car race this weekend. You know?
Yeah.
They were racers, they were pure racers, and they, the business like worked by them being pure racers. I wonder
if that's like, I've never thought about this before, but I wonder if that's part of the model problem is that instead Right, right now the series controls everything, right?
Yeah. So you have tv, everything gets packaged, the driver becomes a part of that value chain, right? They get locked into No, no, no. The value proposition to being associated with this driver is that he is an F1 guy.
Right.
We need him. And we're, and now, now this whole thing is a huge business. So we're, you know, back in the sixties, seven, yeah.
Guys are making a lot of money. It's business, but it's like loose, free, loose,
right,
right. Like anything, it's like everything was it's notional
wealth level
business. You know? This is now like, no, we got real commercial partners. Like, we gotta take, you know, we're locking down.
Yeah.
You know what, how we're gonna do this?
We gotta, we gotta gain more control over these assets. And the drivers just at that point kind of an asset. You know, like they lost the, they lost, the drivers lost their power of influence through that period. The, the thesis for Rufus was. All of this great stuff is still out there in motor sports. Um, although one of the big pushbacks that I got at the beginning of this whole thing from people who were not like inside Motorsport was, but there's no evidence that racers are still that way because they're not out there really doing this.
You got your Tony Stewart's or Right. You know, whatever. But it's few and far between in comparison to what it was like back then. And I'm just like, what are you talking about? Like, these guys are race car drivers. Like, you know, that. And that was, I, I, I, it was a good I reflection for me to like get, I was, at first I was just like, what are, like, who are you?
Like, you don't know. You clearly just don't know anything about this. And you have a lot of people start to be like, well, you know, they're not gonna be able to get outta their thing. They're not gonna be able to do this and that, you know, kind of throwing cold water on the idea that this could even be poss that guys would even want to think about motorsports that way, let alone that they have any interest in doing anything outside of their swim lane, let alone that they would, could do it, would do it, you know, whatever.
Um, so that was the, and I had some partners at the time that were like, yeah, we'll underwrite
mm-hmm.
Seeing where this goes. Um, so I just launched it. As like a secret society.
Yeah.
Basically in 2019, beginning of 2019, we had these sick welcome kits that were ba we, we came up with a criteria, we came up with a point system.
You know, we, we could go into this whole thing, what the calendar is, how you accumulate points. Yeah. You know, blah, blah, blah. It basic, but in basically end it
an incentive for drivers to step outside of the
Yeah, it was, and, and the, they're serious. And it was pretty on the nose that it was basically like we had this sick video.
Parnelli actually helped us with the whole thing. That's right. He, he wanted to see the whole thing, you know, kind of go down as did a bunch of the other guys from kind of back in the day that it was basically like, Hey, look, like if you don't do this, then nobody will ever know if you could have or not.
Mm-hmm.
You know, like, and, and, and that a lot of this was also the whole a a lot of the, you know, reasoning behind the way that it worked and the way that we went about it was these two other components of the thing that we, you know, thought had occurred, which is motorsports, even, at least during Ana's F1 era, like, you could reasonably say you, you'd sit there and just watch him drive an F1 car and you'd kind of go, I bet he'd get anything and haul ass in it.
Yeah. You know, because, because it was so over the top, the way that you know this, you know, I keep coming back to it, but this human expression element was so evident that he was just unquestionably great. Like there was no hiding it. Um, that has changed now. So you've got all these guys at the top of the sport and it's kind of like, well, maybe they're great, but maybe it's the car.
Like, who knows? Yeah. You know, I mean, I sit there and watch a Formula One qualifying laugh, and I'm kind of like, I don't know.
I mean, one of the debates that I see a lot about,
like we shouldn't have to like watch the sector times to figure out who's doing a good job, but that's just kind of how it is.
One of the debates I think that comes up a lot now is, are the modern day F1 drivers better than the eighties, sixties, whatever, pick a, pick an error, a driver because they're going faster, or is there an argument that there was so much more to do as a driver mechanically in the car? You know, like where, where does that live that they've become these robots?
And it's like, it's really amazing when you look at how fast they are, how close they are in times. Yeah. Like you're, it's, it's tense. It's hundreds of a second, like the, it's gotten so, so close, but. You know, if you were to stick them into, you know, a car from the seventies or the eighties, like, would they perform the same?
Right. And I, I, I don't know, I you may have a better thought on that, and I'm sure it's a conversation that drivers talk about more.
I think if you were, if you were watching F1, you would think the answer, you, you, I think you would be led into thinking that the answer to that is no, because it's become such a sterilized experience that you're like, well, they're not, they're not actually doing, there's nothing about this that is analog.
You know, in terms of the experience. My reaction to that would be, I am certain that the best guys today are as good as the best guys from yester year. We just can't fucking tell and that that's the problem.
We're
just not,
we're just not
platform. And so see it, we have, we have that, which is, I think, a problem that deserves to be solved.
Basically, the, the, the, the mechanism for solving that via Rufus was incentivizing them to just get out of their swim lane and go do something else. Mm-hmm. You know, and that, that functions to be able to showcase that, yes, you could get in something else and go crush at it or enjoy the experience or whatever.
There were, I'll kind of get to guys actually starting to do that, and it turned out that there was all kinds of different reasons why they were doing it and why they enjoyed it, you know, and whatever. But the other piece of it is. You mentioned it with Ken's coming out with calendar release that we came from this period in time, pre tv where the drive, what the driver was doing, like had a lot to do with creating value.
We got locked into this TV only mechanism for value creation within the sport. And that was like, well, what team are you on? Are they gonna be fast? What's their commercial deal? Mm-hmm. And you're just a part of that operation. Our hunch, I mean, this was five or six years more than that, seven, eight years ago now.
But like the hunch that I had was, I think that has all flipped basically to the Ken model. Like you guys, you know, sort of, sort of did, um, that the drivers actually have incredible power of influence now that in motor sport you see it in every other sport, but in motor sports you've, it's kind of been a little bit untapped.
Yeah.
And that by driver X going and competing across different championships, that's like good for everybody. Like that's. Floating all the boats a little higher because they're bringing their now built in owned audience on mm-hmm. Social and whatever that's cross pollinating with some other championship that they wouldn't normally be existing in.
It's bringing, you know, chase Elliot comes and does Right. You know, sports Guard race. It's kind of, you know, doing this whole thing, um, that's completely independent of tv. It's this, it's this whole other layer of things that's going on. So we were, I, I was, my point of view on this and a bunch, I had a little team that shared this point of view was like, this for sure makes motorsports better.
It's just, you know, what are the mechanisms in place to actually make it happen? And I, and, and basically I didn't, I didn't know, like when it was kind of like mm-hmm. I think this is a good idea. I think guys will do it just because, basically because they're bored.
Mm-hmm.
And like if we, and that there's realness to it.
Mm-hmm. There's a, there's a truth. There's a very basic truth to the idea that if you don't do this, then just nobody will ever know. Like, I, like I sort of said, and I'll never forget, we made these sick welcome kits that had a little video. You know, all of this stuff, this like dope little Parnelli Jones helmet gold pin, you know?
Mm-hmm. All these things we kind of, you know, came up with criteria for who was gonna get one of these things. We basically just isolated Incar, nascar, F1 guys. 'cause although there are unquestionably guys outside of those three championships that ought to be included in something like this to start with.
It's like these are the guys that are most in the cross hairs of the problematic area of this thing that already have the highest profile. So if we can kind of get these guys to start to operate in a little bit of a different way, then it more easily trickles down elsewhere. Um, um, I obviously knew all the IndyCar guys.
Uh, so in one weekend it was Sebring Fontana and Australian Grand Prix in 2019 that there was a group of guys that took these welcome kits to Australia that were there. Um, I went to the Fontana NASCAR race and then flew to Seabring that night and like a bunch of the IndyCar guys were there. 'cause it was a, it was an IndyCar off weekend delivered these, you know, kits to the, all these guys.
That was just a rundown of what this thing is. And I, I knew a bunch of them, but chose not to brief anybody Mm. On like this going down. 'cause I wanted an authentic reaction.
Yeah.
Like, maybe this is stupid and these guys will all be like, yeah, but I don't have time for this. Or, or yeah, if there's 5 million bucks, I'll do it right.
Or, you know, whatever. Um, and. I will never forget walking into Kyle Bus's. Holler. I don't know Kyle at all. Mm-hmm. I've never met him before. You know, whatever. And this is Peak Kyle Bus. Yeah. Like, I mean this was in his absolute, not to say he's not still a championship. Yeah. Kyle Guy. But this is like championship.
Joe Gibbs, mss, Kyle Busch
also very unfiltered.
Yeah. Walked in, he opens this thing, you know, throws headphones on, watches the video. And you're, and he was not the only guy that this happened with, but you're like watching his kind of jaw clinch a little while. He's like watching the video and takes the headphones off.
And we had this vellum sheet that was all of the guys' names that were, that we were sending these things to with their name highlighted. Kyles was like next to Lewis. And he was just like, okay, so how do I do this? Like what do I do? You know? And was super serious. He, I mean, it's not to say it's the only reason, but he did the 24 hours of Daytona the following year.
Mm-hmm. And like sighted. That was the beginning of 2020. So 2020 pandemic occurring is a big part of the reason why this didn't continue. Yeah. Yeah. But, um, you know, he cited, like, he got asked by Marshall Pruitt, like, so what are you doing here? And he was like, you know, about this thing called Rufus. Um, and so over that year, in 2019, and we didn't even let any of these guys know that this was a, like, we delivered this stuff totally unannounced in March of 2019.
By the end of that year, the IndyCar guys had kind of the most flexibility. So like a bunch of those guys had already messed with their schedule that season, like in season had messed with their schedule to try to accumulate enough races to kind of meet the criteria. Fernando Alonso was, was in his, you know, mode where he was in between.
So he, that was the year that he did it wasn't because of Rufus, but that, 'cause he already had these things on his agenda. But that year he did Dakar race, Lamar, you know, won, Lamar, won Seabring, uh, competed at Indie, did all that kind of stuff. He was a huge, like, he and I became boys that year. Mm-hmm.
Because he was just like, you know, he, we fired up an Instagram account basically just the day before. I was like, shit. These, there's, I, I don't know, a bunch of these guys, they don't, they're not gonna know that we're coming. The stuff was all like Floro. Mm-hmm. Yellow. So we started just like tagging all of these guys in a bunch of posts just so that they would kind of
be like, oh, I think I saw
that.
Yeah. So if this guy is like walking towards me with a bag and this stuff, like, you don't just like run the other direction, you know? And, uh, and so Fernando, you know, a couple of the guys, but Fernando like immediately just took a screenshot or, you know, took a photo and posted it and kind of like blurred stuff out and like made it real, like Yeah, I remember that.
Yeah. You know, questionable. And, you know, within the first week of the Instagram, Instagram I, you know, like shut it down since then. But the first week of the Instagram handle handle existing, it had like 200,000 profile views or whatever. Just instantly. Yeah. So it was the thing that I'll kind of fast forward, which is.
One of the things that 2020 happening the way that it did, I couldn't travel, I couldn't like, keep up with all this stuff. Some of the backing that had sort of been promised, like fizzled because things were just haywire at that point. Um, and we hadn't, I looked at that kind of 2019 years like a prototype of just how does, there's a bunch of things that until we start to just do this, like we're not gonna be able to answer some of these questions about how does this actually work?
What incentives really need to be in place. Um, and one of my takeaways for sure from all of that was it's a fun idea to think about treating something like this as a media business.
Mm-hmm.
Um, but that still leaves there being no, they're there.
Mm-hmm.
You know, and so this needs an event. Like this needs a, this, this needs a place where all of this converges Yep.
In one place. And, and that has to be fucking incredible. Yeah. And there's room for that. Like, there that, that ought to be a thing. Mm-hmm. And it can be a thing.
Yeah.
Um, so, so that's definitely on that side of things. I've got this other project, which is
Yeah. So let's, let's, let's
talk about that. Build the, build the car.
Yeah. So that ought to be the thing, right?
Because, and, and
that's, that maybe is like the final boss of this deal.
No. And, and I think these are, these are all the pieces, right? Like for me it's about. How do we tell a story that captivates people, makes them want to follow this in the way that I think people follow stick and ball sports.
Yeah.
Right. Where, I mean, imagine in, I mean I, and I know it exists on levels, but it's like you look at things like fantasy football, it's like people love this so much.
Yeah.
But they wanna participate in this like, weird fantasy gamified version. Version gamified way. Yeah. And I did a year of fantasy football just 'cause a bunch of my friends were doing it.
And it's like, and it made me realize like, there are so many facets of football. Like there's just so much that you can enjoy. Yeah. You can enjoy it simply, or you can be like all in and know every running stat and like all these things. And like, and I'm not a stick and ball person, but I, I do enjoy, I, I enjoy football as a sport 'cause I like the strategy of the coach side and everything of it, and I like the brutality of it.
But, but for me, you know, I always look at things like that and say like, I wish there was this, I wish there was that same love for motor sports where motor sports isn't giving the pieces out there. Yeah. So one, it's like, I think you have to have the, the story there that that's good. And then I think you just have to have something exciting and fun to watch.
Right. Yeah. I mean when you talk about, like for me the Gymkhana films, it's all about like, is it fun to watch? Yeah. Like that's the simplest thing. Right. And you know, and do that. And then I think it needs to be, um, I think it also needs to be something that obviously is competitive but has to have style.
Part to it. And I, and I, you know, you're, I was gonna bring this up before, but we jumped ahead on the Gymkhana thing's really interesting to me. 'cause we did it for years with Ken. And it wasn't until I went and did it with Travis that I realized that it was so different with Travis.
Yeah. These two guys were like
so different.
Completely
different. And they brought something so different to it, you know, and it was, it was a completely different experience. And someone actually asked me while I was making the last film, they said, you know, is this difficult for you to make this film with Travis? You know, like, does it remind you a lot of Ken?
And I'm like, oddly, no, because Travis's approach to this is so different. Like, there's moments on set with the crew that reminded me of it, but working with Travis doesn't 'cause it's so different. And then I thought, you know, that's one of the things that's so like, kind of sweet about the Gymkhana project is like, you could, like the, like Travis's films don't feel like a rip off of Ken's films.
There's something completely different. And then I think to your point, it sort of lets that human element of the driver sort of come through. He drives differently, he likes different stuff. Travis likes big scary fast jumps. Yeah. Like that's what he's into Ken like nuance.
Yeah.
Travis couldn't spell nuance.
Like Travis is like a wrecking ball through a wall type of experience. He's a sledgehammer. He's a sledgehammer.
Yeah.
Yeah. And, and, and Ken is like a TIG weld, you know? Yeah. It's like slow and methodic. Right. And these, and, and it was really fun to do that. But I don't, I think that creating a motor sport where.
I use Gymkhana as an example because it's something I, I know well, but I think creating a motor sport where those characteristics can come out in a driver
Yeah.
Where you can see that. And even my knock on Sebastian Loeb earlier, it is great though, because that sport still allowed different driving styles.
Yeah. Where I think a lot of things, the cars become so regulated that there is only one way to drive them.
That,
and that, and then that's a hundred
percent
true. And then only one type of driver is rewarded. And from what I've experienced, it tends to be the more conservative driver. And I hate to say this, but conservative driving doesn't create Michael Jordan's of the sport.
No.
Right. And, and, and that I, so to me, those are those pieces. But what I think is really interesting from your side, and I'm, I'm, I'm setting you up for the vehicle side, is that I, I have my opinions on what drivers need, vehicles and all of this, but this is my expertise for you. The expertise is what the drivers need and what the vehicle needs to be to get what I need to create here out of it.
So yeah. Without further ado, tell us about the project that you're working on right now. Yeah. I mean, which is your, which is your current moment?
Yeah. Um, you know, Blackbird 66. I basically just, just sort of a, I don't know, in essence, kind of a studio that I formed just to. To do this kind of stuff, like a place for where these kinds of things can live.
And um, the, the first sort of project that, that I worked on, you know, through that was the mark one. So it's this, it's an open wheel concept that is all these things. I mean, I, I, I, I didn't think about it exactly like this doing it, but I think everything over the last 10 or 15 years has made it so that it's this way.
It's sort of. My frustration with the fact that Motorsport didn't take anything from Gymkhana and trying to sort of translate what I, what to me, resonated so instantly about it to mash together with a lifetime of going to vintage races and seeing what, seeing what cars from the sixties and seventies driven in anger are like, um, you know, seeing Can-Am.
And I've, I've driven a bunch of that stuff at this point. Like I've driven seventies F1 cars that are, you know, 10 seconds elapsed slower than a contemporary race car. Are they more fun? Oh my god, man. Like it's just you. And, and so talking about from the experience of a driver, like kind of talked about like that flow state thing, you just lock in instantly.
Like you don't have to think about it. There's no like buildup to it. It's just the thing is meant to drive on the outside rear like a sprint car. And it's fast that way. Like you couldn't drive it any other way and get it to go fast. The more you're willing to set it up to just be driven that way, the faster it goes.
'cause it's on like fucking drag slicks, you know, and like little tiny front wheel up front tires. Um. And h pattern. And you know, they weigh, I mean, I, I say it's 10 seconds off. I, I, I did a test day at Sears Point. This was 10 years ago or so. I mean, I don't even know if I was racing IndyCar at that time.
Um, was shaking a car down for somebody, but it was after a big race weekend, 1975 Penske PC three. So flat bottom car, big wedge nose, you know, formula 5,000 style Scoop, DFVI mean, weighs like a thousand pounds soaking wet, um, you know, naturally aspirated. DFV we were on decent rubber after a big race had gone on.
So the track was rubber down and we were like three seconds off the track record in that car. 'cause it's just, and
it probably looked way more
excited and you're doing, it felt in the most badass way possible. You're going through turn 10 at Sears Point, which is argu, like a super high commitment corner with just, ah, you know, like not thinking it's, there's risk and there's stakes when it's like that, but it's not like.
It's not like just the moment you start to lose traction that you're like, oh shit. You know, like, 'cause that's, that's how a modern race car is mm-hmm. Is like, you're exactly to your point earlier, like the fastest way to, uh, the a one way to go fast, to be at the very limit. You gotta be able to be right at the limit, you know?
So to stick the thing on pole, you gotta kind of be willing to throw caution to the wind. Yeah. But you can be really fast by being just a little under the limit everywhere, because that's kind of how the cars are designed to work. Like the, the consequences even not in terms of crashing, but just in terms of losing speed from going over the limit mm-hmm.
Are significant doing anything. Um, so, so this mark one concept is kind of taking all of that, taking frustration with modern mos motorsports and just saying, Hey, look like there's a different way to do this, which is take the fucking wings off, like get rid of the downforce in a big way and we can crank all the knobs back up to make up for that in so much as it matters.
Like, I don't even really care,
right? Yeah.
But we can, we can create a, an experience both for driver and fan at the performance level. We'll just say generally of top tier motor sports, that is radically different and. I don't, there are a lot of questions about that in the context of an existing series, like in an indie car or an F1 or whatever that I don't know the answer to.
Like, how do those cars do this or that, do that. Where, what do they actually look like? How do they actually work at certain tracks? You know, whatever. There's all these things. But I pushed this out into the world. 'cause as far as I'm concerned, like, and this is, this is a little bit of speaking on behalf of everybody, like is, this is a conversation that happens within every part of the motorsport industry.
You go into any paddock and you gain, you know, if you have the
Yeah.
Trust of whoever you're talking to, like they're gonna be straight with you. Nascar, IndyCar, formula One, I'm sure the WRC guys have the same conversation, like, why do the cars have so much downforce? Mm-hmm. Like, why? And, and the question that follows that up is because, because they all have a lot of downforce and the WIC has been turned way down.
So it's like, what's the, why are we still doing this? Right? And the question that ends up being left unanswered is, well, what would happen if you changed it? Like what, what really is the outcome of doing it the way that we all from Mario to Rick mes to. Gordon Murray and mm-hmm. Adrian Newey, like, you've got, it's such a funny thing.
We, we talked to this whole, a lot of this project was inspired by a conversation with Dan Gurney before he passed away, that the, on the, the main thing that I'll mention about it was that he, he even said, he was like, I had to become removed from the 24 7, 365, just trying to beat the other guys.
Right.
I had to be like 10 years removed from that to even, this is kinda like, you know, your conversation, you what you mentioned about the NASCAR execs and stuff like that, it's like, when you're
in it, it's hard to think about anything but what I need to do tomorrow.
You're just, you know, you're just like, well, this is just how it is, and now we gotta figure out the immediate next thing after you're just putting out fires. Right. Left and center, of course, right.
As is, as is anything. And so, and being three years removed to Hoonigan, I'm like, man, I would've done so much of that different.
But when you're in it, you're just in it and you just gotta live through tomorrow.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so this is, this is my version of, let's find out, we've been talking about this for long enough. We've been, like, this conversation has been a conversation for my entire IndyCar career. Like from the very beginning, from the moment I set foot in IndyCar, there's been people wondering like, why not just crank the engines and take the downforce away?
Or, or just take the downforce away. Yeah. Like to our, to our points like. Wouldn't, wouldn't that all by itself just create for a more naturally engaging thing going on here? And so,
so is the, is the Mark one something that'll make it to a prototype phase, or is it sort of a, like a engineering sort of paper experiment?
So that's, so I basically just finished scoping, building an actual, you know, proof of concept, basically, of the idea behind it. So the idea behind it is very simply create a hyper analog driving experience that is built around a, you know, significantly reduced downforce open wheel car that makes a thousand plus horsepower on big fucking meats.
Like, I
like that.
Get big tires on the thing to turbo to turbo, uh, it'll end up being turbocharged. That's good. Um, so the, the buck that we're gonna use is the 2007, the last Champ car.
Okay.
Um, so 2007 Panos DPO one, this was, you know, among the still to this day is faster than a current IndyCar. Um, you know, it was the last year that Champ car existed, so it's, it's a little bit of a stillborn vehicle, but it was built in the United States.
It was made to make a point. Um, it was just, it's, I mean, I've gone and looked at the chassis. Yeah. Um, since, you know, you, you're kind of sitting there like, oh man, it's like 2007. That's a little, that's almost 20 years old. But you go look at it and you're like, just the craftsmanship, the, the build quality of this thing was, was.
Today's spec. Mm-hmm. It has a little bit less of some of the, it doesn't have the windscreens, it doesn't have halos, it doesn't have some of those things. But you know, again, like nothing really has changed in, you look at a Formula One chassis from 20 years ago and kind of like the same as a Formula One chassis.
They're different sizes and stuff. Now, the safety
changes,
you know, Indy cars have states literally been the same chassis for 12 years. So in some respects, like not that much has really changed. So it's a good, it's a good starting point in terms of, it's a lightweight thing. I mean, I'll kind of cut to the chase here, which is we're gonna end up developing a bespoke motor for this.
We've already got that, you know, locked in and dialed. 'cause if you wanna make 850 horsepower, there's a lot of stress engines that can do that. If you wanna make a thousand plus, there's just not, there's a lot of, there's a lot of engines that
do you know
what kinda
archetype you'd
do today for a day and become a grenade?
Um,
you mean like, can you talk like, it is like V eight, V 10, V 12. Like what do you guys
It's, it's, it's not gonna be as sexy, I don't think as, as that type of thing. Just out of, because I think the end, the end game here is end up with something that is sounds fucking incredible. Yeah, yeah, of course. And is, and is all the things, my aim initially is prove out that this just as a way of doing things can make sense.
So I think this is actually gonna be more in, you know, for, for IndyCar fans, this is gonna be a little bit more in like, you know, rekindling a little bit of like offenhauser vibes from the seventies turbo four cylinder. But gonna be like an absolute,
he's an old hot rock guy. I love offy stuff.
Fire breathing.
Yeah. Like this is gonna have some, you know, switch switching to nitro vibes, you know, and that's what
we need.
Um, that's what we all
grew up on.
We
don all grew up on hitting
to, to start with. It's not gonna be like, you know, 15,000 horsepower or 15,000 rrp m um, but it's gonna be, I mean, it's gonna make, I think, I think on like a single day basis, it'll make 1200 horsepower.
Like it's,
and if it sounds good doing it,
it, it's gonna fire, it's gonna be like, it's gonna be rowdy as like one way or the other. Um, the, I think we'll end up, you know, some of the suppliers and stuff like I'm not gonna talk about yet because we don't have like completely locked in, but. I, I think the end game here is there, there's a couple of, in order to move further in this direction, um, there's a couple of questions that need to get answered, but the primary one being how, if you have the ability to increase power, if you have the ability to increase mechanical grip with a bespoke tire, if you can make the car lighter weight compared to like the existing stuff, how much downforce can you take off before the whole thing just falls off a cliff?
Like I, you know, I'm not, I'm not trying to develop a car that is not fun to drive, that is not still fast. Yeah. Yeah. You know, those things. So there's, and, and we just, there's no data point for any of that. We've screwed around with, I mean, I've got, you know, lead engineers, technical directors at current IndyCar teams, like out the back door, like helping me do all the data analysis for all this stuff, running simulations, all these kinds of things.
But at a point there is no current model for something that is trustworthy once you get outside of like a 10 or, you know, five or 10% variance from some current thing. So we're just gonna go do this out in the open. Like I, I think the story here is we're gonna go find out what the answer to a bunch of these questions are towards developing a vehicle that.
Feels and behaves, whether it, whether as a prototype it exactly looks, the part may or may not like, 'cause you're just gonna be stuck with, this is kind of the size and shape of a, of an existing thing so that we can go figure some of this stuff out as a development buck. But, um, we're gonna go find out what the ultimate Racer's race car is and what that should be like in a totally contemporary sense.
Like, I, I think this is the thing that race car drivers, that fans, that people across the motorsport industry are within the context of their own thing, wondering what this version of their thing, you know, is like, and, and it's just like, it's time to find out, you know, it's time to start actually doing something here, um, you know, to figure this stuff out.
Well if, uh, if you need someone to help tell that story, I know a guy, he happens to be sitting at this table, but
I mean the, the, the badass thing about it is that there's, there's a version of this car just as a prototype, not as a bespoke thing. Mm-hmm. That is compared to a current Indy car. 30% lighter, 30% more mechanical advantage, 30% more power.
Um, and, and at that point, like, like if you just added all those things up and kept the wings on it, you have the fastest race car to ever exist. Mm-hmm. Basically. So it's a, it's a lot of grounds to. Like there, I think we'll have a lot of margin to peel the layers back, take a lot of downforce off the car to really try to hone in on what is the core experience that we should be after here.
Yeah. Um, without, and, and being able to showcase that this is possible to do without sacrificing based performance. And that, and it's possible to do in a, in a much with, if you take all the constraints of the sanctioning bodies and the rules and all of that stuff away, that, you know, we're gonna do this with an engine that's designed and built in a Michigan garage, you know?
Mm-hmm. Like that. It's possible to do this with homegrown partners that the technology and resources required to do a lot of the things at a performance level of mainstream motorsports have been democratized at this point. Um, so I, I'm, I'm excited just to, I'm excited to get with it, to start, I actually seeing something happen because I, I, at this point, I just think that's, that's the missing piece.
Yeah. Until you prove that it can be, if I'm, if I'm IndyCar, like I get it, like this is a big risk to. Or anybody.
Yeah. Well, and
and if you don't think you have a problem, then you're not gonna fix it. So,
and to rewind back, I said when I asked like, do you think that you have to start something new or do you have to like, you know, or can these original OG sanctioning bodies and series, you know, write the course?
I, I think there's actually the answers in the middle and I think the middle is you have to build proof of concepts that they see as successful because these are billion dollar industries that they're not going to change the direction of unless they know that it could work. Yeah. Right. And I think that that's the thing.
And I think to your point earlier, which was like, why did they look at Gym Kana and not, you know, figure out how to make that work? They, you know, I think it's because they didn't have the understanding of what parts of Gym KANA could be carried over to what they did. Yeah. Right. And I, they looked at Gym Kana.
I agree with that. And they knew that it was something cool. They knew that it made them excited and made an audience excited, but they didn't understand what parts of it, what parts of that recipe could be sprinkled on what they had to, to make it work. They didn't know why it worked. And to be honest, if they knew why it did, they would've already done it.
Which I think was part of the issue. 'cause it was like a new media, it was something different. But I think that. Where, where I look at this and, you know, and I, I've spent a lot of time like, you know, post Hoonigan thinking like, what do I want to do next in life, right? Yeah. I wanna make movies. That's a big part of it.
I enjoy podcasting because this is just an enjoyable thing for me. I just enjoy the conversation. Um, if it can be a business, that's great, but I just, I just like the format. But the other big part of it for me is the like, save motorsports thing. And I, and I, I know when I say that that's like, this, like really sounds big and bold.
I wanna go, like, I, not that I expect that I can save motorsports, but I think I have some ideas that can help other people who have ideas like you to kind of come all together. And I realized that we'll never be, I don't think we're there to build a new series. I think that's a lot of the mistakes that other people have taken, right?
Yeah. Who've said, I'm gonna go do my own thing, because they didn't wanna work within the confines. And I understand that 'cause the corporateness of the current system is very difficult. But I think if you could go build one thing and have it be very successful as a standoff, you'll have other people go, okay, how do, how do we make our sport more like that?
How can we bring you guys in to help us do this? Or, Hey, you. It could even be something as simple as like, that's a great thing. We'd like to own that and license that from you. Yeah. And, and go do something else with it that maybe lives as a subseries to their series as they continue to test it and say, Hey, does this work right?
And, you know, does this live well as our, as our Friday event? And that's what, you know, when I was talking to nascar. Their whole thing was like, Hey, we went from being a Sunday event to a Saturday Sunday event to a Friday, Saturday, Sunday event. And now it's like they're talking about like Wednesday through and they're looking for these other sports that don't have to be nascar.
Yeah.
Right. That could live in a space, and this was years ago that could live in a space that maybe if it does well on a Wednesday, it could eventually become a Saturday event. Like they were not beholden to the core sport of oval racing nascar. They were like, if it does well and the audience wants to watch it, they're gonna lean into it.
Which is why there's, look how many road races there are now. Yeah. In nascar. 'cause they're realizing a younger audience is watching nascar. If they do road racing Yeah. They're not watching on the oval because that's just a different, a different audience for whatever reason. Right. And it's interesting, my dad doesn't like the road races.
He likes the oval stuff for whatever reason that is. But me, I'll tune in to watch the road racing stuff. 'cause it's more, to me it's like the closer they can get to like Australian supercar, the more I'm gonna watch it. Yeah. Like if they just tomorrow work,
take this thing on the road. Yeah. Go to Mount Panorama.
If tomorrow I'm all in. I'm all in. Like if tomorrow, like they were like, Hey, we're just going to, it's just gonna be American supercar. I'd be like, yeah, I'll watch it. I'm like, I'm number one me up number one, fan up. What you want me to do one fan? So, but no. Um, and I, I think like these pieces all have to come together to make it, but maybe that's the goal.
Maybe the goal is like, go do a one single standup event at a place that matters. Because I think that's really important thing that you brought up. And I'm, I'm, I'm trying to put all of our pieces here right now. Tell a great story. Bring it to a place that matters because you can't go race. And I don't want to, I don't wanna name a a nothing track 'cause I don't wanna insult them, but there's a lot of nothing tracks we all know about.
Yeah. You go do something there, it doesn't matter. But you go do something at a Laguna, you go do something at, you know, obviously any of the famous international, you know, tracks a bathhurst, right? Yeah. Like spa whatever it spa. Yeah. Yeah. It matters, right? Even Road America. Like there's certain, you know, I'll throw one out there that I think is a fantastic track that we don't talk about in Watkins.
I was, I figured you were gonna say that.
Like, I, I was
waiting for that to come
up. Yeah. 'cause I think like I, Watkins has such great history, dude. It's perfect. The bog
and it's so sick.
Do you know the parties? Yes. At Watkins were like, w like were like Woodstock level
is, that's like inside turns. 1, 2, 3 or
something.
Yeah, I think it was the
OR or whatever. It's not turn one, but
everyone just partied. Don't even watch the race. Everyone just got drunk and like had like a wild time. There's so much cool history at Watkins. Like that's a great place, you know,
sofas get lit on fire.
Yeah. Yeah. Which is like a little Sebring vibes too.
Sebrings definitely that just on concrete and Florida humidity. But yeah. Um, but no, I think that, um, like those are those pieces. Like we go, we build this thing. Um, yeah. This is what we should do it. This is, we should leave here. We should figure out a plan to go. You've got the car, you've got the, you've got the driver's experience.
And I also think you have the ability to talk to other drivers to bring them in. 'cause when they hear me talk, they're like, oh, this guy just wants me to like jump. I can
get some guys on
board with, with this, this guy just wants me to jump a canyon or some crazy shit. I ain't Travis. Stay away from Friday.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone just expect, want them to do that. But I, I actually, you know, we made Gymkhana because we wanted people to watch rally racing.
Yeah.
Right. Like for us it was the top of the funnel to get people to watch more rally. And I, I think that that's how we used that. Um, but to me, I think there's an interesting thing on All Motorsport, which was like, yeah, go, go build these one things and get people to go.
I wanna see more of that,
I think. And, and I'll only just say that I, I'm certainly not afraid of the, the challenge to just go do it. Like,
yeah,
I think there are actually, there's actually so much less red tape than there's ever been to just go do shit.
Yeah.
And, and that's the only way we, I'm, and I'm, you know, like, I'm happy to be wrong about all of this, but none of us learn anything by just doing the same thing over and over and over again.
Yeah. So it's like, it's time to
just, and we've been doing the same thing over and over again in Motorsport for 50, 60, 70 years.
Yeah.
I mean, it's interesting because
like, it's time,
well the, the number one things I'm gonna take away from this conversation that I think are really interesting is like. How do we put the driver in a position to perform in a way that you care about the human interest of that driver.
And it is, it is completely like obvious to the viewer, right? That, that one I think is super important too. I, I do think that the series and what you refer to as the package is a huge issue with motor sports because like, it has to be 13 weekends of television or 50 weekends of television depending on what you race in.
And that becomes this thing that's not like, they're not all great, but the, and it's
big and heavy and,
but like one off events like hikes and some of these other things are really interesting. And a one-off event could be a, a great way to introduce something new. The vehicle side of it, I think, I think we both very much agree there.
Yeah. That technology has pushed the vehicle to a place, um, that maybe just doesn't suit entertainment purposes anymore and also doesn't seem to suit the driver. No one seems to be having as much fun in the way that, that it was. Um, I think the storytelling side of it, like all of those pieces, like that component, like how do you tell this in a way that not only is consumable in a two and a half, three hour format but is also really digestible in 30 seconds that makes you go, I wanna see more of that.
And eventually we get you to the two and a half hour consumption it, you know, if yeah, that ever matters or if you always wanna live in the short side, that works as well. Um. I think the other one is like, how, how do you create all of that? And this is the part that, you know, both of us aren't talking about.
This is probably the third person at the table that we need. How do you monetize it? Because unfortunately, motorsports is expensive. I, I always wanted to make a shirt. You know, like the motorsports is dangerous.
Yeah.
Like thing that you see like it's really big in Europe. Yeah, yeah. Like every sign that says like, Motorsport is dangerous and it lists all the ways you could die.
I just wanted to make a shirt that just said, Motorsport is expensive. All the
ways you could
go and all the ways could lose money in Motorsport because it's the part, because you and I can both sit here and have these amazing conversations of we're gonna fix motor sports and it's. We just need $200 million to do a prototype event.
And that's the reality that, that people don't, don't wanna talk about. Okay. I'm gonna hit you with one last question. You talked about you're not afraid of the danger, which is a perfect segue into, I had a podcast I did with Rob Dom. Rob Dom bought an old indie car. I think you heard it. Yeah. Yeah. You texted me about it.
Yeah. Would you do that? Would like, like, because Rob lives in a fantasy world. Like that's what makes Rob great. Yeah. Rob lives in a world where like, it's just his crazy brain. Yeah. The neurodivergence that puts together his rotary engines. But would you hop in a car that one is that old? Like, and all of that and go to try and do you think it's actually possible in what he said to go set a record at at Laguna?
Well, I, I don't wanna pick his part too much without Rob being here, to be honest with you. Of course. But just, and, and so Rob, I would say first, like a hundred percent call me. Like, we'll put us, put us in touch if you wanna, I mean, I'm happy to engage with this whole thing. Yeah,
yeah, yeah. I'll connect you guys after.
Um, I think that there, there is for sure just like a baseline safety component to the thing because of course, I mean, I drive, I drive all kinds of vintage stuff and whatever, but I like sort of, but you're
not trying to set a lap record.
You're not trying to set a lap record. I mean, sometimes I am. Um, that's what I like about you.
But that, uh, you know, I've actually learned like. Don't like, just 'cause it's gonna be clubbing, baby seals. Like, don't relax. You know, like you gotta actually, you're, you're there, you're, I'm there to be a professional race car driver.
Right, right.
Um, I've, well I've certainly gotten much more joy out of it, treating it that way.
The, uh, so the, the first thing is, you know, you're, you're, you're talking about a Laguna is no joke for one, and you're talking about a car that's gonna be, you're gonna be going like 180 miles an hour in this thing. Mm-hmm. To be, to be able to achieve that kind of performance with Yeah. To, to even get in the window
Yeah.
Of that kind of lap time with that car. It's gonna have to, it's gonna haul ass like it's downhill.
Breaking into turn one
really fast moving, um, you know, cork going up the corkscrew at like 170 probably. Yep. Right. Because this thing, this thing's, this thing is on the spectrum towards, like what I'm talking about compared to modern cars.
Like, you're gonna achieve performance with that car, you know, Lola cart car, I think, right? Like it's a Lola. Yeah.
Lola,
yeah. Um, 1997, those cars were fastest as shit like 97, I think. Uh, I, I looked this up 'cause I, so I was there in 1997 watching that race. Mm-hmm. That's Brian Herda was on pole. Uh, 1 0 7 8 was the lap time.
Um, the official track record is like a current Indy car there, which is like 1 0 6 and some change after the repave. The unofficial lap times, which is, I, I think what Rob has kind of pointed at mm-hmm. Are, you know, there's, there was originally a, a Toyota F1 car in demonstration that went 1 0 6, like two or three Sebastian borer in the Panos Champ car that, that I've been talking about.
So using that car as the base went, 1 0 5 8 and then the Ferrari F 2003, I mean peak kind of F1
right
pace, um, 1 0 5 7. So that's the neighborhood that you gotta get into. So that's all to say to even just get under like a minute 10 or something. There's very few cars that occupy that. Space and you're gonna be moving and, and I guess I think the, the concern, the only concern that I would have for anybody in that kind of situation is to go run laps at like 90% or even 95% in a car like that.
Um, there's like safety things that you have to be aware of and pay attention to doing that. You're still gonna be going 180, but like not at the absolute limit to, to go break a track record, you're gonna have to be on the absolute limit mm-hmm. Like a hundred percent of the limit and willing to go over it at every part of the track.
So that's, cars got, cars gonna be pulling four Gs
Yeah.
Under braking and all that kind of stuff. Like, there's just a level of preparedness required to go do that. I mean, you're talking about a car that in order to run that's
30 years old
Yeah. And that even in period, in order to run those lap times is backed by the infrastructure of Ford Cosworth, of Bridgestone, Firestone of, you know, a a hundred person, a 50 person race team.
Mm-hmm. You know, all of that stuff. So that, I guess that kind of trickles down even to the performance side a little bit. Mm-hmm. Is, you know, this is not a thing that you're just gonna show up and go do.
Right.
Um, the, however. I'll, I'll, I'll say why This is plausible for the sake of like putting some, putting some skin in the game here.
Um, he's got the motors. The motors are the hardest part. He's
got like 20 of them.
Yeah. He might need all 20 of them. You know, the, just, just because like, I know from working around, so he's got the xd, which is the cart motor From that time, the, like the Panos champ car that I'm talking about is the XFE, like iteration of those motors.
They're just hard to get 'em running, right? Mm-hmm. You know, for like real periods of time you can't really get 'em on. They're hard to get on Dinos, like they run on methanol. It's like a whole, it's a whole thing. Um, so it's a little bit of like, like running the car ends up being the dno, you know, like hopefully this one's good, you know, send it out, see what happens.
Um, tire is a huge piece of where performance is gonna come from or not, and there's not something that's like off the shelf. Mm-hmm. Like there are off the shelf tires that are really good for cars like that, but not to hit a performance target.
Okay.
Um, so there's, there's definitely some stuff that's like, but I guess the point, the, the, the reason that it's plausible though is the track was probably slower than it is now.
Back when that car ran in its peak form, it was not that far off of the current track record. Um, there is room to make it faster than it was.
Mm-hmm.
I don't, I honestly, I don't think there's a lot of room on the engine side. Like there's probably room to turn those things up, but they were, that was like a competition era in, I mean, that was Ford Cosworth versus Honda versus Toyota versus Mercedes-Benz.
Like, it's not like they were pulling punches, you know, at that time. But tire, get the right tire on it, get a lot grip outta the
tire, feels the right tire partner to come in where a tire partner wanted to come prove something. Yeah. That was willing to jump money in because I think that's
the, you could do a development on the car, like
Yeah.
You know, um, but you, you're getting into like, this thing's gonna be generating like real loads and, and like it's this, it's a development program Yeah. Basically to actually go do it. So, um, but,
but you're in,
but it's badass and like I'm happy to, you know, like if it, it's a type, like all of these things always for me are like, if you're gonna take it seriously and which I'm sure Rob will to a degree, and at a point, it's like, how much resource do you have and how much time are you willing to invest to actually go do that?
I think there's a different version of the whole thing just listening to it. Like the car is totally badass. Like Rob, like you go drive it and like get down to a, a ultra rob, rob in that car. Could be one of like the, you know, inside of like the 20 fastest people at Laguna ever. Right? Yeah, yeah. You know, like that's badass too.
So anyway.
All right, sir. Well, dude, I appreciate you coming through. We, we could probably talk about this for like another six hours, but I think now we have to,
we'll get off. We'll pull some pen and paper out.
Yeah, I was gonna say, now we have to pen and paper this and actually build a strategy. Hopefully there's one person who's listening to this who's like, we should invite those guys in for a meeting that never goes anywhere.
But, um, you know, we've both been in those meetings, but No, no, I wanna, I wanna say motorsports and, and there's probably a lot of people they might not have listened this far, who are like just normal car people who like aren't motorsport people.
Yeah.
But for me, I think all of the best things in cars are inspired for motorsports.
So even if you don't love motorsport, like. There's something about motorsport that cur, like, it's, it's why the car ising to the right of like the nine eleven's not just cool because it's nine 11. It's cool because what it did in racing. Yeah. Right. Like that's like what makes it cool, even if you don't know that.
It's why other people think it's cool. Right? Yeah. So it's like there's, it, it's the classic of the, uh, the trickle down. But anyway, JR thank you. I, I knew this would be a quite enjoyable conversation. I just realized now that we were filming for a podcast as I was just listening to talk on all the things we need to fix.
But uh, yeah. You got any last remarks?
No man. I'm, I'm good. Um, I'm ready to, I'm ready to start making moves, so.
Cool. Well, I'm, I'm excited to, uh, hear more on the mark one. I think that, uh, when, when do you think that that would be something that actually comes together? Year?
I'm started working on next year
two.
Yeah. Working on, I mean, it's, it's a project that once I can hit the go button on it, which is, which is a little bit of getting some initial funding lined up, which, which is like in conversation. Yeah. Already. Um, for sure. You know, we haven't talked seriously about like the content side of this, but that's definitely a part of it.
Um, but once I can hit the go button on it, it's like inside of 12 months.
Cool.
So
keep me in the loop.
Will do.
Thanks bud.
Cheers.
The mailbox is, the mailbox is the Accept any messages at time. Goodbye. Goodbye,
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