INDYCAR: Jeff Krosnoff, Stay Hungry Pt. 2

IndyCar

INDYCAR: Jeff Krosnoff, Stay Hungry Pt. 2

In Part 2 of Jeff Krosnoff: Stay Hungry, Eddie Irvine, Tom Kristensen and others tell of his move to Japan, time in sports cars and return to America.

Marshall Pruett | Posted July 03, 2012

Krosnoff's steely determination permeated every facet of his life. Self-belief was at the core of what allowed him to endure so many years away from home while pursuing his dream. (LAT)

READ: Jeff Krosnoff, Stay Hungry Pt. 1 about the talented Californian Indy car driver who lost his life racing at Toronto on July 14th, 1996.

“A little more than a year ago, I was questioning the most effective way to give my career a boost. At that point, I was still working hard to land a ride in a formula car, but a drive was not going to materialize unless I came into a great personal fortune. I mean, my goal is to be World Champion plain and simple, and how many F1 drivers have earned their big break in closed-wheel cars, let alone racing pickup trucks?”

~Jeff Krosnoff, On Track magazine, March, 1989.

It would be like Panther Racing’s JR Hildebrand—years before he won his Firestone Indy Lights championship in 2009—announcing that he was headed to race in Africa with the goal of making it to the Indy 500. Or like Conor Daly relocating to Stockholm to race in Swedish F3 with an eye to becoming the next Sebastien Vettel.

That’s how uncommon and risky it was for Jeff Krosnoff to leave America behind in favor of starting fresh in Japan in 1989. The Japanese racing scene had become a viable option for a limited number of European drivers in the late eighties, but it wasn’t amongst the top 10 choices for an American with a dream of becoming Formula 1 World Champion.

As unconventional as it might have been, Krosnoff was faced with a few harsh realities by the end of the 1988 season. He’d impressed everyone in his rookie season of SCCA Racetrucks, but in terms of advancing his career, the stall was turning into a free-fall.

While "Kroz" was in Japan, his boyhood friend Tommy Kendall was tearing up the tracks on the SCCA Trans Am circuit. (LAT)

The best times in Krosnoff’s young career had come while competing with his friends in the Jim Russell Racing School, the Pro Mazda Series and again in the SCCA Pro Atlantic series. It was close, familiar and he always knew where he stood amongst his peers.

That situation was lost in 1988 as his friends headed down a path that led to Indianapolis or Sebring, while his ties to that world came to an end as he raced in relative obscurity.

He and his girlfriend Tracy (they would wed in the early nineties) were extremely close—she’d supported him throughout every turn or dead end that came his way—but for Krosnoff to get back in the game, extraordinary measures would be required. Shunned and forgotten in America, he not only craved the opportunity to rekindle his career, but also the chance to race in an environment where the kind of friendship and camaraderie he grew up with still mattered.

That furtive, nurturing scene would be found, ironically, in the most foreign of lands.

“Throughout the past few years I had been developing a rather good relationship with a Japanese wheel company—Speed Star Wheels—and, in fact, had run its wheels on both my Atlantic car and Racetruck,” Krosnoff continued in the March 1989 edition of On Track. “Anyway, towards the end of the ’87 season, I had been in Las Vegas for the SEMA show as part of the Speed Star exhibit. During the show, Mr. Asai, the director of the company, had been discussing with me the possibility of traveling to Japan to test in a Formula 3 car. Soon after that, Mr. Hamada, the owner of the company, said to come over and do a test in the Speed Star Racing Team’s Formula 3000 car!”

Krosnoff’s test in the team’s 1987 Lola late that year went well, as he got to within two seconds of Masahiro Hasemi, a living legend in Japan and Speed Star’s No. 1 driver at that time. Crammed into a cockpit that was tailored to accept the much smaller Hasemi, Krosnoff impressed the team by finding speed while barely having enough room to shift gears.

He went home after the two-day test and soon got the call to join the team for the season finale at Suzuka in November. To acclimate himself with the 12-hour time change, and to get in some pre-event testing, Krosnoff’s trip would last 17 days, giving he and his wife the first taste of what his new career path could involve.

Qualifying 12th out of 22 cars, Krosnoff planned to draw from his experience doing standing starts in Atlantics, but without the opportunity to do a practice start in the 500-horsepower machine, he dropped the clutch when the lights turned green and watched in horror as his car seemingly stood still, enveloped in a cloud of his own tire smoke while the rest of the field streaked away.

The NHRA-grade burnout looked spectacular, but Krosnoff fell to 21st as a result. In hindsight, the error turned out to be a blessing as the Speed Star team got to watch a great comeback drive where he made a number of thrilling passes to get back to his original starting spot.

Masahiro Hasemi was as big a racing star as Japan had to offer, and he welcomed Krosnoff into the Speed Star team--and his own car--with open arms. (LAT)

That fighting spirit—which Krosnoff possessed in copious amounts—was an intangible trait that was greatly valued in Japanese racing circles.

The march from to 12th to 21st and back to 12th would soon be halted by a delaminating rear tire, but the Speed Star owners had seen enough to offer Krosnoff a full-time drive for 1989.

With that move, Krosnoff joined a small but popular underclass of foreign drivers making a living in one (or more) of Japan’s three major championships—F3, F3000 and the All-Japan Sports Prototype Championship, which boasted healthy grids filled with factory Le Mans prototypes from Toyota and Nissan, along with semi-works entries from Jaguar and Porsche.

Japan’s economy was strong and its three national series were awash with sponsorships and factory contracts on offer. Krosnoff made the move at the right time and thrived in Japan, but like his move to racetrucks the year before, he was almost invisible to those racing at home and in Europe.

“I didn't see him as much over there,” said SPEED’s Tommy Kendall, Krosnoff’s childhood pal. “But he’d come home every now and then and I’d follow him as closely as I could, without the Internet being around for his first few years in Japan.

"News of his races were few and far between; I kept up mostly by reading On Track, but that always came out a few weeks after an event. He toiled away there kind of in obscurity but made some really deep impressions.”

Being gone for great lengths of time, as his friend Paul Pfanner shares, was a constant strain on the Krosnoffs during Jeff’s seven-year stint in Japan.

“I remember there were times when he’d be home for a few weeks, but he’d be [in Japan] almost the entire time the season was active,” he said. “Once the season started, seeing him was infrequent. Tracy would go over to Japan when she could, but the fact was Jeff was gone for long periods of time. It was hard on both of them. But the thing that he liked about it was that the guys he raced against were really good and it was a great benchmark and it helped establish his value. There was a standard that was maybe higher in Japan at the time.”

The sacrifices made by the Krosnoff’s to get Jeff’s career to a point where they could reap the benefits went beyond what most drivers are willing to endure. Most of the foreign drivers racing in Japan were single, but for Krosnoff, his commitment to his wife never wavered.

Ireland's Eddie Irvine, who spent time in the top international F3000 championship, found himself in a similar situation with Krosnoff. The two would head to Japan in search of their next big break. (LAT)

“The other drivers would want to go out and act young and crazy, but Jeff was [with Tracy] and was in a different place in his life,” Pfanner explained. “They’d try to drag him out to the bars, but he’d let them go and stay in his room to build a model F1 car, or something like that. He found that more fulfilling, which spoke a lot to the focus he maintained while he was there.”

Krosnoff’s life in Japan from 1989 through 1995 isn’t well documented—a testament to the obscurity Kendall referred to—but the education he was receiving was absolutely invaluable. Hidden away from the world’s motoring press, Krosnoff’s speed, skill and racecraft skyrocketed while contesting Japanese F3000 and the Sports Prototype championship year after year.

He was getting by on raw talent on the open-wheel ladder in America, with the responsibilities of life--from finding sponsorship to attending university to being in a relationship--making it hard to focus solely on his growth and development as a driver. Compared to his contemporaries who had little more than driving to concentrate on, Krosnoff went as far as he could while maintaining the roles of boyfriend, student and marketeer.

Once he landed in Japan for the 1989 season, Krosnoff’s career went vertical in an instant. The Japanese F3000 series, at that time, was unlike the rest of the national and international F3000 categories. With heavy funding and engineering resources being invested by a number of Japanese tire manufacturers, Krosnoff and the rest of the drivers had a dream scenario on their hands.

PHOTOS: Click Here or on the image below to view INDYCAR: Jeff Krosnoff Retrospective.