INDYCAR: Jeff Krosnoff, Stay Hungry Pt. 5

IndyCar

INDYCAR: Jeff Krosnoff, Stay Hungry Pt. 5

With Jeff Krosnoff and Gary Avrin gone after the crash that took their lives on July 14th, 1996, the aftermath, memorials and the search for a new driver followed.

Marshall Pruett | Posted July 14, 2012

Jeff Krosnoff and his famous "Superman" pose on the front wheel of his Arciero-Wells Reynard-Toyota for RACER Magazine in 1996. (Photo: Courtesy of RACER Magazine)

READ: Jeff Krosnoff, Stay Hungry PT 1, Stay Hungry PT 2, Stay Hungry PT 3 and Stay Hungry PT 4 about the talented Californian Indy car driver who lost his life racing at Toronto on July 14th, 1996.

“We at All American Racers were increasingly impressed with the outstanding abilities and character of this fine young man. The stark reality that Jeff is gone reveals once again the facts that such things are part of the business despite our attempts to deny it. The veil erected by our passions and our faith in improved technology and track safety is blown away in moments like this. For better or for worse, incidents like this contribute to the fascination, the drama and the mystery of auto racing, and should increase our appreciation for the people who are willing to lay it on the line every Sunday. Jeff did. We admired him for it. And we will miss him."

~Dan Gurney

Owing to the graphic video of the crash that killed Jeff Krosnoff and Gary Avrin 16 years ago today, it was only a matter of hours before news of the accident—and footage of what took place—reached the mainstream media. The members of Krosnoff’s tight-knit network, near and far, were understandably shocked to learn of his death.

One of Krosnoff’s friends from his time in Japan, then-Ferrari F1 driver Eddie Irvine, was testing during the Toronto race and got the news from SPEED.com F1 correspondent Adam Cooper.

“I remember exactly where I was,” said the Irishman. “I was at Silverstone and Adam [Cooper] came over to me and said, ‘Jeff’s been hurt.’ And when he said that, I just knew, you know? I just went back behind the Ferrari truck...”

Before he had become “Mr. Le Mans,” eight-time LM24 winner Tom Kristensen also spent time trying to advance his career in Japan, and during the summer of 1996, the Dane even ventured to North America in search of Indy car opportunities.

“I also remember that day because I was there, I was there with my girlfriend,” he said. “We traveled to Toronto to meet some potential teams where I had set up some appointments. And it was, of course, a sad day to have your girlfriend there and obviously to watch a great friend leave us.”

Krosnoff was major part of four-time Trans-Am champion Tommy Kendall’s his life from the moment they met and as school boys in southern California, which made his loss incredibly hard to accept.

SPEED's Tommy Kendall, above, and Jeff Krosnoff, below, two young open-wheel hopefuls at the Jim Russell Racing School at Riverside in 1984. (Photo: Courtesy of the Krosnoff Family)

“I was in Idaho, Sun Valley, visiting my mom on vacation, which was kind of rare for me, but I was on vacation,” said Kendall. “I remember I got online that morning, I think it was good old CompuServe, and checked the qualifying. Saw that he had qualified the best ever for a Toyota, but still a ways down. We were driving all day over to Fish Lake, Montana. So it’s an all-day drive and I was dying to know what was going on. Out of cell range and all that stuff so I didn't know a thing. So I got to our hotel and I turned on the TV and there was, I was trying to get race results…it’s still really weird because the only thing I can think of is just the brain’s sort of protecting me, but I turned on the TV and there was a story about – it made it sound like it was a local race. It said: ‘Track worker and driver killed.’ And for some reason as I was seeing the story, I wasn’t paying that close attention.

“And then they ran the video I'm like, whoa, whoa, wait, that's Toronto. And then when the car came to rest and they showed it just for a second, I thought it was Jeff's car. And I'm guessing they were talking and saying what happened and who the person was but I didn't hear any of it. And only at the very end of the footage did I hear them say that it's Toronto and that it’s Jeff. I'm sure they said ‘Jeff Krosnoff’ but my brain just shut down. So I got on the phone and tried to call people and couldn’t reach anyone, and finally got a hold of Mike Hollander from RIS and he told me. He said, ‘We lost Jeff.’

“So that's how I found out. My mom was there and she knew Jeff from the time he was a little kid. Was like a first son to her. So it was a real mess. You can't believe it. I just remember I went outside and laid down underneath the stars in Montana and just laid there and couldn't process it.”

As the news of Krosnoff and Avrin continued to spread, the Arciero-Wells team, the drivers involved in and around the accident scene and members of the CART series were being subjected to a rather unnerving investigation by the authorities in Toronto.

“This is a different type of situation and none of us had been through it before and, frankly, since; I haven't heard of anything like this since, where the city comes in and takes control,” said Adam Saal, who looked after CART’s communications department in 1996.

“We all had procedures in place but it quickly emerged that this is going to be under the charge of the Toronto coroner, Dr. Huxter. I remember that clearly because he had on a sun hat, like a Safari type of hat, to keep the sun off him, he was wearing all white with a shirt that said ‘City of Toronto’ or whatever his affiliation was. He was there and it quickly became clear that they fully intended to treat this as a matter, as they would in any other incident that happened on their city streets, and we complied. There was no sense in trying to go against that.”

Saal, who now looks after PR clients like actor/racer Patrick Dempsey and the Bob Stallings Racing/GAINSCO team, shared a tale that many others reported in dealing with the city after the crash.

Cal Wells, left, would look after the racing side of things for Michael Waltrip, right, after transitioning out of the CART Indy car series. (Photo: LAT)

“Their procedures called for, and, again, it's part of the criminal investigation department, so their procedures called for detailed interviews with everyone involved,” he explained. “And that was one of the things we helped set up in the media center. You would call it the Toronto pressroom that was up in the meeting rooms of the actual building there, we cleared out a couple of rooms where they could set up their operation. And I even overheard a couple of the questions they were asking; I think it was Stefan Johansson at the time.

“Very procedural questions like, When did you arrive in town? Why did you take that flight? Why were you coming from Sweden? Did you know this person; did you know that person? Kind of invasive stuff, if you think of it for a guy like Johansson who was directly involved in the accident. These were the questions given to a suspect, almost. I remember [CART VP of Competition] Kirk Russell did a very good job reminding everybody, including us in the PR department, that, look, we're in their jurisdiction and these are people who are here to do a job and we’re here to do our job and let's work with them. And we did.”

Team owner Cal Wells had dealt with a number of deaths during his company’s long tenure in off-road racing, and despite the gravity of what took place in Toronto, had to focus everyone’s attention on what was taking place.

“I can tell you that at the time, it was incredibly stressful, it was very straining in my particular position,” he said. “We had an accident plan for about everything and one thing was a strategy for a tragedy, never thinking we'd have to invoke it. The investigation involved Gary Avrin as well as Jeff. It involved the safety procedures instituted before, it involved the track layout, it involved the promoter, Molstar at the time, it involved the team…you name it. It got ugly real quick.

“So we’re left working through how do we get Jeff out of Canada, it's a foreign country? His mom and dad were there, how do we deal with that? His wife was there, how do we deal with that? How do we deal with all of it? How do we protect the company? How do we protect the people in the company? How do we protect the sponsors? How do we deal with all of it? We were pretty well prepared, but it wasn’t easy and we didn’t have all the answers.”

Wells relied upon a number of people to look after the situation, and Mark Johnson, who now serves as General Manager for KV Racing, was tasked with working through all of the details on behalf of the team in Canada.

“Mark Johnson, who had been Kawasaki's global motorsports manager for years, headed up our operations and he had a tremendous amount of experience with motorcycle guys getting hurt and killed when we raced in Baja together,” said Wells. He had experience, particularly off of American soil, and so collectively it was a very, very, tough task for anyone, but he was great in that role.”

Wells also credited the entire team for helping to deal with Krosnoff’s death.

“Heather Handley, she was our director of corporate communications, and she was incredible,” he said. “Everybody that day, that moment, the entire process, they stepped up; and so for me, the emotions get jammed into a box and put up on the shelf for me. What I can say is that there are a lot of people that deal with tragedy and it's really their truly defining moments, and it was the first and, as of yet, still only major league drama like that I’ve experienced.

Adam Saal, right, shares a laugh with Honda's T.E. McHale, left. (Photo: LAT)

“I was incredibly close with Jeff, I only knew him 10 months but I really enjoyed him, I was very close with him but I just couldn't…I had to set that all aside and say, okay, I've got to frame this so that I can function in a way that will actually get something done. And it was hard because there were a couple of times that everybody broke down. So as the patriarch of the company, as the owner, I was able to hand off sections that had to get done. And it's complex. When you’re trying to get a body out of another country, when the car’s impounded for seven years, there’s a lot of things that you just don't think about. Now, I would now, but not then on all those levels. So I was very, very lucky.

As the Toronto inquest continued, Arciero-Wells and the CART series faced the awkward and inevitable step of moving on. For CART, its next race, Round 12 on the Michigan International Speedway oval, was scheduled just two weeks after Toronto.
For the team, and with more pressing needs north of the border, missing MIS was the only option as it had to arrange farewells for Krosnoff and to find his replacement in the No. 25 Reynard-Toyota.

“Well, I'll tell you, you don't have a lot of time to think about it,” said Wells. “I had to get a special dispensation about the next race because it was just going to be too hard to put everybody through it. So I had to write a letter and get a special dispensation [from CART] so we wouldn’t lose our points and lose our standing and our franchise standing, and so on and so forth. But that was it and I had to get going.”

Prior to the public memorial, Wells and the Precision Preparation Inc. team said goodbye to Krosnoff in their own way.

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