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TAKE ME TO...
IndyCar
PRUETT: Triple Stint, 3.2
4-Time Facsimile?, Why I Love eBay, Falcon 2.0, Like T-Ball with Formula Cars, Tick Tock, LDM-DFM, Polishing a ...., and Is GAINSCO Ready to GAINS-GO?
Marshall Pruett  |  Posted March 02, 2010   Oakland, CA
A 1/8th scale Porsche 962 is the closest I'll ever come to owning the real thing, but my wife doesn't see it that way. She says spending $3995 on a 'toy' will get me a visit to the emergency room. (The Motorsport Collector)
Welcome to the latest edition of Triple Stint -- enjoy a few appetizers before we get to the main courses.

4-Time Facsimile?
Jimmie Johnson's new lid looks awfully familiar. (LAT)

While watching the excellent Jimmie Johnson 24/7 docu-reality series, I couldn’t help but notice JJ’s new helmet bore a striking resemblance to one of my favorite drivers, 4-time IMSA GTP champion Geoff Brabham.

With Johnson’s affinity for sportscar racing, it seemed like a perfect fit – an homage from one 4-time consecutive champion to another 4-time consecutive champion.

Johnson’s PR rep loved the synergy of it all, but didn’t believe the dark blue/light blue bars with silver piping was done to intentionally match Brabham’s dark blue/light blue bars with gold piping.

As Jason Beam paints the Sprint Cup champions helmet, she asked if it was possible Beam had also painted Brabham’s, and had reached back to a previous design and updated it for JJ’s 2010 lid.
4-time IMSA GTP champion (1988-1991) Geoff Brabham, older brother of 2009 ALMS LMP1 champion David Brabham, might need to ask for a licensing fee from JJ... (IMS)

It made a lot of sense, but Brabham told me that too was a dead end. “A crazy Brazilian named Cleber in Miami painted my helmet. He painted a lot of helmets in my era.”

The best we could come up with was that as unlikely as it might be, the similar designs for the two 4-timers happened independently, with Johnson’s livery being more of a coincidence than an outright copy. ?

LDM-DFM

Good on Gil de Ferran for finding a new IndyCar opportunity at the 11th hour with the Luczo Dragon Motorsports team.

As a fan of bad auto racing acronyms, LDM meets DFM, giving us LDM-DFM. If only they could sign the Germany industrial rock band KMFDM as their primary sponsor, we’d have LDM-DFM-KMFDM on the grid at Sao Paulo.

(Actually, never mind.)

Tick Tock

The start of the 2010 IndyCar season is just over a week away and Graham Rahal, America's top young open-wheel driver, is without a ride. J.R. Hildebrand, decisive winner of IndyCar's Indy Lights feeder series, is also without a ride. Warms the heart, doesn't it?...

What kind of message does that send to the parents of every young open-wheeler in the country? If no one will invest in the two shining examples of what we can achieve in our own series, why bother wasting the money on buying little Johnny or little Sarah a kart? Why sponsor a kid in FF2000, Star Mazda, or any of the other 'Road to Indy' series if aces like Rahal and Hildebrand can't get a whiff of a decent opportunity?

I don't blame the series for this, although they are certainly complicit in making it so incredibly hard for their teams to find sponsorship, but regardless of who's responsible, they end up carrying the weight for it. The message goes out that the IndyCar Series is a dead end for young Americans.

With the Brazil race just around the corner, I wonder if the League will do something to fix the troublesome message that's being sent out right now.

Is GAINSCO Ready to GAINS-GO?

Even reigning champions can struggle to fill their plate with sponsorship.

A few sites with a flair for the sensational have prematurely announced the demise of 2007 and 2009 Rolex Series Daytona Prototype champions GAINSCO/Bob Stallings Racing, and while the Texas-based sportscar team is undoubtedly on shakier financial ground than they were this time last year, the doors aren’t being closed.
GAINSCO has been a big supporter of Bob Stallings Racing, but as the team owner shares, the auto insurance company has never filled the role of primary sponsor. (GAINSCO)

Rumors of their possible failure to answer the bell for the second round at Miami-Homestead were also premature, but from what I’m hearing, an important sponsor meeting late last month could provide an answer to solving the their full-season funding dilemma.

Team owner Bob Stallings wouldn’t comment on the results of the meeting, but his enthusiasm was clearly renewed when I spoke to him over the weekend about the well-being of his outfit.

“First of all, I should say that we have a plan and the intention is to run the entire 2010 season. And my ambition, as is usual, is to win a championship and we’re capable of getting that done. And that's what the team is focused on. So in that sense, 2010 is just like any other year for us at GRAND-AM. The only thing that is different this year than the previous years is before, in the beginning of the season, and in every previous season, we have been able to lineup all of the sources of funding.”

I’d heard that with the commitment from their sponsors, Stallings’ Riley-Chevrolet would be seen through almost the first half of the season, but with a sharp decline, if not a near complete withdrawal of funding from General Motors, a bit of a pall had been cast over their bid to repeat as DP champions.

The ‘Red Dragon’ nickname was given to the team’s Riley-Pontiac/Chevy in deference to the primary color of sponsor GAINSCO, but Stallings revealed that despite the prominence of GAINSCO on the car, the auto insurance company has never played the role primary sponsor.

“There's always three and sometimes five sources of funding to handle our budget. GAINSCO has always been a high profile and pretty important piece of that but they've never been the dominant source or the overwhelming source of funding for the team. The team has gotten the money from a variety of different sources. I think it's public record that at one time we got an important amount of our budget from GM. And GM is in bankruptcy; it’s a new GM and we don't have that type of relationship with them. There are also other sources that we’ve had, other sponsors, that just are not available to us this year. We have every expectation that we’ll run the whole year, that we’ll figure all that out. Right at this minute we don't have all these things in place. And that's the difference. But I don't have any expectations that we’re not going to be at the last race of the season fighting Chip Ganassi and the other teams for the championship again.”

Stallings said that adjusting to the challenges of finding significant funding in our current economy has been a humbling experience. Winning two out of the last three GRAND-AM Rolex DP championships has helped to open some new doors, but he’s learned that closing those deals now involves a much lengthier process.

“I have a business partner who, whenever I get frustrated about things, reminds me that we are going through the second worst financial crisis the country and possibly the globe has ever seen. And that problem is not going away and, frankly, I don't expect it to go away for quite some time. It means the world is a slightly different place than it was and a lot of people, companies, organizations have to make adjustments. I think we’re going through an adjustment process. The good news is, honestly, there actually could be some opportunities that could come out of this process. We're talking to a number of sponsorship sources that we never even considered before in our need to be a little more innovative and creative. I'm actually pretty optimistic that a couple of those are going to bear fruit.

“In a way, it may end up making us even more durable in the longer term because we found different partners that seem to be intrigued by the series and very intrigued by our team and the success that our team has had on the track. But, yeah, you never know about any of those things until you get across the goal line.”

A Colonel Mel Update

The Pruett household lit up when I heard from one of my favorite readers, Army Colonel Melvin Hull, who’s stationed in Afghanistan. After two months of silence, Colonel Mel popped up to say hello, noting that the region he’d been in wasn’t overflowing with Starbucks and free WiFi.

If all goes according to plan, he’ll be home in time for the Indy 500, but if that doesn’t pan out, a weekend of motorsports overload at Mid-Ohio for the combined IndyCar/ALMS event is what he has his sights set on.

It’s rather humbling to know that while we’re over here vigorously debating the merits of everything from the Delta Wing design to the ‘Danica Effect’ in NASCAR, folks like Colonel Mel are thankful just to have auto racing to help them bench race while half a world away from home.

Why I Love eBay

If only I had a spare $685,000 last week.

OK, How About in 1/8th Scale?
Rest in peace, Joe. (F2000 Series)

My wife would beat me with this 1/8th scale Holbert Lowenbrau Porsche 962 model if I spent the $3995 to buy it. If there was ever any doubt that motor racing is a sickness, I’ve been able to fully rationalize how saving the money to buy this would be a sane purchase on my behalf. Paying for the divorce and my hospital bill is what’s keeping me from pulling the trigger…

Goodbye to Joe

Joe Stimola, one of the supreme characters and all around good guys of open-wheel racing, lost his life last month from complications that arose during heart surgery.

He played a role in the lives of countless numbers of racers, and was instrumental in helping to launch or advance the careers of many high profile drivers, including a young open-wheeler from Pennsylvania.
Kleinubing cleans house for Acura yet again -- this time at Road Atlanta in 2003. The ridiculously talented Brazilian will now enrich the Mazda camp in the Continental Tire series. (LAT)

“Joe was a character for sure; a legend in the paddock,” Chip Ganassi shared. “However, there was nobody more serious about Formula Ford engines, formula car preparation, and the science of winning races in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Joe had more than a hand in a lot of top drivers in that era, and they would be the first to tell you he was one thing: a true racer.”

I first met Joe in 1994 at the SCCA National Runoffs at Road Atlanta. The Runoffs, then a place where the country’s greatest amateur talent could still catch the eye of a professional team, was a prestigious event filled with hundreds of drivers across dozens of classes.

Our team was crammed into a small paddock space that we shared with the Formula Ford Stimola was running, and for the better part of two weeks, Joe kept us in stitches as he regaled us with story after crazy story of his days in the sport.

It could have been that we were floating on a chemical high most of the time, thanks to the uncorked barrels of ELF racing fuel in our trailer (think Jägermeister mixed with weapons-grade plutonium), but just about everything Stimola had to say got tucked away in my mental ‘gotta remember that one and tell it for the rest of my life’ file.

The best one he told in his unmistakable New Yaawk accent involved a Formula Ford win one of his drivers had claimed at one of the SCCA Runoffs a few years earlier at Road Atlanta.

Prior to its purchase and modernization by Don Panoz, Road Atlanta was a chicane-free bastion for balls out speed. With so few slow or fiddly corners to be concerned with, the key to a fast lap came from getting a superior launch onto the track’s numerous straights.

As no one offered a spool – a piece that joins the rear axles, replacing the customary differential – to use inside the Swift DB1’s gearbox, which could provide Stimola’s desired performance advantage onto the straights, he began doing his research in the SCCA rule book and at his local hardware store.

Armed with a homemade locked differential, Stimola’s driver promptly won the Formula Ford class at the SCCA Runoffs, but the fairytale unraveled in post-race technical inspection.

Engine and gearbox teardowns were routine in the class, and while Stimola’s engine met the regulations, the inspectors cried foul when they peered into the Swift’s differential housing. The DB1’s differential, apparently, had been locked, creating a spool-like device, using cement that Stimola had mixed and poured into the unit prior to installing it. Once the cement dried, effectively welding the axles together, the rear wheels spun in unison and gave his driver that extra bit of oomph onto the straights.

With the inspectors citing the rule book where it clearly stated only metal and petroleum-based products were allowed inside the gearbox, Stimola’s car was thrown out of the impound shed and his driver was stripped of the win.

Never one to lose an argument, Stimola left the tech inspectors, went to his trailer and returned a few moments later and produced a large bag – it was the cement bag he’d used to concoct his custom diff. Asking the inspectors to read the bag, he said a devilish grin began to grow on his face when they read the ingredients and got to the part where it clearly listed the product was made from asphalt-based cement that was produced from petroleum crude oil.

Joe’s ‘gotcha’ moment was classic – he’d read the rules, found a loophole, and entertained the tech inspectors as they congratulated themselves for catching a cheater. With nothing left to support Stimola’s exclusion, the win was reinstated and Joe was armed with another stellar story to share with anyone smart enough to listen.

Stimola wasn’t politically correct, he wasn’t half as polished as many of his contemporaries, his volume was always stuck on 10, and I don’t think he wanted it any other way. Joe was old school, and his old school ways made him that much more valuable.

With his passing we’ve lost another invaluable link to our sport’s past. He will be dearly missed.

Falcon 2.0

Provided USF1 fails to make the grid as our Adam Cooper continues to chronicle, the kindly Ken Anderson could have two consecutive stillborn open-wheel designs on his hands.

His tidy Falcon IRL chassis, produced in 2002 in partnership with ex-Ford Racing boss Michael Kranefuss, came close to being fielded by Greg Ray’s Access Motorsports team, but after the Texan ran short of dollars, the Falcon failed to fly.

As I wrote of in a Triple Stint last year, the Falcon was for sale for $14,000 and has yet to sell.

It’s still there and makes me wonder whether we’ll soon see its younger brother listed alongside it.

Tunnelheads, Pick Your Starters! Win Weekly! Win Monthly! Win The Championship!




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Marshall Pruett

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