157: Inside CART’s Golden Era of Racing
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Car
1973 Pontiac Trans Am
It's an old American sports car from 1973 that's famous for being fast and looking cool.
Car
Pontiac Trans
The Pontiac Trans Sport is a type of car that was changed a lot to make it very fast for racing. The original car was made in 1973 and looks different now because of these changes.
Part
twin turbo LS V8
It's a powerful V8 engine from Chevrolet that uses two turbochargers to make the car go much faster.
Car
Pontiac Firebird
The Pontiac Firebird is a strong and fast car made in America. People like to fix and change it because it looks cool and has a powerful engine.
Concept
EFI
EFI is a way cars get fuel to the engine using computers to make it work better and use less gas.
Term
wiring harness
A wiring harness is like a big bundle of wires in a car that connect all the electrical parts so they can work together.
Concept
fabrication
Fabrication means making or changing parts of a car, like building new pieces to make it better or fix it.
Concept
3D modelling and CAD
3D modelling and CAD are computer programs that let you draw and see car parts on screen before making them.
Concept
race driver education
Race driver education teaches people how to drive cars fast and safely in races.
Concept
data logging
Data logging means recording information from a car while it’s running to see how well it’s working.
Car
Chevrolet Chevelle
The Chevrolet Chevelle is a big, fast car made in America. The 1967 Super Sport version is popular because it looks nice and has a strong engine.
Concept
IndyCar racing
IndyCar racing is a type of car race where special fast cars race on big tracks, including the famous Indy 500 race. The cars are built to go very fast and turn quickly.
Concept
Formula One (F1)
Formula One, or F1, is the top level of car racing in the world. It has very fast cars and teams that focus on very specific jobs.
Concept
team specialization in racing
In racing teams today, people have very specific jobs, like only working on one part of the car. This helps the team work better and faster.
Term
shock technician
A shock technician is a person who works on the parts of a race car that help it stay smooth and stable when it goes over bumps.
Term
gearbox technician
A gearbox technician is someone who works on the part of the car that helps change gears so the car can go faster or slower.
Concept
spec series
In a spec series, all race cars are mostly the same so the races are about how well the drivers and teams perform, not who has the best car parts.
Company
Dallara
Dallara is a company that makes the main car bodies used by all teams in IndyCar racing today, so everyone uses the same basic car shape.
Company
Firestone
Firestone is the company that makes the tires all the IndyCar race cars use today.
Concept
USAC (United States Auto Club)
USAC is a group that used to be in charge of many car races in the U.S., including the big Indy 500 race.
Concept
CART (Championship Auto Racing Teams)
CART was a group that ran many important car races in the U.S. during the 80s and 90s, including the IndyCar races.
Company
Penske
Penske is a U.S. company that makes race cars and runs racing teams, especially in IndyCar.
Company
Lola
Lola was a company from Britain that made race cars used in IndyCar racing a long time ago.
Concept
composites
Composites are special materials made by mixing things together to make car parts very light but strong, which helps race cars go faster.
Concept
aerodynamics
Aerodynamics is about how air moves around a car, helping it go faster and stick to the track better when racing.
Term
chassis
The chassis is like the car's skeleton that holds everything together. In some races, all cars use the same skeleton to keep things fair.
Term
engine choices
Engine choices mean the different types of car engines teams can use in a race. Having only a few options means many cars have similar engines.
Concept
displacement
Displacement is how much space inside an engine's cylinders can hold air and fuel, which helps decide how powerful the engine is.
Car
Mazda Miatas
The Mazda MX-5, or Miata, is a small, sporty car made for two people. It's known for being fun to drive and easy to work on, making it popular with car fans and students learning about cars.
LIVE
you know, when we set the world record at Fontana back in 1997, the closed course qualifying record,
we did 240.9 was our average speed. I got the poll in the world record at the time. You know,
we were taping shut little wishbone holes where the wishbones penetrated the side of the tub.
But now that extreme is just everything has to have a piece of tape on it if it has any sort of
variation in the flow of the aerodynamics. Because if you're all racing the same thing,
how do you make your same thing as good as it can be?
Welcome to the HPA Tune In podcast, I'm Andru your host and in this episode we're joined by
Russell Cameron from Horizon Motorsports. We met Russell and his son Kevin who's also been on the
podcast a while back over at World Time Attack last year in 2025 where they debuted to the World
Time Attack world, their custom built 1973 Pontiac Trans Am. That's really understating what this
project is when you dive under the skin, it's essentially an old Indy car or more specifically
a kart car but it's powered by a twin turbo LS V8 producing around about 1400 horsepower,
this thing is an absolute work of art. However Russell's son Kevin took most of the credit for
that but we also wanted to dive into Russell's background which is incredibly interesting.
Russell owned and ran a kart team back when kart and Indy car were sort of competing for top honours
and as part of this we find out about what the difference between Indy car and kart is and how
that sort of feud developed, how it also all wound up in the end. We also talk about how you
actually end up owning a kart team in the first place and the logistics of running a kart team
and making it successful, part of this dives into the intricacies of running a car at this level
and the different levers that are available to pull in order to get a competitive advantage
against the other teams. Later once the kart racing sort of ground to a halt, Russell built a
business around rebuilding historic kart cars and as part of this he's got a massive stock of
old kart componentry which is really what led to the Pontiac Firebird project in the very first
place. Regardless his background has really provided an amazing stepping stone for his son
Kevin and we talk about how he's helped Kevin in his pursuit of his dreams in an automotive
performance career. Before we jump into our chat, for those who are new to the TuneIn podcast,
High Performance Academy is an online training school, we specialise in teaching people how to
build performance engines, how to tune EFI, how to construct wiring harnesses, we also cover topics
on fabrication, 3D modelling and CAD, race driver education and data logging just to name a few.
You can find all of our courses at hpacademy.com forward slash courses. All of these courses
are delivered in high definition video modules that you can watch from anywhere in the world
provided you've got an internet connection. This means you can learn from the comfort of your own
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listeners, you can also use the coupon code podcast75, that will get you $75 off the purchase
of your very first HPA course. We'll put the coupon code in the show notes to make it nice
and easy for you to find. Lastly, if you like free stuff, then I've got a great deal for you.
We are constantly partnering with some of the biggest names in the aftermarket performance
industry to give away some great prizes. You can always find our latest prize at hpacademy.com
slash giveaway, it might be an aftermarket ECU or dash, it could be some engine components or
engine building tools or just about anything in between. They are great prizes and we will
ship them free of charge to your door if you're the winner. There's no tricks here,
no purchase required to get your name into the draw. Alright enough with our introduction,
let's get into our interview now. Alright welcome to the podcast, Russell thanks for joining us
today and as we always do, let's start by finding out about your background and how you
got an interest in cars. That's a great question. I grew up in a really little city in South Dakota,
Western South Dakota called Custer. It's a place in the Black Hills of South Dakota and I was
fortunate enough to be a teenager in the 80s and the 80s were for a guy like me where your
identity was kind of defined by a car that you might have. Kids were really into cars back then
and you'd cruise Maine on most nights trying to find a race, trying to find somebody to
hang out with or have a beer with or whatever but it was interesting you know from a young age
I grew up on a ranch and you know we didn't have a lot of money so things that we wanted we had to
build and we had to fix and we had to learn the kind of hard way how to make things function and
keep them functioning and you know when I was when I was young my first car might have been a
I think a 38 Chevrolet Coupe that I bought and partially restored and really didn't have the
skills at all to do that you know tooth fruition because you know I was eight years old and it
was hard to find somebody to paint it and work on it and stuff but I did make it quite a ways and
by the time I was 14 I'd made enough money in buying and selling sheep and cattle and other
things to buy my first car and it was a 67 Chevelle Super Sport which in the US those are
now extremely popular cars because they had a big block 396 and a four speed and they were
you know they were muscle cars they went fast in a straight line so we could drag race from
bridge to bridge on the east side of this little city where we would where we grew up and it was
just an extension of what I really love which were machines I love to see how machines work
and how they function so for me finding something that was in pieces and putting it back together
was kind of in a real interest for me how did you how did you build that skill set is this
something that you had sort of a parent to kind of show you the way or is this kind of 100%
self talk so I'm guessing also that's probably before the era of forums and definitely well
before the era of YouTube which has made things so much easier for people to learn skills these
days yeah there's no question you know in today's world you know so many resources available you
can just google something or YouTube something and find out how to do it but back in the day
you learn a lot the hard way you know you'd make a lot of mistakes or you'd you know maybe you'd
find a mentor somebody that was older than you that could rebuild an engine that could show you
what he knows about it and you know he had the Chilton's manuals back then where you could
find some information on specifications or rebuild things for tune-ups or engine clearance
specifications and things but you learn the hard way my dad was kind of a jack of all trades he
was an entrepreneurial kind of guy and always dabbling in things and he knew a lot about
construction and quite a bit about automotive stuff from his upbringing in South Dakota as a
farmer I guess if you're running a farm and you're somewhat rural you're probably kind of by default
have to be pretty skillful with all sorts of mechanical things yeah so yeah I think growing up
on a farm for my father was one of those things that's built out of necessity if something breaks
you you fix it or you learn how to fix it or you get somebody on a farm close you to come in and
help to fix it because you know the farmers don't have a lot of money and they're pretty you know
they'd rather learn to fix things on their own than they would to write a check and so I grew up
like that it forced me to learn a lot of things I mean I can do electrical on a house I can plum I
can build a I've done a lot of construction I've built vehicles and it just sort of led me on a
path where you know you have one skill and it it sort of helps you in another I think it's a really
super valuable sort of upbringing that most people don't get today in the way the world works
you have to fix things out of necessity it forces it totally yeah I think these days of we're sort
of living a world where it's more about a throwaway culture when something breaks which is a little
bit sad obviously the type of guests that we tend to have on this podcast break that mold a little
bit but I think yeah simpler times back then when you were just forced to figure it out and work
through it so you could fix something yeah now you kind of alluded to some maybe less than legal
drag racing back in the day is there any sort of other forms of motorsport that maybe a little bit
more legalized that you were personally involved with yeah so it's interesting I my family moved
away from South Dakota when I finished my junior year in high school so they left this city where
I had known everybody my entire life and I moved to Scottsdale Arizona and I spent my senior year
there at Chaparral High School and I had my Chevelle and you know some other people seniors
saw that I was into cars and they accepted me into their group and one of them in particular was
from a wealthy family and he was really into off-road racing and sprint car racing midgets
and so I ended up helping him you know he was the driver and I I co-drove a little bit in some
off-road races but ultimately I helped him build his cars and get them ready for racing and we
traveled together and we did a lot of those things and it was really my forte into professional
racing because once you sort of find even grassroots or amateur type racing to be
interesting and you like that that level of intensity and the schedule and the way it works
it became really interesting well you know that's really what got me into IndyCar racing is
we were living I was living here in Indianapolis and my friend was here racing in the Thursday
night Thunder series on ESPN with Midget racing on pavement and he decided that he was going to
pack it in and move back to Arizona and I was 20 or 21 years old I needed a job you know so I
he was kind enough to speak with another person that we knew named Corey Phillip his brother was
Chet Phillip who used to race Indy cars in NASC stock cars back in the 80s and they got me an
interview with Patrick Racing and Patrick had just won the Indy 500 the prior year in 89 with
Emerson Fittipaldi and they were looking for somebody and I got a recommendation and an
interview with Jim McGee who's you know arguably the probably the most well-known chief mechanic
team manager of of our time and I sat down with Jim and he said what can you do and I said I can
do whatever you want I he said can you drive a truck and I said yeah I don't have a CDL but
yeah my dad had a trucking company I can drive a truck you know just plug me in and so we went to
a test in mid Ohio and and he put me in the truck and I rode with the truck driver named Larry Foust
and we went and did the test and Jim had me work on the car a little at the test and he we got back
from that and he said you don't need to be driving a truck you we can see that you're you're a
mechanic and he plugged me in let's actually just stop stop there and just come back a little bit
you said that was I believe 21 I was 20 or 21 yeah yeah so at that point if we just roll back a
little bit sort of did you what formal qualifications did you have and and all of your mechanical
knowledge at this point is this just purely self-taught purely self-taught I might I didn't
have any school in that regard I you know when I left high school in Arizona I did do a semester of
community college at Scottsdale community college and really didn't find nothing that you really
nothing that you really loved nothing I loved and it always defaulted back to cars and racing and
customizing anything like that that I could do I wanted to go back and do that and so you know
this this left me with an opportunity at a team to sort of find a level in a career that I hadn't
even dreamed about when I walk in and first saw an indie car up on high stands with the bodywork
off I thought I was looking at a fighter jet you know they just they don't look anything like a
conventional car of course when you have the skin off of them and it looks like all aerospace type
stuff and I didn't know if really it was going to be for me but I just right away I love the fact
that the work ethic and the quality of the people involved in the processes that were used in the
technology and all of it was just it was so far ahead of where I had been and I just I loved the
opportunity to learn it and it was a very impressive environment to be in I can only imagine in this
day and age you would struggle to get that same opportunity to slot into a team like you've just
explained you know a sit down interview yeah I can do whatever you want oh yeah cool come and
drive a truck okay now we're upgrading you know actually spinning spanners on the car
am I right in saying that's probably an unlikely approach to either indie car or maybe even F1
in this day and age? Absolutely right I mean teams have become extremely specialized each
one of the jobs that they have to offer are pretty specialized so if you're if you sit down to
interview for an indie car team today and certainly Formula One teams you have to be educated to even
get an interview through engineering or even a PhD sometimes but you know you sit down and
they tell you that they have a position open as a shock technician or a gearbox technician or
something like that and that's what they're going to slot you into and there isn't as much crossover
back in the early 90s the teams were still pretty small and people did carry multiple roles and it
became more specialized all through the 90s as teams became more better financed and big corporate
sponsors were stepping in and the competition was extremely rough so you had to you had to be
really organized and you had to have people that did their task and didn't drift around too much
because you know you couldn't make too many mistakes. Sure could we talk a little bit about
IndyCar as a series versus Formula One just for those who who may be a little bit fuzzy on the
detail so you know I guess I'll describe it Formula One as a constructors championship where
each team build their own cars but IndyCar is a spec series where you choose from I believe
is it a couple of different chassis manufacturers and a couple of different engine manufacturers?
It's with IndyCar today it's one manufacturer it's Dallara and they have exclusive rights to
the series and they have two engine manufacturers they have Honda and Chevrolet and then they have
one tire manufacturer's Firestone so if you want to rewind the clock and talk a little bit about
how it was in the 90s prior to the 90s in the 70s 80s there were a lot of small companies
individuals building race cars that they would bring to Indianapolis and Indianapolis was
sanctioned by USAC United States Auto Club and CART was the sanctioning body that would bring most
of the entrance to that race every year but there were a few privateers in the 70s and 80s that would
bring their own creations but once Aerospace really started filling in the manufacturing of
IndyCars by the early 90s companies like Lola, Swift, Reynard, Penske these were the companies that
built purpose built race cars most of them built in England because British Aerospace
had spun off so many knowledgeable people about how to construct these kinds of vehicles
using composites and high-grade materials and lightweight and all of the things with the aerodynamics
that were required the privateers fell off to the wayside and the big manufacturers really ruled
the day but in CART back in the 90s we had you know by the middle of the 90s we had Lola's,
Reynard's, Penske's, Swift's, Gurney's there were lots of different people making constructing
their own chassis and there were two tires there was Firestone and Goodyear and then you had four
engine manufacturers you had Mercedes, Ford, Honda and Toyota so it was really you could pick
quite a different recipe so the teams all looked quite different and you're always looking for
that unfair advantage you know who who's bringing the next good item. When you've got that much
selection between chassis manufacturers and engine suppliers do you think in your opinion is that
a better recipe for diverse racing than having now as you mentioned in IndyCar one manufacturer of
the chassis and two engine choices? I completely believe that's what's really wrong with IndyCar
racing today is that there isn't enough diversity between the teams so if you're a fan and you're
trying to follow along and it's really one recipe in a lot of ways because tires are such a big part
of racing and the engines are regulated and really there you can't tell much between a Honda or
Chevy they're very very similar performance. As you'd expect everything's sort of going to iterate
towards the same effective results and then we see we see the same with Formula One as well
particularly when there's a lot of there's a lot of money involved in both of these sports so
there's a big drive for these manufacturers to be as competitive as possible.
Yeah there's no question yeah you know they want to make sure that they're going to get their return
on investment for being involved in a series and development is of course is extremely expensive
so if you can limit development areas for manufacturers and they can still get the competition
and they can get the marketing value out of the program the relationships then I think it's a little
bit easier but back in the 90s you know the only regulator that we had for our manufacturers was
displacement and boost levels and so they were 2.65 liter or the V8 and they had you know 40 inches
of boost pressure a very very small amount of boost but they could rev to the moon and by the
time we were done in 2001 with Toyota we were running qualifying engines that were revving
18,500 rpm. Wow so you mentioned that qualifying engines and I'm guessing this is sort of similar
to before my time but Formula One back when the rules were a lot less stringent and budgets
were a lot bigger and definitely not capped and they would run a qualifying engine that
was basically a ticking time bomb is that the same with IndyCar you kind of had something
that might have made 50 or 100 horsepower more than the race engine and you swap it out after
qualifying before the race? Yeah no this is a really interesting point to talk about if we can
because I think when you look back at the series cart it's a very end in 2000-2001 manufacturers
are bringing qualifying engines to the racetrack so we had a Friday qualifying session and a Saturday
qualifying session these were half hour sessions and so we would come to the racetrack with our
primary car with a practice engine in there and we would have our backup car with a race grade
engine in it in case we needed it but literally Friday after practice we would do a 45-minute
engine change and put in a qualifying engine we'd go into qualifying after practice do qualifying
then after qualifying put the practice engine back in Saturday we would do a repeat of that
and so we you know we were a two car team we'd have 12 engines with us.
It's just it's outrageous by modern standards but I guess when everyone's doing it you have to
you have to also be doing it otherwise you're just going to be nowhere. Yeah I mean we were
talking about splitting hairs you know there'd be less than a second a lot of times from first
to 24th on the grid so you had to do everything you could to find qualifying position especially
on street courses where it's very difficult to pass I mean track position in racing is everything.
One of the the most sort of I guess well known engines from that era was the Cosworth XD 2.65
litre V8 and from what I understand there's two generations of that engine I think though there
are red and a black and correct me here if I've got it round the wrong way but the red one was
the Quali engine so if you ended up with one of those for you know your modern hill climb car or
demo car or whatever the hell you wanted to put it in don't whatever you do end up with the red
engine because it's not going to last more than about 50 miles is that sort of is there any truth
in that? Yeah there is truth to that that is it's really how they did it and you're talking about
that era of like 1999 that was the last year for the XD engine and yeah they were bringing
those red tag engines to the track and those were qualifying engines and the black tag ones
were race engines and I bought several of those because I after you know I left my team Horizon
Motorsports in Cart in the IRL then I built a whole bunch of rainards back to really right to
their original spec I mean the one that's probably most well known is the Brian Hurta Shell powered
98 car 9805 I put that car back together as a vintage racing car and it's an XD car yeah.
Okay there's so much information that we've just glossed over there that we need to go back and
cover off but while we're still on this quality engine spec so internally what are they doing
different in the qualifying engine to the race engine and why are they only going to last you
know a handful of miles? Well they allow them to rev higher that's the biggest piece of the puzzle
is that you know when you take an engine that's designed for let's say 1999 an XD engine was designed
to race at 15,500 rpm you might have a qualifying engine that is built to rev 16,000 or 16,5 but
you could only do it for a certain number of revolutions or a lot of times we tracked it
by miles and we would look we would look out very closely to make sure there were no downshift over
revs and those kinds of issues but it's just about turning those components faster than they
were supposed to be turned so you reduce their lifespan. Yeah okay so it's just the old equation
of horsepower is torque multiplied by rpm so if you can make the same torque and add rpm you're
going to make more power. Yeah you move it out you move it all up just a little bit more and it
gives those guys with you know having a great lap let's say and you've got your gear ratio set for
a certain speed at a certain place it gives you a few more hundred rpms to you know keep in the
throttle a little bit longer into the corner or late braking. Sure okay in terms of getting a
competitive advantage in a spec series like Indy Car or Cart what levers have you got available
to pull other than at the time where you had multiple chassis and more engine choices you know
where do you look for advantages what can you do? You know it's interesting I don't I'm probably not
the greatest expert on the current IRL rule package that close areas of development and
have open areas of development I mean I had a guy with me you know down in Australia for a
current and he's an Olan shock guy and he worked at one of the most competitive teams right now in
the series and we talked a lot about these things because I'm not as current as he is but it sounds
like you know the big areas that are still really focused on is the damper package you know the grip
the override the ride quality so they do an awful lot of seven post testing and they look at things
like inertors that help ride quality and it's funny because inertors on the Indy Car program
are only allowed to be in the four road shocks but not in the third devices and so you don't tie
those together I think there's open areas like that that they certainly look at as a series and say
they don't want to go too far down the rabbit hole because of the cost that could
aspire that to control yeah because they're all really let's just get a bit of a description
that's actually not a term that I've heard so can you explain what you what you're actually
meaning well there's an a nerder is is a really interesting thing that didn't sort of exist
back in the late 90s early 2000s but it's become widely used on Formula One cars and Indy cars
it's essentially a sort of a shuttle that moves fluid the mass of fluid from one side of the
piston to the other in the shock and so when that when that happens it could be controlled by a weighted
valve that deals with that issue or it can be deal it can be dealt with with a volume of fluid in
in a hose so it has to shuttle that back and forth and it it essentially from my understanding of the
inertor is it takes out some of the oscillations that exist that are hard to get out with a piston
okay so it allows a better ride quality and it keeps the wheel on the ground better it's something
I don't have a lot of experience with but it's really interesting and I and certain dampers
have inertors built into them now from Olens, Penske, those kinds of things and I'm really
interested in myself because Kevin and I talk about it at times is I'm trying to teach Kevin a lot
from our project of Hammerhead on how a lot of these different theories and systems work so we
think we're going to try to get our hands on some Poland's TTXs with inertors to just play with it
a little bit and see what they what they do okay in terms of that technology is that something
like if you were to take that off an open wheel wings and slicks type race car obviously they
weigh nothing compared to just about any other form of of closed closed in race car that we deal
with are they going to be something that's applicable to the likes of your Hammerhead race car?
I think it will be yeah I think it's I think it's can be used on all kinds of cars when you
are seeking that last little bit of grip and ride quality that you can't get through the
conventional tools so I do think it's good you know one of the things I will say is
the current Indy car is not a light car anymore it you know with the with the hybrid unit in
the Indy car I think a lot of these Indy cars are weighing close to 2000 pounds wow yeah I
mean I think it's the same with Formula One over the years everything's kind of just expanded and
the weight's gone up and the size of the cars have gone up and maybe to the detriment of the
racing actually. Well partially too because the chassis itself is I think from 2012 it's this
version of the car has been updated aerodynamically in its bodywork but the tub itself and a lot of
the components have continued just to sort of stay along the track and when you run a car year
after year getting things repaired getting things added on inevitably they get they get kind of fat.
Yeah yeah naturally all right so you've talked about dampers obviously that's a big area for
development and I mean the thing that probably is easy to overlook is no matter what car you're
racing whether it's you know your grass roots home built race car that you're doing you know
motor car is on the weekend in or it's Formula One ultimately the amount your lap time is going
to be defined by the amount of mechanical grip you can get between the tyre and the race track
so it's always about optimizing that and that's where the dampers come in. In terms of aerodynamics
as well obviously in the car the aero is going to be very very important I'm assuming there's
still a lot of flexibility in terms of the aero setup of the chassis so that's an area for
team development as well. There really isn't anymore I mean they've closed off I think just
about everything when it comes to aerodynamics. As a matter of fact the controversy that you saw
last year at Indianapolis with just a small bit of filler on the rear continuator on the
Penske cars got them disqualified and three of their managers got fired you're talking about a
little raised section of carbon that they filled in and this is an continuator bracket that was
very close to the rear section of the gearbox where you know if you looked at it you would think
there's no aerodynamic advantage to that but here's what here's what happens when you start
closing up areas of development aerodynamically then all the teams can do is rub on everything
they have to make it as efficient as possible so body fitting race cars became the standard 15-20
years ago where a car would get its bodywork fitted and all the gaps closed up to the point where
you know there's hundreds of hours involved in closing gaps fitting bodywork and you know teams
are taping all the lines completely shut with heli tape before qualifying in the race because
they need every bit of advantage they can get to you know when we set the world record at Fontana
back in 1997 the closed course qualifying record we did 240.9 was our average speed
they got the pole in the world record at the time you know we were taping shut little wishbone
holes where the wishbones penetrated the side of the tub and put a little heli tape on the leading
edge but now that extreme is just everything has to have a piece of tape on it if it has any sort of
variation in the flow of the aerodynamics they rub on everything and it's because if you're
all racing the same thing how do you make your same thing just as sort of as good as it can be?
Just a little bit better yeah I guess that's one thing I sort of see with the spec series or even
you know where you're just introducing very very stringent rules for development
and I think often a lot of it is done around trying to reduce costs how I kind of see that
panning out and I'm interested to get your take on this is that the better funded race teams just
end up spending all of the money they've got available on less and less critical things so it
doesn't really fix the problem of budget do you agree with that? I do agree I think that the real
issue in racing is you know Formula One use cost caps and they track spending and they try to make
sure that there's people that try to create an equal sort of opportunity for teams to step up and
compete because fans we all want competition we love to see the underdog step up and have a great
weekend and it's not much fun if you see the same person winning time and time again but when you
look at business or racing or I don't care if it's Formula One or IndyCar you know there are
certain teams who have the money they just have the right partners involved in the team and it's
just easier for them to spend money on everything in sight it could be cars trucks things that create
efficiency better shops better cabinetry more spare parts more radiators anything that could make the
a better car and it's so difficult for teams that are struggling to get their way up because
they can't attract the engineering staff and the mechanics the drivers all of the things that
the best money can buy and certainly you know IndyCar don't have a way I don't think at the
moment to control cost it's more that the team owners have pushed back on opening areas of
development and schedule and things like that that really massively affect the cost of doing
business but I will say what's encouraging with IndyCar racing today is that these open areas
and closed areas of development have created at least a stable economic model that you can optimize
so you see teams like Dale Coyne Racing who have been in the series for 40 years or something now
and they've been typically sort of a small team they've been able to compete in big ways and I
think that's really encouraging you know you get a good driver and you pair them up with a good
engineer and you get a good crew that doesn't make too many mistakes and you know you can
you can have some good weekends I don't know if it's championship type material but you'd be in
the mix you can be in the mix and then you know the big thing is is why do you invest in a sports
franchise team like a Formula One or an IndyCar or a NASCAR is because you know you need to be able
to build value in your franchise and I think that's what's exciting about IndyCar racing today
is that it of all the racing series out there it still has a lot of room to expand and the value
of its team franchise you know you have to make it kind of a hard club to get into right just
like Formula One is today you know it was hard for the American team to get the approval because
they were happy with 20 cars and and they had a good mix of money and they didn't really need
more and they didn't want the value of everybody's franchise to be diluted by adding more more slots
so there is a magic number yeah yeah it was a hard push to get that across the line from the
guns and things oh yeah all right let's uh let's just move back a little bit we're kind of here
there and everywhere on this interview but that's absolutely fine I want to talk about your sort
of career development so we sort of left that with you getting involved with this team and sort of
upgrading from driving trucks to actually work on the cars so you know what what did life look
like for you at that time and how did your career develop well as I said I started it at Patrick
Racing and you know we were a team that was taking on a new engine with Elfa Romeo that year
which was essentially a copy of the Chevy A engine that was developed by Elmore Engineering and it
was had Magnetti Morelli electronics and it was a very tough year we had Roberto Guerrero driving
the car who was very fast but the car wasn't very reliable it was a Lola it wasn't reliable because
the engine was just not developed and that's part of the pain of bringing in something that you think
could be an advantage to you whether it's financial advantage or a performance advantage
but at the end of that season I went I left and I went with an engineer named Morris Nunn
he was the top engineer in the series he asked me to come to Arizona and work for Vince Granatelli
Vince was Andy Granatelli's son and um he had an IndyCar team and he had put together a package
where he had Ari Lyandike the defending Indy 500 champion and he had hired Morris Nunn and Morris
Nunn was at Patrick in 90 and said when he left he said Russell will you come to this new team
and out of all the guys in the team and the only person he asked to come and I went and I sat down
with Vince Granatelli and I quickly realized that I was being interviewed to be Ari Lyandike's
chief mechanic in my second year of IndyCar racing. Wow that's quite the step up. Yeah
And I had to I had to tell Vince I said Vince I you know here's my background I mean I'm one
year into this I said I really don't think I should come aboard and be your chief mechanic
I'm just not the person that knows enough about how the paddock works yet to do something like
that for you so I didn't do that I didn't want to do that I just I joined the team as a lead
mechanic I worked on the rear half of the race car that's the most complex part of the race car
from fuel cell engine exhaust turbos rear suspension and that kind of stuff and so I spent a year there
and unfortunately the team didn't carry on after 91 because they had some financing issues but it
was a it was a really great experience because Vince was a hardcore operator he wanted that
place to be like a laboratory you know like a surgical room everything was white yeah you had
to roll out rugs under the car when you took it apart to make sure any brake dust or anything hit
the rugs the rugs were quickly swept away and the floor was polished again and it was always
working like you're in a lab and I really liked it because it it taught me a lot about how to work
in an environment that sort of reduced mistakes by just keeping things focused on a singular item
you know like if you were rebuilding the rear wishbone or an upright that's all you had on the
bench you brought out one item you fixed it you put it back in the cupboard marked it rebuilt
and you put it away and it wasn't a big mess you kept your mind you know decluttered I liked
working there we won a couple races that year with Ari and I really enjoyed it and and then after
after that I went to work for Gallus Racing in Albuquerque New Mexico Rick Gallus owned the team
and we had Alan Sir Jr. and we had Danny Sullivan for two years 92 and 93 and that was incredible
we won the Indy 500 with Al Jr that year we won Long Beach with Sullivan that that year in 92 and
that was a chassis called a Galmer it was an engineering company really owned by Rick Gallus
and Alan Mertens he's the engineer from the UK that sort of put it all together and we
we had our own car that year we had five of those cars built and we ended up winning the Indy 500
and the car had no business winning the Indy 500 it was just a super cold day that day and
Al Jr drove it flawlessly and there were a lot of crashes and it wasn't the fastest thing by any
means but sometimes you do also need a little bit of luck on your side and the old story in order
to finish first first you must finish so it doesn't matter how fast the car is if you stick it into
the wall you know halfway through a race yeah I'm interested if you could give us maybe a bit of an
idea of what the average day looked like for you working on one of these teams and you know first
of all when you're at an actual event so a race meeting what you're doing I mean I'm hoping you're
not sort of doing anything too serious on the car I guess there is the point we were talking about
with swapping between a race engine and a qualifying engine which I can imagine is a pretty big job
and then also you know between events what you're actually doing back at the back at base.
That's a great question a lot of people you know when we would meet people on the road they would
say hey what do you guys do between races it was if they thought that you know the trucks just you
know the cars went back in the truck and nothing happened just tighten them to the next event yeah
and the traveling circus was moving to the next event but you know basically once the cars are
prepared at the workshop and the discipline that you have to have to be a winning team is that
the car leaves the workshop ready to go ready to run 100% and you you take it to the racetrack and
you your trucks show up on Wednesday night or Thursday morning when they're loaded into the
paddock area and parked and you show up on Thursday morning with your team you fly into
most of the races you put up the awning you set up the Kiwi towel floor you bring out the setup
pads and level them you take the car to tech inspection you roll it back onto the setup pad
to make sure that the setup is as it was is when you left the shop and really that's the day you
set up your pits and make sure they're ready to go and that's how Thursdays were spent back in the
90s and and a lot of times if we had a little extra time we would go play softball we'd find a
place right penske and Newman Haas and and gallus were notorious for going out and finding a place
to have a cooler full of beer and go out and play some softball and we made a lot of friendships
that way the paddock was very wide open when it came to camaraderie and people helping each other
all the way up to race day and you know it was just a great environment to be in so Thursdays behind
us Friday morning you come to the track you warm the car up you put on a heater for the oil and
the water and you get it warmed up and you start the car and make sure everything is ready to go
you take it out to the pit lane and you do practice typically there are a couple practice sessions
and then there is a qualifying in the afternoon on Friday and then repeat of that again on Saturday
and then on Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning there would be a half hour warm-up session where
you might do a live pit stop and make sure those things are ready certainly on Fridays and Saturdays
you might roll the car out to the pit lane and do some pit stop practice as well because back in
the workshop in those old days you didn't necessarily have a lot of time to do pit stop
practice and it wasn't as big as a focus as it is today now teams spend an enormous amount of time
with pit stop cars and coaches doing pit stop practice and then Sunday of course is race day
and race day is you know it's uh roll the car in the grid they have all the pre-race festivities
driver introductions and it gets down to business and race day was you know always I think my
favorite day just because it really becomes a sport in so many ways on Sunday when the mechanics
are also the pit crew members doing tire changes and refueling and there's a lot of activity behind
the wall helping roll tires out and you know hold the dead man valve on the on the tank to make sure
that there's a escape valve if the hose got broke off or something but it was just incredible and
Sunday night we would after the race we would take the awnings down and load the cars back into
the transporter and we would run for the airport a lot of times to make it back to Indianapolis
or Albuquerque or wherever your team was on Sunday evening sure thank you so it's pretty intense
in terms of the the actual work you're doing on the car over the race weekend short of you know
someone sticking into a wall and you have to do a quick rebuild of the car what sort of changes
are you you making to the car in order to try and dial it in during practice to qualify
another great question this process is repeated over and over and over throughout the weekend so
after a session the car would roll back to the paddock area it would roll up onto the setup pad
and you would measure its all of its settings its toe its camber ride height cross weights
any of those things that wing angles anything that made it onto the set down sheet that would
be provided to the engineering staff they would kind of look at that compared to the notes that
they made during the session and kind of compare it to the changes because when you're asked as a
mechanic to go up on push rods down on push rods change this spring change that spring when you
roll back to that setup pad and you measure it all up all those changes you've made in the pit
lane should correlate and if they don't then you've made a mistake somewhere and those mistakes
can be felt I remember a time when our driver Mauricio Gugelman was walking with me back to the
paddock area in Toronto and he said hey that last spring change you guys made I promise you
one of the springs you put right back on he goes one of them is one of them is 1100 lbs
spring and one's a 1200 he goes I promise you that and we got back to the paddock
and he was absolutely right he could feel it. That's a real sign of the level that these drivers
are at to be able to tell that sort of a subtle difference but also you would expect nothing less
there's only a limited number of drivers who are ever going to make it and in the car roll formula
one so yeah they have to be pretty special to get there in the first place. Yeah that's the you
know the other thing that you do during the week the during the weekend as far as changes I mean
beyond the engine changes that were always planned for because we didn't have engine rules back then
it said you had to have engines last a certain amount of time you could change them at will.
Yeah you weren't changing an engine you were certainly changing gears to optimize gear ratios
in every aspect every corner of the track you were changing brakes you were working on driver
fit issues you know those are the kind of things that are just tuning all through the weekend and
you know in the early 90s the cars weren't nearly as reliable so you had to really pull them apart
almost every night and look for inspect everything you know you're looking at wishbone making sure
wishbone weren't cracking or uprights weren't cracking and things like that. Alright a couple
more follow-on questions from that so these days obviously again with the the interest of keeping
costs down testing is is cut very short and most teams are using drive-in-the-loop simulators
and some very sophisticated lap time simulation software to essentially come to a given racetrack
with a setup that should be at least in the ballpark and then basically a guide to sort of help them
immediately make setup changes of the cars you know maybe a little loose or maybe it's pushing
too much for the driver's liking. Is that kind of how things worked back when you were involved
or was there a bit more kind of hands-on and a little bit less simulation heavy?
It was there certainly wasn't the simulation that we have today you know we didn't have
drivers sitting in simulators for long periods of time you would certainly look back at data from
prior years to sort of look at tires and set up recommendations and you if you had a new
racetrack that the series was adding you would get track maps and you would be able to run
some calculations to figure out what gear ratios what speeds you might be achieving at
certain corners and what brake package you might need and things like that but today the simulation
stuff is just incredible what's available to teams and drivers they show up and the setups are
pretty close and it's important too because the sessions are also much shorter than they used
to be you didn't get nearly as much practice time so you have to unload your car we used to always
say we we have to unload quick and that's not getting the car off the trailer fast that's
basically your car needs to unload and be a quick car on the track and ultimately if you can start
off that way and you're not behind everyone your weekend goes pretty well if you unload and you're
not good it can be a hard thing to catch up on. Yeah I can imagine that making for a fairly difficult
weekend if you kind of find yourself completely out of the ballpark from the first practice session
because as you say there isn't there isn't a lot of time to dial that setup in and then you're on
the back foot for the whole weekend. Yeah I say so and that's you know that's one of the reasons
that you see teams run two three or four cars in the series because one car could be having a bad day
and the other one is running really good and so you can compare data and you can try to find out
where things are going right and wrong and try to make some adjustments quickly before the weekend
gets away from you. Is there a degree of with that with multiple cars and the same team of
different drivers obviously in those cars? Just because a setup works for one driver
doesn't necessarily mean you can just copy and paste that setup onto a car that's slower
and get the same results. Is it driver specific? It's pretty driver specific and when you look
at certain drivers and I'll reflect back on 1997 when I was at Pack West Racing Group and we had
two X Formula One drivers, we had Mauricio Gugelman driving for us and Mark Blundell.
And Mauricio drove a car that was just dangerously loose all the time you know. He just loved the
back of that car to be sort of flailing around back there. He wanted it to be pointed, steered
exactly where he wanted to point it and Blundell was the opposite. He wanted the back to be super
planted. He loved that predictability of understeer and when you look back at that and you realize
the mistakes you make after the fact is you know that loose car is only going to get more loose
in the race. So when you start off that way and the tires get hot and they get worn out too quick
it's just going to be more tail happy and Mauricio you know he was the highest qualified driver in
the series in 1997. He had an average starting position of 4.4 that was better than Zanardi
because he could drive a car really loose but in the race he typically went backwards where guys
would you know started in 15th and so would move their way forward because they had this
understeer and that's really how Mark Blundell's races went you know he won three that year in
97 for us. Mark did and he knew that he needed a certain amount of predictability in the car and
understeer really provides that. So essentially a car that's a little loose could be faster with
the right driver on a one lap pace for quality but in race trim it's going to be difficult to be
competitive over the the length of the race. It's really difficult I mean you got to be able to know
where your car is going to you know where it's going to be in the braking zone and how deep you
can go on somebody you can if you can out brake somebody even if you have understeer you can keep
them at bay if you can just find a position in front of them before the corner. So I think
drivers are different they certainly like different style of car and that's when you select
drivers in a two or a three car team you kind of have to take that into consideration or you have
to work with your drivers and try to convince them that they don't need a level of sort of
oversteer that they think they need. You know they got to convince them to come off of that a
little bit. I look back on that and that's really the biggest mistake we made with Gujulman over
those years is we just didn't have we didn't pull him away from what he thought he needed.
Yeah I think you can sort of also see exactly the same thing in Formula One with the lights of
the red bull car which is pretty clear everyone sort of understands that the whole car has been
built around Max Verstappen's desire to have a very sharp front end but every other driver they've
put in the second car has struggled to be anywhere close to Max. So I guess you build or develop
your car towards one particular driver doesn't necessarily mean that that's going to work for
anyone else. It's so true I think that's the you know the comment I made about trying to make sure
you have two drivers in your team that have a similar style so you can compare setups and you
can develop a car around a certain driving style. Yeah now you also mentioned the reliability of the
car mechanical components and you know looking for cracks and wishbones and things like that.
Do these parts sort of get lifed out or is it purely on inspection and non-destructive testing
you decide when when a parts pass it's used by don't? The answer is yes to all of that they do
get lifed out and they do get tracked and the mileage limits have to be sort of discovered.
You know you can't just say I think a wishbone is good for 2,000 miles or a set of headers is
only good for 1,000 miles. You sort of as you start a season and you've got new components you
track them they all get serial numbers and you and the people in each department are responsible
for putting the information into the tracking software. When you start to see something crop up
you can look at that mileage on that component and say okay that one's got you know x amount of
miles let's put that aside and let's keep tracking the others and see if they start showing signs.
So you know you want to try to get to the bottom of it because it's a financial issue too right I
mean you just can't keep throwing everything at these cars but gear ratios those kinds of parts
drive flanges upright hubs oddly enough wheels didn't get tracked as much back in the day for
mileage because a lot of them got crashed and broke before that was ever an issue plus they got
Zygolo tested twice a year to see if there was anything going on and they were really
very reliable the wheels are forged magnesium and they actually did a pretty good job but
you know things like you know headers are a big one clutches those things have to be mileage and
have to be put aside there's just no way around it. I guess it's a very tough tight rope to walk
you obviously don't want to be needlessly throwing parts away that are still good because of the
financial implications you mentioned but at the same time you know push something a little bit
too far and it fails on the car at best you're going to have a DNF and at worst you could be
putting a driver or multiple people in some real potential harm as well so you really want to have
that dialed in. And it could cost you even other things you know like if you break a header for
instance and you start burning up body work or wiring harnesses and things that cost can go sky
high but you know this is again where teams that have a financial advantage get a performance
advantage because they can put those parts aside at a much faster pace than other teams they don't
ever have to kind of put themselves in that zone of unknown where they could have a DNF or
to affect their championship level sort of efforts that they find they're financing I mean
ultimately you know Penske, Ganassi, you know Ray Hall you get on the list these are pretty well
financed teams that are out there to try to win championships so they're I'm sure very serious
about their mileage programs and their reliability. Yeah of course. Alright let's go back to sort of
your career progression and I'm kind of interested to get to the point of how you ended up running
your own team so can we sort of fast forward through to that point that that seems like a
a bit of a stretch goal if I'm honest. You know I'm just one of those guys that was in the right
place at the right time with the right people and that's kind of how that all unfolded but
you know if you go back to where I think we left off we were at Gallus Racing in 92 and 93 where we
had Al Jr, Danny Sullivan these were household names back in the 90s but I left there and I went
to Ganassi for about a year and that's where I met Mauricio Gugelman he was driving their second car
Michael Andretti was his teammate there and I really developed a big relationship with Mauricio
and so at the end of 94 Mauricio was not going to stay there and a new team called Pack West
Racing Group had kind of come into the mix and it was owned by a couple of guys from Seattle
Washington that had done very well they saw sort of a vision for CART and I interviewed with them
and I really liked where they were going and so they hired me to be a chief mechanic on one of
their cars and Mauricio came on board a year later in 1995 and Mauricio drove there until 2001
we had other drivers like Mark Blundell, Danny Sullivan, Scott Dixon who's obviously been
a champion many times now in the series he was our driver he won his first race with us
also our claim to fame since he's a Kiwi yeah he's a great guy too I mean he's just such a
he's a cool operator he always was every since we brought him over from New Zealand and ran him
on our indie lights cars at Pack West he his focus is incredible so I worked for Pack West all
through those years the golden years of CART in the 95 to 2001 era when there were so many
manufacturers and so many sponsors the money was flowing actually I'll just pause you on the story
there because you've just mentioned CART and again for those who kind of aren't intimately
familiar with IndyCar and CART can you talk to us about that split and what was different
between IndyCar at the time and CART? Yeah I'll do my best it was very frustrating at the time
you know in 1995 Tony George was in control of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and as I think
I told you earlier USAC is the sanctioning body that regulates the rules and the running of the
Indy 500 and CART teams would go there and race every year because obviously CART would race 16 or
18 other races around the world we were racing in Australia we're racing in Mexico Canada other
places but Indianapolis is really what you had to have to sell a sponsorship package and so we
would we would go to Indy every year and in 95 Tony George decided that he wanted to create the
Indy Racing League and the Indy Racing League at the time they were focused on trying to give
more American drivers from the feeder series of sprint cars or even stock cars a way to make it
to become an Indy 500 driver and so they formed the Indy Racing League and it became a situation
where they did a rules package that said that I think 25 of the positions of the 33 for Indian
apolis would be guaranteed to IRL season participants so it would only leave eight open
for CART teams to come and try to get through qualifying yeah it's tough and so CART teams
were certainly more professional and they were they had longevity compared to these new IRL teams
so a lot of the IRL teams that sparked up were lower level teams that saw an opportunity to
get into the Indy car world at a reduced price and even the first year of running the Indy Racing
League at Indianapolis they ran year-old CART Reynard chassis lowless chassis they didn't
have their own chassis or engine so Causeworth provided engines for it Ford Causeworth firestone
tires that kind of stuff and in 96 the CART owners decided that rather than go to Indianapolis
they would run their own race in Michigan called the US 500 on the same day so they went to the
Michigan racetrack a two mile oval and we ran the US 500 the same time as the Indy 500 so the
war was on yeah sounds like there's a bit of politics coming into play here yeah and it was
really a shame it just it diluted open wheel racing at that level in America at the worst
possible time because CART had was really finding its feet and competing with NASCAR in 95 it was
extremely popular I mean CART was all over the world we were expanding teams were getting bigger
and better financed and then this bomb hit where the IRL came in and said no we're going to split
it up and we're going to take Indianapolis out of the equation for these CART teams pretty much
and by 97 some of the CART teams decided that they were going to go there and qualify cars and that
kind of stuff and by 2001 Penske and Ganasi had decided that they were going to leave
CART and go to the IRL because their manufacturers were pushing in that direction with Toyota
Honda that kind of stuff and you know eventually it just it made it difficult for
CART to continue without having Indianapolis on its list of races that you were selling sponsorship
for yeah understandable and it was a shame too because it coincided with the the law in the US
that tobacco companies could no longer sponsor race cars so if you all the way to 2001 we had
sponsors like Marlboro and Cool Hollywood these are all cigarette companies that helped
paid pretty big bills for for teams but I guess those companies had more money than they could
spend so it was an easy outlet for motorsport sponsorship yeah and it was the only way for
their brand to show up on a television broadcast so they you know they were they were all in on
sponsoring race teams like Camel did the same thing and you know super bikes and off-road and
all kinds of things but it was a shame because it really diluted things and you had to pick a side
and I really liked the format of CART better because it was a mix of super speedways short
ovals road courses like permanent road courses and street courses you know temporary street courses
so the championship was a really diverse and it was really interesting and you got to do different
things and I like the turbocharged 2.65 liter engines and I didn't really care too much for 3.5
liter naturally aspirated low revving production engine the CART series to me was still way more
interesting but CART decided they would venture off and become a publicly traded company around
that same time and team owners saw the opportunity to take the shares that they were given as part
of their franchise value and sell the shares which effectively killed their franchise and
CART as a series was over and it was a shame I don't think there's too too many instances
worldwide where you sort of get a split like IRL and CART and it doesn't just destroy everything
because there's only so many people, obviously the US is a lot bigger than we are here in New Zealand
and there's a lot more money and a lot more manufacturers prepared to spend sponsorship
dollars but still there is a limit to how many dollars there are and they can't go in two different
directions so yeah I don't think there's ultimately just no future in that sort of a split which
obviously proved to be the case just in terms of the difference in the specs it sounds like to start
with at least they must have been very similar if people were using you know a year old Reinhard
CART chassis in IRL but then you've mentioned naturally aspirated 3.5 liter versus turbo 2.65
so did the spec kind of split and move move apart yeah I did by 90 I want to say it was 98
that it finally they went their own direction as far as specification of the car and they did that
because the first couple years of the IRL they couldn't gear up fast enough to build chassis or
engines I don't think they had prepared for what was going to happen and so they were able to buy
old year old or two year old Lola's and Reinhards from existing CART teams and get
Cosworth to supply engines and they ran their series that way but I believe it was 98 I don't
think they were able to do it by 97 my memory is a little foggy but by 98 then you had I think was
a 4 liter v8 with overhead valves naturally aspirated that came in and they had a G4 chassis and they
had a couple of things like that going for them to try to go on their own but the cars were they
were very unsophisticated compared to a road racing sort of versatile car like a champ car what
we call them champ cars you know because you know our cars were built to be configured for all those
different kinds of races those super speedways and short ovals and road courses and tree course it
all it all needed different geometries and different wing packages and gearbox ratios and
everything so our cars were really sophisticated and so you know you fast forward to 2001 and
that's really when Pansky and Ganassi I mean I was in the I was in the franchise board meetings
when all of this was going on our owner Bruce McCaw at that point was frustrated with franchise
you know the model at CART was falling apart and so I attended on his behalf I was team
manager by then I went to these meetings I I saw the sort of the activities of the franchise owners
and what the direction was and you could certainly see that manufacturers like Toyota and Honda were
telling their owners to you know basically abandon CART and go to the IRL because of the Indy 500
yeah okay interesting that that one race has so much power behind it to to basically destroy an
entire race series well you think about this and a lot of open wheel fans in America and maybe this
is worldwide they know about the Indy 500 if that's a famous race right definitely but they don't
always know that the series races in so many other places unless it comes to your town and
you're a race fan or it's in your streets you might not even know that there are other races
in the series itself that was always an opportunity and a contention point for the for the owners is
how do they make sure that they you know have successful promoters in these areas that can
help make sure that we're filling seats and making sure that these places can carry on with a business
model that works you know if you look at the pillars of racing you have to have team owners
that are well financed and you have promoters that are making money by having people in their
their racetrack or setting up in the streets it's very expensive it takes years to recoup the cost
of setting up a street race and then you have a sanctioning body that has to have title sponsors
and be able to sort of pull all this together on behalf of the owners and the promoters so
it's a complex model but you know ultimately it was a shame because you know CART fell into
bankruptcy in 2002 I think it was and it was all sold off a bankruptcy court and a guy named Kevin
Calcoven and some of his partners came in and bought it all and ultimately ended up buying the
team that I had my opportunity to own a team was a bridge between 2001 when pacwest racing group
shut down and 2003 when Calcoven's team cropped up and in 2002 I was looking for opportunities
to run my own team so I had all of the remnants of pacwest racing group in the shop I had the
employees we had to skinny things down to a livable level that I could finance and then
I ended up doing business with two IRL teams to keep my team alive in 2002 I put half of my guys
with Kelly Racing running Tony Rena and I put the other half at Panther Racing to run Dan Weldon
and so that's how I kept the doors and the lights on for a year while we looked for opportunities
and that was all under the name of Horizon Motorsports and then in 2003 Kevin Calcoven walked
through the door and he's like what do you want to do here and I said well I want to I want you
to lease my services under Horizon Motorsports to run a team for you and he said I don't want to do
that I want to buy everything and I want to employ you for a contracted period of time
and so that's what we did we sold off the assets and I ran the team for Kevin for for two years
okay when we need to go back one step I'm just struggling to join the dots here of how you sort
of go from from head mechanic to owning a team I can only imagine there's a massive financial
burden to own a car team there is can you kind of can you fill us in there on on what I'm missing
out so if I look at my time at pacwest racing group it was my longest stint at a team and so I
went there in 90 mid 94 actually and I was there all the way until the doors closed and
the team went out of business so during that period of time I started there as a chief mechanic
by 97 I was what they call a crew chief I oversaw the build of all of the cars in our shop and then
I stayed that way for 97 98 and 99 I became kind of what they called a team manager or general
manager and I had one guy above me named John Anderson he was a guy that everybody loved so
much he died of a heart attack but he was from Australia from Sydney he kind of took me under
his wing all those years and really pulled me along in in my career and the team owner also
really believed in me and in 2001 in the beginning of the year John Anderson decided that he didn't
want to stay there anymore he didn't like some of the things that were happening and he wanted to
go somewhere else so he left and the owner asked me to become president of the company right so
you're right on the top step at this point yeah so now I'm at the top step and a year later
the team goes out of business because there's no there's really no sponsorship to be found
you know we we're on basically you know you can have a billionaire that owns the team
you can operate but you're on borrowed time sure all right so how do you go about owning a team so
can you fill in the the gaps there I mean is this something that you stepped in and purchased
essentially an existing team where you set this up yourself no I I took over the remnants of
PacWest Racing Group that I had run I had been a part of for the last seven six seven years
whatever it was and essentially with PacWest going out of business there was a facility a race
there was a race shop there's we had 102 employees I guess you also knew everything like the back of
your hand because you've been there for so long yeah it was all there it was a matter of me setting
up a company putting my name on the door and taking a chance and that's a difficult thing to do if
the rich people the billionaires and the billionaire class can't find money from your rich friends how
am I going to find money from my friends my friends you know totally different level but
we tried you know and we we put it out there and that's why we ran those two IRL programs that
year because that cash flowed our team it essentially I had a lease payment on the facility and I had
the employees compensation and by leasing out the services and the equipment I was able to
cover that and kind of come out neutral while I was looking for opportunities you know I had
opportunities the series itself at CART was offering it had to become champ car they were
offering to help subsidize my team to make it go into the following year it must have been a huge
leap of faith for you when you've got a team that you've been involved with again you know rich
people running at lots of money around and they can't make it work it must be a huge leap of faith
to think you know what I can do a better job than than they did well I wasn't sure I could but I
also I felt a huge sense of loyalty to the people who had stayed with us through the rough times we
had a I said we had 102 employees in that shop we had two indie lights cars we had two indie cars or
cart cars I should call them rainards and we had marketing and we had hospitality made all of that
stuff so as the team started to deteriorate and you have to run race cars but you don't have to
have hospitality you can get that some other way you don't have to have a big marketing department
because they're not producing anyway right you can't even as hard as they're working the money is
not coming in so we would run it we ran it down to the bare bones and I think I got it down to about
60 60 plus people ultimately I helped transition some of our employees to new teams by working with
other teams to say hey I'm going to have to let some of these people go here's what they do and
here's how good they are and I was extremely proud that we were able to put some of our team members
over at Ganassi and Penske and and Dreddy and all of these different really great teams
and they're highly valued employees I thought I thought that that was the least I could do as we
were transitioning into whether or not we could find enough money to go race and you know we were
down to about 35 employees when we found Kevin Calcoven who came in the door and like I said he
didn't want to run under Horizon Motorsports he wanted to run his own effort and that's what
we decided to do is just go ahead and let him buy all the assets lease the building and employ us.
Can you talk a little bit about the economics of this sport and we've just talked about
PacWest going bankrupt so obviously it's not a guarantee for success but you know is it
I guess how would you put it like a rich guy's playground where he's interested in
going racing and it's just a net loss every year or between sponsorship and prize money
can you actually end up running a team that's cash flow positive?
I think you can run a team that's cash flow positive but the bridge is really difficult
to get there you have to have a healthy series number one so you don't feel bad about investing
in the future of your team you know you look at a lot of race teams they've become military
contractors in the US because race teams run pretty efficient programs and they can hit time
schedules and they're used to working at you know high level production and those are also
economic models that help the team stay in business too so now they have another way
another revenue model but you know the question is is it just a rich guy's game or can you actually
make money with it and I think there are teams out there who can cash flow and make it work
and you have to give those guys a lot of credit because it's extremely difficult to do that when
you're up against the competition of captains of industry who have a race team and they have a
lot of sponsors they can lean on and they have deep pockets that they can continue to fund
the performance that they they want from the team. I think what typically happens is you get a wealthy
guy that sees the opportunity to invest in a sports franchise and they say to themselves
hey that's a fun series that's I love racing and that would be a lot of fun to spend money and
I've got a massive income and I could use a deduction for and I can justify it and they
say to themselves after three or four years it's like this is taking a lot more of my time it's
more competitive it's harder to run than I thought my deduction is is going to dry up here pretty soon
with the IRS and so if it doesn't going to make money or break even I have to shut it down so
it's a way for them to say it's got to be it can't be a hobby anymore it's got to be a real business
so it's actually gonna it's got to make sense yeah so then that's what it becomes really difficult
because in carts situation you can imagine all of those things collided for PacWest at the same
time when it was really getting off its feet and becoming a very competitive organization in 97 98
and all of a sudden the series is falling apart because the IRL has kind of mixed it all up for
the world and tobacco money dries up like where are you going to get the kind of money you need to
run your team now as far as money you know you needed about a minimum of six million dollars
to run a single driver for a season wow and that was back in the mid 90s and a lot of times you
could pay the driver some out of that but they weren't making the driver wasn't making a million
dollars a year I mean that's that's probably paying the driver 250 or 300 thousand and giving
in prize money you needed all of that money to be able to fulfill your engine contract and your
your tire contract and all of those things and and then the other equal inequality that creeps
into racing is when you have engine companies that will sponsor certain teams but other teams
have to pay full boat for their engines yeah I guess that must make a huge difference to your
outgoings and that's one of the things that happened with PacWest is Toyota had come in and
they were giving engines to Patrick Racing and Newman Haas but they charged PacWest for their
engines and each engine contract was two and a half million dollars per year so it's five million
dollars in engines yeah that's brutal and our owner is like I'm giving you I'm giving you five
million dollars so you can help pay for the engines in my competition like I don't want to do this
anymore like nah and finally we we because Dixon we won at Nazareth with Dixon we negotiated a deal
with Toyota to provide his engines for that year which was very helpful I mean it's you know it's
two and a half million dollars right so get off the list but when I worked for it's a little tidbit
here but when I worked for Kevin Calcovins team we had an opportunity to get a Mexican driver
and Nextel Mexico sponsorship so I'm the top of the team we didn't have any marketing people at
our team it was called PK Racing back then 2003 I flew to Mexico City and sat down with the CEO of
Nextel Mexico and and walked away with a two million dollar sponsorship and you know that was
probably one of the biggest sponsorships of 2003 well I said I suspect that in 2024 2025 and onwards
the the numbers probably even have a few more zeros than than what you were dealing with they do
I'm telling you the team I think the number now to run a competitive program for a single driver
is eleven or twelve million dollars that actually still sounds relatively cheap compared to the
numbers you hear thrown around it in Formula One level where you know some of the top drivers
alone being paid thirty forty million dollars so yeah it's um it's a different world and I think
you know that's a great point too because I think that's why the IRL represent a very good place to
be for a sports franchise if if they get a little luck on their side and they choose a chassis in
2028 that is going to come in and replace the old one and and have a car that is exciting or they
open it up so there's a couple manufacturers or they make the cars really interesting in a way
I really think that they're the series that probably has the most to gain right now as
franchise value for their owners it's an exciting format they race all over the place they do all
kinds of different tracks like we did back in the cart days I really think that you know like you
said that's not a lot of money for kind of what it costs to run a sports franchise yeah absolutely
well so at what point did you decide you'd had enough and tapped out of this business
uh well I worked for Kevin and Calcoven there's Kevin Calcoven who owned the race team for the
two years for the 2003 and 2004 he was interesting he bought the series out of bankruptcy he bought
Causeworth he bought Pi the data logging company and he bought the Long Beach Grand Prix so he
he was a billionaire on a buying spree and so he can he was controlling all these different pillars
of series and he was paying for a lot of the drivers that were racing in the series as well
so he was trying to make it he was trying to continue on with this magical formula I worked
for him for another year in 2005 on some special projects we ran a a Mexican driver in Monterey
Mexico for a race and I did some other things for him but I really at that point my son Kevin was
a couple years old and my daughter was a year old and I I had been doing this a while and
it was a tough couple years I had gone through after the demise of Pacwest and working for you
know Kevin and his group and things were chaotic and I I needed to step away you know I was looking
for more family time my wife had a successful business at the time that she loved and the kids
were toddlers so I thought I'm just gonna I'm gonna go home and do my own thing you know yeah I guess
that life of following a race series all around the country or all around the world is not really
conducive to a good family time no it hurts families a lot I think it's racing is extremely
demanding sport that it requires all of your focus and all of your time if you're in any sort of a
position of power running a team or engineering a race car and it takes a lot of planning and
thinking you have to be sort of on all the time it's pretty hard on family life and I knew that
from the years that I had been running a team and dealing with employees that were having family
problems and that kind of stuff I just knew that I had to make a decision you know was was my career
worth the trade-off of a failed family yeah and I decided that there was really no decision to be
made you know I had done well enough I had reached sort of a level that I had never expected and it
you know the other thing that I had I was kind of doing because I'm this I love automotive things
I started buying up all of the Reynards that I could find and all of the Reynard parts so I became
sort of the go-to guy in the world for used Reynard parts in 1994 to 2002 so I had had my
shop at the house and I had relationships with all the team managers and when they were getting
rid of old cars and parts they would call me and I would come in and buy pretty much all of it and
I have a big shop at the house and I think I've had 42 of those Reynard chassis through our shop
here where they've been put back to their original liveries and sold to vintage guys and collectors
so is that kind of what life and work looked like post working for Kevin yeah it was completely
like that it was family time mixed in with just as much work as I wanted to do in my own shop
putting some of these cars back together that had been sort of pulled apart and cannibalized by teams
for their carryover parts I get to bring them back to life look at their race history give them a
paint job the graphics and find a vintage person who wanted them so it was a way for me to keep my
mind and my hands busy and not feeling like I was completely out of it sure yeah but on your terms
yeah that's kind of perfect if you can if you can do that yeah well it's funny because I've got a lot
of photos of Kevin in the shop when he was young and in Clara our daughter and just like sleeping
inside of a tub while I'm working on it you know my wife's got her business she's at work and I'm
watching the kids and I want to do some work so they're just they're napping inside of a tub
could be worse yeah so yeah so that's what led me down this road to this point you know and that's
a lot of years though you know you think I've been out of the series now for around 20 years yeah
that's a while let's fast forward to you know how we ended up getting to to meet you and and Kevin
which is of course world time attack with your Pontiac hammerhead I've obviously we've had this
story about the Pontiacs who want to go too too deep into it we've got the episode with Kevin which
we'll link to in the show notes but in terms of how that all came about I'm just sort of interested
as a father what you saw in Kevin and how you've kind of directed his his sort of growth and
upbringing and then of course this project car that the two of you have done so can you
give us your side of that story please. Yeah it's always a little risky as a parent right you want
not to lead your children down the same path that you had in life I mean obviously if you've had a
good path you want to recommend that path because it was very satisfying and my path in racing
was very satisfying I mean I lived in the greatest times of kart racing through the 90s and early
2000s and so what I saw during those times was you know great people working together and these
amazing people these engineers that I got to collaborate with and learn so much from and
you know I realized the world's not the same place as it was 20 years ago when it comes to the
way teams function and the way that it works but there's also when I think about racing as a career
for my son or some kind of automotive doing that is got to be better than the average day at work
for no matter how bad you might think it would be in racing you know the you still get to be around
incredibly creative people and build things with your hands and solve problems right I mean that's
really why Hammerhead exists because Kevin grew up as a competitive swimmer in high school and he
didn't have a lot of time but we did build a really really beautiful Resto Mod Nova together when he
was 14 and that was a typical sort of bolt-on a bunch of off-the-shelf components make a car really
nice and it's fit finish and all that stuff which was nice I mean it exposed him to that kind of a
build sequence and then as a senior he decided that he was going to attend the motor sports
engineering program at Purdue University it's a very specialized program it's a degree in
very focused on motor sports engineering so it's thermodynamics aerodynamics geometries all these
different things you get to learn from a professor who's involved in these teams and so when he made
that decision in high school I thought to myself like how can I make sure he's prepared how can he
be a good engineer a really sort of a thoughtful engineer how can he have some experience and
it was right at the tail end of COVID and you know when we looked at some of the other internships
that were available teams race teams don't really like to have internships unless they're like seniors
in college right that's the ones they're looking for that have training in the new technology that
they can plug in and get to work but a 17 or 18 year old kid is not what they're looking for they're
all too hyper focused on their jobs and they don't want the distraction so I discussed with my wife
opportunities to do something here and I said why don't we take four months in the shop I'm not
doing anything important we could build a car lots of fabricating lots of problem solving
lots of engineering type sort of thinking that could roll into it and at least open his eyes to
sort of processes of packaging and problem solving and utilization of some of the knowledge
that he's going to learn throughout his time at Purdue. I think what I see from that as well so
I did just interrupt is you know you go through, you could say this for just about any degree but
you go through a degree and it's obviously all theoretical, you come out the other end with
theory but not necessarily much if any in the way of practical skills. No I don't necessarily
know exactly what his degree entailed but I'd say that's probably a fair statement for the
majority of degrees but you've kind of filled in that practical side of his knowledge as well
and I think you know if you've got that great mix of the practical skill set and the theory
you're going to be a much more well-rounded engineer. That was my theory, you know I had
worked with a lot of engineers throughout the years that weren't car guys, they were just
engineers right so they knew the equations and they knew how to run the laptop and the excel
programs and they knew how to pull some some of those things together but what they lacked was
that ability to talk to a mechanic or talk to a fabricator about things and that was old school
stuff. That's how the series used to be in the 70s and 80s because before engineers ruled the day
it was guys who were builders and they learned the hard way on the way up and I thought to myself
we could build a car in four months. We set up this curriculum, we got it approved by
Noblesville High School, they have one of the biggest internship departments in the state of
Indiana for their seniors and we proposed the idea and they said yes and typically having an
internship with a family member was not something that they liked but they monitored the situation
and they came to the shop and in the end they said it's the best internship that they had ever
ever had and it progressed much more slowly than we had anticipated. I thought we could build
something much faster. Everything always takes longer and costs more than you think or you hope
at the outset, that's my experience anyway. Yeah and I think you know I'm very optimistic right,
I think things can be done faster and you know and I don't look at the downside to many things,
I look more to the upside and then I fix my problems along the way and I wanted
Kevin to be part of that process from the very beginning of you know what could it be without
being constrained by a racing rule book except for safety. How can we build something that is
just as kind of wild as we can build it and he did lead the charge a lot on a lot of the ideas
because of things he had been following along. He's an avid user of Instagram and he follows a
lot of car builders and he has a lot of grand ideas of course as young people do but we would
sit down and we make planning sessions and we would come up with ideas on how we were going to
do this and I know in the episode that you did with Kevin you talked a lot about CAD and you
know early on it was not much with a computer because Kevin didn't have those skills yet,
it was really cardboard and ideas and it transitioned into mostly using the computer and
for me learning an awful lot too about the benefits of some of those things that he was
bringing to the table. So he's actually teaching you and you're teaching him? Yes I mean in the
end he's like dad why would we do it your way when I can draw that we can have it printed I mean we
just we just purchased two 3d printers we've got a scanner we're we're moving into the future
in our little shop here you know the hammers and chisels are going to stay in the drawer and we're
going to be making stuff in a much more efficient way but it's really exciting for me too because
I got to see him grow so much you know he is in a group at school it's called Practicum on
Fridays they work on these miatas and Kevin is the go-to guy for welding and fabricating and
he just finished an air intake system that's all 3d printed carbon nylon that we had to
weld some aluminum for and you know he's a very good welder he has a really good design sense and
it all is because we took the time to you know let him sort of lead a lot of the ideas on this
build with hammerhead and even though I knew some of them were going to be wrong or difficult
we I wanted to go down that road because where you really learn is those mistakes and the
correction periods that you have inside of those and by no means is hammerhead even close to a
perfect car it has a lot of development that we can do but those are really fun areas now for him
as a student as he learns aerodynamics and he learns the stuff about CFD we have a great
relationship with Varys and Kevin is the liaison with Varys and they deal with the aerodynamics
stuff on the car and Kevin gets to learn how to read some of those documents and those reports and
he gets to talk with them you know in their language this is an opportunity for a young
person to be able to do things that most 21 or 22 year old kids don't have the opportunity to do
I mean Kevin's learning MOTEC he's not great at it yet but he's learning how to navigate the
MOTEC system pretty well. I think with all of the skill sets that he's built up over the course
of that project I can't imagine learning how to tune is going to be a massive challenge for him.
I'm sure he'll knock that one out of the park as well. I'm just interested with the fabrication
side of things because I could be completely wrong here I'm assuming your involvement with
CART there's not a lot of fabrication you're actually doing on the cars or am I wrong there?
Where I'm going with this is is this something you could teach Kevin or did he have to learn
fabrication skills independent of you? No you're right you know when you look back at a CART team
when you get a chassis that's developed in England and it's all in carbon fiber there's
really not much fabrication work that comes in there's little things like you know we used to
make our own wishbones at PacWest Racing Group so we had a big CNC shop and we had fabricators and
so instead of buying wishbones off the shelf we would buy them or if we wanted to optimize our car
for super speedways and make a narrow track car we could build narrow track suspension and these
kinds of things so that kind of fabricating does exist a lot of fabrication in those departments
at IndyCar teams is pit equipment support equipment that kind of stuff that gets built
so you can run the car efficiently but I was exposed to a lot of really good fabricators I mean
incredible fabricators and when we started down this road I knew you know I wasn't one of those
great fabricators but I knew that enough about it that I knew that we could learn together and I
could show him some of the tricks and some of the shortcuts to be able to figure things out
and so I learned a lot in the process myself I mean there's no question fabrication is one of
those things you just you have to do a lot of it to get really good at it you know it's like you
learn all these little shortcuts and you learn how certain metals behave and all of these things but
now obviously with the car it's a work of art, we saw it at World Time Attack, we've done a tech
feature on that with Kevin which is on our YouTube channel which again we'll link to if people want
to sort of find out a bit more, it wasn't maybe the dream outing for you guys at World Time Attack
with a failed transmission on the test day, what's the sort of plan for that car from here on in
and will we see it back at World Time Attack in the future?
Well that's a great question, number one I just want to thank Ian Baker and everybody at World
Time Attack Challenge, they really put together a really first-class event and we were proud to
be there it was a little bit of a push-up hell to get to the event for us because Kevin as a
full-time student in the car had been sort of sitting dormant since SEMA last year we just
really didn't have any sort of thing on this horizon to run it and when that cropped up we knew
we wanted to get a couple of things done before World Time Attack so we could try to compete down
there it's a very serious event so you know we were able to do a test before World Time Attack
Challenge we went to Salt Lake City and ran on the course there with Cole Paulson driving and
the car was showing just incredibly strong promise it you know it was fast Cole said it was amazing
the balance and he loved it so he said yeah we definitely take this to the dock we definitely
want to go down there and compete and so we did and we you know we knew that we were kind of behind
the ball a little bit we did two dino sessions at Croydon's in Sydney where we end up increasing
the size of the turbos and things and ultimately we had a boost control issue at World Time Attack
Challenge that we're in the process of doing some testing with the boost controllers and
they seem to work so there's going to be either a broken wire in the harness or the control that's
set up for it is not set up correctly so the waste gates were effectively just their pin shut
yeah and it's not going to help yeah it's going to make infinite amounts of boost I mean it's
like it made 24 psi when we broke and that's our tuner thinks that's somewhere around 2000
wheel horsepower and obviously the gearbox was never designed for that kind of torque power
and it's not what we were targeting you know we knew that we didn't need much power from the
boost system anyway and so we're looking at all of that that's what's next we picked up the car
from the dock and then I took it down to the thermal club down in southern California and I
worked on it for about a week down there I changed the gearbox put a fresh one in I have
several of those and I looked into the boost system and came away with some information and
what we needed to do to sort of fix that and we are going to return to thermal at the end of
December first part of January and we're going to run some laps there without sort of the pressure
of of a rented track yeah I don't know if if you've ever rented a racetrack but you know if
you're a privateer and you have a $1,000 an hour rental on a track and you feel like you have to
be running all the time because if you're sitting in the pit solving electrical problems or fixing
a gearbox it's you're burning money but with thermal club I have a really good friend down
there that has a shop and he's given us space and the ability to sort of run so we're going to work
for three or four or five days down there and I think Cole Paulson's going to come and join us
at some point and we're going to run some laps and we're going to get the boost under control
and we're going to work on shifting you know we could we can make the shifting a lot faster
and we're going to make sure we get a pretty good balance and and then I don't know you know
Kevin recently registered us for an ice race in Big Sky Montana I'm hoping that they were a little
bit late to register but I'm hoping that they'll say yes to us and we can go to Big Sky and do an
ice race an ice race can you explain I have not heard of an ice race yeah so they have these fat
ice races they have one I think in Aspen Colorado and one in Big Sky and so they set up a race course
in the ice and they have all these famous cars and race cars that are invited and they come to
the event and it's it's kind of a it's a car show I think of really famous cars that are
studded up and they run them on the ice. I'm going to guess that 1400 horsepower is not a great
combination on ice do you sort of detune the hell out of the car just to get through it?
Well it's it's a funny thing you know ice is extremely grippy when you stud the tires I had a
friend at race motorcycles on ice for a long time and he could lay the thing all the way down onto
the handlebar and ice studded tires wow and so you can easily break parts and gearboxes on ice
because when you stud them up they get a tremendous amount of grip but you know what I want to do
with Hammerhead is carry on this idea where Kevin can learn from the development and the operation
of Hammerhead and also take Hammerhead to special events across the country or the world you know
if we can sometime in the future get an invitation to Goodwood I'd love to go there I want to
certainly come back to World Time Attack Challenge I think. Unfinished business there.
Yeah I think we do I think the car is super fast it's obviously as an owner builder of the car and
seeing your car go past the pit lane at you know the kind of speeds that you're going to have at
World Time Attack Challenge it's it's very nerve-wracking it's either you see that happen and you
think oh my gosh you know like everything goes through your mind you know everything that you
welded and built you want to make sure the car is is safe for the driver and not not crashed but
yes we we want to come back there and we're going to have a little meeting with Cole and
and Ian Baker here in a few weeks Ian's coming over for PRI so we're going to get a chance to see
him. Okay well I certainly hope that we do get a chance to see it in action I did miss all of
the running that it did get at World Time Attack so yeah we'll have to make sure that next year
it's on. Look we're getting a little short on time here so I think we'll move towards wrapping
this thing up I imagine we could probably talk for another couple of hours but I do want to
respect your time as well and we've got the same three questions we ask all of our guests at the
end and the first of those is what's next in the future for you time to to retire completely
or are you still happy putting historic car cars back together and selling them to collectors?
Well my supply of cart cars is finally down to zero I sold the last one about a month ago
and I delivered it to a guy out in California. I have a 32 Ford Roadster that I started 16 years
ago and because of all of the things that our family has done over the years and now Hammerhead
other things got pushed into the back burner but if you can visualize Hammerhead's construction
in a 32 Ford Roadster with an Indy car an actual Indy car engine in it I have that in the shop
and I've been working on that recently and I'm trying to get that car across the finish line
and I have a couple of other projects but you know every time I turn around Hammerhead keeps
creeping back into the job list it's like the gift that keeps giving. Yeah and you know I want
that focus to be on Hammerhead now because this is the time in Kevin's life where you know a school
and what he's learning from Hammerhead and the you know the relationships that he's earned as a
result of his involvement in Hammerhead he spent a tremendous amount of time working on the car
and helping and doing all the things that he he does and our social media account is completely
up to him he does all of that and I think he's done a very nice job of that and you know it's
not just car building it's relationships it's part of the whole learning that we're doing we
have a lot of sponsors that we have great relationships with and and other car builders and
you know even you know people like you that have shown interest in what we've done. Yeah I'm sure
that with the direction you've taken with Kevin no matter what he decides to do or where he ends up
in the motorsport world you've set him up for the best chance of success and like you say it's not
just about physically working on the car it's also managing all those relationships and yeah he's
kind of getting a trial by fire if you like with all of that. Next question we've got here,
is there any advice you'd give to a younger version of yourself to help reach where you are
today in your career faster? It's been an interesting journey from what you've explained but
yeah any sort of anything comes to mind there? Well that's a great question because the value
of time sort of exposes the sort of the things that were wasted and things that could have been
different and certainly although I got a great opportunity laid out in front of me to have the
career that I had I wish I could have just maybe dumped in a little bit more of myself at times
when there was more to learn there was more time to be spent making things better. I mean you do
this in racing you have to make things dang near perfect to be able to be successful but in hindsight
you look back and say okay if we had only done that if we'd only done that and so if I if I could
instill into a younger version of myself or into a young person is you know they have to stay as
sort of curious as possible and learn as much as they can and work with people and keep the sort of
ego and the attitudes out of it as much as you can so you can form relationships and you can learn
and you know there's just so many avenues that a young person can go down now with technology
and all of the different positions that are out there so you know being curious will help you
find that road that you need to go down. Yeah I think that's great advice. The ego thing is
definitely a big part of this entire wider performance automotive industry but I think if
you can stay humble it will serve you very very well. The other point you've raised as part of
that though is just why I'm still so passionate about the industry is no matter what area of it
you're in, there's always something new to learn, it's never stagnant and it's never boring so that's
what's still, you know I still love coming to work, there's always going to be something new
and exciting that I'm going to learn about so that's great for me. It keeps the mind ticking
along and keeps you sort of enjoying what you're doing. Right our last question for today Russell,
if people want to follow you and see what you're up to how are they best to do so?
I think the best way to follow what I'm doing is I'm an old timer you know so I don't really
operate my own social media pages at all and so most of the things that I'm doing are wrapped
around hammerhead and horizon underscore motorsports underscore LLC on Instagram and you know we've
got some YouTube stuff out there too but it's really we haven't spent enough time creating
YouTube content. I mean certainly something that we should have along the way because
we had a lot of interesting content and tutorials that could have been valuable to the community but
ultimately you just have to pick and choose your battles when you're in the thick of building a car
under a schedule and it's quite an investment of an effort that goes into creating some good
YouTube content. I find it's a blessing and a curse with YouTube because anytime we want to
film content the job that you're doing that you're filming takes five or ten times longer than if
you are doing it without trying to film it but unfortunately sometimes it just has to be done
particularly for us it's a big part of our business model so I just have to take the hit and realise
that this job is going to take longer than it should and that's okay. Yeah hard to do that when
you're working to a timeline though for a race meeting on a race car that's a different story.
No doubt when we were building the car you know we Kevin he started putting it up on Instagram
just because he wanted to share with some of his friends who were interested and it became a
pretty good account. I think we have 127,000 followers and as a result we have a lot of
companies that came forward and wanted to be part of the build and you know companies like Garrett
and Vibrant and Radium come to mind that they were huge supporters from the very beginning and
they have kept us in their group the entire time and every time we could do that we made the car
a better car than we ever visualised and I think that's the value of relationships. I mean when
Kevin when he got to meet you I mean he was just like you know you're one of his heroes out there
in the whole automotive world teaching young people that there's a way to learn and you know
this is a thank you for what you do. I mean it's really it's a great resource.
I appreciate it. I don't think I've ever been called a hero before not maybe a term that was
sprung to mind but very flattering but yeah thank you very much. Alright Russell I appreciate your
time today it's been great to learn about your backstory and how that sort of moved into the
hammerhead build with your son Kevin. I really appreciate everything you've done and as I say
look forward to seeing the car actually in action next year.
Well thank you very much, I really appreciate your time too.
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About this episode
Russell Cameron shares his journey from a rural upbringing in South Dakota to working in the golden era of CART racing. He discusses his early passion for cars, self-taught mechanical skills, and how necessity shaped his expertise. The conversation covers his experience running a kart team, the rivalry between karting and IndyCar, and the technical nuances of racing. Russell also reveals how his background influenced his son Kevin's ambitious 1400hp Pontiac Trans Am project, blending historic kart components with modern power. The episode offers a deep dive into grassroots motorsport culture and the evolution of racing technology.
Original notes
The 1990s were arguably the ‘Golden Era’ of motorsport, particularly in the world of wings-and-slicks racing. High-revving engines, intense competition, and iconic car designs made it an unforgettable time. Championship Auto Racing Teams (CART) was no exception, and Russell Cameron from Horizon Motorsport was right in the thick of it.
👉 Use the code ‘PODCAST500’ to get $500 OFF HPA's VIP Package: https://hpcdmy.co/podvip
In this episode of Tuned In, Russell shares his journey from a small-town upbringing in South Dakota to building a successful career in the professional racing world. He discusses the evolution of his mechanical skills and his rapid transition into professional racing within the CART series.
Russell also dives into the legendary Cosworth engines of the ’90s, the role of qualifying engines, and the relentless push to squeeze out every last bit of performance. From reliability to driver preferences and the subtle setup details that can make or break a lap time, he shares insights from inside the garage.
We also explore his career across multiple teams, the infamous CART–IRL split, the influence of the Indy 500, and the factors that led to CART’s decline. Russell reflects on moving from team manager to team owner and the realities of running a racing team. He also talks about the incredible ‘Hammerhead’ project he built with his son, Cavan — a stunning machine incorporating a lot of ex-CART/IndyCar components.
Russell has lived an extraordinary life in professional motorsport, and now he’s on a new adventure building the Hammerhead with his son. Combined with his storytelling ability, it makes this episode a seriously compelling listen.
👉 Use the code ‘PODCAST500’ to get $500 OFF HPA's VIP Package: https://hpcdmy.co/podvip
Follow Russel here:
Instagram: horizon_motorsports_llc
Youtube: horizon_motorsports_llc
For more on Hammerhead & Cavan Cameron listen to episode 153: A High School Project Gone Wild: 1,450HP IndyCar x Firebird.
Also check out theHammerhead World time Attack Challenge 2025 Youtube interview on our channel @Hpa101
Timestamps:
0:00 Inside CART’s Golden Era of Racing
4:10 How did you find an interest in cars?
8:24 Were you involved in any motorsport growing up?
12:17 Could you get into IndyCar the same way today?
13:36 What’s the difference between IndyCar and F1?
17:35 Were you using qualifying engines? How were they different?
21:54 Where do you look for advantages in CART/IndyCar?
23:14 What is an Inerter?
25:54 Can you make much adjustment to the aero package in IndyCar?
28:20 Does tight rules reduce budgets?
31:35 How did your career in CART/IndyCar develop?
35:53 What is a CART/IndyCar team doing between weekends?
39:25 What changes are you making to the car between practice and qualifying?
44:06 Is the car setups always driver specific?
47:20 How did you decide on a part's lifespan?
50:06 How did you end up running your own team?
51:99 What is the difference between CART & IndyCar?
1:02:15 How did you go from head mechanic to owning a team?
1:06:50 Can an IndyCar team be cashflow positive?
1:12:25 At what point did you decide to step away?
1:16:20 How did your son Cavan get involved?
1:26:15 What's the plan for Hammerhead in the future?
1:31:52 Final 3 questions
Tuned In
High Performance Academy
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