When Preparation meets Teamwork and Opportunity

With aspirations of a racing career, and after many years of karting followed by a single season in the Skip Barber Southern Series Championship, I felt prepared to push my limits, leaping into professional showroom stock racing. On this #tbt (July 8, 2020), I’m celebrating 20 years to the day of experiencing what it was like to learn what happens when preparation meets teamwork and opportunity.

Armed with what I thought was a dependable and systematic approach for learning a new race track, I joined Team Spartanburg Racing (TSR) at the fabled Road America road sportscar course in Wisconsin. The team’s BMW Z3 Coupe was competitive in the Sport Touring class of the Motorola Cup, a series that featured four categories of racing and ST was the meat in the middle of the SGS/GS and Compact Touring sandwich. Perhaps most important of all, the Z3 was rear-wheel drive, offering continued driving style development that I thought would serve me well further down the career path.

Determined to uphold my end of the driving deal, especially after seeing the “never surrender” approach of the TSR crew and co-driver (my now dear friend), the late Jeff Trask, I started the two-hour race smack dab in the middle of the field. I’ll never forget taking the green flag; there were cars everywhere! It felt as though I could have let go of the steering wheel (being boxed in by so many cars) and still successfully navigate the entire 4-mile circuit - that’s how crazy close that opening lap was!

Handing off to Jeff mid-way through the race, the final race result came down to a last-lap battle with the top four cars in our class separated by just under five seconds. With only a few corners to go to the checkered flag, Jeff made his move to put us second on the podium, just 1.1 seconds behind the winning Lexus GS400 of Chuck Goldsborough and Rick Fairbanks!

Proud of what we managed to accomplish as a team, my pro race debut experience stands as a fond reminder of why we always need to be pushing the envelope of our comfort zone. After all, Road America was a track I had never seen before. The BMW Z3 was a car I never even sat in before my one practice session. And TSR was a team I had never met before that Friday morning. Despite this, we accomplished a great result when preparation and teamwork met opportunity. ??