Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / Fuel, Fiction, and the Fast Lane: The JK Kelly Story

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Fuel, Fiction, and the Fast Lane: The JK Kelly Story · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

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BreakFix podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from
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all over the autosphere, from wrench turners and racers to artists, authors,
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designers, and everything in between.
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Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrolheads that wonder How did they
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get that job or become that person?
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The road to success is paved by all of us because everyone has a story.
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While studying journalism at Penn state university, our guests
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traveled to auto races on the weekends where he took photos.
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He was able to sell to racing magazines.
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One of his editors suggested you're taking the pictures.
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So write the feature stories that go with them.
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After a stint with the Darryl Woltrip Gatorade number 88 NASCAR team, he
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spent the next 30 years traveling the world for VP racing fuels.
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But that passion for writing never left him.
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Following the advice of James Patterson, who said, give the readers what they want,
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six novels later from his debut title found in time to his accounts on the road
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with VP in fuel and around through his latest thriller, deadly driver, author,
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JK Kelly has striven to do just that.
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And we want to welcome JK to break, fix to share his story.
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And we're here on site with him at the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing in York
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Springs, not far from where he lives.
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So he can share his story with us.
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So welcome to the show, JK.
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Hi, Eric.
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How are you?
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So normally we would start a break, fix episode by asking people for their
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superhero origin story, the who, what, where, when, and how they came into the
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petrolhead world, what they're all about.
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But in your case, most of that is outlined in your book, Fueling Around.
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So let's rewind the clock a bit.
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Talk about your passion for cars.
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It's an interesting story for me, hopefully for other people too.
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I grew up in a funeral home.
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Not many people know that.
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And not many people can brag or boast or shabbily say that's what happened.
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But for me, I grew up in a funeral home, had all the strange occurrences that
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everybody would always ask me about.
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What's it like growing up there, et cetera, et cetera.
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But for me, the beauty of it was as I got older and I got into cars, I
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realized that what we had sitting in our garage were a couple big block
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Cadillac Hurses and Limousines.
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Once I got my license, my job was to keep the cars clean, fueled up, ready to go.
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A lot of it was during one of the gas crises back in the day, so I'd
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always be sitting in the gas line with everybody else, sitting there
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idling with a big ol Cadillac Hurse.
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Then all of a sudden I found myself doing a little drag
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racing, street racing at night.
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In the hearse?
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In the hearse, in the hearse.
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The beauty of it was, you know, as I got my license, I now could do a lot of good
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things where I would use the limousine, meet girls, pick up girls, they'd
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pull, they'd drive around, add a limo.
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So I'd use the limo for one thing and I'd have the hearse for racing.
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And it wasn't until a friend of the family, A local police
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officer caught me speeding.
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He said, you better tell your dad or I'm going to.
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So I did.
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My father said, look, two things.
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Take the name off the side of the hearse.
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We don't need that name.
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Lights or red lights and crashing and doing any of that other stuff.
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And also we don't need any of the bad negatives out from that.
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Just be safe.
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So I realized I can't be tolling around in those.
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A couple of us thought that getting a 1973, 74 Plymouth Fury, old
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state police car, Pennsylvania, they had the four forties.
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Dual exhaust, they were badass as far as we were concerned.
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Thought about buying one of those, and instead, talked my father into, Cato
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and Moisey's station wagon, right?
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Limited, he bought that.
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All of a sudden, the two barrel was gone.
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New intake for metal rock, four barrel carburetor, dual
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exhaust, et cetera, et cetera.
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That opportunity afforded me a lot of cool things to do with cars.
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But the beauty of this was, I got a side job working at Upper Darby High
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School after hours as a janitor.
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Met all these other guys, same mindset as I, and in time, they
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started taking me to races.
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Go to the NHRA race in Englishtown, New Jersey.
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I went to the NASCAR race at Pocono.
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And once I got to those, I fell for the sport.
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Just fell in love with it.
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My original passion for law enforcement got shot in the head
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because I found that my eyes would not pass any of the eye tests.
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We had friends at the FBI Academy.
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We had friends, police forces, etc., etc.
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To the funeral home, bottom line was, if your eyes can't pass the test,
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there's nothing we can do about it.
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I always was into storytelling.
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I loved telling stories.
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I shifted from a law enforcement major to journalism major.
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That's where you picked up getting, I wound up going to races, taking
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pictures as a hobby, and someone said, no, the photos are really good.
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Probably sell them.
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So I sent them a super stock magazine.
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They said, yeah, we'll buy two or three of those.
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And before you know it, they were giving me connections to go to the races.
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That's when the one editor said, you know how to write, so write
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the stories that go along with it.
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That just played out.
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I was going to the races, doing what I did.
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But then I realized that freelancing is not going to pay the bills.
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I fell in love with NASCAR, as I had said.
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My dream job would be to work in NASCAR.
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So I decided while I needed to get a full time job, I called
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Charlotte Motor Speedway.
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I said, are you hiring anybody in your PR, communications office?
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And they said, no.
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The key question that came up next was, You know, anybody that is,
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and they said, we think Dygart is give them a call called Dygart.
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Three days later, I was on a plane, flew down to Charlotte, had the interview.
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They were one of the first incursions of Yankees into the South Gardner
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brothers were from Connecticut.
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They actually started using Bill Grumpy Jenkins power to qualify at
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Daytona and do some other things.
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Another Yankee from where I run from in that area.
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And they brought another Yankee in as their PR guy and I was
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there for a year, learned a lot.
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Went to 34, 35 races.
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Had a great time.
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And right at the end of that first year, Waltrip and the
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Gardeners were having a fight.
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He wanted to change his contract or he wanted out.
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It got weird in the shop.
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Some of the guys were pro Darryl.
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Some of the guys were pro owner.
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That time, my wife decided I don't like Charlotte.
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I miss home.
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Both my parents encountered cancer and said, we need your help
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opportunity or a sense of duty caused me to move back home, work in the
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funeral business for a little while.
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After a time, my parents both passed away.
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We've got this fight of VP racing fields for you, brand new company
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blood a few years old, and they asked me to run the office.
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It's based in Chester quasi.
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Look that over and it's thirty years.
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So let's pause there a second.
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Let's go back a little bit, though.
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We ask our guests all the time.
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Did you come from a racing family?
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Obviously you didn't grew up in workshop.
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Funeral directors, whatnot.
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For many of us, when we were younger, we imprint on a certain car.
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I don't want to say that the purse was the car that got you excited to
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go to the track and go to racing.
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Was there some sort of sports car?
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Was there something out there that you like, Oh my God, that's the
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most beautiful car in the world.
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At the time I really fell for the Dodge Charger.
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I was very impressed with Richard Petty's career.
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The first time I saw that car, person not on TV, that dig little orange
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that they had in the car, Petty blue, his track record, his performance,
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the king of the sports, so to speak.
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And I was just totally impressed with that.
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So I went out and bought a Dodge Charger too.
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From there, which sent me to the racing fuel end of things.
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Well, Englishtown.
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I had never seen a nitro funny car before.
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Jungle Jim Lieberman, who was from Pennsylvania, very close
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to where I grew up as well.
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He was there, Bruce Larson was there, all the local Pennsylvania heroes were there.
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All the touring guys were there.
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Once they let a nitro car, I was done.
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Didn't matter to me what car it was, just the nitro just got me going.
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Oval track racing, the sound, the smell, the excitement.
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It was, it was a three ring circus and I fell for it.
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They often say that you only need to see something about seven times before
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it really sticks in your memory.
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So back then, Richard Petty, sponsored by STP for almost forever, another
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fuel company, I think that was subliminal messaging, or maybe some
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sort of serendipity carrying you to VP.
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No, it's interesting you say that though, because the VP logo, if you really look
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at it, if you take the outcroppings of the V and the P, cut them out, it
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looks like an oval shaped STP logo, the red, white, and blue of the logo.
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I don't think at the time, I don't know what was imprinted where, but
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after I left VP, I've still worked with them as a consultant for many years.
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And two years ago, they asked me to write 50 year history of the company.
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Company turns 50 in 2025.
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Interviewing the founder, who I knew very, very well for years, we talked
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about Where the logo came from, where the name came from, et cetera, et cetera.
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So I don't know about STP being a credit in my head, but I do remember in
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elementary school, somebody said, if you send STP, self addressed stamped envelope,
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they will mail you two STP decals.
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So everybody in the school did that.
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At the time Andy Granatelli was sponsoring the IndyCars.
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Everybody was watching wide world sports and the Indy 500.
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And I could tell you that our school was blasted with STP logos.
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They were everywhere.
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30, 40 years later, here I am making sure that the DP logo, similar logo
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is plastered everywhere in the world.
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We wanted to put it in front of anybody and everybody.
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Get it on as many race cars, get the fuel in as many cars, make the company famous.
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That's what we did.
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Let's talk about your early days at VP.
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Now there's many people out there that are familiar with the VP logo.
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We're talking about logos and to your point, it's everywhere.
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I mean, I personally have 12 VP cans in my own garage, different
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colors and styles, whatnot.
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Let's start from the basics, kind of twofold.
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A, what does VP stand for?
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But B.
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You went from journalist to now being in fuel industry.
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What was that transition like?
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And what did you do when you first got there?
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The question about what the VP logo stands for, what the name stands for.
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It came from volatile products.
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That was what Burns came up with many, many years ago,
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back in 1975 in San Antonio.
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They actually named volatile products here on the very first design.
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Then after that.
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Company name was actually VP hydrocarbons.
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That was on the logo as well.
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And in time we removed that again.
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Here we are.
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As far as the transition from journalism to racing fuel, pretty drastic jump.
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That's really a tough one.
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I've always had an investigative mindset and that's where the wanting
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to go into law enforcement came from.
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I didn't want to be a beat cop and no disrespect to those guys, but I wanted
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to go after white collar criminals.
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That was more of my interest.
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When I found out I couldn't be in law enforcement.
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On that side of it, journalism gave me the opportunity to become
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an investigative journalist.
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That's where my mind went.
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I was so excited and so thrilled to be around racing.
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I really did put that off to the side.
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So once I got an opportunity to not so much leave the investigative journalism
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behind, because I did enjoy doing some stories, once I got to be in the
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circus, to be a part of it and not just sit in the grandstands, but to be.
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delivering fuel and talking to Jungle Jim Lieberman or John Force or going
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out to Kruppy Jenkins shop in Malvern, Pennsylvania, shitting the brakes with
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him for a little while and sitting there while I did some dino pulls.
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That was cool.
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That was the coolest thing you could do.
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And at the time, what I found also was trying to find people
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to come and work with us.
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It was so easy.
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If you told somebody who might have been a truck driver or a secretary or a warehouse
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worker, you get the opportunity to go to races on weekends, you get an opportunity
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to meet all these different famous people.
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They just gravitated to it.
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At any given time at the VP Warehouse, whether it was in Chester or in the
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new facility we built in Newark, Delaware, you could have a pro circuit
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rig coming in to pick up fuel before they were heading to Southwick.
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You can have a road racing team coming in that was headed for testing
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down at Summit Point or Daytona or wherever they might be going.
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It was just a cool environment to be in.
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So you wrote Fuelin Around before you left, right?
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I wrote Fuelin Around after I retired.
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There was an ownership change.
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I just saw that as an opportunity to, it's like I'd been a Philadelphia
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Eagle all my life, and the transition to what, to be a Dallas Cowboy
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was not necessarily in my mindset, it's not in my blood, so to speak.
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My daughter had just gotten pregnant with her first child, she had her
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hands full in need of my help.
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My wife had had some health problems, and it really curtailed
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some of the things we were doing.
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And so all the stars aligned for me the same way they did that day.
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I called Charlotte motor speedway decades before and
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said, no, anybody that's hiring.
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I think fate just said, it's time for you to do something different.
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So I was still able to maintain my relationship with VP as a consultant.
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It gave me the full time opportunity to work with my daughter.
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Help my wife as well.
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And then everybody says, well, you're retired.
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What are you going to do?
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Play golf.
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I have no time for that stuff at all.
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So I just said, you know what?
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I want to get back to writing for, you know, six months later, my first
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novel was cracked out, found in time.
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And then everybody had said.
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You know, such an interesting life, had a great time.
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We want to know more about it.
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So I thought it was a perfect opportunity to write a book about what I'd done.
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Was there some events or something that happened at VP that inspire you to
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write Fueling Around or what is Fueling Around really based on somebody's trying
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to figure it out for the first time and wants to pick it up and read it?
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In one sense, I had told people that are interested in the business side of things.
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It shows people how we took a very, very small company, a company
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that only had about eight or nine employees when I started there.
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So where it is today, where it's a global entity, there's some business
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lessons in there on how to approach things, how to attack people, how to
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do a slot analysis of the competition.
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You have to be self aware.
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If you're going to go to war with another company, you need to know where your
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strengths and weaknesses are, where your vulnerabilities are to a degree.
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It's like playing chess.
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If this company is going to make this, take this series away.
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Or they're going to entice an organization, change the fuel
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regulations, so the VP products aren't legal anymore, which happened.
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You got to understand how to deal with those bombs that
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go off, how to work around.
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In the book Feeling Around, I can tell you a quick story that's in the book.
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Hell, everybody knows the off name.
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If you grew up watching the Formula One races, they're a French based company.
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They have since changed the name to Total.
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But they decided they wanted to get involved with motocross in America.
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BP was fueling everybody.
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We were winning all the championships at the time.
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We were the go to fuel for supercross motocross.
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They came over to the AMA and said, I'd like to sponsor.
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One of the series.
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The only thing we'd like to do in return for that is we'd like you to
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adjust a specific gravity regulations.
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Can't remember the numbers for sure, but at the time I think RC 12, which
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is the most popular fuel on the planet, particularly in two stroke motor
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cross racing, I think the gravity was about 716 corrected at 60 degrees.
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They talked the AMA into jacking it up to 718.
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Which would accommodate one of their products, which happened
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to be auctioned at the time.
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Ours wasn't.
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And AMA took that deal.
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We said, alright.
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Hey chemist, what do you got to do to jack the specific gravity up?
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716 to 718.
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A little tweak.
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A week later, our fuels are still legal.
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And we kept winning.
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Then when they brought the auctioned product, as I said, they turned around
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and spent six months developing a fuel.
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In a week's time, we had something better.
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They'd go back to Solace with the chemists.
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We need this.
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We need something better.
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They'd bring a new fuel to pro circuit and all these other teams,
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we'd see what they had done.
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All right, let's go.
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We had asked the French to help us get away from the British back in 1775, 76.
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And here we are, the son of a guns of France, it's an incursion
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of our realm, so to speak.
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So we turned around and went head to head with them.
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We beat them down and sent them home with their tails between their legs.
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And years later, I met the gentleman who was with Health at the time,
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who was running that organization.
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And he said, what amazed me about your company was it was
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so proactive and reactive.
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And I've been to the lab there where they have all these chemists.
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They had more chemists than we had dock workers.
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And they said, you guys would turn around and make something better.
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One or two of you guys would make something better in a week's time than
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we had been working on for months.
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So I related some of those stories about how to overcome all obstacles.
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Now, some you can't, sometimes you can't just beat the money,
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you can't do some of it.
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But it's wrapped in a work of fiction though, right?
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It's not just autobiography or autobiography.
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Fueling Around is an autobiography.
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There's not really any fiction in it at all.
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It went over very well, it was a popular read, and a lot of people
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have asked me to write a sequel.
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And because I'm still doing what I'm doing, I've started something called
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Still Fueling Around, but I don't think that would come out for some time because
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I'm so busy writing the other novels.
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Once you write one novel and you get a good response to it,
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people say, well, it's a sequel, I'm going to, it's a sequel.
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Thrillers appeal to a much broader audience.
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A motor sports book appeals to a certain smaller group where you
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might enjoy telling your story.
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So I guess for most of us, we don't realize how competitive
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the fuel industry is.
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There's many other Pennsylvania based fuel companies as well.
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BP's not the only one.
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How did that play out?
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I mean, obviously you kind of ousted the French, but you
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still had Sunoco to deal with.
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You still have other people.
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VP is actually based in San Antonio.
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That's where Steve Barton's born and raised, that's where HQ is.
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We opened, as I said, the plant in Chester, Pennsylvania.
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Right up the road, or actually a little bit south of us in
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Markershut, was the Sunogo Refinery.
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It was so funny that we were so close.
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We were enemy combatants, we were right there.
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I actually would run into some of the Sunogo higher
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ups at the local Home Depots.
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We'd bump into each other while picking up lumber, plywood, or whatever
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we're doing for home improvements.
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We always had a friendly rivalry.
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If you go back into the 70s and early 80s, when things were a little bit different,
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the people that ran the Sunoco Race Fuel Division had told some of their
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distributors, you're not even to talk to.
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Don't fraternize, don't visit with them, don't talk to them.
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As things have changed, we hang out, we can have a beer together
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at a bar, during a trade show, or during a race, and have a good time.
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It's a rivalry, but we're still friends.
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Let's switch gears a little bit.
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Let's talk more about what it's like to write a book prior to journalism.
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Your background is steeped writing.
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Many people will say, like you have said, I, I would love to write a book,
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but it all becomes very, very real when you sit down at the screen and start
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your journey of 85, 000 words, right?
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It's very different than writing a blog post or a quick article for
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a magazine or something like that.
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So how do you make that transition?
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Stepping away from fueling around, which is more nonfiction based.
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How did you develop that wanting to write in thriller genre aspect of it?
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Well, thrillers always intrigued me, whether it's movies,
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television shows, books.
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A thrill is a thrill.
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It always intrigued me.
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I have a very vivid imagination.
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That genre appealed to me.
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The first book I wrote was called Found in Time.
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It involved a select group of marine raiders going back
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in time to do some missions.
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Because I'm a history buff, the idea was, what would happen if you could
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send them back to do certain things?
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Maybe you sent them back to be witnesses to history.
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With the idea or the understanding, they could not change it.
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If you know any Marines, if you put them in a situation where they see something
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bad going down, they really struggle not to help, not to get involved.
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Of course, that's what happens.
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I set the guys back.
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They saw something happening, they can't just stand by, they get involved,
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of course, all hell breaks loose.
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Yeah, yeah, so the story, James Patterson, who I took his master class and I met
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him and he gave me some great advice.
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He was always big on, you must do outlines, and I've never outlined any.
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I just turned around and I'd start telling the story.
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I'm, uh, they call him a pantser.
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That's I, I ride by the seat of my pants.
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I'll write a chapter.
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I kind of know where it's going, but as the book evolves, if you might've
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had an outline, you might've wanted to go this direction, but sometimes
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it just takes a natural organic feel where now it's going over here.
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That's where I go.
18:59
I just follow wherever way it takes.
19:01
Dream of consciousness, I believe they call it.
19:03
Yeah, very much so.
19:03
Yeah.
19:04
So if you're writing at two o'clock in the morning when you sat down at 10
19:07
o'clock, think I'll put a half hour in.
19:09
Now it's two o'clock.
19:10
Your wife's looking at you like, what are you doing?
19:13
A laptop awake.
19:14
It is what it is.
19:15
Writers just write when they can.
19:16
It's something we do.
19:17
It's in our blood.
19:18
You're a writer yourself.
19:19
You know what it's all about.
19:20
I stare at that cursor blinking sometimes.
19:23
Where am I going from here?
19:25
But you know, it's funny.
19:25
A lot of people have said to me, I'd love to write a book.
19:28
I've got this story I want to tell.
19:30
That's great.
19:31
Sometimes just writing something, whether it's a paragraph, or an
19:34
essay, or a short story, or a novel, can be very freeing for someone.
19:39
You can channel a lot of things, download a lot of things that maybe you've been
19:42
carrying around in your backpack for a while, even if it's in the subconscious.
19:47
If you really want to become a writer, if you want to become a commercial writer
19:50
and sell books and make money selling books, what you have to understand
19:54
is who's going to want to read this?
19:56
Who's going to want this story?
19:57
Has this story already been told?
19:59
If you're going to go out and talk about some secret agent that's
20:01
going to go do this or a marine who's going to go do that, stories
20:05
have been told a million times.
20:06
Guys like Jack Carr, James Bond.
20:08
Whole nother story.
20:09
I've tried to tell stories that had not necessarily been told.
20:12
I was interested in the time travel thing, so I did that, did a
20:15
sequel to it called The Lost Pulse.
20:17
They both did very well.
20:19
Then I started into something else that involved an FBI agent who was
20:22
disgraced, and get his mojo back.
20:25
But then came Deadly Driver.
20:27
Which we're going to get into here in a little bit.
20:28
You've created this whole world.
20:30
And I think that's one of the hardest things to do, especially when you're
20:33
putting together a disjointed series, you have some sequels in there
20:36
and sequels that you're working on, but how did you sit down and
20:38
kind of flush out all the persona?
20:41
Do they come from your personal experiences or any of the characters based
20:45
on people, you know, or based on yourself, let's take Bryce winters as an example,
20:48
the main character in deadly driver, which we're going to expand upon a little
20:51
bit more, or even, uh, Matt Christopher.
20:54
Those two main characters in two of your books, where did that come from?
20:57
Where did those ideas come from?
20:58
How do you flush out their voice and the way they think and things like that?
21:02
Well, a being a history buff that allows me to have studied people and study
21:06
their, their stories, their biographies.
21:08
There are certain elements of certain people that interest me and I just heck
21:12
and choose what seems to make sense to me.
21:14
For instance, Bryce winner's character in deadly driver.
21:17
He is an American kid who grew up in Vermont.
21:19
He was playing with rally cars in the woods of Vermont.
21:22
Something happens in the book.
21:24
He decides it's time to go to track racing.
21:26
He goes there.
21:26
Something happens there.
21:28
It was onto something else.
21:29
But through that, I had always been an admirer of Mario Andretti.
21:32
I thought he was a spectacular racer.
21:34
He's done so many great things.
21:36
He's another Pennsylvania boy, transplanted from Italy, of course,
21:40
having won Daytona Indy and then Formula One World Championship.
21:44
In addition, all the other things that he did, I thought, that's cool.
21:48
There's not many guys that boast about that, about doing that.
21:52
And so I came up with a character who would be this homegrown kid, would
21:56
work his way up through motor sports and pursue his idol, so to speak.
22:00
Runs into some folks that are putting him in the right cars, the right opportunity.
22:04
He goes to the top.
22:05
And, you know, there's a lot of similarities between Bryce's origin
22:08
story and Mario Andretti's, especially with us here at the Eastern Museum
22:12
of Motor Racing, you see a lot of displays of Mario Andretti here,
22:15
where he got his start in dirt track racing, sprint cars and whatnot.
22:18
So it's kind of funny.
22:20
Bryce started in rallying backwoods of Vermont and similar
22:23
to Mario Andretti in that respect.
22:24
So I think you've done a good job of encapsulating that, but.
22:27
In some ways, I think the bigger challenge is in the auxiliary
22:30
characters, the supporting cast, his father, his uncle, all these other
22:34
people that he's interacting with and how you paint those pictures.
22:37
And, and in talking to you offline, a lot of scenarios in the books
22:41
actually come from true stories.
22:42
And we'll dive into that a little bit more as we talk more about the book.
22:45
So I also want to ask, before we make that transition, outside of Patterson, who are
22:50
some of the other authors that you admire that influenced you to develop your style?
22:55
Going back a few years, some of my favorite writers have been Tom Clancy.
22:59
But someone who really got me turned on to books was Dan Brown.
23:02
From the time he wrote The Da Vinci Code, he wrote about
23:05
four or five books after that.
23:06
I read every single one of them and I read fast.
23:08
I just fell in love with the way he wrote, the way he did his characters,
23:12
the way he developed his stories.
23:13
Just went for the ride.
23:15
I started to read a lot of James Patterson.
23:17
There was such a volume of books.
23:19
There was too many to read of Patterson's.
23:20
He's got a bazillion out there.
23:22
Once I got the idea in my mind that I wanted to write, I encountered
23:25
some editors that would do some work.
23:28
I'd set up some chapters that'd show me where I had lost my mind, where I had
23:32
wandered off the reservation, so to speak.
23:34
And they would show me how to come back in.
23:36
Ryan Stack is one of them.
23:37
He just came out with a book called Fields of Fire, which is getting great reviews.
23:41
Ryan's a great editor.
23:42
Good friend.
23:43
He taught me quite a way of developing my writing style.
23:45
I was always a huge fan of Michael Cray.
23:47
I gravitate towards his work and I was very fortunate to meet him
23:50
the year before he passed away.
23:52
And I've always kind of held other authors of, you know, that technical science
23:56
fiction sort of world against his work.
23:59
For me, that's always kind of the gold standard.
24:01
I mean, you get the Dean Coombses and other people, you
24:03
know, in that similar genre.
24:04
But for me, that's, what's always influenced my writing
24:06
is how do I a, the technical.
24:09
To the lay person.
24:10
And that's always, and I even have to do that in my day job.
24:14
So I guess we all pull our inspiration from different places.
24:17
And that was a challenge that I faced when I wrote deadly driver.
24:19
Everything I've ever done in motor sports was always trying to entice
24:23
other people who don't know anything about racing to come, try it, come
24:26
check it out, come to the races.
24:28
I had experienced carding for instance.
24:30
All my friends had drag cars, they spent a fortune on their drag cars,
24:33
a fortune on their motors, and a trailer, and at the end of the day,
24:36
I would bust on them, Okay, you did all this, and you spent a total of 2
24:40
minutes and 12 seconds in the race.
24:41
I spent 10 percent of what you spent, I spent all afternoon in
24:44
the car, having a great time.
24:46
Quad wheel karting, having a ball with two stroke motors,
24:49
on ovals, that was fantastic.
24:52
The one thing I can tell you about different riding styles, if you enjoy
24:57
fast paced action, that's the way I rate.
24:59
There are a lot of authors that have to give you so much, a ton of exposition.
25:03
They tell you the color of the blinds, the color of the tile on
25:05
the floor, what color my shirt is.
25:07
So I can't read Tolkien.
25:08
The first whole chapter is about the guy getting out of bed.
25:11
Really?
25:12
Yeah, to a degree.
25:13
I write as if I'm Talonel Joe.
25:15
If I say a monkey walks into a bar.
25:17
I don't waste time telling you what color the bar is, what color the chandelier
25:20
is, or color of the beer bottles.
25:22
I just go for it.
25:23
I'm also regarded as somebody who likes to introduce a lot of multiple threads
25:27
into the book, and I wind up luckily being able to put them all together
25:30
and then have a fitting conclusion.
25:32
Let's talk about more specifically Deadly Driver.
25:35
So I want to read a kind of synopsis here to bring our audience up to speed
25:39
on what the book is really about.
25:41
Jetting off to Monte Carlo, Speeding through the tight turns of a mountain
25:45
road en route to an evening at the casino.
25:48
What could be more exhilarating?
25:50
After racing in a Grand Prix, Bryce Winters boards a luxury yacht to bask in
25:54
the limelight and mingle with celebrities, only to find a gun to his head.
26:00
From the rolling hills of Vermont to some of the world's most powerful
26:03
cities, Winters is thrust into improbable adventure, riveting
26:07
intrigue, and elusive romance.
26:09
The question remains, can he navigate around the dead ends in a maze of
26:14
CIA manipulation and entrapment?
26:16
Or will he fall prey to the sinister forces of underworld intelligence?
26:21
So I've personally read Deadly Driver.
26:24
To me, it's an arrive and drive, jump in, strap down and go sort of read.
26:28
To your point, it's very fast paced.
26:29
You are thrown directly into the action on page one.
26:33
I feel that the book is lots of fun.
26:35
It's a great introduction to the motorsports world, as you said, especially
26:39
Formula One, especially in today's day and age of people watching, you know,
26:42
Netflix's Drive to Survive and being more interested in the motorsport discipline
26:47
of open wheels, specifically Formula One.
26:49
Why Formula One?
26:50
Are you a fan?
26:51
I'm a big fan of Formula 1.
26:53
I think it's the ultimate bit in motorsports.
26:55
And because I'm a travel bug and because I've traveled the world and attended
26:59
so many different events all around the world and enjoyed the cultures and the
27:02
cities and the people and everything, if I was going to write a book about
27:05
racing, I want to have a global audience.
27:07
I want to appeal to them.
27:09
Obviously, if you want to sell books, you want to sell them all around the world.
27:11
You still want to write something about NASCAR or IndyCar.
27:14
You want to write something that someone in Buenos Aires will want to read.
27:17
Somebody who goes to Or who goes to Hockenheim, Gerber, Silverstone, I want
27:23
them to pick it up and relate to it.
27:24
So let's talk about Bryce a little bit.
27:26
We kind of mentioned him a couple times earlier.
27:28
People might be thinking, how plausible is a Formula One driver and super spy combo?
27:34
Does this imply something that has occurred in the past?
27:37
Am I implicating something maybe we shouldn't be talking about?
27:40
The concept came to me and I just started writing.
27:42
It wasn't until after I finished the book that I ran into some folks in Los Angeles.
27:46
Who claimed that there were a few drivers way back in the day who might have been
27:50
doing a few things overtly for their governments, whether it was for the United
27:54
States government, British government, the German government, for that matter.
27:58
I think it's very plausible.
27:59
Price operates in a world that's super elite.
28:02
There's not that many F1 drivers on the planet.
28:04
He gets to go to all these fancy galas.
28:07
Meet all these fancy people, go places where a lot of people can't go, he
28:10
hobnobs to everybody, he's partying on yachts, private jets, et cetera.
28:14
Something happens in the book that puts him in a vulnerable position.
28:17
The CIA catches him at it and they force him to work for them.
28:21
It's pretty simple.
28:23
You're going to do this or we're going to make this known.
28:24
You're going to be not in a world of trouble just with the
28:27
United States, you'll be in trouble in these other countries.
28:30
And so they force him to work for them.
28:32
He doesn't mind doing some of the jobs that they assign him.
28:36
Because he believes he's doing the right thing for his country.
28:38
He doesn't like having a gun put in his head.
28:40
That's what he really struggles with.
28:42
So his dilemma is, trying to win a second Formula One championship,
28:46
he wants to do better than Mario.
28:48
First his goal was, be as good as Mario and then rise to the
28:50
occasion, go another step.
28:52
So he wants to do that, he wants to do the job that the government's asked him to do,
28:56
but he also wants to break free of that.
28:58
He'll go to some extreme ends to try and break free, but
29:01
not he ever accomplishes that.
29:02
Reader's got to find out for themselves.
29:04
And then to add the other little element to this, he suffered
29:07
a tremendous heartbreak in his younger years in Vermont.
29:10
He's never found love again.
29:11
He's never pursued her.
29:12
And so he finally runs into a woman on a long haul flight, is totally taken by her.
29:17
He decides to pursue her.
29:19
When she realizes what she's gotten herself into, I'm not
29:22
going to elaborate on that.
29:23
No spoilers here.
29:24
She cuts loose, and his job is to try and win her back.
29:28
And it gets very complicated.
29:29
So I really like the fact that Bryce is a simple guy.
29:33
His upbringing is very relatable to most of the people that are problem with this.
29:37
It's like you said, grew up in Vermont, backwoods, running cars,
29:40
having fun, started in the lower leagues and worked his way up.
29:43
It's very similar to the stories of Andy Pilgrim and Andy Lee and other folks
29:47
that we've interviewed on the show.
29:48
Obviously the bigger overture is that Mario Andretti is one of his heroes
29:52
or that he's going to be, As good as, if not better than Mario, right?
29:56
A triple crown winner, all those kinds of things.
29:58
So I wonder, is Mario Bryce's idol or is he more complex than that?
30:04
I feel that there's a lot of you in him as well.
30:07
So how much of that comes through?
30:08
Like the more in depth part of Bryce's personality.
30:11
How was he formed?
30:12
What did you model him?
30:14
Part of it probably evolves from the fact that I wanted to be in law enforcement.
30:17
He grew up in an environment raised by a cop.
30:20
Adam Marie with those two influences in his household.
30:23
And imagine what that by product is.
30:25
Just like you have young people that are growing up in the Midwest.
30:27
They're homegrown.
30:29
They have a strong work ethic.
30:30
They believe in America.
30:32
They're very patriotic.
30:33
So that's what you got when you meet Chris layers.
30:35
As I wrote the book and put it out for reviews, there was a French journalist
30:39
that came back to me and said, can't really relate to him because rice.
30:42
He's not like formula one drivers.
30:44
I said, well, he isn't.
30:45
He's an American kid, grown up in rural Vermont.
30:48
He didn't grow up in the streets of Monte Carlo.
30:50
Thousand dollar watch on his wrist.
30:52
Going to exclusive schools.
30:54
Born into a family of fortune and fame.
30:56
He's worked for everything he's gotten.
30:57
And so it's a different culture lately.
31:00
He's not like the typical Formula driver, and I think that's what makes him special.
31:04
So he's got a car tucked away in Vermont.
31:06
He lives in Utah.
31:07
But when he does go back to Vermont, he picks up his black Subaru WRX.
31:12
But nowhere else in the rest of the book does it ever mention what he's
31:15
got tucked away in his garage in Utah.
31:18
So what is in Bryce's, let's call it, and who car drive?
31:23
Three or four car.
31:24
I'm still working on that.
31:25
But anyway, the Subaru WRX, so you know, comes to the
31:28
fact that I love rally racing.
31:30
And I know a lot of the guys at Vermont Sports Car.
31:32
And so in the story, Bryce befriends them.
31:36
They have a working relationship with him.
31:37
He started out with Team O'Neill, New Hampshire.
31:40
That's where some of the other history comes from.
31:43
But when you do get to his home in Park City, up in the hills, after you go inside
31:46
his garage, he's got his Uncle Pete's Toyota pickup, which is an old standby.
31:52
He has a Mercedes AMG GT Coupe that they've sent him, because he's
31:57
involved with Mercedes and racing.
31:59
That's a red one, by the way.
32:00
It's a beautiful vehicle.
32:01
He also has a Chevy Tahoe Z71 that he used to just cruise around.
32:05
He's an American guy, so he's got mostly American cars.
32:08
The foreign stuff that's there was, was sent to him by Germany, by the Mercedes.
32:12
He's got to have a bike in there too, right?
32:14
Well yeah, that's not American, that was not a Hurley, it's a Ducati.
32:17
Red to match the Mercedes, right?
32:18
Yeah, yeah, well that, yeah, that's the funny thing too.
32:21
If people were to take the time to study the cover of Deadly Driver, I had
32:24
mentioned to you offline that there's something about the cover that nobody's
32:27
picked up on that'll come to play in the sequel that I'm halfway through right now.
32:31
And I'm just gonna leave it at that.
32:32
I just mentioned Ducati, and I'm gonna mention the book cover for Deadly Driver,
32:36
so you can study it and see what I planted there that nobody's seen yet.
32:40
That's the funny part about Deadly Driver.
32:42
It's a book where there are a ton of twists and turns, which keeps the reader
32:46
waiting for, pun intended, the next apex.
32:49
And I noticed as I was reading it, there's a ton of nods to VP Fuels.
32:53
Obviously, it's in your background, you were there for 30 years.
32:56
Some are obvious and some not so much.
32:58
Why don't we stop and talk about the PRI scene?
33:01
Some of the nods you made specifically in that.
33:03
It felt like a homecoming and it almost felt like you were Telling people, but
33:08
not telling people, Hey, thank you.
33:10
Thank you.
33:10
Thank you.
33:11
And kind of name dropping and going there.
33:12
So what was that all about?
33:13
Why was that kind of in the middle of the book?
33:15
Oh God, that's very complicated.
33:17
That's very, very complicated.
33:19
After I retired from VP, the SEMA show, the PRI show, the auto sports show
33:23
in Birmingham, some of the other big shows around the country had always
33:26
been something I had attended, always works with the VP uniform, et cetera.
33:30
I wanted to send Bryce because he's American.
33:32
Once the season's over, he's not spending his time on the slopes in Switzerland.
33:36
He's not in Belize.
33:37
He's back home in Park City or in Vermont visiting his family.
33:41
So when he goes to the PRI show, it gives him an opportunity to say hello to the
33:46
people that have helped him along the way, the friendships that he's made,
33:49
because as he worked his way up through Track racing at Stafford and Thompson
33:54
and on the dirt track at Lebanon Valley.
33:56
A lot of people were friends, Anns crew members, et cetera.
34:00
For me, that was a journey.
34:01
The first PRI went back to everybody was, Hey, you're retired.
34:05
What hell's matter with you?
34:06
What are you doing?
34:06
You know, what are you gonna do?
34:08
It was a way of having me go back through that.
34:10
But in Bryce doing that, he got to thank a lot of the folks who had meant something
34:14
to him in his career, but it also gave him an opportunity in the book to tease
34:18
what he might be doing in the future.
34:20
In the book, there's something critical that's happened after
34:23
the last race of the season.
34:25
And so as he's wandering around the PRI show before it opens, they let
34:28
him in early to say hi to some folks.
34:30
He stops by the NASCAR booth and he stops by the IMSA booth and
34:33
the local media and some of the foreign press that are following him
34:36
around are like, what's this mean?
34:37
What's it mean?
34:38
And so he just says, you never know.
34:40
Maybe I'll go back to running cup.
34:42
Maybe I'll back in an IMSA car.
34:44
Who knows?
34:45
You'll just have to wait and see what happens.
34:47
But the last page of deadly driver will let you know what he's up to.
34:50
No spoilers, but I do want to take yet another pit stop here and ask you
34:55
a question because the PRI scene was also important in the fact that there
34:58
were some other undertones there and you make some hints about maybe your
35:02
personal thoughts on EVs, electric vehicles in that particular scene.
35:07
So I want to ask you, what are your thoughts on the evolution
35:10
coming from the fuel industry?
35:12
That's probably something that needs to happen on a grand scale.
35:15
But there'll always be a niche, always be just as there is today.
35:19
Motorsports is not mainstream, not everybody on every street
35:22
is involved with motorsports.
35:23
So there'll always be cars, there'll always be racing.
35:26
Gasoline will always be around in some capacity, as will lubricants, etc, etc.
35:30
But EV is coming, they'll be here to stay.
35:32
And just like as we've toured this beautiful facility today, as you
35:36
see the evolution of sprint cars and all the other cars they've got here,
35:40
the EVs will go down the same road.
35:41
Just like everything else.
35:42
I remember the first cell phone I ever had came in a black box
35:46
that was the size of a lunch pail.
35:47
And now, you know, they've got these little itty bitty tiny things
35:50
that connect you with the world.
35:51
I feel like I've got a Dick Tracy watch on, you know, where I can talk to people,
35:54
check the internet, order lunch, check the stock market and book a flight.
35:58
So EVs will probably go down that same route, but.
36:01
Us guys who love the smell of race fuel, all the other things that come along
36:05
with that, the exhaust and nitromethane, they'll remain for a long time, at
36:08
least in our lifetimes, I would think.
36:10
The only thing that concerns me the most about it all is I remember hanging
36:14
out with the guys in high school where we were changing the carburetor,
36:18
playing with the timing light, doing all the cool things they used to do.
36:21
In the garage, whether you're doing it with your uncle, your brother, your
36:24
father, best friends, whatever, there was a camaraderie that came about
36:29
encircling the engine, so to speak.
36:32
What are you going to do now?
36:32
Am I supposed to sit on the curb with my grandson and show
36:35
him how to change batteries?
36:37
There will always be something about racing that will draw those of us who
36:40
enjoy those competitive sports to it.
36:42
Of everything with EVs and racing that concerns me is the same.
36:46
I was in Catalonia a couple years ago when somebody was testing
36:49
a race kit electric motorcycle.
36:51
What the?
36:52
It was like, you know, when you go to the beach, you've got a mosquito
36:54
or something or buzz around your ear.
36:56
It's like, what is that?
36:58
If you go to an NHRA national event and you stand at the starting line when
37:02
John Force does a burnout and you feel your chest rattle, there's a wow factor.
37:07
And electric's just no.
37:09
Unless they figure out a way of sending thunderbolts out to the
37:12
people in the crowd to give sort of a static charge or something.
37:16
I don't see the entertainment value.
37:17
I can see that and a lot of people have said that and we say that even about
37:21
different ice power plants when you compare as an example, you know, there's
37:25
nothing like the sound of a flat six or a Ferrari 12 or even the difference between
37:30
the C7 and the C8s at IMSA races, right?
37:33
I mean, the C7 and the Mercedes SLSs, they're ground thumpers to your point.
37:37
You not only do you hear them, you feel them.
37:38
And so we have gotten that response a lot from folks to say, What I will
37:42
miss the most from racing is the sound.
37:45
For me, the analogy would be watching a very passionate, hot love scene in a
37:49
movie versus watching a silent movie.
37:52
That's the difference.
37:54
A lot of folks have also said, and maybe this is how they justify it.
37:57
There's a high probability that motor sport will become very equestrian.
38:01
How do you feel about that particular state?
38:03
The biggest frustration I've had in the last 20 years is seeing how racing
38:07
has changed as far as attendance goes.
38:09
It was 2008 when we had the issues that caused everybody to stop spending.
38:17
People stopped going to races.
38:18
People stopped doing a lot of different things.
38:20
What I've found was for the longest time, people didn't come back.
38:24
Scary things seem to be that they had gone away from races.
38:27
They had found something else to do and they'd go back to the racetrack.
38:32
Promoters and series are struggling very hard to get some cases.
38:36
You see that you go to the U S nationals.
38:38
It's a packed house.
38:38
The special events are always going to have packed houses.
38:42
And the 500 was sold out was 400, 000 people.
38:45
I forget what the attendance is there, but you also have to model in the fact that
38:49
they haven't had full capacity allowed because of COVID for the last few years.
38:54
So sadly, it seems as though some people have found other things to do.
38:57
Some people have gone to an NHRA race.
38:59
They've gone to see the nitro cars, but then they've seen
39:03
it and they don't come back.
39:04
And that's a sad thing.
39:05
That's why promoters and series and racers have to evolve.
39:08
And you have to continue to reinvent themselves to give people something
39:11
to Something to bring them back.
39:14
These phones, computers, and everything else are great, but they've caused so
39:17
many people used to come out and see and feel and experience excitement are now
39:21
sitting behind a screen doing all these other things, playing all these other
39:25
games, and if they're doing something related to motor sports, they're driving
39:29
the screen and I could tell you from racing in Baja course to almost going
39:34
off a couple of cliff sides and all the other fun things that that involves.
39:37
It's starting with cards, getting in somebody's penthouse, doing
39:41
some burnouts in the driveway.
39:43
All those things are experiential.
39:45
Nothing on the screen can replace that.
39:47
Yeah, sure, you can go to Universal and your chair can vibrate when you're seeing
39:50
a scene with the Shrek thing, which I did with my grandchildren and stuff.
39:54
But there's nothing like strapping yourself, get in a race car, fire
39:58
that thing up and go have some fun.
40:00
And then if you're competitive, doing it side by side, going on
40:03
a turn with somebody that's just as hungry, just as motivated as
40:07
you are, you're nothing like it.
40:08
So will Bryce ever sit and strap into a Formula E car?
40:13
If his series continues, is that a thought crossing?
40:15
He might be involved with ownership, but he won't drive one.
40:17
Well, it's the same thing we just said a few minutes ago.
40:20
I had the opportunity to go to the Formula E in Brooklyn.
40:22
And to be honest with you, there was something, I shouldn't say this, but
40:25
there was something more interesting for me to do, uh, in Montreal.
40:29
Doing something with the guys who run Fantabox.
40:31
Which is the F1 store in the old city of Montreal.
40:34
I understand what Formula E is doing, but when I've seen it on television,
40:38
all's ears is a squig of the tires.
40:40
It just doesn't excite me.
40:41
I want to support the sport and get people to go out and give it a try.
40:45
But for me myself, nah, gotta make noise.
40:48
So let's go back to the book a little bit talking about Bryce, his humble
40:51
upbringings, and if you follow his career, you had him at Lebanon doing
40:54
roundy rounds and things like that.
40:56
And he works his way up in sports cars into formula one, but there's that team
41:00
O'Neill part that sticks out growing up a WRC fan myself in the group era.
41:05
I've always wanted to do that.
41:06
When I look at how expensive it can be to get into rally in the United States.
41:12
That gave me pause when I read the book and I said, how did he afford, you
41:15
know, how did that work out for him?
41:17
Well, in Bryce's case, book starts out at a young age when he's, he's late teens.
41:21
Essentially what he did was he fell in love with rally racing and he
41:25
did a deal with team O'Neill where.
41:27
I'll put the hours in, I'll work here, sweep up, I'll do whatever, teach
41:31
me some things, learn what I can.
41:32
Let me take one of these out.
41:34
You're not talking about a WRC world class car that Travis Pastrana might
41:39
be playing with for Vermont sports car.
41:41
There are some lower grade, lower level rally cars where you go out on the course
41:45
and don't need a lot of money to do that.
41:48
Just got to sign up.
41:49
You could go to the team O'Neill school and take their school.
41:51
Guess what?
41:52
You're driving a rally car.
41:53
If you're good at it, and as our guide today at the museum said, if you got
41:56
some balls, then strap in and go in something faster and give it a try.
42:02
And you know, what's funny about that part of the story, I relate
42:05
that to pro driver Andy Lee's story where he did the same thing.
42:10
Never finished high school, found himself in Arizona, turned the wrenches at
42:13
Bondurant and then worked his way up.
42:15
So him and Bryce are similar in that way.
42:17
Bryce is this really every guy in America race car driver, but on the
42:21
same token, there's so many facets of other famous race car drivers stories
42:25
in his kind of more complex persona.
42:28
And that's what I really enjoyed about this book is pulling those threads
42:31
out and going, that reminds me of this former guest on the show or this
42:34
driver that I know, things like that.
42:36
And it makes it very relatable for us, at least our audience.
42:39
And then the people beyond to your point is getting them
42:42
out there to understand that.
42:43
There's more depth to these drivers.
42:45
They're not just people strapping on helmets and going around in circles.
42:47
Very true.
42:48
Balancing act that I had to do though that was a struggle for me
42:51
was some racers have told me there wasn't enough racing in the book.
42:55
And some people have said, ah, there might, for me, there might've
42:58
been a little too much detail in some of the formula and racing.
43:01
And so that was in the early drafts when I was getting people to my betas,
43:05
as you call it, there's beta readers.
43:07
Give them a chapter, they give you the feedback, tell you if
43:09
you've gone the right direction, if it's interesting, if it's not.
43:12
But the balancing act that I worked with Deadly Driver and I'm working on
43:15
in the sequel is giving people who are into motorsports enough to get them
43:19
excited, but also giving someone who doesn't know that much about motorsports,
43:24
enough to be interested in it.
43:26
Not just in a thriller aspect because Bryce's story could take place anywhere.
43:31
I could have said this character not in motorsports.
43:33
I could have had a little CPA in an accounting firm.
43:36
I mean, there's all kinds of folks that get stuck doing things for the FBI.
43:40
Because they have to do a plea deal or something.
43:42
It was a good balancing act.
43:43
I think I pulled it off.
43:45
You seem like you liked it.
43:46
So, well, there's one other part that I did appreciate.
43:49
And you being from this area, from the East coast, especially especially
43:52
Pennsylvania, for a lot of us, we call summit point home and seven
43:56
point raceway is mentioned in the book, especially there at events of
43:59
driver training and things like that.
44:00
That's also Grand Touring Motorsports home track.
44:02
A lot of us, you know, pilgrimage there weekend after weekend for
44:05
a CC a NASA races and et cetera.
44:07
So I wanted to thank you for throwing that in there because.
44:10
A lot of people forget about Summit Point, right?
44:12
Used to be part of the Trans Am series back in the day.
44:14
You know, it's kind of fallen down in the ranks, but they're
44:17
also seeing a resurgence now after 53 years of being open.
44:21
So I really appreciated you doing that.
44:23
That was my pleasure.
44:24
I love Summit Point.
44:25
I've been there many, many times myself.
44:27
So that being said, the flow of the book, it really does grab you right away.
44:31
Like I said, the first three chapters are really set the stage and then you start
44:37
to interleave the exposition, right?
44:39
For like the next 12 chapters or so.
44:41
And it's done in this flashback sort of way.
44:44
It reminded me of how some TV shows and movies do it.
44:47
It's like, you're thrown in the action.
44:48
You're going, what, what is going on here?
44:50
They've captivated you.
44:51
They've drawn you in.
44:52
And now let's go and show you how we got there.
44:54
And plays this bouncing back and forth again for like the next 12 chapters or so.
44:59
So that led me to my next question, which is, could you see Deadly Driver
45:02
being turned into a screenplay?
45:05
Oh, yes.
45:06
Oh, yes.
45:06
The beauty of that is, most of the reviewers, a lot of people
45:09
that have read the book have told me, it reads like a movie.
45:12
It ought to be a movie.
45:13
It ought to be a limited series.
45:14
It ought to be something.
45:15
I agree.
45:15
When I write books, I see it as a movie in my head.
45:19
I see it playing out in my head.
45:20
I studied film.
45:21
One of the side studies I did at Penn State was film courses, full circle,
45:25
all the way back to the shitter lump, when I was in sixth grade.
45:29
My father allowed my brother and I and a family friend, a
45:32
schoolmate, to make a video, make a movie essentially at the funeral.
45:36
We had a casket, we had dry ice and buckets, we had all
45:39
the spooky stuff going on.
45:40
So I've always been a movie buff and I've always been interested
45:43
in these that rotate around that.
45:45
Following everybody's encouragement, I reached out to some folks in California.
45:49
I met with some producers and directors who have given me notes on what
45:53
I should do, what I shouldn't do.
45:54
They've encouraged me to talk to this guy, all this guy.
45:57
There are people that.
45:58
Claimed to have connections to Tom Cruise and they're trying to get
46:01
the book in front of him because if everybody on the planet they could do
46:04
something special, a deadly driver.
46:06
Cruz probably could.
46:08
However, you'd have to read the book.
46:10
I don't see Cruz as Bryce Winters.
46:12
I see him as Max Lerner.
46:14
I would agree with you on that.
46:16
So Max, for those that haven't read the book yet, is the person that
46:20
really takes Bryce to the next level.
46:22
He is the money behind the scenes, behind the team, the team
46:25
owner, all that kind of stuff.
46:25
He's, you know, he's a German guy.
46:27
I'd love to see Tom Cruz pull off the accent, you know, that'd be kind of funny.
46:30
Well, remember though, he's He did the Hatterboot.
46:32
Well, I forget the name of the book, but Oh, Valkyrie.
46:34
Yeah.
46:34
Valkyrie.
46:35
He did Valkyrie.
46:35
And he didn't lay it on too hard.
46:37
Werner is true German, but he's Americanized.
46:40
But he also has a dark side, comes out.
46:43
And I think Cruise could really get his teeth into that.
46:46
But there's a million other people that would You can do a fantastic job as well.
46:50
I'd love to see the cast and call that like to see who they pick.
46:52
I envision this Bradley Cooper type playing a Bryce, you know,
46:56
the brown hair comb over boy next door sort of racer, right?
47:00
Well, there's all kinds of things.
47:01
When I wrote Uncle Pete, I pictured Sam Elliott.
47:04
Everybody knows Sam Elliott most recently from ATV.
47:06
That's the vision I got from him too.
47:07
Yeah, Sam Elliott kind of character.
47:09
But here's a stretch that isn't really a stretch.
47:12
Chris Pratt and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
47:14
Chris Pratt married Schwarzenegger's daughter.
47:16
How about Pratt as Bryce Weiners, and Schwarzenegger as Weiner?
47:21
He's got the accent.
47:23
That could work.
47:23
Although I don't know how serious I would take it at that point because
47:27
I'm a big Schwarzenegger fan, but every movie I watch, I consider them a comedy.
47:30
So, you know, yes.
47:32
And then, well, then you got to go to who do you cast as Kyoto?
47:35
Yeah.
47:36
She's a Japanese lawyer.
47:37
I mean, who do you put in that role?
47:39
There's a tremendous amount of exquisite actresses that could play that role.
47:43
But you know what happens when I've learned from visiting with these
47:46
producers and people who have talked to me about the film either as a film
47:50
or a limited series or as a regular series, once they buy the project.
47:54
They do whatever they want to do with it.
47:55
If all of a sudden, Kyoto, they don't want her to be from Japan anymore.
47:59
They want her to be Hungarian or Australian or whatever.
48:03
Or Max.
48:04
Suddenly Bryce becomes English and he's really Jason Statham.
48:06
And it's the transporter.
48:08
No, that can't happen.
48:09
But Max Werner doesn't have to be Max Werner.
48:11
It could be Max O'Malley.
48:13
It could be, he could be from anywhere.
48:14
There are certain parts of the world, South America, for instance.
48:17
They are rabid formula love fans.
48:20
So having Max be from Sao Paolo works.
48:24
Yeah.
48:24
What kinds of things you can do.
48:25
If you remember the book starts out at Sochi, but what's happened
48:29
since Sochi first, Sochi lost its race and then Putin decided to go.
48:33
Apeshit in Ukraine.
48:35
And so here we are.
48:36
So as I've developed the limited series scripts, pilot limited series scripts
48:41
for that, we've moved out of Russia.
48:43
I have a lot of friends in Russia.
48:45
I love the Russian people.
48:46
They're great folks.
48:47
I've been there many times, but I don't want to give any attention to those.
48:51
I can see you easily dropping the hungoro ring in its place, you know,
48:54
no, we actually, there's something with me and my French counterparts.
48:58
And so we've gone, we've gone, now we've gone to Paul Ricard.
49:02
Oh, nice.
49:02
Yeah.
49:03
So we'll see how that goes because actually, if you know where Paul Ricard
49:06
is, very, very close to Marseille.
49:09
And I don't want to get shot if anybody's listening from Marseille, there is
49:12
a strong underworld in Marseille.
49:15
There is a French mafia, so to speak, the same way there is in Russia,
49:19
same way there is in South Philly.
49:22
It's an easy conversion.
49:23
Yeah.
49:23
It's so, it's very easy to do some of the tweaking that I needed to do.
49:26
And it also helps too, because Bryce.
49:29
And his third home is on the French Riviera.
49:32
So him being in France makes it a little easier too for movement,
49:36
probably for filming, things like that.
49:37
So there's a lot of upward possibility there.
49:40
Yeah.
49:40
He maintains a residence in Monte Carlo because, you know, the tax laws
49:43
there, I think the rule is you have to have a residence six months in a
49:46
day in order to get the tax breaks.
49:49
And there's mention of that in the book too.
49:50
He says, Oh, I got to be here for X amount of time.
49:52
That's what he does.
49:53
So that actually leads into the next question, you know, without giving any
49:56
spoilers or talking about the sequel or anything that, what is Bryce's future?
50:02
What do you think?
50:02
What do you think?
50:03
What can you share with us?
50:05
We know certain things happen in the book.
50:06
We know there's a, there's a happy ending, so to speak.
50:09
Despite his injuries, he will be able to come back and the following season,
50:13
he'll be trying some new things.
50:15
I really don't want to lay too much out there.
50:16
I, I really believe that if people read Deadly Driver, they'll care about Bryce.
50:21
They'll like him.
50:22
I want to follow his career.
50:23
And then we'll find out what happens to them next.
50:25
They hang in there and they enjoy the first book.
50:27
The other one will be out.
50:29
So outside of your own books, do you have any recommended reads for our audience?
50:32
God, right now everything Jack Carr has written has been super hot.
50:35
Jack is a former Navy SEAL who worked for the government in a lot of other
50:39
capacities after he left the SEALs.
50:41
He's been reading since he was fourth or fifth grade.
50:44
Believe the story is his mother was a librarian.
50:46
This guy fell in love with books at an early age.
50:49
He's read thousands of books and he took everything he learned from those
50:53
books and has written the series that was turned into a limited series
50:57
on Amazon called The Terminal List.
50:59
So anything Carr's done has been great.
51:01
As I said earlier, Fields of Fire just came out.
51:03
That's Ryan Steck.
51:04
That's his debut novel.
51:05
He's an editor that I work with on a couple of my books.
51:08
Great guy.
51:09
The scariest thing that gets me is I run into people every
51:11
day that say, I don't read.
51:14
I've read books since high school, and the only reason I read it in high
51:16
school is because they told me I had to.
51:18
I get it.
51:19
If you work all day and all night, you've got your other things going
51:22
on in your world, you just don't have the bandwidth or the time,
51:25
you're exhausted and you can't do it.
51:27
I understand.
51:29
Some people say I don't have time to sit there.
51:30
I can't sit there and read a book.
51:31
I can't pace through it, whatever.
51:33
There's solutions.
51:35
There's audible books.
51:36
Audible has opened up a whole new world to people who, truck drivers, somebody
51:40
who works with their hands, somebody who can put it on their speakers,
51:44
headphones, and just go for the ride.
51:47
And Deadly Driver's Available is an Audible book as well.
51:49
Yes it is.
51:50
And another top tip for folks that don't have time to flip the old paper
51:54
pages, you can also leverage your local library and apps like Libby as well
51:59
as Hoopla and be able to digitally take books out from the library.
52:04
So there's no cost.
52:05
So if you're looking at it going, Oh man, some of these services are pretty pricey.
52:09
I'm already oversubscribed my budget.
52:11
So there are some free ways to get ahold of these books.
52:14
So there's some awesome resources there.
52:16
There's also Kindle.
52:17
Yep.
52:17
Some people want to read on an airplane, but they don't want to deal with
52:20
the paper and the book, et cetera.
52:21
So you can read a Kindle.
52:22
Something that everybody asked me for was 60 years old.
52:26
My eyes are failing.
52:27
How about large print?
52:28
Guess what?
52:29
We got deadly driver and large print.
52:30
That's available as well.
52:31
So JK, any shout outs, promotions, or anything else you'd like to
52:35
share that we didn't cover so far?
52:36
Your podcast.
52:37
It's great.
52:38
Ever since I've met you offline, I've listened to a bunch of the shows.
52:41
The most recent one I think was with Andrew Bilgrim, which opened
52:44
up a whole new world for me, cause I didn't know that much about him,
52:46
but it was a fascinating interview.
52:48
A pretty relaxed conversation.
52:50
It wasn't really an interview.
52:51
It was a conversation that you had.
52:52
So I enjoyed the way you did that.
52:53
If you're looking for thrillers of The Deadly Driver, I'd say pick
52:56
up Ryan Steck's Field of Fire.
52:58
Go to the races, if you've not been, or you have been in a while.
53:02
Go check it out.
53:03
For us, it's getting to be the fall, and the east coast, the leaves
53:06
are starting to change already.
53:07
That's probably because of the drought more than anything else.
53:10
Races are going to close the garage doors pretty soon, so take
53:13
it in the last races you've got.
53:14
Enjoy yourselves.
53:15
Author J.
53:16
K.
53:16
Kelly lives in Media, Pennsylvania with his wife Lisa and continues a never
53:20
ending pursuit of the next adventure.
53:23
He has just finished another thriller, The Blood Compass.
53:26
All six of his books are available on Amazon in either paperback,
53:30
Kindle, or Audible formats.
53:31
And you can learn more about J.
53:33
K.
53:33
and his work by visiting www.
53:36
jkkelly.
53:37
com or following him on social at jkkellybooks on Instagram
53:42
and Twitter, or by emailing me.
53:44
It's at author JK Kelly on Facebook, and you can always
53:48
look him up on LinkedIn as well.
53:50
So JK, I can't thank you enough for coming on the show and
53:53
sharing your journey with us.
53:54
I actually really am looking forward to the history of EP and some of
53:58
the other books you have coming out, and I'm really excited to know what
54:01
happens with Bryce and if there's some crossover with some of your other
54:04
characters like Matthew Christopher and others that are in your series.
54:07
So the best of luck on your subsequent novels, and we
54:10
look forward to reading them.
54:11
Thank you.
54:11
Really enjoyed it.
54:17
If you like what you've heard and want to learn more about GTM,
54:19
be sure to check us out on www.
54:23
gtmotorsports.
54:23
org.
54:24
You can also find us on Motorsports.
54:27
Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, You can call
54:31
or text us at 202 630 1770, or send us an email at crewchief at gtmotorsports.
54:39
org.
54:39
We'd love to hear from you.
54:41
Hey everybody, Crew Chief Eric here.
54:44
We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted
54:47
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