Latest / BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show / From Miatas to Motorsports PR: The Dean Case Journey

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From Miatas to Motorsports PR: The Dean Case Journey · BREAK/FIX the Motorsports & Vehicle Enthusiast Variety Show

0:00
Break Fix Podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from all
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over the autos sphere, from wrench, turners, and racers to artists, authors,
0:09
designers, and everything in between.
0:11
Our goal is to inspire a new generation of Petrolhead that wonder how did they
0:17
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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The following episode is brought to you by SRO Motorsports America and their
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partners at AWS CrowdStrike, Fantech Pelli, and the Skip Barber Racing School.
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Be sure to follow all the racing action by visiting www.sromotorsports.com.
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Or take a shortcut to GT America US and be sure to follow them on social
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at GT America, on Twitter and Instagram at SRO GT America on Facebook and
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catch live coverage of the races on their YouTube channel at GT World.
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After graduating Cal Poly San Luis Obisbo with a mechanical engineering
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degree, our guest joined Mazda Research and Development in Irvine, California.
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And while at Mazda, he worked on the original Miata.
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Second generation MX six, first Gen MPV, and the third Gen RX seven.
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While he loved the people and the work at Mazda, he wanted to try something
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new, working at a larger car company.
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That opportunity came in 1993 when he joined Ford as a layout engineer
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in the electric vehicle department, and in 1997, he was able to transfer
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to the Ford Motorsport effort in the SCCA TransAm Championship.
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While the Ford experience was professionally rewarding, he wished
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to return home to Southern California a little later, acting as the EV q
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and a technical expert on a Nissan Media event in 2000, a life-changing
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event that would lead him from engineering to communications.
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He became the Nissan product PR manager from 2001 through 2006,
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where he worked on every Nissan brand product launch, including the return
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of the Z, the launch of Nismo, and the first Nissan 360 global event.
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Fast forwarding to two Today, our break fix guest is one of those legendary
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behind the scenes people in motor sports.
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Mr. Dean case.
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Public relations manager for SRO Motorsports America, where he works
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to promote the premier GT and touring car series in the United States.
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And he's here to share some of his most fascinating paddock stories with us
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as if this intro wasn't enough, right?
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So please join us in welcoming Dean Case to break fix.
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Thank you.
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Thank you.
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Glad to be here.
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So Dean, let's jump into it.
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In that intro, it stands alone.
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Let's talk about Mazda.
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You know, we joke all the time.
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The answer is always Miata, but let's talk about your work on the Miata team.
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Well, actually it was pretty funny 'cause I, it was the only automotive
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offer I had when I graduated, and actually it was months later.
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I didn't get the offer right when I graduated from school and
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I had one non-automotive offer and I was about to take it.
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My dad said, why would you do that?
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You work all this time again into automotive, you know, we can.
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Put you up for a while till you find something.
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And then I got the opportunity to interview with, uh Mazda, October of 86.
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I had just graduated, I guess it was August.
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I didn't finish up in June like I was supposed to.
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I had one more quarter to finish at Cal Poly.
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I was a little bit behind.
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It was a layout engineer.
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I didn't even really know what a studio engineer did.
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They offered me the job and I took it.
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And so I show up the first day and once you sign all the paperwork, then I go
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back, they take me back into the studio and there was a full size clay model.
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Of a two seat road story that was still about two and a
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half years away from a launch.
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That was the Miata.
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You know, I wasn't there really at the birth.
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I was there during the development of it.
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It was still an incredible opportunity to be right place, right time.
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You're talking the late eighties at this point.
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You said The debut of the Miata was a couple years later That
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came to our shores in 1990.
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What were they having you do on the, on the Miata at that point?
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Mazda RD and Irvine is a relatively small group.
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There was a manager, a senior engineer, and myself, just three
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of us in the engineering group.
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And then we had the design studio, and then there was a various testing function.
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So what would happen?
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An early layout, you know, a concept that came out of.
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California suite would be sentencing the mothership in Japan for development.
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It would come back to us in various times.
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So we would be involved in some of the early drives.
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So I got to go on some of the early drives with the Miata, you know, so it
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was kind of the tail end of it, but I was there for the launch when we were
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at Chicago Auto Show in February of 89.
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There.
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Is it really true that the Miata was modeled after the Lotus Ilan?
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Is that where it's got its inspiration from?
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Well, some of it not entirely.
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I mean, they had to Triumph Spitfire and they had other British cars, and
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even a couple, I think we had an Alpha one time, Mazda went out and bought a
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number of cars, including a, an Ellan.
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The Ellan was at a higher price point, so a lot of it was looking at the
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cars that were available to everybody.
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And conventional wisdom at the time is there was no market for
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a small two seat sports car.
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And the reality was there was no market for a unreliable two seat sports car
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like most of the British cars were.
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The reality is most of the triumphs and things they fail on
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the US shores 'cause they weren't particularly reliable or comfortable.
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The Miata was kind of trying to improve on that.
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Y Yeah.
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You could say spiritually, a little bit of a lawn, but there was a lot of
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other cars that they were targeting.
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They wanted to make sure the price point was affordable.
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Keep in mind, that car launched, I think it was $13,900.
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That was a screaming deal for what it was.
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There's some names that surround Lamata folks like Jeffrey Barnes and Bob Hall.
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Did you get to work with them as well on that project?
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Did that come later at Mazda?
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No.
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Well, actually, Jeremy, I think at that time, worked for Toyota.
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He came in later.
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Jeremy joined, I'm not sure what year he joined Mazda, but Bob Hall was there.
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I mean the original nucleus of the mean auto.
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A lot of people claim to be the father of the Miata.
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I would say Bob Hall is the father of the Miata.
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There was a lot of other people involved, Mark Jordan, Wang Chin, Mr.
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Hii, but ultimately it was an American concept.
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The original three people who really led the pitch to Japan was Bob Hall.
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Mark Jordan and Norman Garrett.
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Norman Garrett, who was the engineer who hired me.
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You know, a lot of other people were actively involved.
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Amazing talent in that studio, Wuhan Chin, who really led the
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design of the final generation.
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RX seven was one of the most amazingly talented people I've ever had the
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privilege to work with during this whole time, working on the MX six,
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working on the minivan, and then the RX seven, an iconic vehicle.
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We still talk about the third gen RX seven today as a timeless design by Mazda.
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You look at it and you go.
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What year is that car?
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I don't know.
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Yeah.
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What were the different pieces?
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What were you working on?
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Or were you already in your head kind of thinking about the marketing side?
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Or were you still just bogged down in, in the mechanics of vehicles?
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Well, a lot of what we did was, we joke that a studio engineer
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is more like the physics police.
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You know, the designers would come up with this incredible shape as
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like, well, you know, we really like to have someone who's over five
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foot five be able to fit in the car.
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You know, and, and so a lot of it was making sure that we could
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fit a 95th percentile American male into it, fifth percentile.
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Asian female and making sure that things like headlights are in legal positions.
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A lot of what we did was, you know, on our standpoint was to support the
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creative efforts of the students.
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Interesting.
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We had to make sure that when we sent the proposal to Japan, they didn't
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laugh at and say, yeah, we can't build that, and we're gonna talk about more
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about your history as we go along, but there's a big gap and then there's a
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return to Mazda way later in your career.
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Yeah.
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So let's kind of jump forward and then jump back a little bit.
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Try staying in the topic of Mazda in general, and so.
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When you came back to Mazda on the second go round, now you're in a position of
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communications, you're in the media department, public relations, et cetera.
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So I gotta ask you, it's a pretty loaded question.
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Zoom.
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Zoom, was that your, was that your doing was, is that you Dean?
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No, that was a, a previous agency donor I think.
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Did that, that, I think that was, who came up with that?
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It was a great.
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Slogan and I mean there's a lot of uh, Mazda fans out there who still
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embrace that over some of the more current ones, but anytime you change
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agencies, they have to burn everything.
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Ultimately, the fact I was able to go back was don't burn bridges, you know,
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leave on good terms anywhere you go.
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And I have to thank Michael Jordan from Automobile Magazine.
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He's the one connected me with Jeremy Barnes in the end of 2005.
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'cause I was working at Nissan at the time and Nissan was relocating from
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Los Angeles to Nashville, Tennessee.
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And that didn't work for me from a family standpoint.
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I wasn't bashful.
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I told everyone I knew I'm looking to find something else to stay in California.
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And Michael used to bust Jeremy's chops about, you're doing all this
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racing but you have no PR support.
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And Jeremy's response to him was, well, I'm never gonna get headcount approver.
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It's gonna have to be contract.
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The only motor sports PR people I've met, I don't like.
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Michael said, I know the exact guy you need to hire.
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He knows your products 'cause he used to engineer 'em.
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He knows the media 'cause he is been doing PR for Nissan and Best for you.
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He is about to be unemployed.
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So when Nissan leaves, so I sat down with Jeremy at the
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2006 LA Auto Show over coffee.
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Got to know each other and he says, what's your timeframe?
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I go, well, I'm working on this formula, SAE project right now, so
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I'm not even available until uh, June.
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He goes, perfect, because it'll take me at least that long to find budget.
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And he ended up calling me in August and said, I've got budget.
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And actually I think I did the first.
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Three races on a handshake agreement.
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'cause I trusted Jeremy and then ended up 11 one year contracts.
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So you mentioned to me behind the scenes that you worked on
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the Mazda Road to Indie project.
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So do you wanna talk about that a little bit and what that was all about?
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Mazda at that time, you know, they were getting into more and more series.
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You know, they had the MX five.
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Such a strange time on both sports cars and open wheel because when Mazda started
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out, you know, when I joined him in 2006, we still had Champ Car and IRL.
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What happened was there was already the Star Mazda Championship
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with the rotary powered cars.
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The origin you can trace back to the original Russell Mazda car in 1984.
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Gary Rodriguez was running that series very successfully, and
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Mazda signed on with Skip Barber.
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Also, Mazda had the engine for the Atlantic Championship, the beautiful
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brand new Swift car, which could have been a Ford, it could have been
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a Mazda, ended up being a Mazda.
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So now all of a sudden there was three open wheel series, so you had.
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Skip Barber, which would feed into Star Mazda, which would feed into Atlantics,
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which would feed into Champ Car.
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Then 2008, champ Car imploded, you know, it got sucked into IRL.
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We lost the Atlantic Championship, which was a shame 'cause the Atlantic
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cars were just incredible on multiple levels and current cars were great and
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the history of, uh, Atlantics was great, but that disappeared and then all of
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a sudden it became Skip Barber, the F 2000, the Star Mazda, the Indie Lights.
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The lights was never a Mazda engine, but just kind of worked out to where
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it kind of morphed into this thing we had with Champ Car to the Mazda Road
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to Indy in conjunction with Cooper Tires was a key player in that as well.
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There was so much going on and lucky that it survived through the recession.
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You know, that time period.
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So we'll talk more about your transition from engineer to PR as
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we go along in the conversation.
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But one thing I wanna ask while we're still talking about Mazda, how did you
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find yourself when you came back in 2006?
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Did you find yourself still kind of wanting to be in the shop, looking
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at the designs, working on the cars or at, at this point because you
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had changed careers, you came at it with a whole different set of eyes.
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And I bring it up because a lot of people go through these metamorphoses
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in their life where they do career changes and things like that.
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But in your case.
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You were still in the automotive world and you went from one end to the other, so I
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just wanted to expand upon that experience for you as you walked back through the
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gates of Mazda with a different role.
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Well, I still knew some of the r and d folks.
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Some of those were still there.
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Actually, one of my best friends from Mazda r and d
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just retired a few weeks ago.
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Kelvin Heri.
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He was the director of r and d, and he and I worked together in the late eighties.
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You have to be honest with yourself about what you're good at and
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what your strengths are, and I used to get this really strange
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compliment early in my career.
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My writing was excellent.
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Pause for an engineer.
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It's kind of like being told you're the healthiest person
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in the intensive care ward.
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You're not really sure if it's compliment.
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But I realized my real niche was explaining technical topics
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to non-technical people, and most engineers hate doing that.
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And so that was a niche that I could kind of explore.
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You know, we did a lot with Mazda and it's like, yeah, I, I like to
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think I was a competent engineer, but I was not a brilliant engineer.
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My first engineering boss at Mazda Zero mahi.
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He had over a hundred patents to his name.
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I was never at that level, and I could admit that, you know, I'm honest about it.
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I like to think that, you know, I was competent, but I wasn't the rockstar
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engineer like some of those are, and most of the ones in motorsports,
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you know, you gotta really be good, otherwise you just don't last.
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So I like to help tell those stories of the technology and things.
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But Ford did what Nissan did, what Mazda did, and now what SRO does.
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Let's talk about Ford.
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You wanted to go on to bigger and better things.
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So obviously at some point during this.
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Entire journey.
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Ford and Mazda were partnered up, or Ford bought Mazda, if I remember correctly.
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So was that a natural progression to go from Mazda to Ford?
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No, actually it was pretty funny.
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Ford had historically owned about 25% of Mazda dating back to the seventies.
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And there was a lot of, you know, if you bought a Ford Courier
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pickup, it was actually a Mazda.
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And then much later years, you know, you buy a Mazda B series
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and that's actually a Ford Ranger produced in Edison, New Jersey.
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When Mazda ran into some economic problems in the early nineties, Ford
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increased their ownership to 33% and basically put their management in place.
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But when I left, I basically gave up all my seniority at Mazda and
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started at ground zero at four.
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There was no.
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There was no opportunity to to make a transfer and keep any of my seniority
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or anything, but it was a good move.
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But it was really wild to do electric vehicles in the nineties.
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The F-150 lightning's amazing, but it's not Ford's first electric pickup truck.
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There was a 1998 Ranger Electric.
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I worked on it.
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This was all back because California Air Sources Board had
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a A mandate they were pushing for 2% zero emission vehicles by 1998.
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And this is a great trivia question for people who like EVs, can you name
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all of the EVs that came out in 1998?
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There was eight of 'em that came out and virtually no one can ever guess that.
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I mean, other than the gm EV one, right.
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I can't think of too many others that are in the popular media at least.
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Right?
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Well, most all of 'em were fleet only.
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They were never sold to consumers.
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But Toyota had the RAV4, ev.
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Nissan had the Ultra ev.
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I drove one of those for eight years.
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Chrysler had a Pacific and Minivan Electric, so there was a bunch of these
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out there, but they were all test fleets.
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Only virtually all of 'em were brought back and then crushed.
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If you saw the movie, who Killed the electric car, they talk about the EV one.
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You know, were all, those were destroyed.
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It basically happened with most all the other ones, and it was all beta software
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that the technology just wasn't there.
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One of the really great things I loved about Ford was they had a
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lot of career development process.
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You know, I encourage students to consider employment at a Ford, at
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GM or something right outta school because there's just so much training
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opportunity and mentorship available.
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Ford, uh, you get your annual performance review, but you'd
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also get your semi-annual, I guess it was little bit of a review.
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It was more of a coaching session.
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The joke is what they want you to say is, well, I'd like to be
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a design release engineer, get my MBA and move into product planning.
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And they got a path for that.
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It's easy.
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But if you say, I wanna be transferred to Ford Australia or transferred to
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Ford Motorsports, they look at you like those are not normal goals.
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And I finally got a boss who said.
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Let me ask, and he called up the head of Ford Racing and asked, how does
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someone move into your department?
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He says, well, all of our junior program managers are
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on loan for other departments.
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So if you're willing to continue paying a salary out of your budget,
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we'd be happy to have 'em for a year.
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So when I worked on Trans Am I was being paid by the electric vehicle group.
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What was that transition like?
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You go from EVs to race cars.
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What did they have you working on at Ford Motorsport?
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A lot of it was making sure that we didn't, didn't have bad things happening
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to us, BOP wise, you know, good old balance of power, balance of performance.
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Yeah.
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Or blaming other people.
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But you know, actually it was 25 years ago, just a few weeks back,
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St. Petersburg, Florida, the season opener for the TransAm series of.
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It was kind of funny, the, the strangest job title, I was the TransAm
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program Manager at Ford Motor Company.
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People say, wait, I thought TransAm was a Pontiac.
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Yes, it is.
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General Motors licensed the name from the SECA.
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So I had that strange job title there, but a lot of it was just making sure
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that our teams had what they needed.
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Help facilitate some of the uh, pre-race testing.
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We tested Dearborn Proving Grounds.
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That was a special one 'cause we got the test with Newman Haas and Paul
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Newman was there at the same test.
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So some good things there, but a lot of it was just making sure that we were
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staying equal and trying to support a couple of the private tier Mustang teams.
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Mike Lewis and Auto Con.
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And we had the deck stack that year.
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You know, we had.
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Tommy Kendall and Danny Banks prepared Roush Mustangs, and that was the magic
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year where Tommy won 11 straight races.
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It's kind of funny because that period in TransAm, imsa, A LMS, let's call it what
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it is, it was a weird, turbulent time.
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I call it the dark ages of touring car and GT racing because there
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were so many programs, so many series going on at the same time.
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And then eventually they would, let's use a racing term homologate and get together.
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Right, and And it became.
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IMSA and then SRO.
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Now today as a separate for GT three and GT four, there's a lot of names
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that we're still lurking around.
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You know, folks that like, you know Willie t Ribs and Lynn St. James.
17:22
Yeah.
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And you mentioned Tommy Kendall and Paul Newman.
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And you know, Tom Cruise ran with Paul Newman and things like that.
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And so there's a lot of celebrity during that time that you came across.
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And what was that like?
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The few times I met Paul Newman during the 97 season.
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The one thing I've been warned ahead of time with Paul, you
17:39
can talk to him about racing.
17:40
If you ask anything about entertainment, he will just walk
17:43
away from you and never speak to you.
17:45
Don't ask for an autograph, but if you wanna ask him about how the
17:48
team's going, you know, a race, fine.
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He'll talk to you like anybody.
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You know, he was legendary for when he clubbed race.
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He would drink beer with the coursework on Sunday, uh, after the races.
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I mean, really, genuinely.
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Nice guy.
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Very serious about racing.
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When he was there at the racetrack.
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That's all you want.
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Do not talk to me about movies.
18:06
Do not talk to me about tv.
18:07
So that was pretty cool.
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Lynn St. James got to know a little bit while I was at Ford.
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We formed a group, a club, Ford Motor Sports Enthusiast.
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You know, it was actually, it was kind of funny 'cause we were
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frustrated as Ford employers.
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We weren't really getting Ford news of race results.
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So we actually ended up getting in trouble by posting race results that
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we were told we weren't authorized to post on the electronic bulletin board.
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So we formed a club so we could have an electronic bulletin board.
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Legit, we ended up inviting a number of people to speak.
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Uh, Lynn St. James being one of 'em, we made her an honorary Ford Motor
18:37
Sport enthusiast member, and we had the legendary, John Fitch is a
18:41
speaker and some other folks like that never met Willie T during that time.
18:44
He had really finished his Trans Am era.
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By that time, I mean, Tommy's only rule challengers that year were
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Dorsey, Schrader, Brian, cmo, Paul Gen, Greg Pickett, that generation.
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So we're name dropping all over the place.
18:58
But you have some other famous friends that you've influenced
19:01
and, and partnered with.
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I'll, I'll drop a couple names here.
19:04
Looking at your bio.
19:04
Sylvia Wilkinson.
19:06
Got Jay Leno.
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Gar Stein.
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Tim Kine, yeah, yeah, yeah.
19:10
Tim Kine.
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Gar Stein's a good Mazda, right?
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John Dunan, who was the director of Mazda Motorsports at the time,
19:16
back in 2008, he was flying to La Mo, so he picked up Starbucks.
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At that time you used, you could actually buy books at Starbucks.
19:22
Remember that, and they would like to feature Seattle based authors.
19:25
Many times John picked up those book, the Art of Racing in the
19:28
Rain, just 'cause of the title.
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It was like, okay, you know, I need something to read on
19:32
an eight hour flight to Paris.
19:34
Bought it immediately.
19:35
Emailed all of us, Jim Jordan, Steve Sanders, and I. It was like,
19:38
you gotta go out and buy this book.
19:40
It's amazing.
19:40
And so we, we all did.
19:42
It was great.
19:43
The racing was very accurate.
19:44
It wasn't a racing story, but racing was the backdrop.
19:47
Patrick Dempsey was racing with us at the time.
19:49
A couple things happened.
19:50
One, we reached out.
19:51
Jim Jordan sent a note to, uh, Garth on his website, posted a
19:55
little comment, like, love the book.
19:57
You either did amazing research or you must.
20:00
He responded like 30 minutes later.
20:02
Oh yeah.
20:02
I used to club race a spec Miata.
20:04
Everything I learned about racing, I know I learned from a spec Miata and it just
20:08
so happened we were gonna be racing at Portland six weeks later with MX five Cup.
20:13
We had a guest car at the time, so we called him up and said,
20:15
would you like to race a pro race?
20:17
With us.
20:18
And then we added, uh, Sam Moses, who wrote Fast Guys.
20:21
Rich Guys and Idiots back in, I'm not sure the nineties when he wrote that book.
20:24
So we had fact versus fiction and we had the, uh, motorsports journalist against
20:29
the fiction writer, and they both thought they were gonna come in and do great.
20:32
And they had a, I think, a pretty spirited battle for 21st and the 24 car field.
20:36
Depth of talent in MX five Cup is astounding.
20:38
But we got the book, the Patrick Dempsey.
20:41
Dempsey bought the movie rights and it took Patrick then 10
20:44
years to get the movie produced.
20:45
You know, we're pretty proud of the fact that we helped make that happen,
20:48
but it was a collective effort.
20:49
John Doon and Jim Jordan, myself and others.
20:51
So that was pretty cool.
20:53
Uh, Sylvia Wilkinson is just one of my favorite authors.
20:56
I mean, when.
20:56
I grew up reading car books, you know, as a kid.
20:59
And you know, you start with the little ones, the juvenile books
21:02
when you're 10 or 12 years old.
21:03
And the first serious one I read was the stainless steel carrot by Sylvia Wilkinson
21:08
and Sylvia turns out she was a genre of rider, young southern woman novelist
21:13
who happened to really like racing.
21:15
And her publisher said, you should do a racing story.
21:17
She said, well, I don't wanna do a conventional one.
21:19
Maybe I can do a fly on the wall with a young up and coming driver.
21:23
And do it in the style of a novel.
21:26
And she did the stainless steel carrot, just a fabulous book.
21:29
It was out of print for many, many years.
21:31
It, it followed John Morton in the BRE Dotsons.
21:34
I got to know John and Sylvia when I was at Nissan.
21:37
It was after Sylvia a little bit.
21:38
It's like for the 40th anniversary of the, um, championship.
21:41
Why don't we redo the book?
21:42
And Sylvia's like, no, I'm not interested.
21:44
I, I've worked on a new novel, Sylvia's written like 20.
21:47
Eight books at least.
21:48
She didn't wanna revisit the past.
21:50
After I got to know her and John A. Little bit better, I, I figured
21:53
out how to exploit her weakness, which her weakness was animals.
21:56
And I said, what if we did this as a fundraiser for some animal groups?
21:59
I'll do the PR for you for free.
22:01
Let's put it back in the print.
22:02
But you need to write a new chapter.
22:04
Where are they now?
22:05
Because if you found this book on eBay, it'd been like 150 or 200 bucks
22:09
to find a copy of the original book.
22:10
And so we put it back in print at $46, which was John's car number, and we ended
22:15
up raising a lot of money for animals.
22:16
But Sylvia's a brilliant, brilliant writer.
22:19
She's just re-releasing one of her other books.
22:21
I think it'll come out next month or sometime in the summer.
22:24
Dirt Tracks to Glory.
22:25
So if you like stock car racing, she wrote a really fabulous.
22:28
A book on that, the early days of stock car racing, and she added some new stuff
22:32
on this reissue as well, Tim Consign.
22:35
He just, sadly that one came to mind 'cause Tim passed away this past week.
22:39
Tim was a child actor.
22:41
He played on my three sons and then was very interested in sports cars and became.
22:46
One of the foremost historians on sports car racing, he did a book on all the
22:50
Americans who raced in Grand Prix racing that book's long since out of print,
22:54
and very expensive two or three years ago, he finished a multi-volume set on
22:58
every American who ever raced at lama.
23:00
It's a real, I mean, substantial award.
23:03
I mean, it was one of those that.
23:04
He didn't do it to make money.
23:06
Books like that are a niche, but it was just his passion project.
23:10
And what about good old Jay Leno Society of Automotive Historians
23:13
used to have an annual literature fair in the pre eBay days.
23:16
This was a big deal.
23:17
If you liked car books and magazines and models and other
23:19
stuff, Pasadena City College would host this swap meet once a year.
23:22
It was so big.
23:23
Dealers would drive cross country.
23:25
To sell books there and Jay would show up and just a regular customer and buy
23:29
books and I'd sometimes clear out my uh, some of the things outta my collection.
23:32
Got to know Jay that way.
23:34
When we launched the three 50 Z, there's a funny story.
23:37
A guy called me that was trying to get one of the Z press kits.
23:39
We did kind of an over the top press kitt for the launch of the three 50.
23:43
I was trying to make sure they weren't just ending upon eBay.
23:46
It's like, no, these are very expensive to produce.
23:48
I want them in the hands of media.
23:49
This guy called me and just.
23:51
He goes, what if I told you I work for Jay Leno as a sound
23:54
engineer, and I'll get one to Jay.
23:57
Done.
23:58
So I sent him two press kits.
24:00
Jay called me and we ended up talking.
24:02
We put him into a three 50 Z for a week before the car launched.
24:05
His guys told me it was one of the few times he'd ever seen Jay drive
24:08
the same car five days in a row.
24:10
Jay, pretty much every day would drive something different.
24:12
It'd be a Bugatti or just, you know, all those strange cars that Jay has.
24:16
But we ended up being able to take Mr. Caama up there.
24:19
Mr. Caama was the guy who founded Dotson in America in the 1950s.
24:23
An exceptionally amazing person.
24:26
He would come over for the Z Convention in the early two thousands,
24:29
and I got to travel with him.
24:30
The timing just, it was magic timing worked out where we were
24:33
able to take Mr. K up to a taping.
24:36
The Tonight Show when we picked up the Z after Jay had driven at a week, and it
24:40
got a private tour of Jay's collection.
24:42
Now, Jay's collection is astounding and he was definitely a hands-on guy.
24:46
I mean, he has guys who work on his cars, but you look at his hands,
24:49
definitely gets his hands dirty and knows how the cars work, you know?
24:52
If his Bugatti breaks down the road, odds are, Jay can probably fix it.
24:56
Before we move on, I have a couple questions about your time at Nissan.
25:00
So we've covered Mazda, we've covered Ford, you've mentioned
25:02
Nissan a few times and, and the Z program and things like that.
25:05
So when you came in the door at Nissan as the new PR guy, one of the things
25:10
you probably had to do was go back over old ads, ideas, things like that.
25:14
What can be used, what can't, you know, where have they gone?
25:17
Yeah, what have they said?
25:17
All that kind of thing.
25:18
So I gotta ask you a pointed question because we're reviewed.
25:21
This little gem in the Nissan marketing world.
25:24
A few drive-through episodes back, and that's the 300 ZX Turbo,
25:30
Ridley Scott Super Bowl commercial.
25:33
It was all controversy and it was subsequently pulled right after it aired.
25:37
What are your thoughts on that and, and let's answer
25:39
the big question, why lawyers?
25:44
Why is anything pulled like that?
25:46
We ended up when we did the three 50 Z. Launch.
25:49
We had four discs in the press kit.
25:51
'cause I had started out in 2001.
25:54
We were still doing eight by 10 glossies and 35 millimeter slides.
25:58
It was right at the beginning of shifting over to digital.
26:01
And so when we launched the Z, we had the full CD of press
26:04
images and press releases.
26:06
But then we did a DVD that had I think about 26.
26:10
Minute history reel.
26:11
That was really good that Shiat had produced for the retirement of the Z.
26:17
When the 300 ZX ceased production, they did a retirement party, I think the last
26:21
one ever went into, uh, the Peterson, and they did this big party in this video.
26:26
So we put that video on.
26:28
The DVD technically, I don't know if we had permission, but it was
26:31
one of those things that if you don't ask, no one can say no.
26:34
Well, Ridley Scott didn't come knocking.
26:35
Right.
26:36
So it's all good.
26:37
No, no.
26:37
And you know, it, it is funny that some of these things that we've got,
26:40
these old images, what's really a challenge for a lot of car companies
26:43
is preserving their history because.
26:44
You got records retention, you've got what were the rights to it?
26:48
What was fascinating, some of the photography that Nissan did in
26:51
the sixties was just astounding.
26:54
Two of my favorite shots, one at the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach, which
26:57
is where the original Cannonball run ended, but just the shot of
27:01
this Nissan sedan there in a woman standing next to it, the Portofino Inn.
27:04
Well, that place still exists.
27:05
A bunch of other places don't exist.
27:07
But there's also one, a picture of, uh, a Dotson Roadster parked
27:12
by the LAX theme building.
27:14
Just some really cool stuff.
27:15
So it's a moment in history, not just of the car, but of the
27:18
location in Southern California.
27:20
Back then it didn't seem to be, there was advertising photographer pr, photography,
27:24
there was just photography, you know, but you look back through some of these old
27:27
files, it's like, okay, I can't find any record of who shot it over 50 years old.
27:32
Odds are the person who shot it probably isn't alive.
27:35
You know, Nissan bought the rights at that time and there's no records.
27:40
So we kind of assume, you know, hopefully I don't get anybody in
27:43
trouble by talking about it here.
27:45
But you know, it's kinda like, you know, there's no one who can claim it's theirs.
27:49
And that's kind of how we looked at some of the stuff.
27:51
Actually, here's a funny one, you know, thinking about, 'cause Newman,
27:53
Paul Newman used to race Nissans.
27:55
Nissan Legals, you know, they were really good.
27:57
I mean, I had no problems with 'em, but they were very cautious on things.
28:00
All claims had to be backed up with that.
28:02
If you said it was X horsepower, you better have
28:05
documentation that backed it up.
28:07
You're not gonna inflate anything.
28:08
We did a press release about all the SECA runoff champions
28:12
and Dotson and Nissan product.
28:14
There were like 75 of 'em, and legal asked, do you have permission
28:16
from all 75 people to list their names in the press release?
28:19
And I was like, no.
28:21
You know, some of this.
28:22
I go, I know some of these people aren't alive.
28:24
I went to my boss and said, look, this is history, but you know, the legal
28:28
thing was like, you should be cautious and you don't put someone's name in a
28:31
press release unless you have permission.
28:33
I was like, well, this is racing.
28:34
If we don't put it, they're gonna be insulted.
28:36
And at one point they said, well, you can list everyone except Paul Newman.
28:39
I go, well no, Paul's gonna be pissed if we do that.
28:43
If you notice, I didn't list him as Paul Newman.
28:45
I listed him as PL Newman.
28:46
'cause that's how he raced.
28:47
And as long as we list him as PL Newman, I go, I will stake my reputation on this.
28:51
We will not get in trouble if we omit him.
28:54
We're probably gonna get a nasty note.
28:56
Another one that they airbrushed out a BRE logo on a two 40 Z in an ad, and I
29:02
never saw it for approval or anything.
29:04
Pete Brock called me.
29:05
He was very annoyed, you know, steamed would be better word,
29:10
and it was some junior person.
29:11
It's like, okay, there's a Goodyear sticker on here.
29:13
We got permission from Goodyear to do this, and we got permit, but we
29:16
don't know what BRE is because it was someone who was too young to know.
29:18
And then remove the logo.
29:20
It's like, oh, you shot the credibility of that photo down.
29:23
You know, everybody who knows what they're looking at knows it's missing.
29:26
So, exactly.
29:27
For the folks that are maybe young enough to not remember when the three
29:31
50 Z launched, it's been 18 years since that car hit our shores, right?
29:36
2003 or three 50 Z came out.
29:37
Obviously it was.
29:38
A little bit earlier overseas, things like that.
29:40
But this was also the time when Renault had ushered itself onto the scene.
29:45
Right.
29:45
At Nissan.
29:46
A lot of people don't realize that Renault is behind the scenes at Nissan
29:50
and they share a lot of their technology.
29:51
Mm-hmm.
29:52
And then the folks that do know, say the VQ engine, which is a Renault V six.
29:56
Save the Z. Right.
29:58
Even though it had, it hadn't even launched yet.
29:59
It's like it was the crown jewel of that car and it, and it's kind of funny when we
30:03
look back over 20 years of evolution from the three 70 and now the 400, and we're
30:08
gonna talk about that in a second too.
30:09
I'll have to double check.
30:10
I I will correct it.
30:12
I don't think the engine in the three 50.
30:14
Had anything to do with Renat.
30:16
I think that was a pure Nissan engine.
30:17
You know, Renat obviously stepped in and brought a lot of cost containment
30:22
and they did a lot of things to help steer the ship in the right
30:25
direction in the late nineties, early two thousands over in Japan.
30:28
But I. Pretty certain that is a pure Nissan engine.
30:32
Well, what I wanted to highlight was something interesting that I remember
30:36
about that time period at Nissan, which was when they had announced they
30:40
wanted to do the heritage cars where you could send an old two 40 or two 60.
30:45
Yeah.
30:46
Back to Nissan.
30:47
Yeah.
30:47
Four FP.
30:49
Yeah.
30:49
And get it completely factory rebuilt.
30:51
Now we look at.
30:52
Companies like Singer that are doing that to nine elevens and you
30:55
know, other companies and I'm like, how were you involved in that?
30:58
And correct my history if I'm wrong, but was that a flop or
31:01
was that a success for Nissan?
31:03
I think from a publicity standpoint, a success financially a flop.
31:07
That was right before I joined.
31:09
So what happened when they ended the 300 zx, they still
31:12
wanted to keep some Z alive.
31:13
So they came up with this idea of.
31:15
You could buy a brand new factory rebuilt, two 40 Z Nissans going out
31:19
and buying up old two Fortys, trying to just find ones that were all straight,
31:22
no rust, and they would rebuild them.
31:25
I think there was a little bit of a flaw.
31:26
The joke on this was, you know, they asked someone, you know, would you pay
31:29
$30,000 for a perfectly restored two 40 Z?
31:32
Is that a good price?
31:33
Oh yeah.
31:34
You with a warranty, you know, one year warranty.
31:36
That's great.
31:37
But they didn't buy it because the joke was most of the guys who were restoring
31:40
Zs, let's be honest, it's usually guys, their wife doesn't know how much
31:44
money they're dumping into the car.
31:46
And so he goes, I can spread this restoration over five years.
31:49
My wife doesn't know how much is in it.
31:51
If I spend $30,000 for an old Z, she's gonna divorce me.
31:55
There just wasn't the take.
31:57
It did a lot to show Nissan's commitment to heritage.
32:01
The director of Nissan PR these days is a good friend Dan Pass,
32:05
who he and I have zigzagged.
32:07
He was at Campbell and company managing Motorsports for Ford when
32:11
I was at Ford and then he was at Nissan and he is back at Nissan.
32:15
And so there's guys like Dan and a lot of others who really care about the heritage.
32:18
So the nice thing is, you know, I think Nissan does a lot to preserve it.
32:21
That one just didn't turn out to be economically viable
32:24
because the parts didn't exist.
32:26
So they had to go back and recreate tooling for things like weather stripping.
32:29
And you know, there's a lot of the boring parts that you still need to do.
32:32
If you're gonna make it really proper.
32:34
Rene was good for Nissan.
32:36
Nissan's.
32:36
Good for Rene.
32:37
There's been a lot of change, a lot of progress, a lot of awesome things.
32:40
Even in the racing programs and whatnot.
32:42
I mean, we've seen oddball things like the front wheel drive, Ellen B Car at LeMans.
32:46
Yeah.
32:46
You know, a few years back.
32:47
All sorts of craziness.
32:48
But that's the part about racing that we love is those
32:51
ridiculous, you know, six wheeled.
32:53
Formula Cars and Chaparrals and all these kinds of things.
32:56
Right?
32:57
Here we are 20 some years later, the resurgence of the Z and all
33:01
that and the three 70 was a great evolution, but I wanna get your
33:04
take, let's call it the 400 Z, right?
33:06
The new one that's about to come out.
33:07
Although it, it feels like it keeps getting delayed a little bit and
33:10
I'm really excited to go drive one, but I wanna get your thoughts on it.
33:13
Well, I've seen it.
33:14
I was able to go visit one when, um, friend of mine, Mike Dtz,
33:17
was uh, doing some photography.
33:19
So I got permission from the Nissan folks to go.
33:21
Take a look at it and it looks great.
33:23
So I haven't driven it.
33:24
I think from an aesthetic standpoint, they did a great job.
33:27
So it really looks good.
33:28
It looks good in pictures.
33:30
Some cars photograph really well.
33:32
Don't look right in picture and vice versa.
33:34
Yeah.
33:34
So how does it look in person?
33:36
Is it as good as we think it is?
33:38
I think so.
33:39
I think so.
33:39
I, I think it's a very good looking car.
33:42
I, I would consider buying one, so I'm right there with you on that.
33:45
Yeah.
33:46
And I think that, you know, the Z has such an awesome owner base loyalty.
33:50
I mean, having gone to some of the Z conventions, I think it'll do quite well.
33:54
I think there's people that realize you don't need 800 horsepower
33:57
to have a good time in a car.
33:58
It's more fun to drive a, a slow car fast than a fast car, slow.
34:02
It's more than adequately power, I believe, as all of
34:05
'em have been, the three 50.
34:07
Three 70.
34:08
I also heard there was a bit of tug of war politically introducing the
34:11
new 400 with a manual transmission.
34:14
It's one of the few cars being released in the 20 22, 23 sales
34:19
year with the six speed manual.
34:21
Well, I don't have any, uh, firsthand knowledge of how Nissan came to
34:24
that decision, but I believe.
34:26
Here again, they want it to be viewed as a real sports car.
34:30
And you know, we joke that one of the best ways to weed out the non enthusiasts
34:34
is make 'em drive manual transmission to get, you know, more power to 'em for
34:38
making sure that, you know, the take rate on manual transmission is keeps
34:41
getting lower and lower and depending on where you live, I mean, Los Angeles
34:45
traffic, you know, if you're stuck.
34:47
Using it as a commuter car on the 4 0 5.
34:49
A manual transmission is no fun there.
34:51
If you can get out up to Santa Barbara County or you know, drive up to Ojai
34:55
or something, yeah, it's spectacular.
34:57
But I understand why the take right keeps getting lower and lower.
35:00
It's ab, but true, but you know, more power to Nissan for keeping a
35:03
manual transmission in the new z.
35:06
So let's transition a little bit.
35:07
One of the other things that people don't know about Dean, or maybe they
35:10
do if they know you outside of the motor sports and automotive PR world,
35:14
is that you are big into Formula.
35:17
SAE.
35:18
I know you go around talking to different universities and schools
35:21
and things like that, and so I wanna give you an opportunity to explain to
35:23
our listeners what formula SEE is all about, why it's so important and so on.
35:29
SAE has really been pivotal to my career.
35:33
I mean, when I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the first I showed up, and here
35:37
again, I never even visited the campus before showing up there for freshman year,
35:41
and there was no online research to do.
35:43
All I knew the SAE was, was SAE is the letters on the top of the oil can SAE 20,
35:48
W 50, or you buy SAE grade eight bolts.
35:51
So I kind of knew they, they were something, but I didn't
35:54
really know what it was.
35:55
Until I got to school and discovered SAE Society of Automotive Engineers.
35:59
It's the professional association that automotive engineers belong to.
36:03
You know, a lawyer belongs to the Bar Association, a doctor of
36:06
the American Medical Association.
36:07
Automotive engineers, if they're good, belong to SAE.
36:10
They do a lot of things.
36:11
A lot of it's standards developed on the, like the oil can, you don't have to worry
36:15
if the mobile 10 W 50 is the same as.
36:18
The, uh, Texaco or the Arco or whatever, viscosity is
36:22
measured in the same standard.
36:23
So SAE kinda works out the kinks on things that are neutral.
36:26
Like now with electric vehicles, the charging structure, you don't
36:28
have to worry whether you can plug your volt into the same place, a fee
36:32
at 500 E it's a standard charging plug, except if you're on a Tesla.
36:35
But that's, yeah, I know.
36:36
I don't, I don't, I don't wanna talk about Tesla, but yeah, they
36:40
don't play nice with others.
36:42
With Formula SA and SA bought.
36:44
SA developed these student design competitions and really they're
36:47
to showcase talented students in front of people can hire them.
36:50
And they started out in the seventies.
36:52
The first one was actually sa, Baja, and Briggs and Stratton Wood donating
36:56
eight horsepower lawnmower range.
36:57
Students were making basically dune buggies outta 'em, and
36:59
then some students in Texas.
37:01
In the late seventies said, well, we'd rather race on pavement.
37:03
And that's how formulas SA started.
37:05
Competition grew.
37:06
When I was a student, we did Baja 'cause we couldn't get the
37:09
critical mass to do a formula car.
37:11
And there was only, I think, 15 schools in the country building cars at that time.
37:14
Now there's at least 250 in the US and another three or 400 internationally,
37:20
and these competitions have gone global.
37:22
If you don't have formulas, SA or Baja SA on your resume.
37:26
You almost cannot get an interview with a race team.
37:28
You, you look at Honda performance development for the career thing.
37:30
For an entry-level engineer, they expect to see Formula
37:33
sa or SA Baja on your resume.
37:35
If not, you're four years behind.
37:36
And so it's amazing what this has done to showcase talent in
37:39
front of people can hire them.
37:41
So if you have any, uh, listeners who have anyone in the K through 12 world at
37:45
home, you want to have an amazing career in automotive, please consider picking a
37:50
college as a formal SA or a sa Baja team.
37:53
And even if you're not an engineer.
37:55
The best teams now also recruit business majors and graphic design majors.
37:58
You know, let the engineer design the suspension, don't let 'em pick the
38:01
graphics for the car and get some business majors to help do the business proposal.
38:05
So it has launched hundreds and hundreds of careers, and now we have students
38:10
who go straight from formula, SAE.
38:12
They're working for Formula One teams, IndyCar teams, nascar, as well
38:17
as obviously the major automakers, whether it's BMW, Toyota, Ford, Honda,
38:22
they all recruit from these events.
38:24
And the events themselves are akin to an autocross, if I remember correctly.
38:28
They're basically a three day event.
38:30
And the first day is the static events where they do the design presentation.
38:33
'cause ultimately we wanna say, how did you engineer the car?
38:36
Tell us about the engineering of the vehicle.
38:38
And they have to do a business presentation.
38:39
'cause it's not just.
38:40
Can you build a one-off prototype?
38:42
You're supposed to build a prototype of something that could be put into
38:45
low volume production because that's what's more important to industry.
38:48
And then we have this, also the safety checks.
38:50
We make sure that the brakes work and all this before we put 'em on the track.
38:53
The second day is the preliminary events, which is an autocross
38:57
acceleration runs skid pad.
38:59
And then the third day is the endurance event.
39:01
And the endurance event for formulas run like a solo event.
39:05
We will have multiple cars on track with designated passing zones.
39:08
'cause you know, with experimental student vehicles that have a pretty surprisingly
39:12
high powered weight ratio, and these cars will weigh under 400 pounds.
39:16
Be putting out, uh, close to a hundred horsepower.
39:18
So power to white ratio is really strong.
39:21
Uh, on the Baja one, it's kind of more exciting.
39:23
I think they'll put all the cars on like a motocross track at once for four hours.
39:27
Then you really see what breaks on the car and can the
39:30
students, uh, repair it in time.
39:32
But it, it is been an exceptionally, uh, good thing, the launch career.
39:35
So I've been doing a lot of my work.
39:37
I go and speak at universities and I talk to 'em about, you've killed
39:40
your GPA by working on this project.
39:42
So now let me help you figure out how you get a job out of it so you
39:44
don't end up graduating unemployed.
39:46
A few weeks back we talked to your current boss, Greg Gi.
39:50
About the history of SRO and SRO America and and plans for the
39:54
program, but obviously you guys have a longstanding connection.
39:58
He mentioned he's known you for a couple decades now, and I wanna know how you
40:02
ended up at SRO, but also talk about what your plans are for SRO America and the
40:06
program, the brand, where things going.
40:09
Greg and I first met when he was a magazine publisher and we
40:13
were launching nmo, I believe.
40:15
And I met Greg 'cause he was, had a magazine called Tuner Performance Reports.
40:19
They were a very serious magazine that they didn't just say, these chrome
40:23
bits will make your car look good.
40:24
It's like, no.
40:24
We put it on the dyno and decide whether it actually increase the power
40:28
or put it on a skid pad and see if it improved the handling of the car.
40:31
So I got to know Greg as a publisher, and here again, if you get into the world
40:34
of motor sports or automotive, you find that you see a lot of the same people.
40:38
And so I would.
40:39
Reconnect with Greg every couple years.
40:41
He was the publisher of Racer for a short while, which was just literally down the
40:45
street from Mazda r and d. And so when we were having our, uh, media events at Mazda
40:50
Motorsports, we'd have Greg down there.
40:52
So he and I have run into each other many, many times over the years.
40:55
Jim Jordan was my compadre at Mazda.
40:58
He's working on the touring car side of SRO, and so a lot of it was just.
41:02
They wanted a little bit of help and asked if I was available, and part of
41:05
it was just, I'd been out of motorsports for a couple years, but it's like, I
41:08
like Greg, I like Jim, I like some of the people in the paddock, but I actually
41:12
out now have a new learning curve myself.
41:14
Uh, getting up to speed and, you know, SROA lot of it's just as a
41:17
sport, we always have this challenge.
41:19
Sponsors kind of come and go, names change, and hey, whatever
41:22
happens that Speed World Challenge, well, speed TV doesn't exist.
41:25
It became Pelli World Challenge.
41:27
And then, you know, SRO stepped in.
41:29
The series that existed for 30 years, but we have to kind of educate it.
41:33
But the reality now, we have to look at this from the standpoint of what the
41:36
internet and TV has done to our sport.
41:39
Now, TV has helped grow the sport, but also a lot of times people
41:42
say, well, why do I only go to the event when I can watch it on tv?
41:46
The internet has kind of blown away a lot of the print
41:50
publications that used to cover it.
41:51
As a kid, I used to subscribe to Autoweek and Autosport, and you couldn't wait
41:55
to read the Pete Lyons F1 report.
41:57
It'd be like 12 pages long because even though it was like six weeks
42:00
later, that was the first you knew what happened at that race.
42:04
Now you're watching it live or you got it online and read it.
42:08
So a lot of that's disappeared.
42:09
So.
42:10
A lot of what I plan working on is a lot of the feature stories, the interesting
42:14
people in the paddock and the cars that I don't expect a journalist to come out to
42:19
an SRO weekend and write a race report.
42:21
You know, these were the four races I saw on this day and here's who won.
42:25
No, that's just not gonna happen.
42:26
Everyone wanted to know that, watched it on the, the YouTube
42:29
stream, but they might wanna know.
42:31
Wow, that's a really interesting car.
42:34
I wanna know more about that.
42:35
What I'm gonna focus on is trying to go after a lot of target
42:39
audiences, including SAE groups.
42:40
I mean, I wanna try to work with some of the SAE students, come out to the
42:43
racetrack, bring your formula car, help promote some ticket sales for
42:46
us, and you know, we'll have a lot of people in the paddock coming by,
42:50
offer you words of encouragement.
42:51
Looking at some of the more of automotive press.
42:54
'cause one thing I learned back when I was doing the Mazda stuff, 2006 and 2007,
43:00
is if you wanna stereotype a little bit.
43:01
If you walked into Road America, you got a bunch of hardcore motorsport
43:06
journalists there at the time who may or may not even knew what we
43:09
were selling in the dealership.
43:10
You go to the New York Auto Show, you got some of the smartest
43:13
business riders in the business.
43:14
You guys still race that, uh, RX seven GTU car in imsa.
43:18
It's like, well, you know, they don't follow it.
43:20
So trying to educate the motoring press on what we race and why we race
43:24
and the motor sports press on the cars that these things are based off
43:27
of and why it's important to race.
43:29
That's a lot of emphasis here.
43:31
'cause the nice thing about the SRO paddock, it's wide open.
43:35
So you know when you buy a general admission ticket, you
43:37
can go in and look at the cars.
43:38
There's no restrictions on that.
43:40
We had some amazing tracks.
43:41
This year.
43:42
I'm really looking forward.
43:43
I got two new tracks I've never been to, which is rare.
43:46
The new one at Ozarks, which if you look at the photos, looks like a spectacular
43:50
facility, serious elevation change, and then the Nashville Grand Prix.
43:54
So I'll get to reconnect with my old Nissan buddies when I'm in Nashville.
43:57
One of the things that we didn't ask Greg about on the episode we did with
44:01
him, and because I saved it for this particular episode, because it's more
44:04
your area of expertise, which is.
44:06
What's the vibe like at an SRO event?
44:10
Some of us are used to going to NASCAR events, or IndyCar or Formula
44:13
One or even, you know, INSA events.
44:15
What's it like when you go to an SRO event?
44:17
What's the expectation?
44:18
As a spectator, you are not gonna be locked into a grandstand like a most
44:22
nascar, you know, it's a different animal.
44:24
I don't want to dis NASCAR, IndyCar or anybody else.
44:27
We're our own product.
44:28
But the nice thing is, I think the key word is accessibility.
44:31
If you're at a natural terrain racetrack, I mean, road America is just a
44:35
beautiful racetrack to see anything run.
44:37
Anybody who lives within four hours of Road America should add
44:41
that onto their bucket list to go.
44:42
If they haven't been vi R's a gorgeous track, Watkins Glen.
44:46
It's one of those things you can say, since it won't be a
44:48
hundred thousand people there.
44:49
You can drive around a little bit, walk around, you know, watch
44:53
from a couple different terms.
44:54
You can enjoy different aspects of spectating.
44:57
And the nice thing is if you go into the paddock area and ask
45:00
questions about the car, most of the crew guys love to talk about.
45:04
So I would say accessibility.
45:06
There's certain other forms of the sport that has a
45:08
perception of his accessibility.
45:11
But it is really true in sports, car racing in general, and SRO in particular.
45:16
So if you're accustomed to an INSA race, like let's say going to
45:19
Petite LeMans or the sale mm-hmm.
45:21
Up at, at Watkins Glen, is there the same sort of, let's call it circus,
45:25
that you would come to expect at an INSA race where you've got the
45:28
booths and the vendors and the schwa and all that kind of stuff as well?
45:31
Not nearly as much.
45:32
Honestly.
45:33
It's a different business model, you know.
45:35
You know, we hope to grow the spectators.
45:37
We are looking at how do we get some targeted people in there.
45:39
You know, a lot of it is getting more car corrals, get a Ferrari car
45:43
corral, we've got Ferrari racing, get all Lamborghini car corral.
45:46
'cause a lot of that that we can do at a much more affordable rate for folks
45:50
than like an IMSA race at Petite Lama is a fabulous event, you know, and it is
45:54
crowded and so it draws that, you know, we have a different product, predominantly
45:59
sprint races except for the, you know, the indie, where we get the intercontinental
46:02
GT and they're coming over.
46:04
I would just tell people, look at the calendar, look at the
46:07
map, and come and experience it.
46:09
I think you'll have a really great time.
46:11
And also with the touring cars, there's that aspect of it.
46:14
The SRO, TC America Powered by Skip Barber Racing School.
46:18
There's no less expensive way to get.
46:20
Into professional racing.
46:22
And if you were to go take a Skip Barber class, no racing's cheap there.
46:25
There's gonna be expenses.
46:27
And you know, key is you don't ever quimp on your safety equipment.
46:30
You know, I think Bell used to have that slogan decades ago.
46:33
If you have a $10 head, buy a $10 helmet, uh, stay in a cheap motel, but
46:37
buy the best safety equipment you can.
46:39
But if you could do something like with Skip Barber.
46:42
You could run some of their school races and then graduate and you could
46:45
run a full-blown TC America weekend on a pro weekend, which is pretty cool.
46:50
So that's something also that is, uh, unique to SRO and that's something
46:55
else that people may not realize.
46:56
It lays out similarly to other multi-class racing.
47:01
Programs.
47:01
It's a full day schedule.
47:03
There's racing going on all day.
47:04
So even though it's sprint racing, it's different classes.
47:07
Yeah.
47:08
And the track is busy all day long, so there's something for everybody to watch.
47:12
Yeah.
47:12
Most of our race weekends, we will have four different classes, three different
47:16
GT CL races, and a 200 car race.
47:18
And each one's a double header, so there's gonna be four races on Saturday.
47:21
Four races on a Sunday, on a typical weekend.
47:24
So let me ask you this other question, which we talked about with
47:27
Greg, and that was in the guise of balance of power and this and that.
47:31
But you, with your background in EVs, I wanna get your take on the
47:35
evolution and how SRO America is gonna maybe in the future, adopt
47:41
EVs into the GT Racing series.
47:43
What do you think about that?
47:44
I honestly don't.
47:45
I think they are looking very seriously at it.
47:48
I'm so new to the organization, I don't know.
47:50
What SRO brings to the table is looking at this not just from a US
47:54
perspective, but a global perspective.
47:55
And one of the things is, it is nice is if you buy whatever Porsche, Toyota,
48:00
supra, whatever, you know you're gonna run in GT three or GT four.
48:04
You know that if you're racing with SRO, that same car will not have to
48:07
be modified if you sell it abroad.
48:10
One of the other markets.
48:11
You've helped ensure the value of the car.
48:14
So SROs, adamantly looking at electrification, what makes
48:17
sense, but they're looking at it from a big global perspective.
48:20
I honestly don't know where we stand right now.
48:22
I, you know, my first race week was at St. Pete and we only
48:25
had the, uh, GT America class.
48:27
So I'm getting ready for Sonoma and, uh, I'll know a lot more if
48:30
I come back future visit, but I know that SRO is looking at it.
48:34
Everyone's looking at electrification.
48:36
It does lend itself quite well to sprint races.
48:39
You know, the reality is you still can't put as much energy density into a
48:43
battery as you can, a gallon of gasoline.
48:46
Going back to the nineties, my Ford experience, we had a ranger
48:49
that had a 50 mile range and the battery weighed almost two.
48:53
Thousand pounds.
48:54
'cause battery technology back then was really, really bad.
48:57
And compared to all you would need would be 20 pounds of
48:59
gasoline go that same range.
49:01
Batteries are still not on the level of energy density as gasoline.
49:05
So, you know, we gotta figure out where we don't look stupid.
49:08
I mean, I was not a fan of Formula E when they were switching
49:11
cars halfway through the.
49:13
What message are we telling people?
49:14
You need two cars to do the job of one.
49:16
What was interesting in Formula E, I went to the two races at Long Beach
49:20
and it was bringing out new fan people who probably would not have gone to
49:24
the regular IndyCar race at Long Beach.
49:26
And if you look at things like Formula D. That's expanding
49:30
the footprint of motor sports.
49:31
I don't know, uh, what's gonna happen, but, you know, it's nice to
49:34
see a lot of growth in other areas.
49:36
You know, formula D has brought new fans and younger, more
49:39
diverse fan base into the sport.
49:41
So hopefully some of them will come to some SRO races.
49:43
You know, formula E is, you know, you could bring young kids not
49:46
worry about their ears getting blasted out at a Formula E event.
49:49
So normally we would ask people, you know, about the evolution and
49:53
you know, what would be missing for promoters sport if EVs came.
49:55
But I think I wanna ask you a different question, which is.
49:58
With your background in EVs, if you could pick one EV today to run against,
50:02
you know, the classics, the Ferraris, the Corvettes, and the Porsches,
50:05
let's say all things being equal, balance, power is all taken care of.
50:08
What brand would you like to see come to the checkered flag as an ev?
50:13
Right now I have to look at Porsche.
50:15
I live right by the Porsche Experience Center here in LA and it's like, it's
50:18
interesting how many of the classes they're teaching in the electrics there.
50:21
So I mean, they're really putting an emphasis.
50:24
On the performance of Porsche electric vehicles.
50:26
So that's pretty impressive.
50:28
So I could easily see that.
50:29
That's a good choice.
50:30
That's a solid choice.
50:31
I mean, and, and Porsche has a long pedigree in, in racing, so
50:34
it only makes sense that they continue to carry that torch.
50:37
Right.
50:38
As we kind of wrap up here, Dean, I wanna ask you what other super
50:41
cool things maybe in the automotive sphere do we not know about?
50:46
Case, uh, my obsession with weird car songs.
50:50
Is that what you're getting at there?
50:52
I, I'm, so, let's go.
50:54
I, um, I used to make these mix tapes for my friends at Mazda back in the
50:58
eighties, and the first year is like, okay, you put all the obvious ones, little
51:01
deuce coop, shut down, 4 0 9, all that.
51:04
Then I just started getting more and more obscure and
51:07
finding just really wild things.
51:09
And people were asking you, you should sell these.
51:11
I go, no, I'm already in the gray area, giving 'em away to friends, you
51:14
know, a mixtape, I can't sell them.
51:16
That would be a copyright violation.
51:17
And then in, um, 97 when I was at Ford, I had a friend who's a musician, Christie
51:22
Callen, whose band was Wednesday week, and I knew she knew the folks over at Rhino.
51:26
And I asked Christie, I go, do you know the folks at Rhino?
51:29
And she goes, yeah, I know the VP of, uh, a and r. I go, can
51:32
I get an introduction to him?
51:34
And so I, uh, called and said, I'm Dean Case at Ford.
51:37
'cause I was hoping to do a Mustang CD to celebrate the championship.
51:41
And so I left a message for, uh, the VP of a and r at Rhino Records.
51:45
And like an hour later, this guy James Austin calls me, Gary Stewart
51:49
said to call you right away.
51:50
You had a good idea.
51:50
It's like, okay.
51:52
And um.
51:53
I told him what I was thinking of.
51:54
I sent him some of these tapes I'd made before.
51:56
He goes, these are great.
51:57
We should do this.
51:58
Turned out we Ford.
51:59
We didn't have the budget to do that for the championship
52:02
celebration when it launched, you bought a, this was a 99 Mustang.
52:07
It was right after I left.
52:08
There was a 35th anniversary, three CD box set that came with the car.
52:13
It was the epitome of don't let music be done by committee.
52:16
They took out all the car songs and just made it like a 60 seventies,
52:20
eighties greatest hits package.
52:21
But James said, you're gonna hate what Ford did, but we're
52:24
gonna do this as a Rhino thing.
52:26
So they went ahead and produced a uh, four CD box that I was the
52:29
associate producer on called Hot Rod Hits and Cruising Classics.
52:33
It came out in 99.
52:34
We got nominated for a Grammy for Best box set.
52:36
That's awesome.
52:36
87 car songs.
52:37
But so I like to find the really obscure ones.
52:40
Like, did you know there was a car song about gremlin?
52:42
In my gremlin.
52:43
No, I didn't.
52:44
My my bloody Hugo.
52:46
That's gotta be a good one.
52:48
Yeah.
52:48
I kill for a green Miata by the gutter sluts.
52:53
That's awesome.
52:54
So I got a whole bunch of these.
52:56
I remember at the DC auto show years ago when Scion, you know, the division
53:01
of Toyota that they were rebranding for the young kids was coming on the scene.
53:05
They used to do this.
53:05
Thing called the Scion Mix and they were giving out CDs at all the auto shows like
53:09
Baltimore and DC and things like that.
53:11
And so I'm wondering if again, you know, by proxy Dean, you have influenced
53:16
the automotive world yet again to create I've a, these mix tapes.
53:19
I've got a bunch of those.
53:21
I do too.
53:21
I have a small collection of 'em as well.
53:23
Well actually I think I did have an influence.
53:25
A friend of mine at General Motors asked me to make a mix tape 'cause he wanted
53:28
to show GM management about car songs and the fact that, you know, there's
53:33
so many car songs about General Motors.
53:35
Particularly Cadillac and Chevrolet, but I found ones for Pontiac and Buick
53:39
and Oldsmobile and everything else.
53:40
So I did this mix tape for gm and a couple years later they did an ad
53:45
that I think may have been indirectly inspired by what I had sent them.
53:48
The funny one is they also, GM did a um, poster that says they
53:51
don't write songs about Volvo.
53:54
With a Corvette.
53:55
It was like, bullshit.
53:56
I've got four Volvo songs.
53:59
You know what, Dean, it would've been awesome if you had been on an
54:02
earlier episode of Break Fix called Cruising at the Speed of Sound.
54:06
I think we could have used your opinion when we're reviewed all of
54:09
these car adjacent songs and whatnot.
54:12
So maybe next time, maybe we'll have to do a reprisal of that and bring you
54:14
back on as a subject matter expert.
54:16
Oh, that'd be good.
54:17
I, uh, here's one, have you listened to Mark LERs?
54:19
The car was the one.
54:21
I guess it's on my list on Spotify now.
54:23
I'm gonna have to ask.
54:23
You gotta listen to that.
54:24
And what was amazing is the backstory.
54:27
I listened to the song and I was like, wow.
54:29
And so I read the liner notes and that's why I love still buying CDs because you
54:33
don't get liner notes with streaming.
54:34
He was inspired by Mark.
54:36
Donahue's book The Unfair Advantage.
54:38
Ooh, that's a good one.
54:39
Yeah, that's a deep cut.
54:41
All these fun things that we get into in what we call the car adjacent world.
54:45
And so, you know, speaking of that, Dean, I wanna give you the opportunity now.
54:49
Any shout outs, promotions, anything else you'd like to share that we didn't cover?
54:53
Probably some of the best stuff I ever did from a PR standpoint was we were promoting
54:57
shelter animal adoptions on race cars.
54:59
And we did a lot of work with SPCA from Monterey County, which.
55:03
Anyone knows, uh, Laguna Seka Raceway directly across the street.
55:07
Driveway to driveway is the SPCA for Monterey County.
55:09
So we would do just shameless promotions.
55:12
We would have bf Good Kitty or per Ellie and stuff, and we'd name
55:16
animals after the drivers and stuff.
55:18
So Jay Ato and Robert Davis at Mazda were very supportive of this and we
55:22
managed to donate quite a bit of money to the shelter and do some fun there.
55:26
We even did one when we had the Playboy MX five cup.
55:28
We had bunnies helping bunnies, so we were promoting bunny
55:31
adoptions with Playboy playmates.
55:33
That was fun.
55:34
And then another one I would, uh, give a shout out to another
55:37
project we did was, uh, distracted Driver Awareness Project Eloi.
55:40
If you got.
55:41
Anybody in your audience who's in high school or college
55:45
have any graphic arts thing?
55:46
Project yellow light.org.
55:47
I'll send you the links on this.
55:49
They could win a scholarship if they could produce a 25 second video or radio.
55:53
PSA on distracted driver awareness.
55:55
So we were working with some of our young drivers to get them to promote
55:58
the teenager doesn't wanna hear me now.
56:00
I'm 59, I guess now.
56:02
Tell 'em to put the phone down, but they'll listen to someone
56:04
who's an aspiring race driver.
56:06
And it also gives the race driver an opportunity to do
56:09
some good in the community.
56:10
If you're racing in Formula 2000 or something, you can call up the local TV
56:14
station in wherever, Albuquerque or El Paso or whoever you might be from, and
56:19
say, I'm in the next Joseph New Garden.
56:21
Sadly, they're gonna probably say who and then say, why do I care?
56:23
But if you say, I'm a teenage race driver and I'm saving.
56:26
Lives on the highway.
56:28
Really, how you doing that?
56:29
So it gives a, a, a launch point to talk about what they're doing.
56:32
They have the credentials to talk about that safety.
56:34
So that's just something that, uh, has been kind of a passion project.
56:38
And I worked on that with, uh, Julie Garner from Project Yellow Light,
56:41
and we're hoping to reactivate that with, uh, SRO this year.
56:44
So folks, Dean has remarked that the only topics he's somewhat qualified
56:48
to talk about are cars, motor sports, animal welfare, and his strange
56:53
obsession with music related to cars.
56:55
So if you're into that, you can follow him on social at.
56:58
You can find me on Facebook or LinkedIn and be sure to check out all the changes
57:03
coming to our favorite touring car series, SRO America, sponsored by AWS,
57:08
and CrowdStrike coming very, very soon.
57:11
And thanks in part.
57:12
To Dean's hard work now that he's on board at SRO.
57:15
So congrats on the new gig and best of luck in this 22 and 23 season and we
57:20
look forward to some more epic stories.
57:22
Thank you.
57:23
Cool.
57:23
I think that's it then.
57:24
Okay.
57:24
Thank you.
57:29
The following episode is brought to you by SRO Motorsports America and their
57:33
partners at AWS CrowdStrike, Fantech Pelli, and the Skip Barber Racing School.
57:40
Be sure to follow all the racing action by visiting www.sromotorsports.com or
57:47
take a shortcut to GT America us and be sure to follow them on social at
57:53
GT America, on Twitter and Instagram at SRO GT America on Facebook.
57:59
Catch live coverage of the races on their YouTube channel at GT World.
58:04
If you like what you've heard and want to learn more about gtm, be sure to
58:07
check us out on www.gt motorsports.org.
58:11
You can also find us on Instagram at grantor Motorsports.
58:14
Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, you can call
58:19
or text us at (202) 630-1770 or send us an email at crew chief@gtmotorsports.org.
58:27
We'd love to hear from you.
58:29
Hey everybody, crew Chief Eric here.
58:31
We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted
58:34
to remind you that GTM remains a no annual fees organization, and our goal
58:40
is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge.
58:45
As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon
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58:53
For as little as $2 and 50 cents a month, you can keep our developers,
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59:05
Consider signing up for Patreon today at www.patreon.com/gt motorsports.
59:12
And remember, without fans, supporters, and members like you,
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