Fuelin’ Around with Deadly Driver’s J.K.Kelly

J.K. Kelly - Author for JK Kelly Books

Author James Patterson gave JK some sound advice, “Give readers what they want,” and since his debut novel through to his latest, SPY DRIVER, he has striven to do just that.

Contact: J.K. Kelly at Visit Online!

           

• Recorded ON-SITE at the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing in York Springs, PA
• Normally we would start a Break/Fix episode by asking people for their superhero origin story, the who/what/where/when and how they came to be the petrol-head that they are. But in your case, much of that is outlined in your first book “Fuelin’ Around” – so let’s rewind the clock a bit, and talk about your passion for cars. Was there something as a kid that got you interested? Did you come from a racing family? Was going to racing events a past-time? Was there a particular car that imprinted on you and attracted you to this world?
• You went to Penn State for journalism, at that time, what were your career goals? How did you end up on the other side of the fence, finding yourself involved in photographing and writing about race teams? The journey from photography/journalism to VP Fuels 
• Let’s talk more about writing a book as compared to journalism. Many people say “I’d love to write a book” but it all becomes very real when you sit down at the screen and start a journey of 85,000 words.
• I’ve read Deadly Driver, it’s an arrive & drive, jump in, strap down and go! type of read. You’re thrown directly into the action on Page 1. Lots of fun and a great introduction to the world of Motorsports, especially Formula 1. It comes at a great time because of all the hype and interest surrounding shows like Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” 
• Why Formula 1? Are you an F1 fan? Let’s talk about Bryce a bit – people might be thinking, how plausible is a F1 driver + Super Spy combo?
• Throughout the book there are tons of twists and turns which keeps the reader waiting for the next apex… but there’s also many nods to VP fuels and others throughout the story, some obvious, others not so much.
• The flow of the book grabs you right away, the first 3 chapters really set the stage and then about every other chapter for the next 12 or so, you interleave the exposition in there as flashbacks. It reminds me of how TV shows can easily do that to keep us engaged. Could you see Deadly Driver moving into a screenplay? 

and much, much more!

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] BreakFix podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from all over the autosphere, from wrench turners and racers to artists, authors, designers, and everything in between. Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrolheads that wonder How did they get that job or become that person?

The road to success is paved by all of us because everyone has a story.

Crew Chief Eric: While studying journalism at Penn state university, our guests traveled to auto races on the weekends where he took photos. He was able to sell to racing magazines. One of his editors suggested you’re taking the pictures. So write the feature stories that go with them.

After a stint with the Darryl Woltrip Gatorade number 88 NASCAR team, he spent the next 30 years traveling the world for VP racing fuels. But that passion for writing never left him. Following the advice of James Patterson, who said, give the readers what they [00:01:00] want, six novels later from his debut title found in time to his accounts on the road with VP in fuel and around through his latest thriller, deadly driver, author, JK Kelly has striven to do just that.

And we want to welcome JK to break, fix to share his story. And we’re here on site with him at the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing in York Springs, not far from where he lives. So he can share his story with us. So welcome to the show, JK.

J.K. Kelly: Hi, Eric. How are you?

Crew Chief Eric: So normally we would start a break, fix episode by asking people for their superhero origin story, the who, what, where, when, and how they came into the petrolhead world, what they’re all about.

But in your case, most of that is outlined in your book, Fueling Around. So let’s rewind the clock a bit. Talk about your passion for cars.

J.K. Kelly: It’s an interesting story for me, hopefully for other people too. I grew up in a funeral home. Not many people know that. And not many people can brag or boast or shabbily say that’s what happened.

But for me, I grew up in a funeral home, had all the strange [00:02:00] occurrences that everybody would always ask me about. What’s it like growing up there, et cetera, et cetera. But for me, the beauty of it was as I got older and I got into cars, I realized that what we had sitting in our garage were a couple big block Cadillac Hurses and Limousines.

Once I got my license, my job was to keep the cars clean, fueled up, ready to go. A lot of it was during one of the gas crises back in the day, so I’d always be sitting in the gas line with everybody else, sitting there idling with a big ol Cadillac Hurse. Then all of a sudden I found myself doing a little drag racing, street racing at night.

In the hearse? In the hearse, in the hearse. The beauty of it was, you know, as I got my license, I now could do a lot of good things where I would use the limousine, meet girls, pick up girls, they’d pull, they’d drive around, add a limo. So I’d use the limo for one thing and I’d have the hearse for racing.

And it wasn’t until a friend of the family, A local police officer caught me speeding. He said, you better tell your dad or I’m going to. So I did. My father said, look, two things. Take the name off the side of the hearse. We don’t need that name. Lights or red lights and crashing and doing any of that other stuff.

And also we don’t need any of the [00:03:00] bad negatives out from that. Just be safe. So I realized I can’t be tolling around in those. A couple of us thought that getting a 1973, 74 Plymouth Fury, old state police car, Pennsylvania, they had the four forties. Dual exhaust, they were badass as far as we were concerned.

Thought about buying one of those, and instead, talked my father into, Cato and Moisey’s station wagon, right? Limited, he bought that. All of a sudden, the two barrel was gone. New intake for metal rock, four barrel carburetor, dual exhaust, et cetera, et cetera. That opportunity afforded me a lot of cool things to do with cars.

But the beauty of this was, I got a side job working at Upper Darby High School after hours as a janitor. Met all these other guys, same mindset as I, and in time, they started taking me to races. Go to the NHRA race in Englishtown, New Jersey. I went to the NASCAR race at Pocono. And once I got to those, I fell for the sport.

Just fell in love with it. My original passion for law enforcement got shot in the head because I found that my eyes would not pass any of the eye tests. [00:04:00] We had friends at the FBI Academy. We had friends, police forces, etc., etc. To the funeral home, bottom line was, if your eyes can’t pass the test, there’s nothing we can do about it.

I always was into storytelling. I loved telling stories. I shifted from a law enforcement major to journalism major. That’s where you picked up getting, I wound up going to races, taking pictures as a hobby, and someone said, no, the photos are really good. Probably sell them. So I sent them a super stock magazine.

They said, yeah, we’ll buy two or three of those. And before you know it, they were giving me connections to go to the races. That’s when the one editor said, you know how to write, so write the stories that go along with it. That just played out. I was going to the races, doing what I did. But then I realized that freelancing is not going to pay the bills.

I fell in love with NASCAR, as I had said. My dream job would be to work in NASCAR. So I decided while I needed to get a full time job, I called Charlotte Motor Speedway. I said, are you hiring anybody in your PR, communications office? And they said, no. The key question that came up next was, [00:05:00] You know, anybody that is, and they said, we think Dygart is give them a call called Dygart.

Three days later, I was on a plane, flew down to Charlotte, had the interview. They were one of the first incursions of Yankees into the South Gardner brothers were from Connecticut. They actually started using Bill Grumpy Jenkins power to qualify at Daytona and do some other things. Another Yankee from where I run from in that area.

And they brought another Yankee in as their PR guy and I was there for a year, learned a lot. Went to 34, 35 races. Had a great time. And right at the end of that first year, Waltrip and the Gardeners were having a fight. He wanted to change his contract or he wanted out. It got weird in the shop. Some of the guys were pro Darryl.

Some of the guys were pro owner. That time, my wife decided I don’t like Charlotte. I miss home. Both my parents encountered cancer and said, we need your help opportunity or a sense of duty caused me to move back home, work in the funeral business for a little while. After a time, my [00:06:00] parents both passed away.

We’ve got this fight of VP racing fields for you, brand new company blood a few years old, and they asked me to run the office. It’s based in Chester quasi. Look that over and it’s thirty years.

Crew Chief Eric: So let’s pause there a second. Let’s go back a little bit, though. We ask our guests all the time. Did you come from a racing family?

Obviously you didn’t grew up in workshop. Funeral directors, whatnot. For many of us, when we were younger, we imprint on a certain car. I don’t want to say that the purse was the car that got you excited to go to the track and go to racing. Was there some sort of sports car? Was there something out there that you like, Oh my God, that’s the most beautiful car in the world.

J.K. Kelly: At the time I really fell for the Dodge Charger. I was very impressed with Richard Petty’s career. The first time I saw that car, person not on TV, that dig little orange that they had in the car, Petty blue, his track record, his performance, the king of the [00:07:00] sports, so to speak. And I was just totally impressed with that.

So I went out and bought a Dodge Charger too. From there, which sent me to the racing fuel end of things. Well, Englishtown. I had never seen a nitro funny car before. Jungle Jim Lieberman, who was from Pennsylvania, very close to where I grew up as well. He was there, Bruce Larson was there, all the local Pennsylvania heroes were there.

All the touring guys were there. Once they let a nitro car, I was done. Didn’t matter to me what car it was, just the nitro just got me going. Oval track racing, the sound, the smell, the excitement. It was, it was a three ring circus and I fell for it.

Crew Chief Eric: They often say that you only need to see something about seven times before it really sticks in your memory.

So back then, Richard Petty, sponsored by STP for almost forever, another fuel company, I think that was subliminal messaging, or maybe some sort of serendipity carrying you to VP.

J.K. Kelly: No, it’s interesting you say that though, because the VP logo, if you really look at it, if you take the outcroppings of the V and the P, cut them out, it looks like an oval shaped STP logo, the red, [00:08:00] white, and blue of the logo.

I don’t think at the time, I don’t know what was imprinted where, but after I left VP, I’ve still worked with them as a consultant for many years. And two years ago, they asked me to write 50 year history of the company. Company turns 50 in 2025. Interviewing the founder, who I knew very, very well for years, we talked about Where the logo came from, where the name came from, et cetera, et cetera.

So I don’t know about STP being a credit in my head, but I do remember in elementary school, somebody said, if you send STP, self addressed stamped envelope, they will mail you two STP decals. So everybody in the school did that. At the time Andy Granatelli was sponsoring the IndyCars. Everybody was watching wide world sports and the Indy 500.

And I could tell you that our school was blasted with STP logos. They were everywhere. 30, 40 years later, here I am making sure that the DP logo, similar logo is plastered everywhere in the world. We wanted to put it in front of anybody and everybody. Get it on as many race cars, get the fuel in as many cars, make the company famous.[00:09:00]

That’s what we did.

Crew Chief Eric: Let’s talk about your early days at VP. Now there’s many people out there that are familiar with the VP logo. We’re talking about logos and to your point, it’s everywhere. I mean, I personally have 12 VP cans in my own garage, different colors and styles, whatnot. Let’s start from the basics, kind of twofold.

A, what does VP stand for? But B. You went from journalist to now being in fuel industry. What was that transition like? And what did you do when you first got there?

J.K. Kelly: The question about what the VP logo stands for, what the name stands for. It came from volatile products. That was what Burns came up with many, many years ago, back in 1975 in San Antonio.

They actually named volatile products here on the very first design. Then after that. Company name was actually VP hydrocarbons. That was on the logo as well. And in time we removed that again. Here we are. As far as the transition from journalism to racing fuel, pretty drastic jump. That’s really a tough one.

I’ve always had an investigative mindset and that’s where the wanting to go into law enforcement came from. I didn’t want to be a beat cop and no [00:10:00] disrespect to those guys, but I wanted to go after white collar criminals. That was more of my interest. When I found out I couldn’t be in law enforcement. On that side of it, journalism gave me the opportunity to become an investigative journalist.

That’s where my mind went. I was so excited and so thrilled to be around racing. I really did put that off to the side. So once I got an opportunity to not so much leave the investigative journalism behind, because I did enjoy doing some stories, once I got to be in the circus, to be a part of it and not just sit in the grandstands, but to be.

delivering fuel and talking to Jungle Jim Lieberman or John Force or going out to Kruppy Jenkins shop in Malvern, Pennsylvania, shitting the brakes with him for a little while and sitting there while I did some dino pulls. That was cool. That was the coolest thing you could do. And at the time, what I found also was trying to find people to come and work with us.

It was so easy. If you told somebody who might have been a truck driver or a secretary or a warehouse worker, you get the opportunity to go to races on weekends, you get an opportunity to meet all these [00:11:00] different famous people. They just gravitated to it. At any given time at the VP Warehouse, whether it was in Chester or in the new facility we built in Newark, Delaware, you could have a pro circuit rig coming in to pick up fuel before they were heading to Southwick.

You can have a road racing team coming in that was headed for testing down at Summit Point or Daytona or wherever they might be going. It was just a cool environment to be in. So you wrote

Crew Chief Eric: Fuelin Around before you left, right?

J.K. Kelly: I wrote Fuelin Around after I retired. There was an ownership change. I just saw that as an opportunity to, it’s like I’d been a Philadelphia Eagle all my life, and the transition to what, to be a Dallas Cowboy was not necessarily in my mindset, it’s not in my blood, so to speak.

My daughter had just gotten pregnant with her first child, she had her hands full in need of my help. My wife had had some health problems, and it really curtailed some of the things we were doing. And so all the stars aligned for me the same way they did that day. I called Charlotte motor speedway decades before and said, no, anybody that’s hiring.

I think fate just said, it’s time for you to do something different. [00:12:00] So I was still able to maintain my relationship with VP as a consultant. It gave me the full time opportunity to work with my daughter. Help my wife as well. And then everybody says, well, you’re retired. What are you going to do? Play golf.

I have no time for that stuff at all. So I just said, you know what? I want to get back to writing for, you know, six months later, my first novel was cracked out, found in time. And then everybody had said. You know, such an interesting life, had a great time. We want to know more about it. So I thought it was a perfect opportunity to write a book about what I’d done.

Crew Chief Eric: Was there some events or something that happened at VP that inspire you to write Fueling Around or what is Fueling Around really based on somebody’s trying to figure it out for the first time and wants to pick it up and read it?

J.K. Kelly: In one sense, I had told people that are interested in the business side of things.

It shows people how we took a very, very small company, a company that only had about eight or nine employees when I started there. So where it is today, where it’s a global entity, there’s some business lessons in there on how to approach things, how to attack people, how to do a slot [00:13:00] analysis of the competition.

You have to be self aware. If you’re going to go to war with another company, you need to know where your strengths and weaknesses are, where your vulnerabilities are to a degree. It’s like playing chess. If this company is going to make this, take this series away. Or they’re going to entice an organization, change the fuel regulations, so the VP products aren’t legal anymore, which happened.

You got to understand how to deal with those bombs that go off, how to work around. In the book Feeling Around, I can tell you a quick story that’s in the book. Hell, everybody knows the off name. If you grew up watching the Formula One races, they’re a French based company. They have since changed the name to Total.

But they decided they wanted to get involved with motocross in America. BP was fueling everybody. We were winning all the championships at the time. We were the go to fuel for supercross motocross. They came over to the AMA and said, I’d like to sponsor. One of the series. The only thing we’d like to do in return for that is we’d like you to adjust a specific gravity regulations.

Can’t remember the numbers for sure, but at the time I think [00:14:00] RC 12, which is the most popular fuel on the planet, particularly in two stroke motor cross racing, I think the gravity was about 716 corrected at 60 degrees. They talked the AMA into jacking it up to 718. Which would accommodate one of their products, which happened to be auctioned at the time.

Ours wasn’t. And AMA took that deal. We said, alright. Hey chemist, what do you got to do to jack the specific gravity up? 716 to 718. A little tweak. A week later, our fuels are still legal. And we kept winning. Then when they brought the auctioned product, as I said, they turned around and spent six months developing a fuel.

In a week’s time, we had something better. They’d go back to Solace with the chemists. We need this. We need something better. They’d bring a new fuel to pro circuit and all these other teams, we’d see what they had done. All right, let’s go. We had asked the French to help us get away from the British back in 1775, 76.

And here we are, the son of a guns of France, it’s an incursion of our realm, so to speak. So we turned around [00:15:00] and went head to head with them. We beat them down and sent them home with their tails between their legs. And years later, I met the gentleman who was with Health at the time, who was running that organization.

And he said, what amazed me about your company was it was so proactive and reactive. And I’ve been to the lab there where they have all these chemists. They had more chemists than we had dock workers. And they said, you guys would turn around and make something better. One or two of you guys would make something better in a week’s time than we had been working on for months.

So I related some of those stories about how to overcome all obstacles. Now, some you can’t, sometimes you can’t just beat the money, you can’t do some of it.

Crew Chief Eric: But it’s wrapped in a work of fiction though, right? It’s not just autobiography or autobiography.

J.K. Kelly: Fueling Around is an autobiography. There’s not really any fiction in it at all.

It went over very well, it was a popular read, and a lot of people have asked me to write a sequel. And because I’m still doing what I’m doing, I’ve started something called Still Fueling Around, but I don’t think that would come out for some time because I’m so busy writing the other novels. Once you write one [00:16:00] novel and you get a good response to it, people say, well, it’s a sequel, I’m going to, it’s a sequel.

Thrillers appeal to a much broader audience. A motor sports book appeals to a certain smaller group where you might enjoy telling your story.

Crew Chief Eric: So I guess for most of us, we don’t realize how competitive the fuel industry is. There’s many other Pennsylvania based fuel companies as well. BP’s not the only one.

How did that play out? I mean, obviously you kind of ousted the French, but you still had Sunoco to deal with. You still have other people.

J.K. Kelly: VP is actually based in San Antonio. That’s where Steve Barton’s born and raised, that’s where HQ is. We opened, as I said, the plant in Chester, Pennsylvania. Right up the road, or actually a little bit south of us in Markershut, was the Sunogo Refinery.

It was so funny that we were so close. We were enemy combatants, we were right there. I actually would run into some of the Sunogo higher ups at the local Home Depots. We’d bump into each other while picking up lumber, plywood, or whatever we’re doing for home improvements. We always had a friendly rivalry.

If you go back into the 70s and early 80s, when things were a little bit different, [00:17:00] the people that ran the Sunoco Race Fuel Division had told some of their distributors, you’re not even to talk to. Don’t fraternize, don’t visit with them, don’t talk to them. As things have changed, we hang out, we can have a beer together at a bar, during a trade show, or during a race, and have a good time.

It’s a rivalry, but we’re still friends.

Crew Chief Eric: Let’s switch gears a little bit. Let’s talk more about what it’s like to write a book prior to journalism. Your background is steeped writing. Many people will say, like you have said, I, I would love to write a book, but it all becomes very, very real when you sit down at the screen and start your journey of 85, 000 words, right?

It’s very different than writing a blog post or a quick article for a magazine or something like that. So how do you make that transition? Stepping away from fueling around, which is more nonfiction based. How did you develop that wanting to write in thriller genre aspect of it?

J.K. Kelly: Well, thrillers always intrigued me, whether it’s movies, television shows, books.

A thrill is a thrill. It always intrigued me. I have a very vivid imagination. That genre appealed to me. The first book I [00:18:00] wrote was called Found in Time. It involved a select group of marine raiders going back in time to do some missions. Because I’m a history buff, the idea was, what would happen if you could send them back to do certain things?

Maybe you sent them back to be witnesses to history. With the idea or the understanding, they could not change it. If you know any Marines, if you put them in a situation where they see something bad going down, they really struggle not to help, not to get involved. Of course, that’s what happens. I set the guys back.

They saw something happening, they can’t just stand by, they get involved, of course, all hell breaks loose. Yeah, yeah, so the story, James Patterson, who I took his master class and I met him and he gave me some great advice. He was always big on, you must do outlines, and I’ve never outlined any. I just turned around and I’d start telling the story.

I’m, uh, they call him a pantser. That’s I, I ride by the seat of my pants. I’ll write a chapter. I kind of know where it’s going, but as the book evolves, if you might’ve had an outline, you might’ve wanted to go this direction, but sometimes it just takes a natural organic feel where now it’s going over here.

That’s where I go. I just [00:19:00] follow wherever way it takes.

Crew Chief Eric: Dream of consciousness, I believe they

J.K. Kelly: call it. Yeah, very much so. Yeah. So if you’re writing at two o’clock in the morning when you sat down at 10 o’clock, think I’ll put a half hour in. Now it’s two o’clock. Your wife’s looking at you like, what are you doing?

A laptop awake. It is what it is. Writers just write when they can. It’s something we do. It’s in our blood. You’re a writer yourself. You know what it’s all about.

Crew Chief Eric: I stare at that cursor blinking sometimes. Where am I going from here?

J.K. Kelly: But you know, it’s funny. A lot of people have said to me, I’d love to write a book.

I’ve got this story I want to tell. That’s great. Sometimes just writing something, whether it’s a paragraph, or an essay, or a short story, or a novel, can be very freeing for someone. You can channel a lot of things, download a lot of things that maybe you’ve been carrying around in your backpack for a while, even if it’s in the subconscious.

If you really want to become a writer, if you want to become a commercial writer and sell books and make money selling books, what you have to understand is who’s going to want to read this? Who’s going to want this story? Has this story already been told? If you’re going to [00:20:00] go out and talk about some secret agent that’s going to go do this or a marine who’s going to go do that, stories have been told a million times.

Guys like Jack Carr,

Crew Chief Eric: James Bond.

J.K. Kelly: Whole nother story. I’ve tried to tell stories that had not necessarily been told. I was interested in the time travel thing, so I did that, did a sequel to it called The Lost Pulse. They both did very well. Then I started into something else that involved an FBI agent who was disgraced, and get his mojo back.

But then came Deadly Driver.

Crew Chief Eric: Which we’re going to get into here in a little bit. You’ve created this whole world. And I think that’s one of the hardest things to do, especially when you’re putting together a disjointed series, you have some sequels in there and sequels that you’re working on, but how did you sit down and kind of flush out all the persona?

Do they come from your personal experiences or any of the characters based on people, you know, or based on yourself, let’s take Bryce winters as an example, the main character in deadly driver, which we’re going to expand upon a little bit more, or even, uh, Matt Christopher. Those two main characters in two of your books, where did that come from?

Where did those ideas come from? How do you flush out their [00:21:00] voice and the way they think and things like that?

J.K. Kelly: Well, a being a history buff that allows me to have studied people and study their, their stories, their biographies. There are certain elements of certain people that interest me and I just heck and choose what seems to make sense to me.

For instance, Bryce winner’s character in deadly driver. He is an American kid who grew up in Vermont. He was playing with rally cars in the woods of Vermont. Something happens in the book. He decides it’s time to go to track racing. He goes there. Something happens there. It was onto something else. But through that, I had always been an admirer of Mario Andretti.

I thought he was a spectacular racer. He’s done so many great things. He’s another Pennsylvania boy, transplanted from Italy, of course, having won Daytona Indy and then Formula One World Championship. In addition, all the other things that he did, I thought, that’s cool. There’s not many guys that boast about that, about doing that.

And so I came up with a character who would be this homegrown kid, would work his way up through motor sports and pursue his [00:22:00] idol, so to speak. Runs into some folks that are putting him in the right cars, the right opportunity. He goes to the top.

Crew Chief Eric: And, you know, there’s a lot of similarities between Bryce’s origin story and Mario Andretti’s, especially with us here at the Eastern Museum of Motor Racing, you see a lot of displays of Mario Andretti here, where he got his start in dirt track racing, sprint cars and whatnot.

So it’s kind of funny. Bryce started in rallying backwoods of Vermont and similar to Mario Andretti in that respect. So I think you’ve done a good job of encapsulating that, but. In some ways, I think the bigger challenge is in the auxiliary characters, the supporting cast, his father, his uncle, all these other people that he’s interacting with and how you paint those pictures.

And, and in talking to you offline, a lot of scenarios in the books actually come from true stories. And we’ll dive into that a little bit more as we talk more about the book. So I also want to ask, before we make that transition, outside of Patterson, who are some of the other authors that you admire that influenced you to develop your style?

J.K. Kelly: Going back a few years, some of my favorite writers have been Tom Clancy. But someone who [00:23:00] really got me turned on to books was Dan Brown. From the time he wrote The Da Vinci Code, he wrote about four or five books after that. I read every single one of them and I read fast. I just fell in love with the way he wrote, the way he did his characters, the way he developed his stories.

Just went for the ride. I started to read a lot of James Patterson. There was such a volume of books. There was too many to read of Patterson’s. He’s got a bazillion out there. Once I got the idea in my mind that I wanted to write, I encountered some editors that would do some work. I’d set up some chapters that’d show me where I had lost my mind, where I had wandered off the reservation, so to speak.

And they would show me how to come back in. Ryan Stack is one of them. He just came out with a book called Fields of Fire, which is getting great reviews. Ryan’s a great editor. Good friend. He taught me quite a way of developing my writing style. I

Crew Chief Eric: was always a huge fan of Michael Cray. I gravitate towards his work and I was very fortunate to meet him the year before he passed away.

And I’ve always kind of held other authors of, you know, that technical science fiction sort of world against his work. For me, that’s [00:24:00] always kind of the gold standard. I mean, you get the Dean Coombses and other people, you know, in that similar genre. But for me, that’s, what’s always influenced my writing is how do I a, the technical.

To the lay person. And that’s always, and I even have to do that in my day job. So I guess we all pull our inspiration from different places.

J.K. Kelly: And that was a challenge that I faced when I wrote deadly driver. Everything I’ve ever done in motor sports was always trying to entice other people who don’t know anything about racing to come, try it, come check it out, come to the races.

I had experienced carding for instance. All my friends had drag cars, they spent a fortune on their drag cars, a fortune on their motors, and a trailer, and at the end of the day, I would bust on them, Okay, you did all this, and you spent a total of 2 minutes and 12 seconds in the race. I spent 10 percent of what you spent, I spent all afternoon in the car, having a great time.

Quad wheel karting, having a ball with two stroke motors, on ovals, that was fantastic. The one thing I can tell you about different riding styles, if you enjoy fast paced action, that’s the way I rate. There are a [00:25:00] lot of authors that have to give you so much, a

Crew Chief Eric: ton of exposition.

J.K. Kelly: They tell you the color of the blinds, the color of the tile on the

Crew Chief Eric: floor,

J.K. Kelly: what color my shirt is.

So I can’t read Tolkien.

Crew Chief Eric: The first whole chapter is about the guy getting out of bed. Really?

J.K. Kelly: Yeah, to a degree. I write as if I’m Talonel Joe. If I say a monkey walks into a bar. I don’t waste time telling you what color the bar is, what color the chandelier is, or color of the beer bottles. I just go for it.

I’m also regarded as somebody who likes to introduce a lot of multiple threads into the book, and I wind up luckily being able to put them all together and then have a fitting conclusion.

Crew Chief Eric: Let’s talk about more specifically Deadly Driver. So I want to read a kind of synopsis here to bring our audience up to speed on what the book is really about.

Jetting off to Monte Carlo, Speeding through the tight turns of a mountain road en route to an evening at the casino. What could be more exhilarating? After racing in a Grand Prix, Bryce Winters boards a luxury yacht to bask in the limelight and mingle with celebrities, only to find a gun to his head.[00:26:00]

From the rolling hills of Vermont to some of the world’s most powerful cities, Winters is thrust into improbable adventure, riveting intrigue, and elusive romance. The question remains, can he navigate around the dead ends in a maze of CIA manipulation and entrapment? Or will he fall prey to the sinister forces of underworld intelligence?

So I’ve personally read Deadly Driver. To me, it’s an arrive and drive, jump in, strap down and go sort of read. To your point, it’s very fast paced. You are thrown directly into the action on page one. I feel that the book is lots of fun. It’s a great introduction to the motorsports world, as you said, especially Formula One, especially in today’s day and age of people watching, you know, Netflix’s Drive to Survive and being more interested in the motorsport discipline of open wheels, specifically Formula One.

Why Formula One? Are you a fan?

J.K. Kelly: I’m a big fan of Formula 1. I think it’s the ultimate bit in motorsports. And because I’m a travel bug and because I’ve traveled the world and attended so many different [00:27:00] events all around the world and enjoyed the cultures and the cities and the people and everything, if I was going to write a book about racing, I want to have a global audience.

I want to appeal to them. Obviously, if you want to sell books, you want to sell them all around the world. You still want to write something about NASCAR or IndyCar. You want to write something that someone in Buenos Aires will want to read. Somebody who goes to Or who goes to Hockenheim, Gerber, Silverstone, I want them to pick it up and relate to it.

Crew Chief Eric: So let’s talk about Bryce a little bit. We kind of mentioned him a couple times earlier. People might be thinking, how plausible is a Formula One driver and super spy combo? Does this imply something that has occurred in the past? Am I implicating something maybe we shouldn’t be talking about?

J.K. Kelly: The concept came to me and I just started writing.

It wasn’t until after I finished the book that I ran into some folks in Los Angeles. Who claimed that there were a few drivers way back in the day who might have been doing a few things overtly for their governments, whether it was for the United States government, British government, the German government, for that matter.

I think it’s very plausible. Price [00:28:00] operates in a world that’s super elite. There’s not that many F1 drivers on the planet. He gets to go to all these fancy galas. Meet all these fancy people, go places where a lot of people can’t go, he hobnobs to everybody, he’s partying on yachts, private jets, et cetera.

Something happens in the book that puts him in a vulnerable position. The CIA catches him at it and they force him to work for them. It’s pretty simple. You’re going to do this or we’re going to make this known. You’re going to be not in a world of trouble just with the United States, you’ll be in trouble in these other countries.

And so they force him to work for them. He doesn’t mind doing some of the jobs that they assign him. Because he believes he’s doing the right thing for his country. He doesn’t like having a gun put in his head. That’s what he really struggles with. So his dilemma is, trying to win a second Formula One championship, he wants to do better than Mario.

First his goal was, be as good as Mario and then rise to the occasion, go another step. So he wants to do that, he wants to do the job that the government’s asked him to do, but he also wants to break free of that. He’ll go to some [00:29:00] extreme ends to try and break free, but not he ever accomplishes that.

Reader’s got to find out for themselves. And then to add the other little element to this, he suffered a tremendous heartbreak in his younger years in Vermont. He’s never found love again. He’s never pursued her. And so he finally runs into a woman on a long haul flight, is totally taken by her. He decides to pursue her.

When she realizes what she’s gotten herself into, I’m not going to elaborate on that.

Crew Chief Eric: No spoilers here.

J.K. Kelly: She cuts loose, and his job is to try and win her back. And it gets very complicated.

Crew Chief Eric: So I really like the fact that Bryce is a simple guy. His upbringing is very relatable to most of the people that are problem with this.

It’s like you said, grew up in Vermont, backwoods, running cars, having fun, started in the lower leagues and worked his way up. It’s very similar to the stories of Andy Pilgrim and Andy Lee and other folks that we’ve interviewed on the show. Obviously the bigger overture is that Mario Andretti is one of his heroes or that he’s going to be, As good as, if not better than Mario, right?

A triple crown winner, all those kinds of things. So I wonder, [00:30:00] is Mario Bryce’s idol or is he more complex than that? I feel that there’s a lot of you in him as well. So how much of that comes through? Like the more in depth part of Bryce’s personality. How was he formed? What did you model him?

J.K. Kelly: Part of it probably evolves from the fact that I wanted to be in law enforcement.

He grew up in an environment raised by a cop. Adam Marie with those two influences in his household. And imagine what that by product is. Just like you have young people that are growing up in the Midwest. They’re homegrown. They have a strong work ethic. They believe in America. They’re very patriotic. So that’s what you got when you meet Chris layers.

As I wrote the book and put it out for reviews, there was a French journalist that came back to me and said, can’t really relate to him because rice. He’s not like formula one drivers. I said, well, he isn’t. He’s an American kid, grown up in rural Vermont. He didn’t grow up in the streets of Monte Carlo.

Thousand dollar watch on his wrist. Going to exclusive schools. Born into a family of fortune and fame. He’s worked for everything he’s gotten. And so it’s a different culture [00:31:00] lately. He’s not like the typical Formula driver, and I think that’s what makes him special.

Crew Chief Eric: So he’s got a car tucked away in Vermont.

He lives in Utah. But when he does go back to Vermont, he picks up his black Subaru WRX. But nowhere else in the rest of the book does it ever mention what he’s got tucked away in his garage in Utah. So what is in Bryce’s, let’s call it, and who car drive?

J.K. Kelly: Three or four car. I’m still working on that. But anyway, the Subaru WRX, so you know, comes to the fact that I love rally racing.

And I know a lot of the guys at Vermont Sports Car. And so in the story, Bryce befriends them. They have a working relationship with him. He started out with Team O’Neill, New Hampshire. That’s where some of the other history comes from. But when you do get to his home in Park City, up in the hills, after you go inside his garage, he’s got his Uncle Pete’s Toyota pickup, which is an old standby.

He has a Mercedes AMG GT Coupe that they’ve sent him, because he’s involved with Mercedes and racing. That’s a red one, by the [00:32:00] way. It’s a beautiful vehicle. He also has a Chevy Tahoe Z71 that he used to just cruise around. He’s an American guy, so he’s got mostly American cars. The foreign stuff that’s there was, was sent to him by Germany, by the Mercedes.

Crew Chief Eric: He’s got to have a bike in there too, right?

J.K. Kelly: Well yeah, that’s not American, that was not a Hurley, it’s a Ducati.

Crew Chief Eric: Red to match the Mercedes, right?

J.K. Kelly: Yeah, yeah, well that, yeah, that’s the funny thing too. If people were to take the time to study the cover of Deadly Driver, I had mentioned to you offline that there’s something about the cover that nobody’s picked up on that’ll come to play in the sequel that I’m halfway through right now.

And I’m just gonna leave it at that. I just mentioned Ducati, and I’m gonna mention the book cover for Deadly Driver, so you can study it and see what I planted there that nobody’s seen yet.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s the funny part about Deadly Driver. It’s a book where there are a ton of twists and turns, which keeps the reader waiting for, pun intended, the next apex.

And I noticed as I was reading it, there’s a ton of nods to VP Fuels. Obviously, it’s in your background, you were there for 30 years. Some are obvious and some not so much. Why don’t we stop and talk [00:33:00] about the PRI scene? Some of the nods you made specifically in that. It felt like a homecoming and it almost felt like you were Telling people, but not telling people, Hey, thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. And kind of name dropping and going there. So what was that all about? Why was that kind of in the middle of the book?

J.K. Kelly: Oh God, that’s very complicated. That’s very, very complicated. After I retired from VP, the SEMA show, the PRI show, the auto sports show in Birmingham, some of the other big shows around the country had always been something I had attended, always works with the VP uniform, et cetera.

I wanted to send Bryce because he’s American. Once the season’s over, he’s not spending his time on the slopes in Switzerland. He’s not in Belize. He’s back home in Park City or in Vermont visiting his family. So when he goes to the PRI show, it gives him an opportunity to say hello to the people that have helped him along the way, the friendships that he’s made, because as he worked his way up through Track racing at Stafford and Thompson and on the dirt track at Lebanon Valley.

A lot of people were friends, Anns crew members, et [00:34:00] cetera. For me, that was a journey. The first PRI went back to everybody was, Hey, you’re retired. What hell’s matter with you? What are you doing? You know, what are you gonna do? It was a way of having me go back through that. But in Bryce doing that, he got to thank a lot of the folks who had meant something to him in his career, but it also gave him an opportunity in the book to tease what he might be doing in the future.

In the book, there’s something critical that’s happened after the last race of the season. And so as he’s wandering around the PRI show before it opens, they let him in early to say hi to some folks. He stops by the NASCAR booth and he stops by the IMSA booth and the local media and some of the foreign press that are following him around are like, what’s this mean?

What’s it mean? And so he just says, you never know. Maybe I’ll go back to running cup. Maybe I’ll back in an IMSA car. Who knows? You’ll just have to wait and see what happens. But the last page of deadly driver will let you know what he’s up to.

Crew Chief Eric: No spoilers, but I do want to take yet another pit stop here and ask you a question because the PRI scene was also important in the fact that there were some other [00:35:00] undertones there and you make some hints about maybe your personal thoughts on EVs, electric vehicles in that particular scene.

So I want to ask you, what are your thoughts on the evolution coming from the fuel industry?

J.K. Kelly: That’s probably something that needs to happen on a grand scale. But there’ll always be a niche, always be just as there is today. Motorsports is not mainstream, not everybody on every street is involved with motorsports.

So there’ll always be cars, there’ll always be racing. Gasoline will always be around in some capacity, as will lubricants, etc, etc. But EV is coming, they’ll be here to stay. And just like as we’ve toured this beautiful facility today, as you see the evolution of sprint cars and all the other cars they’ve got here, the EVs will go down the same road.

Just like everything else. I remember the first cell phone I ever had came in a black box that was the size of a lunch pail. And now, you know, they’ve got these little itty bitty tiny things that connect you with the world. I feel like I’ve got a Dick Tracy watch on, you know, where I can talk to people, check the internet, order lunch, check the stock market and book a flight.

So EVs will probably go [00:36:00] down that same route, but. Us guys who love the smell of race fuel, all the other things that come along with that, the exhaust and nitromethane, they’ll remain for a long time, at least in our lifetimes, I would think. The only thing that concerns me the most about it all is I remember hanging out with the guys in high school where we were changing the carburetor, playing with the timing light, doing all the cool things they used to do.

In the garage, whether you’re doing it with your uncle, your brother, your father, best friends, whatever, there was a camaraderie that came about encircling the engine, so to speak. What are you going to do now? Am I supposed to sit on the curb with my grandson and show him how to change batteries? There will always be something about racing that will draw those of us who enjoy those competitive sports to it.

Of everything with EVs and racing that concerns me is the same. I was in Catalonia a couple years ago when somebody was testing a race kit electric motorcycle. What the? It was like, you know, when you go to the beach, you’ve got a mosquito or something or buzz around your ear. It’s like, what is that? If you go to an [00:37:00] NHRA national event and you stand at the starting line when John Force does a burnout and you feel your chest rattle, there’s a wow factor.

And electric’s just no. Unless they figure out a way of sending thunderbolts out to the people in the crowd to give sort of a static charge or something. I don’t see the entertainment value.

Crew Chief Eric: I can see that and a lot of people have said that and we say that even about different ice power plants when you compare as an example, you know, there’s nothing like the sound of a flat six or a Ferrari 12 or even the difference between the C7 and the C8s at IMSA races, right?

I mean, the C7 and the Mercedes SLSs, they’re ground thumpers to your point. You not only do you hear them, you feel them. And so we have gotten that response a lot from folks to say, What I will miss the most from racing is the sound.

J.K. Kelly: For me, the analogy would be watching a very passionate, hot love scene in a movie versus watching a silent movie.

That’s the difference.

Crew Chief Eric: A lot of folks have also said, and maybe this is how they justify it. There’s a high probability that motor [00:38:00] sport will become very equestrian. How do you feel about that particular state?

J.K. Kelly: The biggest frustration I’ve had in the last 20 years is seeing how racing has changed as far as attendance goes.

It was 2008 when we had the issues that caused everybody to stop spending. People stopped going to races. People stopped doing a lot of different things. What I’ve found was for the longest time, people didn’t come back. Scary things seem to be that they had gone away from races. They had found something else to do and they’d go back to the racetrack.

Promoters and series are struggling very hard to get some cases. You see that you go to the U S nationals. It’s a packed house. The special events are always going to have packed houses. And the 500 was sold out was 400, 000 people. I forget what the attendance is there, but you also have to model in the fact that they haven’t had full capacity allowed because of COVID for the last few years.

So sadly, it seems as though some people have found other things to do. Some people have gone to an NHRA race. They’ve [00:39:00] gone to see the nitro cars, but then they’ve seen it and they don’t come back. And that’s a sad thing. That’s why promoters and series and racers have to evolve. And you have to continue to reinvent themselves to give people something to Something to bring them back.

These phones, computers, and everything else are great, but they’ve caused so many people used to come out and see and feel and experience excitement are now sitting behind a screen doing all these other things, playing all these other games, and if they’re doing something related to motor sports, they’re driving the screen and I could tell you from racing in Baja course to almost going off a couple of cliff sides and all the other fun things that that involves.

It’s starting with cards, getting in somebody’s penthouse, doing some burnouts in the driveway. All those things are experiential. Nothing on the screen can replace that. Yeah, sure, you can go to Universal and your chair can vibrate when you’re seeing a scene with the Shrek thing, which I did with my grandchildren and stuff.

But there’s nothing like strapping yourself, get in a race car, fire that thing up and go [00:40:00] have some fun. And then if you’re competitive, doing it side by side, going on a turn with somebody that’s just as hungry, just as motivated as you are, you’re nothing like it.

Crew Chief Eric: So will Bryce ever sit and strap into a Formula E car?

If his series continues, is that a

J.K. Kelly: thought crossing? He might be involved with ownership, but he won’t drive one. Well, it’s the same thing we just said a few minutes ago. I had the opportunity to go to the Formula E in Brooklyn. And to be honest with you, there was something, I shouldn’t say this, but there was something more interesting for me to do, uh, in Montreal.

Doing something with the guys who run Fantabox. Which is the F1 store in the old city of Montreal. I understand what Formula E is doing, but when I’ve seen it on television, all’s ears is a squig of the tires. It just doesn’t excite me. I want to support the sport and get people to go out and give it a try.

But for me myself, nah, gotta make noise.

Crew Chief Eric: So let’s go back to the book a little bit talking about Bryce, his humble upbringings, and if you follow his career, you had him at Lebanon doing roundy rounds and things like that. And he works his way up in sports cars into formula one, but [00:41:00] there’s that team O’Neill part that sticks out growing up a WRC fan myself in the group era.

I’ve always wanted to do that. When I look at how expensive it can be to get into rally in the United States. That gave me pause when I read the book and I said, how did he afford, you know, how did that work out for him?

J.K. Kelly: Well, in Bryce’s case, book starts out at a young age when he’s, he’s late teens.

Essentially what he did was he fell in love with rally racing and he did a deal with team O’Neill where. I’ll put the hours in, I’ll work here, sweep up, I’ll do whatever, teach me some things, learn what I can. Let me take one of these out. You’re not talking about a WRC world class car that Travis Pastrana might be playing with for Vermont sports car.

There are some lower grade, lower level rally cars where you go out on the course and don’t need a lot of money to do that. Just got to sign up. You could go to the team O’Neill school and take their school. Guess what? You’re driving a rally car. If you’re good at it, and as our guide today at the museum said, if you got some balls, then strap in and go in something [00:42:00] faster and give it a try.

Crew Chief Eric: And you know, what’s funny about that part of the story, I relate that to pro driver Andy Lee’s story where he did the same thing. Never finished high school, found himself in Arizona, turned the wrenches at Bondurant and then worked his way up. So him and Bryce are similar in that way. Bryce is this really every guy in America race car driver, but on the same token, there’s so many facets of other famous race car drivers stories in his kind of more complex persona.

And that’s what I really enjoyed about this book is pulling those threads out and going, that reminds me of this former guest on the show or this driver that I know, things like that. And it makes it very relatable for us, at least our audience. And then the people beyond to your point is getting them out there to understand that.

There’s more depth to these drivers. They’re not just people strapping on helmets and going around in circles.

J.K. Kelly: Very true. Balancing act that I had to do though that was a struggle for me was some racers have told me there wasn’t enough racing in the book. And some people have said, ah, there might, for me, there might’ve been a little too much [00:43:00] detail in some of the formula and racing.

And so that was in the early drafts when I was getting people to my betas, as you call it, there’s beta readers. Give them a chapter, they give you the feedback, tell you if you’ve gone the right direction, if it’s interesting, if it’s not. But the balancing act that I worked with Deadly Driver and I’m working on in the sequel is giving people who are into motorsports enough to get them excited, but also giving someone who doesn’t know that much about motorsports, enough to be interested in it.

Not just in a thriller aspect because Bryce’s story could take place anywhere. I could have said this character not in motorsports. I could have had a little CPA in an accounting firm. I mean, there’s all kinds of folks that get stuck doing things for the FBI. Because they have to do a plea deal or something.

It was a good balancing act. I think I pulled it off. You seem like you liked it. So,

Crew Chief Eric: well, there’s one other part that I did appreciate. And you being from this area, from the East coast, especially especially Pennsylvania, for a lot of us, we call summit point home and seven point raceway is mentioned in the book, especially there at events of driver training and [00:44:00] things like that.

That’s also Grand Touring Motorsports home track. A lot of us, you know, pilgrimage there weekend after weekend for a CC a NASA races and et cetera. So I wanted to thank you for throwing that in there because. A lot of people forget about Summit Point, right? Used to be part of the Trans Am series back in the day.

You know, it’s kind of fallen down in the ranks, but they’re also seeing a resurgence now after 53 years of being open. So I really appreciated you doing that.

J.K. Kelly: That was my pleasure. I love Summit Point. I’ve been there many, many times myself.

Crew Chief Eric: So that being said, the flow of the book, it really does grab you right away.

Like I said, the first three chapters are really set the stage and then you start to interleave the exposition, right? For like the next 12 chapters or so. And it’s done in this flashback sort of way. It reminded me of how some TV shows and movies do it. It’s like, you’re thrown in the action. You’re going, what, what is going on here?

They’ve captivated you. They’ve drawn you in. And now let’s go and show you how we got there. And plays this bouncing back and forth again for like the next 12 chapters or so. So that led [00:45:00] me to my next question, which is, could you see Deadly Driver being turned into a screenplay?

J.K. Kelly: Oh, yes. Oh, yes. The beauty of that is, most of the reviewers, a lot of people that have read the book have told me, it reads like a movie.

It ought to be a movie. It ought to be a limited series. It ought to be something. I agree. When I write books, I see it as a movie in my head. I see it playing out in my head. I studied film. One of the side studies I did at Penn State was film courses, full circle, all the way back to the shitter lump, when I was in sixth grade.

My father allowed my brother and I and a family friend, a schoolmate, to make a video, make a movie essentially at the funeral. We had a casket, we had dry ice and buckets, we had all the spooky stuff going on. So I’ve always been a movie buff and I’ve always been interested in these that rotate around that.

Following everybody’s encouragement, I reached out to some folks in California. I met with some producers and directors who have given me notes on what I should do, what I shouldn’t do. They’ve encouraged me to talk to this guy, all this guy. There are people that. Claimed to have connections to Tom [00:46:00] Cruise and they’re trying to get the book in front of him because if everybody on the planet they could do something special, a deadly driver.

Cruz probably could. However, you’d have to read the book. I don’t see Cruz as Bryce Winters. I see him as Max Lerner.

Crew Chief Eric: I would agree with you on that. So Max, for those that haven’t read the book yet, is the person that really takes Bryce to the next level. He is the money behind the scenes, behind the team, the team owner, all that kind of stuff.

He’s, you know, he’s a German guy. I’d love to see Tom Cruz pull off the accent, you know, that’d be kind of funny.

J.K. Kelly: Well, remember though, he’s He did the Hatterboot. Well, I forget the name of the book, but Oh, Valkyrie. Yeah. Valkyrie. He did Valkyrie. And he didn’t lay it on too hard. Werner is true German, but he’s Americanized.

But he also has a dark side, comes out. And I think Cruise could really get his teeth into that. But there’s a million other people that would You can do a fantastic job as well.

Crew Chief Eric: I’d love to see the cast and call that like to see who they pick. I envision this Bradley Cooper type playing a Bryce, you know, the brown hair comb over boy next door sort of racer, [00:47:00] right?

J.K. Kelly: Well, there’s all kinds of things. When I wrote Uncle Pete, I pictured Sam Elliott. Everybody knows Sam Elliott most recently from ATV. That’s

Crew Chief Eric: the vision I got from him too. Yeah,

J.K. Kelly: Sam Elliott kind of character. But here’s a stretch that isn’t really a stretch. Chris Pratt and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Chris Pratt married Schwarzenegger’s daughter.

How about Pratt as Bryce Weiners, and Schwarzenegger as Weiner? He’s got the accent.

Crew Chief Eric: That could work. Although I don’t know how serious I would take it at that point because I’m a big Schwarzenegger fan, but every movie I watch, I consider them a comedy. So, you know,

J.K. Kelly: yes. And then, well, then you got to go to who do you cast as Kyoto?

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. She’s

J.K. Kelly: a Japanese lawyer. I mean, who do you put in that role? There’s a tremendous amount of exquisite actresses that could play that role. But you know what happens when I’ve learned from visiting with these producers and people who have talked to me about the film either as a film or a limited series or as a regular series, once they buy the project.

They do whatever they want to do with it. If all of a sudden, Kyoto, they don’t want her to be from Japan anymore. They [00:48:00] want her to be Hungarian or Australian or whatever. Or Max.

Crew Chief Eric: Suddenly Bryce becomes English and he’s really Jason Statham. And it’s the transporter.

J.K. Kelly: No, that can’t happen. But Max Werner doesn’t have to be Max Werner.

It could be Max O’Malley. It could be, he could be from anywhere. There are certain parts of the world, South America, for instance. They are rabid formula love fans. So having Max be from Sao Paolo works. Yeah. What kinds of things you can do. If you remember the book starts out at Sochi, but what’s happened since Sochi first, Sochi lost its race and then Putin decided to go.

Apeshit in Ukraine. And so here we are. So as I’ve developed the limited series scripts, pilot limited series scripts for that, we’ve moved out of Russia. I have a lot of friends in Russia. I love the Russian people. They’re great folks. I’ve been there many times, but I don’t want to give any attention to those.

Crew Chief Eric: I can see you easily dropping the hungoro ring in its place, you know,

J.K. Kelly: no, we actually, there’s something with me and my French counterparts. And so we’ve gone, [00:49:00] we’ve gone, now we’ve gone to Paul Ricard.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, nice.

J.K. Kelly: Yeah. So we’ll see how that goes because actually, if you know where Paul Ricard is, very, very close to Marseille.

And I don’t want to get shot if anybody’s listening from Marseille, there is a strong underworld in Marseille. There is a French mafia, so to speak, the same way there is in Russia, same way there is in South Philly. It’s

Crew Chief Eric: an easy conversion.

J.K. Kelly: Yeah. It’s so, it’s very easy to do some of the tweaking that I needed to do.

Crew Chief Eric: And it also helps too, because Bryce. And his third home is on the French Riviera. So him being in France makes it a little easier too for movement, probably for filming, things like that. So there’s a lot of upward possibility there.

J.K. Kelly: Yeah. He maintains a residence in Monte Carlo because, you know, the tax laws there, I think the rule is you have to have a residence six months in a day in order to get the tax breaks.

Crew Chief Eric: And there’s mention of that in the book too. He says, Oh, I got to be here for X amount of time.

J.K. Kelly: That’s what he does.

Crew Chief Eric: So that actually leads into the next question, you know, without giving any spoilers or talking about the sequel or anything that, what [00:50:00] is Bryce’s future? What do you think? What do you think?

What can you share with us?

J.K. Kelly: We know certain things happen in the book. We know there’s a, there’s a happy ending, so to speak. Despite his injuries, he will be able to come back and the following season, he’ll be trying some new things. I really don’t want to lay too much out there. I, I really believe that if people read Deadly Driver, they’ll care about Bryce.

They’ll like him. I want to follow his career. And then we’ll find out what happens to them next. They hang in there and they enjoy the first book. The other one will be out.

Crew Chief Eric: So outside of your own books, do you have any recommended reads for our audience?

J.K. Kelly: God, right now everything Jack Carr has written has been super hot.

Jack is a former Navy SEAL who worked for the government in a lot of other capacities after he left the SEALs. He’s been reading since he was fourth or fifth grade. Believe the story is his mother was a librarian. This guy fell in love with books at an early age. He’s read thousands of books and he took everything he learned from those books and has written the series that was turned into a limited series on Amazon called The Terminal List.

So anything [00:51:00] Carr’s done has been great. As I said earlier, Fields of Fire just came out. That’s Ryan Steck. That’s his debut novel. He’s an editor that I work with on a couple of my books. Great guy. The scariest thing that gets me is I run into people every day that say, I don’t read. I’ve read books since high school, and the only reason I read it in high school is because they told me I had to.

I get it. If you work all day and all night, you’ve got your other things going on in your world, you just don’t have the bandwidth or the time, you’re exhausted and you can’t do it. I understand. Some people say I don’t have time to sit there. I can’t sit there and read a book. I can’t pace through it, whatever.

There’s solutions. There’s audible books. Audible has opened up a whole new world to people who, truck drivers, somebody who works with their hands, somebody who can put it on their speakers, headphones, and just go for the ride.

Crew Chief Eric: And Deadly Driver’s Available is an Audible book as well.

J.K. Kelly: Yes it is.

Crew Chief Eric: And another top tip for folks that don’t have time to flip the old paper pages, you can also leverage your local library and apps like Libby as well [00:52:00] as Hoopla and be able to digitally take books out from the library.

So there’s no cost. So if you’re looking at it going, Oh man, some of these services are pretty pricey. I’m already oversubscribed my budget. So there are some free ways to get ahold of these books. So there’s some awesome resources

J.K. Kelly: there. There’s also Kindle.

Crew Chief Eric: Yep.

J.K. Kelly: Some people want to read on an airplane, but they don’t want to deal with the paper and the book, et cetera.

So you can read a Kindle. Something that everybody asked me for was 60 years old. My eyes are failing. How about large print? Guess what? We got deadly driver and large print. That’s available as well.

Crew Chief Eric: So JK, any shout outs, promotions, or anything else you’d like to share that we didn’t cover so far?

J.K. Kelly: Your podcast.

It’s great. Ever since I’ve met you offline, I’ve listened to a bunch of the shows. The most recent one I think was with Andrew Bilgrim, which opened up a whole new world for me, cause I didn’t know that much about him, but it was a fascinating interview. A pretty relaxed conversation. It wasn’t really an interview.

It was a conversation that you had. So I enjoyed the way you did that. If you’re looking for thrillers of The Deadly Driver, I’d say pick up Ryan Steck’s Field of Fire. Go to the races, if [00:53:00] you’ve not been, or you have been in a while. Go check it out. For us, it’s getting to be the fall, and the east coast, the leaves are starting to change already.

That’s probably because of the drought more than anything else. Races are going to close the garage doors pretty soon, so take it in the last races you’ve got. Enjoy yourselves.

Crew Chief Eric: Author J. K. Kelly lives in Media, Pennsylvania with his wife Lisa and continues a never ending pursuit of the next adventure. He has just finished another thriller, The Blood Compass.

All six of his books are available on Amazon in either paperback, Kindle, or Audible formats. And you can learn more about J. K. and his work by visiting www. jkkelly. com or following him on social at jkkellybooks on Instagram and Twitter, or by emailing me. It’s at author JK Kelly on Facebook, and you can always look him up on LinkedIn as well.

So JK, I can’t thank you enough for coming on the show and sharing your journey with us. I actually really am looking forward to the history of EP and some of the other books you have coming out, and I’m [00:54:00] really excited to know what happens with Bryce and if there’s some crossover with some of your other characters like Matthew Christopher and others that are in your series.

So the best of luck on your subsequent novels, and we look forward to reading

J.K. Kelly: them. Thank you. Really enjoyed it.

Crew Chief Brad: If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about GTM, be sure to check us out on www. gtmotorsports. org. You can also find us on Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, You can call or text us at 202 630 1770, or send us an email at crewchief at gtmotorsports.

org. We’d love to hear from you.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey everybody, Crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that GTM remains a no annual fees organization. And our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge. As a loyal listener, please consider [00:55:00] subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies, and GTM swag.

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