International Motor Racing Research Center

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] BrakeFix’s History of Motorsports series is brought to you in part by the International Motor Racing Research Center, as well as the Society of Automotive Historians, the Watkins Glen Area Chamber of Commerce, and the Argettsinger family. The International Motor Racing Research Center, or IMRRC, collects, shares, and preserves the history of motorsports, spanning continents, eras, and generations.

And race series, the Watkins Glenn based I M R R. C. S. Collection embodies the speed drama and camaraderie of amateur and professional motor racing throughout the world. The center welcomes serious researchers and the casual fans alike to share stories of race drivers, race series and race cars captured on their shelves and walls.

The center’s collection documents the history of racing and more than 4000 books along with 250 different motor sports magazines and newspaper titles. The archive also includes club and sanctioning body records, race results, programs and posters, papers from motorsport journalists and scholars, correspondence [00:01:00] between race organizers, and more.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s knowledgeable research and archive staff, like our guests, Kip Zeider and Rick Huey, assist hundreds of scholars, journalists, authors, documentary filmmakers, Drivers and race car owners from all over the globe with inquiries about motorsports history every year. And Kip and Rick are here to tell us all about it.

Crew Chief Brad: And as always, I’m your host, Brad, and I’m Eric. So let’s roll.

Crew Chief Eric: So welcome to break fix Kip and Rick. Hey, how

Kip Zeiter: are you?

Crew Chief Eric: Thank

Kip Zeiter: you very

Crew Chief Eric: much, Eric.

Kip Zeiter: That was a great intro. I, I really don’t have anything to add, Eric. Thanks so much.

Crew Chief Eric: So let’s, let’s dive into this. Let’s unpack International Motor Racing Research Center.

It’s a mouthful. So tell us about your history. Where did this whole thing come from? What’s the, what started this?

Kip Zeiter: The IMRRC, and I agree, it is a mouthful, whether you’re trying to say the whole thing or just trying to get the initial straight. was actually kind of a town’s gift to itself in celebration of the 50th [00:02:00] year of motor racing at Watkins Glen.

I’m sure most of your knowledgeable listeners are aware that the first post World War II road race took place right here on the streets of Watkins Glen back on October 2nd, 1948. So as the village was coming up on the 50th celebration of this, In 98, talks were beginning among some of the town leaders as to what could we do to have a permanent example of that the public library to which we are attached over the years had amassed quite a nice little collection of motorsports books.

So, 1 of the ideas that was floated was to take those books and kind of use them as seedlings to open up an archival library slash research center. One of the chief proponents of that, and there were lots of other people interested in and that did a lot of work on this, but certainly one of the chief proponents of that was Gene Argettsinger.

This is kind of a come full circle type of thing. Gene is the wife of Cameron Argettsinger, and Cameron is widely acknowledged as the founder of [00:03:00] racing here in Watkins Glen. Gene, who had served on the library board for years and years and years, was very intrigued with the idea, was a real proponent of it.

As I say, there were many other people, John Bishop from IMSA, John Saunders, who at that time, I believe, was the president of WGI, all of whom showed interest in this. So I’m going to fast forward here a little bit. The money was raised, the building was started and completed in 1998, in time for the 50th anniversary.

It was actually dedicated, I believe, in June of 1999 by some fella named Sir Jackie Stewart. So yeah, nobody knows

Crew Chief Eric: who he is. No, no, no,

Kip Zeiter: no. You know, a name from the past in keeping with our historical impact here. So that’s really how it all came to be. And, well, it, it, it makes sense. The, the birthplace of American road racing, post World War II, over the years, over the last 20 plus years, we’ve probably morphed into one of the world’s premier archival institutions.

And we have, [00:04:00] you know, from that very small bunch of books that we took back in, in 1998 or so, we now have a library that’s pushing 5, 000 different volumes. But in addition to that, and we can touch on this as we go on. We have many, many, many more things here apart from just a absolutely astounding motorsports library.

Crew Chief Eric: Let’s dive into the collection a little bit more. And I have, I have some questions about it. So, you know, we want to answer the question. What is the, at the library, right? Well, we’ll call it that. Cause it’s easier to say than the IMRRC. So what’s in the library, but I have a few kind of pressing questions.

What’s the oldest thing in the library? What’s the rarest thing in the library? Like let’s, let’s quantify some of these things.

Rick Hughey: Gosh, we have a lot of trophies through the years. It’s driver information, it’s artwork, it’s books, it’s a magazine, uh, racing programs from, uh, all over the world. Those kind of things in the Sports Car Club of America collection, which we manage for, for the club.

We received two tractor trailer loads [00:05:00] of boxes that we’ve gone through. Harry Handley collected all of that information for S. C. C. A. Back in the fifties and sixties, kept it at his home. Then eventually it went to Peter Hilton, who was in the Indianapolis region of S. C. C. A. And he worked through the archives and it was at a storage facility.

And he had worked with some college kids and they’d got it sort of organized. And then the situation there changed. And so they were looking for a place to put it. They contacted us and they worked out an agreement where it’s here now. We, uh, have got it into working order, if you will. So I can go to a box and look for, uh, race information from, uh, you know, 1957 at, uh, you know, someplace Sebring or wherever.

and come up with the answers. It now is a working archive. That’s, that’s the big key point.

Kip Zeiter: I, I [00:06:00] honestly can’t answer your question as to what would be the oldest thing here. I do know we have a start finish line sign from the original circuit. So presumably that’s one of the oldest things as it would pertain to Watkins Glen.

Although I do know we have archives here and I know we have earlier things in that we have publications. that date back to probably the early 1900s. You know, race write ups and things of that nature. I was going to point out some of what I think are some of the more interesting things. Early on in my tenure here, I had a husband and wife come in on a Saturday afternoon, and the lady was particularly intrigued with Sterling Moss.

So she was wondering if we had anything here from Sterling Moss. We had a number of different books. In the library, so they pulled out some of those and we’re leafing through those. Meanwhile, I was going through the archives and found that we actually had a letter. written by Sterling himself on Glen Motor Inn stationary to the organizers of the Mexican Grand Prix, I believe back in [00:07:00] 1961, stipulating his conditions for participating in that year’s Mexican Grand Prix.

And it included, I think, payment of something like 7, 500. There were various other things involved. All bets were off if there was a coup or something like that to upset the government, but it was a page and a half literally written out by him, signed by him on Glenn motor in stationary. Now, for those people that came here in the 50, 60, 70s, kind of the golden era of racing, as I.

Put it the Glenn motor in at the time was where all the team owners, all the drivers stayed. I mean, it was the place to stay for the racing community and Watkins Glenn. So I got this letter out. I showed it to them. They absolutely just flipped out and come to find out one of the reasons she was so intrigued by Mr.

Moss was her father was one of his financial advisors during his racing. I thought the irony of that is would that happen in today’s. legalistic society. You would need a team of [00:08:00] 15 lawyers and 3, 000 sheets of paper and co signers and, you know, notarizers and everything. And this was a page and a half written out by Mr.

Moss himself. Pretty fascinating deal. So,

Crew Chief Eric: and I can say I have had the distinct pleasure of staying at the Glen Motor Inn many, many, many years past its golden days, but it is, it’s an iconic place there along the lake. If you’ve never been there before listeners, I would definitely recommend checking it out.

It’s worth staying at once kind of getting the ambience looking around, seeing all of the memorabilia that’s there. So it is definitely a piece of Watkins Glen history, but the whole area. I love coming up to the Glenn. It’s it’s enriched. It’s entrenched. It just exudes it’s quintessential racing, right?

It’s just everything about the town. You can just feel it when you get there. It’s, it’s unlike anywhere else you’ve ever been. It often reminds me, you know, I go somewhere else and I don’t want to name names of racetracks, but they’re in the middle of nowhere. And they’re. They’re generally in the middle of nowhere for [00:09:00] very good reason.

And it’s very rare to be at a racetrack that where there is civilization, there is beautiful scenery. It’s nestled, you know, high up on the hills, overlooking the lake. I mean, it’s just gorgeous. Everything about the Glen. So if you’ve never been there, I highly recommend it. But we’ll move on and we’ll talk again about the collection.

I guess in my mind, and maybe in some of our listeners minds too, you kind of envision it as not just a library, but maybe like a museum. So maybe, maybe I have this. fantasy in my head. But do you guys see yourself moving in that direction or always staying as an archive?

Kip Zeiter: I think that depends on who on the board you ask at any given point in time, because everybody seems to have a different vision of our future.

Some would like to see us become more of a car museum, which we’re clearly not. We were never designated that from the beginning. We always like to have one or two interesting cars on the floor.

Rick Hughey: Eric, I want to interject something about about the center. is our executive director, uh, Dan DeRusha. Is a [00:10:00] car guy and we are so thrilled to have him, uh, leading the center the last couple of years.

And this, the pandemic of course, is sort of, uh, you know, taking us off at the knees here on a couple of things, but, uh, uh, we have great plans, we have wonderful leadership. We have a wonderful governing council who, uh, are, uh, A lot of them are vintage racers and so we have a good foundation here to make sure this moves forward.

That’s the key thing is getting people to become members and in moving it forward into the next generation. For more programs for kids and just, uh, more opportunities to have a room here to display things. So when someone comes to Watkins Glen, they can not only learn about the racing history here, but maybe there’s a display on Indianapolis or sports car racing or drag racing.

[00:11:00] So you come to the International Motor Racing Research Center and you leave with a pretty comprehensive chance to understand the different types of motorsports. Uh, and uh, so that’s the, that’s the big goal here is to move this forward. Our main

Kip Zeiter: problem at the moment is simply space or lack of. We have so many cool things and this is why it’s, it’s very difficult to quantify what’s our oldest, what’s our most valuable, what’s our, you know, most interesting because we have such a wide variety of different things.

I was going to speak to programs for just a second. I know we were talking at the beginning before this went live, so to speak, how you kind of morphed from an Audi club into much, much, much more over the years. Um, But for your German fans, we have nearly every program from the Nürburgring, arguably the most famous track ever built in the world, dating back from 1927 to 1996.[00:12:00]

Almost every program for every event run during that 70 year history at the Nürburgring. Is that one of our more valuable things? Are we really set up as a museum? Candidly, I can make a case to a degree that we are. We don’t have a lot. We, we don’t have a lot of room for freestanding displays, which is why when you come in the car is usually the most important thing that gets people’s attention right off the bat.

That leads to conversations about what kind of racing they’re interested in, so on and so forth. We just really don’t have the room. At any given point in time, we have some interesting posters or things hung on the wall. We do have several, we have models all over the place, so we have some very cool models.

Racing helmets. Yeah, we have helmets periodically. If we were to pull everything out of the archives, we literally wouldn’t have room to actually display it all here. So we kind of try to rotate things around. And a lot of times that’s dependent on if we’re having a program coming up, one of our center [00:13:00] conversations, or, you know, we have a group like perhaps your group is coming in, a Porsche group is coming in, a Corvette club is coming in, we’ll try and get stuff out that pertains to that and their level of interest.

So it’s kind of a rotating, display type of thing. How does the collection grow? It used to be pre COVID. People would knock on our door two or three times a week. That has since slowed down. Now we get phone calls. We still get the periodic knock on our door, but the collection grows by people that perhaps they are downsizing.

Their, their father, their grandfather was a racer or was a race fan later generations in the family interested in something else could care less about racing. So they have a basement full of old programs or they have trophies or they have helmets or, you know, whatever ticket stubs before they just toss it.

They give us a call. And they say, ask us if we’re interested in it. Now, I don’t want to say that we’re at critical mass, but we’re kind of approaching it. As our space has become more limited over the years, we’ve [00:14:00] had to get a little bit more discretionary in what we take. For example, if somebody calls and says, I have every issue of Road and Track since 1950, I can literally say, we have three issues of Road and Track from 1950 on.

So I don’t need Road and Tracks or Car and Drivers. It’s always nice to add new books to the library. With a library that has 5, 000 volumes, that becomes increasingly rarer because we have so many books, but it’s always cool to be able to add a new edition. People come to us with old photographs, which are just gold, whether they’re sports car racing, road racing photographs, or circle track programs.

I have always considered myself the token short track. which is not true because Rick enjoys it as well. But I spent a lot of time at tracks like Shangri La Speedway in Owego, New York and Oswego Speedway in Oswego watching the roundy rounders go around. And I still love that. That I think is what also makes us a bit unique is that we’re not Watkins Glen [00:15:00] centric by any stretch of the imagination.

We are indebted to the founders of racing here. To Cameron Inger and the family, we are indebted to the heroes that ran those streets from 1948 to 1952 and the current wonderful facility at the top of the hill. But we have much more here than just Watkins Glen stuff.

Rick Hughey: Yeah. The National Speech Sport News Archives are here.

We have Chris Mackey’s, typewriter, , and one of his tape records when he passed away. We were able to receive that through, uh, a gift from, uh, the uh, Dyson Foundation. who purchased it at auction, and they’re just invaluable to research work. Area Auto Racing News, uh, one of the last publications of that sort of newspaper style.

In, uh, in the Northeast, uh, we have their whole collection. So we cover everything from, as Kip says, roundy round racing, to, uh, rallying, uh, Runs the whole gamut.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, and that’s good because multidiscipline is important because I think a lot of people often align [00:16:00] themselves with a discipline and we call them disciplines here, right?

Whether it be road racing, circle track, round around rally, autocross, whatever, motorcycles. I mean, if it has a. If it has an engine and you’re racing against somebody else for us, it’s considered motorsport. You know, motorsport is larger than people realize because again, there are so many disciplines, whether it be off roading, drag racing, road racing, et cetera.

So I’m glad that, you know, you guys are all encompassing because it’s, it’s good to walk in and see more than just, well, this is the history of Watkins Glen under the guise of international racing. And it’s actually just well beyond that. And that’s really, really cool. Would you say the collection is more locally focused?

I mean, it’s obviously nationally focused, but does it go, does it go into the international side?

Kip Zeiter: Yeah, I think you could make a very strong case that it is truly international in scope. A lot of the books that we have in our annuals or reference section of our library are truly worldwide in scope in terms of they cover F1 and rallying [00:17:00] and, you know, sports car racing here in the States and NASCAR and everything.

And, and I think our collections run the gamut of that too.

Rick Hughey: Uh, I just had an email from a guy in England who has a 1965 Corvette. Who has a friend in Spain who has a 1966 Corvette, and he’d like to have us look into its problem. So, uh, we truly are an international motorsports research center, England, France, uh, gosh, there was a car that was found in a garage in Dallas, Texas.

And a gentleman in the Netherlands bought it on auction. He wanted to know about this car. Well, we found a picture of that car in 1982 at Texas Motors, Texas World Speedway. Which I drove.

Crew Chief Eric: I went to one of the last events before it closed.

Rick Hughey: There you go. What a facility. What a facility. And the story about this car is that it was, it didn’t, uh, it only ran twice.[00:18:00]

And then the sponsor, a young gentleman, put it in his garage and it stayed there for 25 years. He passed away. The family put it up for auction. So it didn’t really have a lot of racing history, but we were able to track down the driver who had the whole backstory. The car had been in a fire on the street.

They made it in like a GT3 car and they ran it twice. The guy who sponsored the whole thing. Uh, took it and put it in his garage and it disappeared until that auction. So, uh, the guy in Holland was very pleased to get all that information.

Kip Zeiter: Well, again, the Nürburgring program collection, for example.

Rick Hughey: Autosport, Motorsport, Grand Prix International. We have all of those publications. Track and traffic from Canada that are, uh, Long gone. Some of them, they have such complete information in them about race events. It’s all solid gold stuff. Nice.

Crew Chief Eric: So do you find yourselves also collecting or having [00:19:00] people donate what I consider motorsport adjacent or at least car related or maybe vehicle related publications as well?

And what I mean by that is there’s a lot of coffee table books out there about Porsches and Ferraris and all sorts of cars that also include. The race cars, right? So do you find yourselves people donating that as well?

Rick Hughey: Oh yeah. If it’s connected to motorsports,

Crew Chief Eric: automobilia, we’ve got it here. The complexity of a library most people don’t realize anymore because we’re so used to the digital world is I can walk up to Google and ask it anything or Bing or whichever service you use.

But a library, it’s important that it’s organized in such a way And most people don’t realize it. Libraries aren’t necessarily organized linearly. They’re basically a matrix, right? Because you have to know this is the topic. This is the cross section. This is the genre, you know, and you start looking at it from different angles.

So is it about. Give me all the stuff that’s Ferrari, or is it organized by the driver? Is it organized by the [00:20:00] country? And every library is different. I mean, obviously general public libraries have the Dewey decimal system and it’s a very standardized, but in your guy’s world, you probably had to literally write the book pun intended on how to organize all this data.

So when I walk into the library, how would I find myself? How would I navigate all the information that’s there?

Kip Zeiter: Well, first of all, you’d have to tell us what you were looking for, because in terms of categorizing the books, we do have a marks section and it starts with alpha and it runs the gamut to Volkswagen and you know, you mentioned Porsche, I couldn’t even begin to tell you how many books we have on Porsche.

Porsche and Ferrari are far and away the most volumes. If you’re interested in biographies, we have a biographical section. We have a annuals or reference section where we refer to Indianapolis 500, not program so much, but like the old Floyd Clymer yearbooks that really runs the gamut of the whole month, the [00:21:00] Speedway.

We have those dating back to the probably 30s or 40s. Everything is categorized in, in slightly different Order. And I’d be totally disingenuous if I were to tell you, if you walk in and give me a book title, I can find it in about 30 seconds. Cause that’s kind of rare that that happens.

Crew Chief Eric: But I could come in and ask you, Hey Kip, I want to do some research on Lee Iacocca.

How can you help me?

Kip Zeiter: Yeah, of course. I mean, at first, what we do is we would look into our biography section of books and find what we had there. And then we’d go into the, into the collection database itself and see if anybody had given us. anything pertaining to Iacocca over the years.

Crew Chief Eric: And I bring that up and it’s a bit of an inside joke because I’m a bit of an Iacocca fan, you know, genius ahead of his time and all that.

And he did some wonderful things for Ford, especially, you know, basically birthing the Mustang, even though he didn’t design it, he did, you know, position that and bringing Chrysler back from the grave twice. Right. So, but he’s also influential and a lot of people [00:22:00] realize, Oh, you know, Ford versus Ferrari, that whole movie came out, but I bring it up only because it’s.

One of those motorsport adjacent things where it’s like, I want to come in and do research on that. What can you tell me that I don’t already know from the mainstream or can look up on the internet? And I think that’s really the key of coming into a library like the IMRRC is to say, I want to, like you said about that story about Sterling Moss.

I want to dig in a little deeper. I want to get personal. I want to know about these off the cuff things that just aren’t out there. If I punch it into Google.

Kip Zeiter: One of our greatest resources in that regard would be our historian, Bill Green. Mr. Green has just turned 80 years old a couple weeks ago. He’s lived in this town his entire life.

He’s missed two years of racing here and that was when he was in the service and he was in Europe trying to get in as many races as he could get in when he was in the service in Europe. But Bill Green can tell you stories about almost Anyone related to racing and I don’t care how far back you go. He is a walking encyclopedia of racing [00:23:00] knowledge, more so on road racing.

Obviously you grew up here as a kid and, uh, you know, that’s really his, his bailiwick, but he’s awfully good on Indianapolis. style racing too. So that’s really in terms of stories that you don’t know or never heard of before. Bill Green is the walking talking encyclopedia on that one.

Crew Chief Eric: So let’s talk more about research, right?

Because that’s part of the, one of the core competencies of a library is you’re going there to do research. So how are the items in the library used, let’s say on a daily basis?

Rick Hughey: The, uh, SCCA archive is set up with the race results section. We’ve got driver files going back into the forties and, uh, then all of the sports car magazines from, uh, before it was sports car magazine, it was sport wagon, and it was three pieces of paper stapled together.

And so we’ve got all of that to, to go through the club newsletters. It’s probably [00:24:00] the most important thing. Because we get a driver’s name. All right. We may have his file, may have some results in his file, photographs, that sort of thing. Then we are looking at the years that he competed. So then we would go to sports car, see what we can pull out of there, as well as, as the actual race results itself.

The most interesting thing. recently was a gentleman who had a raw RT1 Formula Atlantic car in England trying to research. He knew the professional history of it, but then wanted some background history of it in its later life in southern California. So we go to the Cal Club newsletters. And start digging through, uh, through there and getting race results for the gentleman who owned it in Southern California in, uh, the late seventies, early eighties, and, uh, uh, come across in a gossip column.

That this car was a prop in an adult film, [00:25:00] which was not what the gentleman in England expected to find out about his car, man. But I knew he

Kip Zeiter: was going to slip

Rick Hughey: that in. You just never know what you’re going to turn up. When you’re digging in information here,

Crew Chief Eric: I’m assuming you guys are on every mailing list that is imaginable too, because they’re sending out results and stuff like that.

And probably collecting things a lot more digitally these days. So your, your digital storage must also be humongous. So we won’t dive into too much details on that as an example. Do you guys, as, as a lot of the racers that are still out there, some of them are still competing well into their, into their old age, are you guys doing profiles on them when, if maybe something tragic were to happen or if they were to pass, are you involved in the OBIT process when people are coming back?

To find out about them. And I’ll give you a prime example. Part of our drive through series. We, we have a motorsport section in there. We call it going behind the wall, which actually was inspired from our trip to Salem’s a couple of years ago at Watkins Glen, where Brad was behind the wall with the Aston Martin team [00:26:00] reporting from there back to us, which is pretty cool.

To go back to this drive through episode last month, we talked about Ralph Hudson, who is a very famous world record setting motorcycle rider who died. Uh, you know, now it’d be about a month ago at 69 years old doing 252 mile an hour on a motorcycle. He’s still competing, right? So I wonder if people are coming back to get that type of information, to build out, you know, these legacies or these, these.

Rick Hughey: We have such an association with S. C. C. A. That when some of their key personnel through the last five or six years have passed away, they call, they want photographs, they want articles that detail part of their work with S. C. C. A. So, yeah, we’ve participated. In that process. Yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: we mentioned in the intro, you know, you guys are also involved with documentaries and filmmaking and things like that, where people are coming in to gather that information.

That makes sense because you don’t want to tell a complete fairy tale. You want it to be grounded in some sort of reality. And [00:27:00] also last month, we discovered that Netflix through an article in variety, Netflix is putting out a drama based on the life of Ayrton Senna. So you guys probably can or can’t talk about it, but I was wondering if anybody’s come a knockin Looking for information like that.

Kip Zeiter: I do know, uh, several years ago, I don’t think it was, it wasn’t a Netflix thing. It appeared on one of these motor racing show things. Uh, there was a multi part series on Patrick Dempsey when he was going to Le Mans. And I do know that we helped quite a bit with that on footage and background information and stuff like that.

Rick Hughey: Uh, we got a request once to host the video production for part of the California Ferrari launch. And, uh, so we had, uh, California Ferrari on the floor. And, uh, Robert Herjavec was here that weekend, the Shark Tank, uh, entrepreneur, uh, racing his Ferrari at Watkins Glen with the National Ferrari Club. And, uh, so he came down, uh, [00:28:00] They moved everything in the place here, uh, set up all these incredible lights and, uh, uh, shielded, uh, windows and everything.

And, uh, spent the day, uh, uh, filming, uh, his part of that, uh, that launch. And, uh, it was, it was really cool. He’s a, he’s a very neat guy. Then they took the car out and we showed them where the old circuit was and they drove around the old circuit and they had a drone. And, uh, they, they got some incredible footage from that.

And, uh, a couple of days later, a friend of mine said, there was this guy in this red car kept driving up my road, and then he pulled in my driveway, and he turned around, he raced back down the other way through the cork fields. And he says he did that three or four times. What was going on? And I said, Oh, I said, you’re, you’re going to see that online someday.

But, uh, so yeah, it’s, uh, behind the scenes a little bit on that production.

Kip Zeiter: I’d forgotten that. Yeah. We help authors. We help film [00:29:00] people and, you know, do that deep background search.

Rick Hughey: Going to, uh, racingarchives. org. You can submit. research requests through the website, and then it goes right to our head archivist, Jenny Ambrose, and then it gets in the queue from there.

So that actually

Crew Chief Eric: brings up a really good question. How big is the staff? It sounds like you got a really good sized team. We multitask like crazy.

Kip Zeiter: No, it’s a pretty lean, it’s a pretty lean crew, Eric. Actually, there’s only what, there’s eight of us, I think, five of us. here that work full time and Rick and Joe Calley, who is the other SCCA technician, kind of split their time throughout the week working on the SCCA stuff.

Yeah, I mean, so there’s only eight of us here all together. It’s a pretty lean group. The only thing I would say, Eric, is to your point of researching and coming in here to do research work, we’re always happy to be able to help people in that regard. The best thing is if you know you’re coming, [00:30:00] shoot us an email, give us a phone call.

Whatever and give us a heads up as to what it when you’re going to be in town and what specifically you’re looking for, because quite honestly, to just knock on the door and come in and say, gee, I’d like to spend the afternoon researching a can be a little bit difficult for us to we can ultimately find the stuff.

It’s just it’s much better from both sides of the equation. If we have a heads up and kind of a notice that you’re going to be in town next week. And here’s what you’d like to look at. We can pull it out.

Crew Chief Eric: Absolutely, I’ll have it waiting for you. So I tell you what, if there was an opportunity for me to get a master’s in automotive history, I’d probably be there every day.

So sounds like the right place to be. So moving on from the research, you guys have something known as on the grid and we talked already about how the IMRC was never really intended to be a museum. But you do showcase a car and it seems to revolve throughout the year. So tell us a little bit more about that program.

Kip Zeiter: When I came here, I’ve been here eight years plus. And when I first came here, there was a [00:31:00] tremendous gentleman by the name of Michael Argensinger. Cameron and Jean Argensinger’s background had nine children all together. They had six boys and three girls. So Cameron and Jean did more than just racing and library stuff.

They were all wonderful kids, just wonderful human beings. Actually, Michael raced for a number of years in Europe, wrote any number of different books, has a tremendous book here on the 20 year history of the Grand Prix at Watkins Glen. Wrote books on Mark Donahue, Walt Hanskin. Opened a PR firm in Chicago.

Tremendous guy. So everybody in the racing universe knew who Mike Gargettsinger was and Mike was Largely responsible for getting the cars here. And it became a question when Mike called you, it was pretty much, yeah, Mike, I got that when you want it and how long you want to keep it. Michael unfortunately passed away four years ago, maybe now thereabouts.

And, uh, so that job of, of, uh, getting cars kind of felt to me, which is fine, except nobody knows who I am, but fortunately I can tread on the reputation of the [00:32:00] IMRRC. So. So what we try to do is we try to get cars here that are relevant to what might be happening at the track. If it’s IMSA weekend, we want to have some interesting sports car.

If it’s NASCAR weekend, we want to have a big Vulcan, Hulken stock car on the floor. Or if we’re doing a particular center conversation and maybe we’ll Focus on that a little bit later in the talk, we want to have something that’s relevant to that. Then there’s just stuff that were no particular relevance at all.

But candidly, I think it’s cool. I had a super modified in here very early on in my tenure here, and it was one of the winged jobs. So we had to basically take the car apart to get it through the doors to get it in here and then rebuild it. But the look on people’s faces when they would walk through the door and here’s this.

You know, big block Chevy engine canted over to the left, big wing on the, on the cage, they had no idea what this car was. It looked like it was dropped down from outer space. And then of course, I would be able to talk about the wonders of Oswego super modified racing. So even when we say [00:33:00] our, our resources here run the gamut from, you know, circle track racing to road racing, so do the cars that we have on display.

We’ve had numerous Formula One cars here. We’ve had a 917 Porsche just several years ago, and we were celebrating the 20th anniversary of this place, but we had actually the, uh, Maserati that led the first competitive lap here in town in 1948. And then we had the Asuka that took the last. checkered flag that was flown on the street circuit in 1952.

We had those two cars side by side. And, you know, the Maserati actually came to us from the Saratoga Auto Museum. The Asuka came to us courtesy of a gentleman out in Vancouver, BC, who had the car restored. Wanted to show it at the vintage festival and it just all happened to work out. It took about a year for all of that to be planned out and worked out.

But so even our cars, and again, like I say, we weren’t ever envisioned as a car museum, but that’s the first thing people see when they come in. [00:34:00] So that lights their eyes up, you know, 5, 000 books, uh, bookshelves are impressive, but kind of like just a big library. So having an interesting car or two on the floor, that’s what gets people’s.

attention. That’s what kind of gets people’s juices rolling a bit. And then, like I say, we can segue into what kind of racing they’re interested in, and then the conversation goes from there.

Crew Chief Eric: Are you guys familiar with the Simeone Foundation out in Philadelphia?

Kip Zeiter: Oh, yeah, we ran a, we ran a bus trip down there, uh, six or seven years ago.

He’s just a, he’s a tremendous guy.

Crew Chief Eric: Absolutely. So, so we went to visit Dr. Simeone as well earlier this year before everything shut down. And so that was, uh, some of our members had gone before and we did the same thing. A bunch of us got together and decided to go to Philly for the day. And what an incredible museum that is, because if you think about it, it’s a private collection that’s open to the public.

And he is a very. Kind of strict or particular, I guess, is the word I want to use about what’s in the collection because every one of those cars, maybe people don’t know this, every one of the [00:35:00] cars in the collection has motorsport pedigree. Right. So I, I joked that Dr. Simeone doesn’t buy any losers. Right.

But, but, but everything, you know, there’s no street cars in there. They all have some sort of history and some sort of, uh, background to them. So I think it’s an interesting crossover overlap there where I could see you guys doing something together in the future. And it’d be kind of neat. And he does have a ton of space.

Kip Zeiter: Yeah, no, he invited our group in actually, uh, our historian, Bill Greenwood. And, uh, we went on one of his demo days. I don’t know if you’ve been there for his demonstration days, but those are definitely, I mean, the place you’re absolutely right. It’s a fabulous place, but it’s really cool to go on a demo day because they’re all geared to actually getting three or four cars out in the back parking lot and running them around so you get to hear them and smell them and, you know.

So after he had done his demo day stuff, he took us upstairs to one of the conference rooms and he just. You know, we just talked to our group for probably an hour easy. He had Bill Green [00:36:00] identify some photographs that he had in his collection. He’s an awesome guy.

Crew Chief Eric: And I was also wondering if they had ever called you to figure out some history on the cars that they have there.

Cause again, all of them have been in races of some sort, right?

Rick Hughey: Yeah. A couple of years ago, they had, uh, the Greenwich car show. And I took Mr. Green down because the feature was, uh, the Cunningham cars. I ran into, uh, Dr. Simeone there and reminded him of our group had been down to his, uh, his museum. And he says, Oh, how’s Bill Green?

I said, he’s right over there. I brought him down here. He says, where is he? He says, I got to get him back down because I’ve got more things I need to have him identify.

Kip Zeiter: You’re right. I mean, the cars on display are fabulous, but it’s, it’s really cool going on a demo day when you get to hear them. I’m a big sensory, you know, guy.

I mean, I, I, what turned me on from racing right from the get go was the sound of it and the smell of it and all the visual stuff that, that it entails. So give [00:37:00] me, give me a night of smell of methanol on Oswego Speedway, and, and I’m a very happy camper. So what’s on the, what’s on the grid right now? Well, unfortunately, nothing’s on the grid right now.

The last cars we had in here were actually two electric.

Rick Hughey: Yeah, they were spec racers.

Kip Zeiter: Spec racers, but

Rick Hughey: electric

Kip Zeiter: engines. Because we had those in here in conjunction with the Green Grand Prix, a very cool event. As its name would indicate that it’s held at the track once the world changed completely. And unfortunately we had to shut down.

It just, it obviously just made no sense to have anything on the floor here if we weren’t going to be having visitors. So this has been in, in any number of different ways. This has been the year that we’d all like to just move on and move immediately to 2021 hit

Crew Chief Eric: that reset button, right? Yeah, for

Kip Zeiter: sure.

That’s for sure. Uh, one more, one more thing on the car. If I might add, when I said originally that when Michael called It was usually just a question of what car do you want? I am always on the lookout for cars. So if I could just tell [00:38:00] your, well, your viewers, your listeners, your

Crew Chief Eric: audience, okay.

Kip Zeiter: That if they have anything that they think might be interesting and are willing to part with it for a month or two, I mean, depending on the tow involved, unfortunately, we’re We’re a struggling nonprofit.

We don’t, we can’t pay money to have, you know, cars brought in and stuff. So I really have to work off just the good nature and, and, uh, wonderfulness of people that are willing to do that. But I, I am always on the lookout for interesting cars. So if I could just throw that out there. I think this is a

Crew Chief Eric: great segue into talking about how the center raises money.

And right now you guys currently have a sweepstake for a Corvette. Is that correct? That is totally correct. It’s the

Kip Zeiter: brand new C8. Well, anyway, this is, this is the mid engine Corvette that Chevy has been promising for, you know, easily 20 years, uh, if not more. You

Crew Chief Eric: mentioned going back to about 20 years or so, but I think you guys would be probably shocked to realize Corvette has been working on a mid engine version since 1964.

[00:39:00] And I actually wrote an article about this on our website, uh, gtmotorsports. org. And if you search mid engine, it’ll come up. Uh, the title is the C8 is not the first mid engine Corvette. And I go through the history of the number of trials and errors that they went through developing the mid engine Corvette.

So if you have some free time, check out our website as well.

Kip Zeiter: Oh, definitely. Well, and actually. Rick, you can speak to this, I’m sure better than me, but isn’t it, is it legend or fact that the idea for the Corvette kind of originated

Rick Hughey: in Watkins Glen? An American sports car, the idea came out of Harley Earl’s visit to Watkins Glen in the, uh, in the 50s.

And he, uh, you know, looked at the Allards and with the big American engines, in these small, uh, British sports cars and said, we’ve got to have something like that. And he spent a lot of time with the local Chevrolet dealer because they had brought the, uh, uh, Lesabre show car [00:40:00] here for, uh, the concourse event.

And, uh, they had, uh, Chance to talk about cars and, and here’s all of these Allards and, uh, such going by. And, and he proclaimed on, uh, the, uh, gentleman who was the uh, dealership owner that there needs to be an American sports car. We’re going to get to work on that. And, uh, so, you know, uh, wasn’t many years later that, uh, a Corvette came to Watkins Glen to be part of that car show.

Kip Zeiter: But the groundwork was laid here at Watkins level.

Crew Chief Eric: Very cool. Man, I, every day I wish I lived closer. Let me tell you.

Kip Zeiter: And, uh, we have one. Ours is a 2020 model. My understanding is the assembly line shut down at some point in time in the spring or, or, uh, Early summer, sometime mid pandemic and everything that was coming off the line after that is now a 2021.

Ours is a true 2020. It’s the base ZL1 [00:41:00] with the Z51 option package. The Z51 package gets you Brembo brakes, Pirelli PZero tires. I think it’s upgraded rubber all around. Uh, some suspension tweaks, some cooling tweaks, front splitter, uh, rear spoiler and a multi stage. driving setup, basically, where you can go from mild to wild.

It opens the exhaust system up. It changes the shift points. It’s one of these digital dashes. It’s very cool. Every time you change to a different mode, the dashboard reconfigures. It’s very cool. That is first prize. But there’s also, in addition to that, You get an hour’s worth of track time here at WGI with a driving coach.

You get the three day, two night Ron Fellows Corvette driving experience in Vegas. Transportation to Vegas not included, but the course is included. You win admission for two to, for next year’s season at the Jack Daniels Club, which is the real upscale place here at WGI to watch races. And when you come to pick up your car, you get an overnight accommodation at the Harbor [00:42:00] Hotel.

Which is literally the, you know, the greatest, nicest hotel in Watkins Glen right now. So you win all of that, if for some inexplicable reason you didn’t want that, you can take 50, 000 in cash instead. It’s not bad. Our main source of revenue is we are a membership based organization. So you can become a member for as low as 25 a year up to whatever your checkbook and your enthusiasm level and your wife or husband will allow.

Our second biggest fundraiser of the year is as you say, uh, we always raffle off a car. Uh, this year we’ve gone to a bit of a, in lieu of the traditional raffle, where we set a finite number of tickets and do it for six months or whatever the length of time is. This year we’ve gone to a sweepstakes model, which means we are going to sell tickets until December 3rd, which is the drawing date.

And you can buy tickets in increments of 25, which is the minimum price, [00:43:00] up to 2, 500, which is kind of the crazy price. But depending on, I think it goes 250, 500, 1, 500, something like that. And of course, the bigger the contribution, the more tickets that you get. So all people need to do is, is get on our website.

Which is racingarchives. org. When you go to the homepage, if you go over to the right, there’s a little thing that says support the center. Click on that. There’s a dropdown menu, which takes you right to the page. And for your listeners, when you actually reach the page, there’s a little blank to put in a promo code, put in KIPP, K I P, like Peter 25, KIPP 25.

That gets you an additional 25 percent more tickets. For example, if you, if you want to contribute a hundred bucks, that gets you 16 tickets. With the KIPP 25 promo, you get 20, and it works that way on up the line. So

Crew Chief Eric: that’s, that’s a heck of a discount code. I like that.

Kip Zeiter: That’s our second biggest fundraiser.

And our third biggest is our Argettsinger dinner, which unfortunately was a victim of, you know, the pandemic this year. [00:44:00] Hopefully next year we will get back into our Argettsinger dinner where we honor a true mover and shaker in, in motor sports.

Rick Hughey: So this is our main fundraiser for the year, and we’d like to invite people to get involved with the sweepstakes, but to become a member of this organization, it’s founded for the motorsports person.

If you need some information, we’re probably the place to come,

Crew Chief Eric: but let’s go back and let’s talk a little bit more about what you guys do. And let’s talk, uh, something that Kip hinted to, which are the center conversations. And I hear that these are held about six weeks Six times a year, every two months or so.

And what is that all about?

Kip Zeiter: Center Conversation is kind of considered our, our true outreach to the community. The actual conversation itself is held literally right across our parking lot at the junior high school auditorium, which when I first started here, had really hard, very uncomfortable seats, awful to sit there for any amount of time has subsequently been renovated.

It’s beautiful, very nice, comfortable seats, all kinds [00:45:00] of, you know, the latest audio visual equipment. Center Conversations can range from an author with a new book. It can be the history of a particular series, a racetrack, a car, a driver. Some of the ones that come to mind that I actually had a hand in putting together one month after the Syracuse One mile dirt track, the Syracuse fairgrounds, which had run races since probably the early 1910 1930s was deemed unnecessary by the politicians in Syracuse.

And we won’t go into that because I’d be going on for another half hour. But anyway, one month after the Syracuse fairgrounds ran their final race, we had a program on the history of the Syracuse fairgrounds, and we had a doctor professor of history, but he went back and did a in depth research of the history of the Syracuse mile.

We had a half a dozen drivers who had driven on the Syracuse mile, but we had a car on the floor called the Batmobile, which in 1980, driven by Gary Ballew, New [00:46:00] Jersey guy, totally blew away the competition at Syracuse to the. To the point where they outlawed it, it ran one year, it cleaned house. That was it.

You never saw it again, but we have that on the floor here. And that was basically an all day thing. We’ve had a program called the men behind the microphones, where we’ve had announcers from various disciplines, from road racing, from short track racing, talk about their experience. history. Rick and Bill and another gentleman do a program that normally kicks off our year talking about the people that are enshrined in the driver’s walk of fame in Watkins.

To your point earlier about coming up to Watkins Glen and the whole ambiance of the area, Hollywood has their walk of fame, Watkins Glen has our walk of fame, and the stipulation being that You had to have driven at the track. So Rick and Bill and Jim normally key off our series of conversations at the beginning of the year by each taking, Oh, I don’t know what is it, Rick, three or four or five gentlemen, and doing a background information on their career.

That kind of sets the tone for the year, but [00:47:00] the Syracuse mile thing was an all day thing, but normally they’ll last a couple hours. Uh, we’ll have, you know, maybe some coffee and light refreshments over here before. And after, and it’s very informal. After the program is done, people come back here and you, and you have the time to chat with the speakers.

And it’s just, I mean, it’s a very cool way to spend a few hours on a Saturday afternoon. Doesn’t cost anything. It’s to the purpose of our mission of preserving and sharing, uh, the history of motorsports.

Crew Chief Eric: So one of the challenges we have, which I’m sure you do as well, is engaging the younger audience, engaging the younger drivers, keeping people interested in motorsports.

And so our charter or our challenge is to continue to spread motor sorts, enthusiasm and educate people on organizations like yourself and all the different groups that are out there and all the different disciplines. Right? So we have a, we have a long road ahead of us and a lot more episodes to come.

And so you’re, you’re a chapter in this larger book, but I wonder from the center’s perspective, what are you doing to engage? Yeah. Children [00:48:00] or younger drivers, you know, all the way down or, and even women, right? Because we, we’ve talked a lot on this show sometimes too, that motorsport is male dominated, unfortunately, and we’ve seen a change in the last 20 years for sure.

But how do you engage that fringe audience that it doesn’t have gas that they need to burn off of their chest?

Kip Zeiter: That’s a, that’s a great question. Let me, I’ll, I’ll just throw in one thing and then I’ll let Rick go. You’re absolutely right. in terms of getting the younger audience. We desperately need to get younger.

I mean, your audience can’t see us, but I’m an old guy. Rick’s not as old as I am. One of the, one of the things that we do, which is not necessarily considered a conversation, but we do it on an annual basis as we have a model car show. And two years ago, we invited and they participated and they were absolutely Tremendous.

The Rochester Lego user group came down with a bunch of cars that they had built out of Legos. They built a track. Uh, they had parts bins where kids could build cars and race them down the track. These people were just phenomenal. We really had reached [00:49:00] out to the various elementary schools in the area.

And that one day in particular skewed our average age down considerably because we had kids probably from five years old. On up just running around the place all day long. But to your point of trying to encourage the younger crowd or the staff members. What 1 thing that was discouraging this year with, you know, the way the year panned out is our chief archivist.

Jenny Ambrose as Rick had mentioned earlier. This being the hundredth year of women’s suffrage has a exhibit, two exhibits, actually one, which I believe is still, it’s a photo exhibit from a photojournalist, Kathy Meredith, who worked for, uh, Cananda Paper. Canand was, I don’t know, 40 miles up the road here and was a photojournalist back in the, again, I keep harping on the golden era of racing sixties, seventies.

So she has a lot of wonderful black and white photographs from Watkins Glen, uh, which is currently on display at the AR art Museum in. I’m sorry, in Elmira, and then we have a, uh, a banner [00:50:00] display. That’s going to be around for a couple more weeks. And then we’re going to move it over here on women in racing, both from a driver standpoint, a photography standpoint, and a kind of behind the scene standpoint, meaning timing and scoring and things of that nature.

We were disappointed. We had probably at least two center conversations that were simply going to revolve around women in racing, which let’s just say they were, they’re postponed. I think we’re still going to do them next year, Lord willing. But, uh, but yeah, we are reaching out to that. You’re right. It’s not just all guys, all that stuff.

There’s many

Crew Chief Eric: of us that love to go fast and love the sound of an engine, right?

Rick Hughey: Very true. When folks are here in Watkins Glen, uh, the Chamber of Commerce is where the Women in Motorsports banner display is. And, uh, we’ve also got a, uh, Formula, Rena Spec Racer in there on display from the collections.

Crew Chief Eric: There’s a couple things left I guess to talk about on the list. You’ve got the Arting Symposium and you also have the Arts Inger [00:51:00] Awards and all that kind of stuff. Do you guys want to kind of dive into that a little bit and explain to the audience again, these are some, uh, uh, more things that the Center does for all of its members and, and, and the interested public.

Kip Zeiter: Let me, I’ll talk about the dinner and then I’ll let Rick talk about the, uh, the symposium. The dinner was started, I believe six or seven years ago, quite candidly as a fundraising project. Cameron Argersinger, again, being the founder of racing here and the founder of post World War II racing in the United States.

Uh, we honor him with this award and I always find myself catching myself when I say we give it to a motor sports personality because yes, they are personalities, but the list of people that we have honored with this award And by the way, they all show up. This is not just an honorary thing. Started with Chip Ganassi.

Chip, you know, raced here both in sports cars, as well as had a nice Indy career and of course has, you know, morphed into a team owner of sports cars, Indy cars, NASCARs. So Chip held

Rick Hughey: a lap record here in Formula Ford for quite a few years.

Kip Zeiter: So Chip was the first, Richard Petty [00:52:00] was the second. Roger Penske, some guy named Mario.

I can’t think of his last name. Yeah, Italian last name. Mario something. Yeah. Um, Jim France and the France family and, uh, Bobby Rahal. Now I can’t tell you, or I guess I’m not supposed to tell you. So I won’t tell you who we were going to honor this year, but it would have just kind of continued that same vein.

So anyway, the dinner itself has always been held at the Corning Museum of Glass. It’s a 250 a plate dinner. A lot of industry insiders attended because we always try to, depending on who we’re honoring, we have it in conjunction with either NASCAR weekend or the IMSA weekend. So there’s a lot of people in town anyway, but it certainly is open for, you know, Joe fan.

Clearly the year that we honored Mario, we had more Joe fans in the house than, than anybody because who doesn’t love Mario Andretti? It’s a very, upscale evening. It’s it’s business casual for dress, but Corning Museum of Glass always did a great job with it. We were very disappointed. We were actually going to move it to [00:53:00] Watkins this year.

We were going to have it at the Harbor Hotel. We were all excited about that next year. It’s a terrific evening. You get to see a lot of guys kind of Semi up close and personal, I guess, depending on what table you’re sitting at. But they’ve all been terrific. I, I’ll preface it by saying that they’ve all been just wonderful.

Richard brought Kyle and the two of them bantering back and forth on stage. It was very clear that it wasn’t just some show that they were putting on for the audience. It was very clear that there’s true love and of. Affection there in that family, the, the fellow that kind of surprised me was Mr. Penske.

I always thought of him as kind of the, the captain, you know, the cold taciturn guy. And he couldn’t have been more delightful and friendly and signed autographs. And, I mean, just totally my conception of him just totally disappeared. He was just wonderful. So it’s a terrific evening again, hopefully back on the schedule next year, hopefully Back here or, or here for the first time in Watkins Glen.

And, uh, kind of a stay tuned type of thing on that. So I’m definitely going to be paying [00:54:00] attention. Yeah, no, it’s, it’s a fun night. We have, uh, show cars and stuff that are outside. Uh, the Corning Museum of Glass is always hugely busy with tourists. The interesting thing is because a lot of the people that attend the dinner are, are, are industry insiders.

You know, what do they care about a show car? They see this every weekend. Okay. It’s the people getting off the tour bus that all come over and take pictures of the, the IndyCar, the NASCAR stock car, the, you know, whatever it is we have on the floor, we have Mario’s 79, uh, world championship winning F1 Lotus on display at one, yeah, well, actually it was the year.

Duh, that Mario was here. Here. So, uh, uh, so yeah, we even get some cool cars that we have positioned out in front of the, uh, out, out in front of the place as well.

Rick Hughey: Now the, uh, symposium is, uh, wide ranging topics in, uh, in motor sports. We’ve had, uh, authors, bloggers from all over the country and Europe have been here to go through the list of topics, [00:55:00] gosh, just very wide ranging.

We’d have to go back and really pull out some, some notes to be honest with you on, uh, on the range of topics. But one gentleman was here with, uh, uh, dirt track racing. In southeastern Alabama, and then another gentleman’s here talking about, uh, Formula One in, uh, in the fifties, Formula V racing in its infancy, we had,

Kip Zeiter: and let me just interject.

These are all academic.

Rick Hughey: Yes,

Kip Zeiter: people. This is, you know, as opposed to our conversations where. Yeah, we’ll have authors for stuff and a lot of fans. These are all academic people in large part talking to other academics. I mean, I, I was surprised that, I mean, I think one year, Rick, didn’t we have somebody fly in from New Zealand or something to attend this?

It’s like, really?

Rick Hughey: So it’s wide ranging and, uh, they’re, uh, very detailed, uh, PowerPoint presentations for the most part. Just, uh, people that have spent. Maybe a year [00:56:00] or two creating this presentation. I mean, you’re, you’re riveted when you’re, when you’re sitting there. Uh, we’ve been holding those at the media center at Watkins Glenn International the last few years.

They have a excellent, uh, audio visual set up and, uh, and hospitality set up there. So they’ve been very nice to, uh, to host that for us.

Kip Zeiter: And normally we would now be getting ready to host that. Again, because it’s been held traditionally in November, but, you know, again, I hate to keep throwing this up, but it’s, that’s another thing that we lost this year.

But again, hopefully next year. But that’s a, it’s a very interesting thing. I’m not an academic. I’m an enthusiast and we approach things at two different levels. And it’s interesting to hear the academics. How they approach it as opposed to just a enthusiastic guy like me approaching it. But yeah,

Crew Chief Eric: I, I think they, they desensitize themselves.

They also strip away any loyalty, right? They look at it purely as [00:57:00] data facts, statistics, all that kind of stuff. So, I mean, as a student, You always have to kind of stand back and look at the bigger picture. And I always view history as links in a chain, right? So certain events occurred, which caused other events to occur.

And it’s a whole ripple effect from that point forward. But yeah, but being an enthusiast, that’s where the passion is. That’s where the excitement is. So that’s where people, uh, you, you can spread that enthusiasm and get other people interested in that particular topic or subject or whatever it might be.

And that is how you continue to propel this forward. And again, I think it takes all types and I think you guys are doing a great job of that. And so having the academics and the enthusiasts, everybody in the same room. That’s what keeps this going. That’s what that’s what keeps it moving.

Kip Zeiter: And to your point about being younger, Alfred State University, which is what, 90 minutes up the road here, probably has a tremendous automotive technology department.

And we routinely have I don’t know, 15 or 20 of their kids come [00:58:00] down to listen to this. So in addition to the older, again, academic people in the room, we have, uh, kids that are involved in automotive technology, be it because they want to go on and be a service tech, be it they want to go on and become something to do with a race team.

So that’s, so that kind of helps us. skew that age thing down a little

Crew Chief Eric: bit as well. And I think there’s, there’s a lot to look forward to in 2021. I mean, I, I’m going to definitely make it a point in my schedule to see which of these events, which I didn’t know about until now that I can attend. I mean, I come up to the Glen very regularly.

So for not this year, but so for me, it’d be easy to say, Oh, on this particular weekend, I’m already going to be there anyway. Or, you know, I’m going to go up. Do this instead because it’s, it’s interesting and it’s something else that we can talk about maybe on a subsequent episode. Hey, what was the topic this year at the Arts Inc.

symposium? Let’s, let’s break that down. Let’s unpack it, you know, that sort of thing. But I do have a couple other questions. I think this question I could only ask you guys. We talk about it a lot because we’re prepping for 2023 [00:59:00] and there’s a significance to that. And here comes the question. In your opinion, what’s more important, the hundredth running of LeMans or the hundredth anniversary of LeMans?

To me,

Rick Hughey: it’s the running of it, the event itself, you know, to be, uh, uh, reading, uh, in history here about Pete Lyons crawling through the woods, uh, in, uh, you know, 1970, creeping up to the guardrail to shoot some photographs and hearing a mantra come up through, uh, the Mulsanne Strait, it’s all about the action.

Kip Zeiter: I think I would probably agree with Rick on the 100th running, but just to throw in yet something else we have in the collections. A guy sent us a VHS tape several years ago of a Ford GT40. This is an in car thing. There’s no dialogue. The guy just starts out and he runs the whole course. And this is way before guardrails and all this stuff.

And you are just along for the ride as this GT40 thunders down the Mulsanne Strait at 210, 220, 25 miles an hour. And the [01:00:00] trees are literally feet away from you. I mean, it’s just incredible. It’s, and there’s, as I say, there doesn’t need to be any narration. It’s just this in car camera with this car, uh, from probably the late 60s.

Okay. That’s when the GT40 was, was dominant there. Unbelievable. Um, spectacular. Unbelievable. Mesmerizing. How many years difference is there between the 100th anniversary and the 100th running?

Crew Chief Eric: Well, Le Mans started in 1923 and there were years in there because of the war and everything else where Le Mans didn’t happen.

Yeah, so the hundredth anniversary of Le Mans is in two years or three years. Well, let’s call it two years, right? We’re not that far away. So this year marked the 88th. Running of Lamont. So that puts us 12 more years out to reach the hundredth running of Lamont. And that’s why we asked the question hundredth anniversary versus hundredth running.

Do you want to wait till 23 or do you want to wait to 32? It makes a big difference for the enthusiast at that [01:01:00] point. So does that change? I think it would also depend on

Kip Zeiter: how old you are at the time. Now I might have to change my answer to the anniversary.

Rick Hughey: Yeah, good, good point. But, uh, yeah, it’s, it’s still, uh, it’s still about seeing it.

And I’m hoping that We’ll see, uh, more interest in, uh, more teams because it’s, uh, it’s the big companies are, uh, finding other ways to spend money,

Crew Chief Eric: unfortunately. So, right. And we talk a lot about that, uh, on, on different episodes where, you know, the, the dawn of. The two door sports car is gone, right? A lot of sedans are disappearing.

We’re moving to electric. I mean, there’s, but it’s what people don’t realize. Yes. Cars are appliances in some respect, depending on how you use them and trucks for their purposes, et cetera, but sports cars, racing, motor sports. Has done so much for engineering. It trickles down into so many [01:02:00] other industries, things that were invented at the racetrack.

And what people don’t realize is not by doctors and scientists in the old days, by guys that went, that didn’t look right. It didn’t work. That broke. We need to fix it. And that ended up trickling down into other things. And so I always viewed racing as. pushing the envelope of engineering, especially Formula 1, right?

And Formula 1 is on the grand scale. It’s, it’s right up there with soccer and other stuff like that. But a lot of other disciplines don’t get the same kind of recognition. I, I like the fact that IMSA has really come up again in the last, you know, Like decade or so where it kind of fell off for a while.

You know, it had its heyday in the Can Am, uh, you know, seventies and eighties, as you talk about the golden era of racing and things like that. And it’s kind of ebbed and flowed, but I’m glad that it’s coming back. But IMSA is very tightly coupled with Le Mans, even though Le Mans is WEC and FIA and all that kind of stuff, but you’re right, the P1, especially the prototype cars, that’s where you’re looking at cutting edge technology that will be in your street car 10 [01:03:00] years from now.

And as we move away from that and people. If we don’t continue to spread the enthusiasm or get people engaged in racing, then, then you’re right. The big companies are going to pull out. They’re like, well, I’m just going to go build something that moves people around all day long. Cause that’s what people want.

So it’s, it’s, it’s, it’s a bit bittersweet, but I hope that, you know, having conversations like this continue to reinvigorate that continue to kind of churn the water. And people look at the older technology and go, that’s still ahead of its time, you know, that car from 1980 or 1970, they were doing that back then.

I mean, I don’t want to go into deep, specific engineering details, but there’s still things that you’re like, wow, I can’t believe they were doing that 40 years ago. Right? So you got to look at motorsport. Not just as a sport, because it is, but also as chemistry, engineering, physics. I mean, it’s all gamuts of STEM at the end of the day.

I

Kip Zeiter: mean, look at, look at how many manufacturers, Audi, I think for one, got out of endurance racing and went formula [01:04:00] E racing. Now I have to, I’m going to show my age here. And I just told you what turns me on about racing is all the visceral stuff. I’ve never been to a formula E race. I watched one briefly.

It was like watching paint dry to me. I understand I’m probably in the minority, but if there’s no sound and no smell apart from a burnt condenser or something, right? I, I don’t know. I would find myself feeling it. I don’t know. Yeah. I don’t know.

Crew Chief Eric: So another question for you. If you guys had to pick one manufacturer that was maybe the most, not maybe the most prominent, not the most winning, but the most influential in changing motorsport, who would you say that is?

Kip Zeiter: You didn’t tell me I need to study for this trick questions here. Wow. Are we talking somebody along the lines of Ford Chevy? Are we talking along the lines of like a McLaren? Could be anybody.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s, it’s your personal opinion. I have my vote, but I’ll reveal [01:05:00] that at the end.

Kip Zeiter: Well, going back to my era of racing, I guess I would say.

I would probably say either McLaren or Porsche because I grew up in the era of the Can Am. And of course, the McLaren was the dominant car in the early years of the Can Am. But then when the killer Porsche 917 came out or whatever it was, I mean, you know, the 1100 horsepower Porsche just completely obliterated the competition.

But McLaren was also very strong in F1 racing at the time. Not so much now, unfortunately, but, or Ferrari. I mean, Ferrari has been like a thread through so many years of racing sports cars, F1, I don’t know. So Rick, Rick,

Crew Chief Eric: what do you think?

Rick Hughey: Uh, I’d have to say in, uh, the big three in this country, I’d have to say, uh, probably General Motors bringing along motorsports.

And then having to drop out yet, still bringing the, [01:06:00] uh, the technology through the back door, if you will, and, uh, working through a smaller race teams and, uh, probably I’d have to go with GM, although I’m kind of a Ford guy, Edsel Ford took me home from the racetrack one time, that’s a story for you. Did he take you home in an Edsel though?

No, he took me

Crew Chief Eric: home in his own

Kip Zeiter: car. He dropped him off. He dropped him off a block before his house. Cause he didn’t want to see him pulling up in front of his house. And then Edsel for God’s

Rick Hughey: sake. No, we were, we were at, uh, at the Grand Prix here and, uh, Edsel Ford Jr. was there. I was with some friends with the Tyrrell team and that’s where he was a Jackie Stewart fan, of course.

And so I’m walking home from the racetrack. And. I’m just down the road and I hadn’t had a chance to meet him in the garage area, uh, but all of a sudden this cougar pulls over and Michigan plates and he says, Hey, you need a lift? And I had a material jacket on [01:07:00] and he says, hop in. So I hop in the back.

He’s got his girlfriend in the front and he says, you live here, right? And I says, yeah. And he says, well, He says, good. And he says, I need to know how to get out of here on Sunday. So he hands me a piece of paper. I draw him a couple of maps and, uh, he dropped me off at, uh, my house, which was right across the road from Seneca Lodge.

And, uh, uh, so I can say that Edsel Ford took me home and dropped me off in his personal car, which had a little plaque on the dash that said, This car built especially for Edsel Bryant Ford. Very cool. So that was a, that was a cool event.

Kip Zeiter: Well, I don’t have anything to top that. Nah, I don’t either. But, uh, all right.

So what’s your, what’s your verdict?

Crew Chief Eric: So growing up in the group B era, Right. So I’m dating myself now in the eighties, right? So I was a big Audi fan. I grew up in a Volkswagen Porsche family and, you know, Honstock is my hero. I got [01:08:00] to see him race at the Glen on TV, uh, things like that, you know, with the, with the ITU cars and all that, but Audi is not my pick.

When I look at the history of motorsport and I look at. One of the most influential in terms of breaking the rules, changing the rules, pushing the boundaries of engineering, having some of the top notch race car drivers of all time. I have to tip my hat to a company that started in a shed in England, and that goes to Colin Chapman and his crew at Lotus.

Oh,

Kip Zeiter: okay. That’s a good choice. I can’t find a fault with that.

Crew Chief Eric: No. My listeners are going, oh, yeah. Well, my listeners are gone. Oh God, he’s talking about Lotus again. Here we go. So Kip and Rick, I can’t thank you guys enough for coming on the show. This has been extremely educational and I think our listeners are really going to enjoy learning more about the IMRRC by visiting your guy’s website, which you can visit by [01:09:00] going to www.

racingarchives. org or if you’re like me and happen to be In Watkins Glen at some point during the year, head down to 610 South Decatur Street in downtown Watkins Glen to check out the facility for yourself. Obviously nowadays it’s not open to the public like it used to be, but you can always reach out to Kip at kipatracingarchives.

org, set up an appointment, come in and check it out and learn more about what they have to offer. So again, guys, I can’t thank you enough for coming on. This has been really cool and a lot of fun.

Kip Zeiter: Yeah, I had fun. Yeah. It’s been a pleasure. Thanks so much. Thanks, Eric.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey, listeners, did you enjoy this particular episode? Did you know you can learn more about what we just talked about by visiting the GTM website? If you want to learn more or just review the materials from this episode, be sure to log on to www.gt motorsports.org today and search for this [01:10:00] particular episode.

From all of us at GTM, never stop learning.

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 Instagram at grandtorymotorsports. 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.

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