SRO Motorsports – GT America

• Discuss the history of SRO – So many name changes: formerly Pirelli World Challenge,  formerly Speed World Challenge, and others… what is SRO?
• SRO is broken into multi racing programs, let’s expand on that and talk about what each one is about, types of cars, is it all “road racing”
• We had SRO series driver Robb Holland (from Rotek Racing) on the show a while back, who are some other Drivers that people might recognize running in the series?
• How does someone watch an SRO race?
• What is the future of the SRO program? What are some of your short-term ’22/23 plans, and what does the next 5+ years look like?

and much, much more!

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Gran Touring Motorsports podcast, break Fix, where we’re always fixing the break into something motorsports related. The following episode is brought to you by SRO Motorsports America and their partners at aws CrowdStrike, Fantech Pelli, and the Skip Barber Racing School. Be sure to follow all the racing action by visiting www.sro-motorsports.com.

Or take a shortcut to GT america.us and be sure to follow them on social at Gt underscore America, on Twitter and Instagram at SRO GT America on Facebook and catch live coverage of the races on their YouTube channel at GT World. With more than 25 years of experience at the forefront of a continuously evolving industry.

S R O Motorsports Group is the established international leader in GT racing. Best known for the development and implementation of the GT three and GT [00:01:00] four regulations. S R O promotes and organizes championships that embrace professional and amateur competitors. It’s a portfolio of highly regarded series, including the Continental GT World Challenge, powered by a W s with categories in Europe, American Asia, s r o continues to play a key role in shaping the future of international GT racing, and with us to explore the history and evolution of S R O Motorsports in the United States is President and c e O of SRO America, Greg Gill.

So welcome to Break Fix, Greg. Great to be here. Thanks. So let’s talk about the who, the what, the where, the why of S R O, and why don’t we start off with what does S R O stand for Death and Rotel organization, not standing room only. Darn. I like the second one. Yeah, so it’s really great. The US organization’s actually slightly older than our namesake organization.

We celebrate our 30th year this year for the S R O, and this season as we go into 2022. [00:02:00] Actually marks our 33rd season. So, uh, we’re excited about that. And there’s the little bit of explanation that has to come to mind, doesn’t it? Yeah. So was it always called sro? No, it wasn’t. We got started and I think people have always heard of different things.

Well, was it the Playboy Endurance series? Was it the Speed World Challenge? Was it the Passport Endurance series? What, you know, what, where is it So the World Challenge that people know and love in North America? Has been an always evolving series. That did start right at now 32 years ago, and when it did, it was a focus on really your original idea of sports car racing, but a real emphasis on Gran Touring and looking at cars for the first time.

Acura’s, et cetera, were getting out on the track. And that had not been something people were seeing. They were normally used to a Ferrari, Porsche type of mentality in that era, and suddenly they saw a blend. What’s really fun, and you see in, in everything that you guys do in the Motorsports Club where.

You know, you mentioned about being about all things automotive. In a lot of ways that’s [00:03:00] what drove us as well. You know, it’s way overused by racers, four racers and every series uses it in one form or another. I worked on a series that used it in the tour car space and the tuner market and so, you know, we get it.

We understand that. But the reality was is that what is World Challenge today in the US was reformed by a group of racers that saw the scca A Sports Car Club of America was looking at going. You know, it’s money losing speed’s, pulling out. We’re not really getting the money we wanna do, you know, I think we wanna do something different.

And a group of our racers got together and said, let’s form World Challenge, or in this case WC Vision and create a new marketing group still working with the S E C A and put on these races. And that, I, I kind of think of us having various decade breaks. And that was a, a real change for our company about 2008.

They looked at all forms of it, and at that point we were running maybe 20 cars. When we run at Sonoma in April, we’ll be having probably 120, 130 cars. So, you know, a lot of growth [00:04:00] over that period of time. And because of that, Really the global leader in GT racing, A man named Stefan Rotel, who went to San Diego State as his name would sound.

He is from France and very much a world resident. He’s lived all over the world, but always talks about how much he loves San Diego and, and the car culture of of America. And really regretted as much as he briefly worked for Bernie Estone for seven years and put on a lot of different races around the world, he always felt like, gosh, I’m missing something in North America.

He is, as you noted at the introduction, uh, a partner in the development with the FIA of GT three, uh, and is considered a lot of ways the, the godfather grandfather of GT three racing in Europe and in the world, and in a lot of ways people often say that Stefan Rotel. Saved GT racing, and I think there’s a lot of truth to that.

It had really become really small. So about 2015, an opportunity came up for Stefan to invest and then eventually take over and become the majority shareholder in 2018. And what was World Challenge? Four of those same racers are still there [00:05:00] today and part of the ownership group, but we’re majority owned by Stephan Rotel, and that’s since the name Stephan Rotel organization.

So if I remember my motor sports history correctly, and, and please correct me if I’m wrong, this would’ve been born in that kind of gray period after S c a ProAm TransAm started to disappear in my formative years watching drivers like Lynn St. James and Hurley Haywood and Willie t Ritz and hunch stook.

Running the I T U and G T O cars and things like that. Watkins Glen and Summit Point were on the schedule in those times. But you’re like, what happened in the, the mid to late nineties and there was still touring car racing, but I think a lot of us maybe turned our attention to B T C C and even Yes. You know, the Swedes and the Australian Supercars and all that.

And it’s like, well, what happened to GT racing in America? And so this was almost born, let’s say, out of necessity to, to our cliche. And it became natural. I joined the company in [00:06:00] 2012. And at that point we had done, I came in in October. In August, we had done a demo of the Audi R eight, uh, at Sonoma, and it was already home.

This might be better than our own built GT cards. And of course that sounded a little bit like blasphemy at that point because the culture still was, Hey, I’ll build all of this and then we’ll get the series to home alligator and then we’ll do it. And it wasn’t really practical and, and many people were already thinking, well, what about this GT three stuff that’s going on in Europe?

So. We were the first to adopt it. AMSA came along and adopted it about three years later and went full bore into it as well. And I think it’s been good for the whole industry. And when you look today about how many GT three cars there are, you can see it as a really successful global platform. And at that time, that would’ve been also when A L M S was very popular here in the United States.

Correct. And it, well, alms was having the challenge of working against him. I know one of the things I always get asked in these interviews is, What’s the difference between you and the other guys? And I’m sure you’ll come to that when you wanna ask it, but, oh, we can have, we can talk about it now. Let’s go.

But, uh, a, a LMS was [00:07:00] awesome, Dr. Pan’s point of doing it for the fans as opposed to what we talked about by racers, for Racers was really awesome. And on the same token, you could not argue. With the corporate strength, just presence that the NASCAR organization could bring to Grand Dam, and yet they really fell into something that was just a constant battle and a constant argument about who was bigger, who was better.

And I don’t think the sport really benefited. Definitely Tell has saying that. I absolutely love. I think all of us can take it to heart for business. And that is, he likes to say, I don’t wanna res slice the pie. I want to grow it. I love that. I love working for someone like that. It’s a great attitude to have and a great way to work.

If you’re always thinking about how are you gonna grow the business, you know, stealing market share from another person, okay, we can do that. Is it really growing? Is it making to, your goal is, you talk about for your site and what you guys do. Of getting more people were, you know, understanding about mobility, transportation, motorsport, the excitement of all of this.

You know, that’s much better than let’s fight and take something off of so-and-so not realizing what things had become. I [00:08:00] will be honest, I reengaged this story along with a L M S, but at the same time, that speed channel became really popular. You know, my dad kind of grabbed me and said, Hey, check this out.

Audi’s back with, you know, Galati running the S four s and the S six s, and then I was suddenly hooked again because again, this was the weird dark ages of I S A. It wasn’t can-AM anymore. It wasn’t this, it wasn’t that. Nobody really knew what was going on. There was all these little pockets of touring, car racing going on, and you needed special access to watch them or you know, cable feeds from overseas, all this kind of stuff.

So now I like the fact that we’ve kind of homologated all this to use a race in term and that we have a platform we can jump to. Hopefully this name sticks. And that’s part of the reason why we’re talking about this, is to reintroduce people to the many name changes that were s r o from Speed World Challenge to Pelli World, challenge Cetera.

But the world challenge part, as you said, sticks. Yes. And now use globally as well. But I also think we wanna take a step into history and talk about Mr. Greg Gill, the petrol head. So how do you get [00:09:00] involved with S R O? What’s the story there? Well, it was part of a work release program with the judge and the parole officer, and it just, uh, it really, you know, they, they were trying to find things that would keep me off the streets and out of trouble.

Probably more true than I wanna admit, but truthfully, growing up in Southern California, 1960s and 1970s, Everything was about two things, really. Surfing cars. You couldn’t grow up in that culture without a love for the outdoors and a love for everything on automotive. My stepfather was a huge sports car fan.

He really wasn’t too thrilled with our displacement passion that we had as a family and. The sixties and seventies, but he also got us interested in sports cars and would talk about racing jaguars and restoring jags and doing different things that we had and projects we were dragging home and I was dragging home all sorts of fallen apart race cars that never really made it back to the track.

But you know, I had a dream like every teenager does. So. Amen. Um, that was fun, but a lot of it was enthusiast driven. What came out of that while working in the family business of [00:10:00] architecture and construction management, a friend of mine was, A big enthusiast publisher, and a real second tier publishing company.

It wasn’t hot rod, it wasn’t Car Craft, it wasn’t names that you knew, but they were names that were really nichey, street Rodder and Trucking and BW Trends and you know, these magazines later. Sport Compact Car, this enthusiast space. I ended up just, you know, I would say luckily, grace of God. Showed up and got an opportunity in it.

And there I was in automotive, at every aspect of automotive, you were dealing with restoration, you were dealing with hot rods, you were going to Bonneville, you were still talking about major events like Long Beach Grand Prix, and I did that for almost 20 years and it was absolutely wonderful to just always be, even though I worked on some kind of highbrow magazines during the same, we got bought by a company that.

Published things like 17 and Modern Bride and Power and Motor Yacht and Automobile Magazine. So you could be, but at the end of the day, I worked with hardcore Hands-on enthusiasts. Dean [00:11:00] Case can always tell you about Desport and the great guys there. I got to work with them. There were a lot of that type of really put, you know, another part on to make the vehicle go faster, to make the vehicle look better.

So the transition from what we might say in the British world, bits of kit and go fast bits was really probably the biggest thing for me. I loved media, I loved communication, and I knew the brand name, world Challenge. Until I got over to working with Racer Magazine, which in the printed motorsports world is pretty much everybody’s holy grail at North America of the highest quality, greatest standards of journalism, and you know, just a dream job.

And I got that opportunity in 2010. Out of that though, I realized that my hands-on experience, I. I’d always been the business guy and I was suddenly signing checks for people who had Jackie Stewart on their phone dial and, oh, if you wanna talk to Bernie Eckel Stone, this is how you do it. I’m thinking, no way, I’m not, this is not right.

And I literally resigned, loved the position, loved the magazine, [00:12:00] but I went to the folks at National Auto Sport Association and said, you said you wanted a vice president of marketing. I think I’m your guy. And God bless ’em for about 11 months. They let me do that. I got to go hands on and start at H P D, start learning how to drive a car, get the experience on track.

Still, definitely not a racer, nor will I ever act like one, but at least I could say I started to understand the terminology and actually had been behind the wheel. Driven at speed. Understood the things that I had been selling and part of for so long, but didn’t have that hands-on experience. And so during that time period, I got recruited by World Challenge, I think because they were looking for that same identification area.

We were doing it with nasa, we were changing things up. We created Speed News, came out with connecting with the both the readers and the participants. And that’s very much where World Challenge wanted to go. And that’s. The opportunity. That’s how I got there. So that’s that long, painful story. We talked about the when and the how, but let’s talk about the what.

S R o, as I understand it, is broken into multiple racing [00:13:00] programs. So let’s expand upon that idea. Let’s talk about each one type of cars. Is it all just road racing in North America? We are. We run our tour car series, our GT four series, and our GT series. Globally though, in the s r O umbrella, as you know, we’re in Australia, we’re in Africa, we’re in Asia, obviously started in Europe.

Because of that, we have really a good relationship with growing and doing new things, whether it’s the Motorsport games, which will go on again in Marsai. The second annual, and that’s on behalf of the F I A. We’ll produce that for them. So that’s exciting. And that is just like, it sounds like the Olympics, but this time now with first time we did it, I think it was 12 or 14 categories, now we’ll have 23 categories.

So really excited. And again, that speaks to that whole importance of transportation and, and how things are changing. So we’re excited about that. We also do something called G T X, which is a, again, spend from our grand tour heritage. And if you know, as you look back, automotively, the whole concept of the Grand Tour was, could we take a vehicle a [00:14:00] hundred miles without breaking down in the X of G T X is talking about your high end Rolls-Royce Porsche.

Mercedes, et cetera, that are creating these full electric powered vehicles. Can we take ’em from Paris to Berlin? What does that look like? Uh, and take care of it. We do something called the Vin Dome Rally. Uh, we’ll be having another one in Italy, all thematically done. Did one as a salute to the eighties.

The next one will be the Dolce Vita sixties. All done in Italy. Really, really cool. So we do some things that are, speak to that enjoyment of the automotive experience. We also have something called Curb Stone. That’s our version of Edge Addict Chin David Murray. Insert your track day company here. It is the most expensive track day series, but on the same token, it’s the absolute best.

And because of that, we have something called the GT one Sports Club where you’re running the Lamborghinis, PAs, et cetera, and people are just having a great experience. It’s not Willow racing. It’s still on track. And they’re getting that experience typically right after one of our race [00:15:00] weekends. So they can tell their friends.

They were at spa, they were at Al the Silverstone, but they were not, or God willing at Indy, but I’m the same token. They weren’t there driving an annual challenge, eight hour racing. And SRO has also expanded into eSports, am I correct? Yes. That’s something we’re super excited about. I came to our board in 2017 after seeing Ericsson at the CES show, demonstrating 5g.

I’m a bit of an early adopter and I, I just got so excited. I walked into the boardroom. Actually, it was a board meeting that served Americas, and so you can kind of get the context of it. I said, Gentlemen, this is the future. We’re gonna be on track here and down in the media center. Guys will be racing against us in real time.

They didn’t throw me out of the room, but I wasn’t exactly warmly received. I don’t think they really thought that was possible. Fast forward now to the Fantech being when our signature sponsoring GT World Challenge are by aws. When you look at it, what Fantech has done, we now have a fate arena. And we require our GT world challenge, European competitors to nominate one of their regular drivers, not a [00:16:00] ringer from someone who’s Billy in their bedroom, or Susie, who’s been playing for, you know, eight years.

But no, these are people who are, are, their day job is racing a, you know, a, a car on track and they’re required to qualify and run. And at SPA as an example, the team that got poll, they were within one 10th of a second in the game as they were on track. That’s how close we are now with eSports. We do a global eSports championship.

We have rounds in Europe, rounds in Asia rounds here in North America. And again, thanks to Fantech, also thanks to Honda h P g, able to do some really cool things with that. And when the pandemic hit like a lot of others, We were already mindful of this, so I think in either two weeks time or three weeks time, God bless Robbie Ola, our Vice President of marketing, he put together a great program and our partners were interested in it cuz we have a great relationship with AWS and CrowdStrike and we’re able to get right out and go into virtual racing and again, Not too much patting ourselves in the back.

I know the rest of the Motorsports professional world did the same thing. I think we were kind of first to market, cuz we were already passionate about doing it. But we have our [00:17:00] own game set of corset com. That’s a very cool game. All branded up running GT cars and now the new B M BMW is in it and I’m happy to say with one of our racers deliveries, Samantha Tan.

So that’s pretty cool. What about S Rro and I s A, how do they compare and contrast, you know, the GT cars in I S A versus the touring GT cars in sro? How does that work? Especially now starting in 2022, we’re on the same platforms, not an L M D H. Obviously, when you come down to their G T D Pro and GT D, they are GT three cars.

Same thing we’re running in GT Real challenge. That can be both confusing and a blessing because on one hand, people, but wait a minute, but on the other hand it really is apples and oranges. If you think about it, NASCAR and ssa. Is a amazing part of American culture and history. They own racetracks. They have a focus on that because of their own personal pleasures and pride.

They also have some of the amazing races at Daytona, Sebring, Atlanta. These are all endurance races. We, on the other hand, are a focused [00:18:00] customer racing and pro racing series using the same cars, but focused on sprint racing. Their attitude might be a little bit of, you can do all these here and you might get to Lamont.

Our attitude is you can get to LAMA through our Asian LAMA series or you can get to the 24 hours of spa through our series. You know, I always tell people we’re like the little brother, the nephew, the cousin, and you know, whatever you wanna say. I never wanna put us in a competition. Light. Back to that example we talked about.

We want to grow the pie bigger. The more people enter imsa, that can be good for us. The more people who enter our series, that’s good for AMSA and it’s good for the whole industry. At the end of the day, we’ll wanna grow that pie bigger for everybody. I always thought the bigger difference was the fact that the World Challenge Series allowed for the inclusion of fun wheel drive.

I mean front wheel drive vehicles, as well as all wheel drive vehicles with penalty, unlike the rear wheel drive and mid engine bias, you know, a series and and, and we have an outright ban of the Confederate flag. But that’s really true though. You’re right. 10, 15 years ago, and especially when we were running Allwheel Drive, Volvos and some other things [00:19:00] that didn’t run in imsa, you could say that, but now with when they’re running tcr, we don’t, they’re in that, that world definitely with their mission pilot serious challenge.

So there’s a lot of similarities. I think a little bit more of a, as much as we’ve got world class racers that people recognize the names of sports car racing globally, that race with us. We also really look for the opportunity. Again, part of that growing the business for everybody, bringing new people in.

And that’s the great thing about T C A TC and, and now T C X people can come in and you’re not looking at a 1 million, 3 million, 5 million budget to go racing. People are coming in in the low to mid six figures or less, and they’re having a successful fund. Pro racing experience, that is a difference there, that there’s probably a lower barrier to entry in the SRO than there is, and that’s across the board, operating costs, et cetera.

And again, that’s by design. But also I’m not carrying the overhead of, you know, running racetracks and doing all the other things that M S A does and their leadership role that NASCAR has. I think it’s very important for all of us [00:20:00] in North American motor sports to remember the weight that these local racetracks carry on their shoulders, whether they’re.

Part of the Penske organization. In the case of Indy, the independent operators who, who race around the country for Indy car and other places, or the small mom and pop tracks, if we don’t support these people, they’re part of an economy and they give us a place to enjoy our hobby and our passions. So it’s important to do that.

Again, God bless the folks in Bay Daytona for, and having to have the courage of building things and like what they just did out the coliseum. That was amazing. So I don’t know if our listeners were paying close attention or not, but if you go back about a minute or so, Greg just dropped a bunch of SRO classes on you, T C A T, cx, et cetera.

Now you might be scratching your head going, well, what happened? Tcr. Wait, I thought does that belong to sro? Is that I, so can we clarify this a little bit? Certainly. The wsc owns the TCR R name and they’ve started a lot and done a tremendous amount that they’ve done in that space over the years. And just, you know, again, have worked with the [00:21:00] SRO and others.

They gave us the opportunity to license and work as a sub license to emsa. So we did run TCR cars for a period of time. But because we were running in a sprint format and, and very much we had to run under a certain b o p, we always hear that term balance of performance. It really made it hard to be competitive for our customers.

Whereas in the same token, T c r in the Michelin pilot series had more room because they had to an allowance of changing things cuz they had to be competitive with the GS cars, in this case GT four cars that were running. So there, there was a little bit more flexibility. So it really. Know, as much as we love TCR R and still do, it just wasn’t practical for us to keep it because it couldn’t be competitive in our fields.

It was really a difficult decision. So did away with T C R, uh, passed on, renewing a license on it. We brought out something called Tcx, which is a pretty cool category that’s growing. I think we’ll have 10 cars in it this year and continuing to grow. Right now it’s predominantly driven by bmw, but there’s some, uh, New cars coming and Honda.

Hyundai, Nissan and others [00:22:00] Subaru, uh, et cetera, are all part of our TC field. You mentioned something really, really important here. B O p Balance of Power. It comes up all the time. You see it in the headlines, especially after the last Rolex where Team Corvette was nerfed by the b o p. And if you’re not in the Mel Sport world or you’re just learning about what does that mean, what does that mean exactly?

All these terms? Yeah, just. Remember, it does mean blame other people. Just to understand. Just Yeah. Just to be clear what that stands for. It could be balance of performance and light driver Rankings. It’s something in the SRO that we started first and light driver rankings are maybe times that we scratch our head and say, what were we thinking?

But it is the best way to take. A wide variety of cars when you have to balance a Bentley against a Carrera, you know, how does that work and what you know, what are the good ways to do it? And the same thing when you look at back to our friends at Hessa and you’re trying to balance Lamborghinis, BMWs, and Corvettes with GM’s normal way of doing business and how aggressive and competitive they are.

Ferrari, the same way, none of them wanna lose. Right. The series then has to find that [00:23:00] balance of performance where they evaluate everything and we’re talking from not just how fast did you go into that corner, but you know, what was your breaking pressure? Where are you at? What was your exit speed? How much fuel were you carrying?

What’s the flow rate of the fuel that you were getting on your refueling? It goes on and on, and then you’re always gonna deal with interpretations of it, and different engineers are gonna argue. No, no, no. You’re interpreting that data completely different than I think you should interpret that data. But at the end of the day, if you look at bounds of performance, and again, back to the SRO and the leadership on it, we brought it out so that people could not just have all spec series racing cuz that’s where it was heading.

You were gonna have one dominant brand that was gonna do well and no one wanted to compete against them. Now, when you have a balance of performance, you have the opportunity. Sometimes it works out great. But if you look at it, when I first started hearing the word B l p. In 2012, you know, 10 years ago it was stated, this is a true story.

If you can get 10 cars within two seconds of each other, you’re [00:24:00] doing really good on your B O P. Oh my goodness. Here we are now with sometimes 20 and 30 cars within a 10th of each other. As much as any one team on any one weekend is gonna tell you that b o P is a terrible thing. You have to look at those overarching stats and say, If I can take again, we’ll say a minimum number of 15 world class drivers and get them within tens of a second of each other in different platforms, b o p works and is here.

Yeah. And there’s different arguments to that idea, and I think we all understand it and appreciate it. You know, back in the eighties. Got slapped with the unfair advantage, which was kind of the genesis of B O P. Yes. Cause they were running all wheel drive and all these kind of things. So what did they do?

Sandbags in the trunk. Just keep adding weight to the car, reduce the power to weight ratio. You know, they were only making 600 horsepower with a single turbo against the big, massive v8. I mean, you know, whatever. But that’s a history lesson we learned from that. But I do also appreciate the simplicity in [00:25:00] that because Audi and V A G kind of turned around and said, Why don’t you guys build a better car?

Yeah. Stop. You know, punishing us for having cutting edge technology. And by the way, we are making less horsepower than you we’re on a production chassis, not a two frame. We’re on all these things. Build a better car. The argument goes both ways. If you went back to simple, to power to weight ratio as a balance of power.

If you’re behind by five seconds, build a better car. But I get it. Some of it’s politics, some of it’s, you know, whatever. Yeah. And Eric, I think the other thing you have to, to look at too is the fact that. We have one thing, again, coming from the era that I came up in and you know when million dollar payouts, and I always like to talk about the fact that people woke up from the tobacco hangover and just this amazing amount of money and the merchants of death were throwing at motorsports.

And so those were grand times and it was great for people. When that went away, you couldn’t just say, Hey, I need a bigger engine. I need to figure out how to more creatively cheat. Well, I’m sorry, creative interpretation of the rules. People don’t cheat. Then [00:26:00] manufacturers had to go to customer racing, and so you know, that happened.

But on the same token, What it did, and you really touched on it with it, was Audi, Porsche, and others that led the way saying, okay, great, we’re gonna do this. Now here’s the problem with that, though. It’s an arms race. Now we’re in GT one again, you mentioned history lessons. Now we’re talking about, oh, look how great this is.

But pretty soon you’ve got one dominant manufacturer. But when they’re charging people for building their program and they want someone to buy their car something, oh well, we’re not sight manufacturers always do this. The history for the last 30 years has shown this, and you mentioned British Terrain Car.

You can look at the same thing as SUPERCARS and O CCB eight. You allow the manufacturers come in, they get excited, they wanna win. They’re there, they wanna dominate. And they build more and more and more expensive vehicles, whether they’re a straight manufacturer, like General Motors in the Cadillac program or a Corvette program.

And then you say, well, let’s go custom racing when I have more people buying it. And then you talk to ’em and say, well, how much is your engine? Well, that’s $5 million. Now that’s not really gonna work. But that’s the same [00:27:00] thing we see in the evolutions of GT three, which is why we brought out GT two, which is why we have GT four, which is why we continue to believe in Turing car because if we go the normal way of that arms race approach every year, the EVO and the GT three will be even more precise, only to be driven on that 10th, 10th edge by the absolute most professional person in Motorsport.

Then that’s gonna take the driver. Who is funding those programs? The term we use obviously is gentleman driver. He or she is out there and, and they’re paying for the program, but they may not be able to drive that car at that level. What happens then? They say, you know what? I think I’m gonna go sailing instead think I’m gonna go horse racing.

Instead, they put their money in something else. We don’t want that. We want ’em enjoying motor sports. For a long, long time. And you know, this actually segues into my next question, which comes from basically a very simple question, which is, what is the definition of a touring car? And I have to lead into this, right?

We, we can very simply say, well, what kind of vehicle brands run in this series? Are they factory teams? Are they private [00:28:00] tier? But more important to that is kind of this ethos behind what is touring card, because the definition. Of vehicles, right? We kind of slice it like music. It’s all these genres, right?

You have the hypercar, the supercar, the luxury car, and the grand tour and the sport compact and all these kind of things. But when you go to the dealership, you don’t walk up to the salesperson and say, I’d like to buy a tour car, a car. What is a tour car? Yeah, but it’s a two door sport coup. But that doesn’t really put that way, and it’s very hard for people to relate to it.

And then you have the same thing. The series looks at it and says, Well, wait a minute. Kia wants to run, but the car only has four doors. Oh, okay. We’re gonna make allowances so it gets really confusing fast. Or in the case of our series. Okay. It’s always gonna be front wheel drive. Well, except for these cars, cuz they’re okay cuz they’re real wheel drive.

So they’re running. So the, the definition gets very hard. So what we do is really kind of keep to a power to weight ratio in our turning car class. So we start at 200 in TCA and we’re gonna say you’re gonna be 150. We’ve gone as low as a hundred with T cv. That was kind of. Exciting but [00:29:00] not practical.

There are TCB cars still out racing today, but uh, it wasn’t really good for us. So we have tca, which runs in that power to weight, 200 horsepower. Then you go up to our TC cars and you’re in 300 and then you’re at Tcx, where you’re 400 being throttled back, it works out really well for us to have kind of a horsepower and a power to weight ratio that we deal with.

And you, when you touched on earlier, About those, you know, make a better mousetrap, you know, build a better car. You didn’t really touch on rewards weight. And I came in as we were killing rewards weight. What a negative term. Hey, you won, you’re gonna have to carry some ballast, you know? Right. Exactly. Work harder.

Or in the cases of like when we had Hyundai running in tcr, they’re like, do you know how heavy 90 kilos is? And what we’re having to do to compensate for that, you know, on a, on a Hyundai. And yeah, they did great. They did very good. But my goodness, what kinds of brands do run in the SRO America series? So we’re really proud that we have 20 different brands and you can literally start, you know, and, and you can, you can read through and.

Say Aston and Audi and [00:30:00] BMW and you know, you just keep going through the alphabet and you’ll find the cars that are appropriate there. I no longer try to count them off like Pokemon because I inevitably miss people and then feel really bad after an interview. You know, like we have bmw. Um, we have many, it’s a constant additions all the time as we bring new people in, as we homologate new cards.

I would say every year there are one or two marks that are being added to the series. I think I’ve been as high as 24. Different marks running in the series in a year and as low as I believe as 17. So it can vary just on what people’s programs and like I say, there are the standards, bmw, Porsche, Ferrari that we’re used to.

But, and again, you look at Aston Martin, then you start talking about what about a Janetta, uh, what do you do about a k tm Crossbo? And you know, there’s all these other, other brands that have become GT four Homologated. Or in some other category, they’re homologated and running with us. They, Julia and tcr, the Alpha Romeo, you know, interesting to see the, the different cars that can run.

I’m still upset with the 1 47 [00:31:00] gta, a rear wheel drive hatchback that Alpha Romeo brought over, teased us that they were gonna sell and never did. I’m still really mad about that, but that, that’s a whole discussion for another day. But there’s a lot of cool cars in Europe that I wish we had. Yeah, lots of French cars in touring car racing too.

Oh my goodness. Yeah. I would love to get some CI drones over here, but uh, uh, Cleo Sport would be the first one on my list, but that’s okay. Oh, boy. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. If our audience recalls, not long ago, we had an Ssro series driver on break Fixx by the name of Rob Holland for broTECH racing, and so he came on and shared his experience.

He talked about sro, which got us clued in and doing a little bit of investigative work ourselves and say, what’s sro? And obviously we covered that earlier. Are there other drivers, are there other names in the sro, especially in the GT America series that people might recognize or not know that these drivers are running in the program?

You know, it’s, we can’t ever release before we hit the entry list or release, but. You know the [00:32:00] drivers that are well known racing around the globe. John Halen, Robbie Foley, Ron Dal, bill Oberland. You know, again, you know, an awesome, uh, driver. Corey Lewis. People know that name. That’s the name that again, they see in both paddocks I mentioned earlier, no longer racing in the series, but now rent managing for the series, Jack Baldwin, one of those TransAm, great celebrates of Vac Camel GT days.

Two names that I love being part of the series are Aaron Vogel. And Michael Cooper. Michael is somebody who came up through our touring car, went through GT four, went through GT three races around the world, raced to the Cadillac program. Michael was just down racing in Daytona, so that, you know, those, those are some of the names of that.

And then again, I’ll say Rob Holland as somebody who knew that world challenge in those, in the quote early days or in the glory days. And then came back in after racing at BTC and doing the different things in Europe and adac and all the different areas came back in, said, Hey, I wanna change things up.

Let’s make some differences in motorsports. I am so grateful to be running with Rob and working with him on just making the paddock a more [00:33:00] inclusive space, creating more opportunities for people, and it’s just an honor to work with him and some other great people too. Samantha Tan, who I mentioned earlier, Samantha is really no stranger to coming up through our touring car ranks through GT four.

Now in GT three and there’s a good example of somebody where in their family they’ve said the goal is Lamar. I imagine we’ll see them a couple more years in GT World Challenge and then you’re gonna find them over in GT D and GT D Pro as their goal is to get to Lamar. Now maybe they’ll go through Asian Lamar series and and go in that way, or maybe they’ll go through the 24 hours of spot and head out that way.

In Europe, who knows what their path will be, but we have people who have been racing with us like GMG and James SOIs have been with us for. Over 20 years and racing it and then mixing it up against the Johnny O’Connell’s and Jan Halen and others, you know, for those 20 years. Uh, so it’s been really a great com in combination of people.

Tony v Lander was one of our regular sts. Tony’s now been out for a year, but you know, again, names that people would say like Jordan Pepper and Cal Rally and the different names, global Sports Car Stars involvement [00:34:00] racers with us. You actually mentioned something really important, which was the progression.

From S R O to a series like lamonts, the W E C, how does your aspiring ProAm driver, somebody in S E C A or NASA make their way into S R O? What does that progression look like? What are the qualifications? How does somebody get in involved if they’re at that level? And maybe to your point, look to mix things up and do something different, grow out of spec Miata.

Into sro. You know, again, you look at the people in the momentum space and there’re some of the best racers out there. You watch a spec me auto field in, you know, in either NASA or S c. It is hard, tight, some of the best of the best, absolute grinding, fast racing, and I love watching it, and I love the people who participate in the detail they put in along the way.

People sometimes get a bug, and I think it’s the transition when people are looking at the end of the day, they just wanna be able to tell their country club friends that they raised a Porsche. Okay, so they go to pca. They do that for a period of time. [00:35:00] They may be going one of the Cup series and they may be very, very happy there.

But along the way they start hearing about, oh, well I heard the Ferrari did this. I heard the Lamborghini did that. And they start thinking, why can I beat them? You know, you talk to people about the, you know, putting ’em in a GT four Supra, we’ll tell ’em, look, this is an awesome vehicle. And it’s really that very small evolution when you look at all of the great enthusiast groups out there and, and racing groups out there.

There are literally hundreds of cars on any given weekend that could be running, and many of ’em qualified to run an R series or an SSA in terms of they’re a GT four, they’re a GT three car, they’re in the TC classes. The difference is a lot to do with how good are you and how hard do you want to push?

If you wanna be a pro racer at the very entry level with us at T C A or in GT World Challenge, You’re gonna have to have a ton of time to do it and you’re gonna have to really push hard for it. Could Chris go better race with us comfortably? Yes. Chris is a good shoe and he could do a great job and I can guarantee you he would do very, very well.

Chris has run and and run long things before, but it also [00:36:00] might be the case where Chris would go, man, that is just too much. That is really. Too much of a commitment. It takes too much time and training. Is Chris qualified? Absolutely. But on the same token, he may just not have the mindset and temperament for it to do that.

A great example was said by George Robinson, which is Gar Robinson’s father who, uh, who just did so well in LMP three down in Daytona, and obviously his co-driver was Jack Baldwin years ago. He said to Jack, do you understand why I raised Jack? Do you know why people like me who have private jets and live in that type of lifestyle?

Why we race. And Jack said, well, you know, cuz it’s competitive because the prize money’s like, no, no, Jack. Not that at all, because we want to and we can’t. And if you take away either of those interests, then it becomes less likely. So, But at the end of the day, you’ve gotta allow that people who want to and can, and some absolutely want to, but they can’t time, money.

Other reasons they can’t. Or at the end of the day, they just like go, you know, I’d like to do that, but I don’t know if I, you know, one thing that we all acknowledge that entry level. [00:37:00] NASA, H P D E, it’s expensive to go racing. It still costs you some money in time, even if you’re just taking your bone stock street car out and H P D E is still gonna cost you in fuel.

You’re gonna still put some tape on the car, you’re gonna have to get some lessons. And if you get hooked, like most everybody does, it’s you know, the beginning of a very expensive drug habit and we realize that. So I think you have to look at, there’s an economic driver to all of this too. And that’s why we push so hard to keep the Turing car.

You know, we can very nicely say gateway drug. So that people can look at it and go, okay, I got that. I got these skills and I wanna be on television. And there’s some other aspects of it that in pro racing that become a big deal is it’s a bit of a fraternity of like-minded individuals. People are there, they’re part of something special.

And when they go to St. Petersburg to race with IndyCar, when they’re out in Sonoma, yeah, they’re at wine country, but they wanna be able to tell their friends that they’re old school. They’ll say they’re at Sears point, they’re gonna wanna be able to talk about, you mentioned about Watkins Glen. We know the F1 history there.

We know James [00:38:00] Hunt at Watkins Glen. Why wouldn’t you want to be there? You know, I was so happy to be from my first time racing at Sebring. I had attended Sebring, but I’d never been part of the promotional group putting together a race at Sebring. You’re at Sebring, for Pete’s sake. This is this historical place, and you’re looking at the track service.

I mean, it’s a nightmare, but you’re thinking about it. Erase. You think about all that water stacking up years ago, you know, you’re, and there’s this amazing experience. You’re there. You earned the right to be there. That’s the, I think, kind of the excitement in that transition. You name dropped some tracks, the Glen Sonoma, Infineon, sea Point, whatever you wanna call, depending on your era.

What tracks does the SRO America series run at? Obviously it’s nationwide, but what are some of the, the keystone events that you’re at? You’re looking at roughly for our classes of racing, there’s probably about 22 to 25 tracks in North America. We’re very excited to have our, our season finish at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

There’s something very magical about that place and kick the year off this year, um, outside of some special [00:39:00] IndyCar appearances. In St. Petersburg and Nashville, where we run as a support series with just one of our racing groups there. Our other ones are what we call standalone weekends. So we’re at Sonoma, then we’re at Ozark International Raceway, which is just the coolest place when follow along with those guys since they were literally blueprints in December of 2017.

And, uh, at a dream and an intention, we’ll be back racing there five years later. Very excited about racing there. It’s gonna be, it’s a very technical track and, and really a cool deal. So from Ozark International, we head to v i r. Virginia International Raceway. You and I were just talking about that from v i r.

We go up to Watkins Glen for Watkins Glen. I unfortunately jump on a plane outta JFK and go to the 24 hours of spa. Well, somebody has to do it, so a group of us are gonna have to suffer and do that. But then afterwards we’ll be back to Nashville with the, uh, IndyCar race and doing the street race there.

Followed up by Road America, just one of the most iconic, beautiful places to race at. We go from Road America to Sebring, and as I mentioned, we’ll finish the season there at Indianapolis in October. [00:40:00] Those are some great tracks. I mean, these are names that people should recognize and should be excited to watch races at.

Which brings up my next questions. How does one go about watching. An SRO race. There’s so many different providers now. I mean, I think we’re all overwhelmed. We begged for years for a la carte television and cable service, and now everybody’s got a platform. Everybody’s got an app. So how does one go about tuning in if they can’t be there live to an SRO race?

Well, if you have a dialup modem, you go to a aol. Um, you know, I started with a company and we were doing streaming, and it really looked like that. It was just, You know, it was difficult, but here we were, a speed World challenge and everybody knew where we were and it was so cool. But speed went away, and so we were struggling.

We did NBC sports. We were really happy to go to CCBs Sports. It’s been a great relationship. So that’s our quote unquote broadcast partner. So we love being on c Bs sports. All of our races in highlights packages. A few are live on CCBs sports and our global races [00:41:00] are as well, are on CCBs sports. So for folks we can say politely that are over 70 and watching TV that they watch on a wall, they can go to CCBs Sports and it’s in almost every cable package.

I think it’s like 90 million households or something. Crazy number. I don’t know who really does it, but nowadays I think we’re all more inclined to do same way that I watch any other racing around the world. You know, we run through our global YouTube channel GT World, which is a great way to watch and we love that and especially helps for people at all hours and times.

We keep all of our races there, so that works. We also are on Twitch, we’re also on Facebook. We’re on MAP TV afterwards too, so we have a week after the race. You can find us at CVS Sports. The day of the race on our live stream. You can find us on our website, you can find us on YouTube, and I want to give a quick shout out to the folks over at Motorsport tv because I catch a lot of the overseas SRO races on that platform and a lot of people forget about that there.

It’s awesome. You can watch you European Touring car and Asian touring, all that stuff on Motorsport [00:42:00] tv. So if you haven’t checked that out, it’s actually. Free to get into and then you know, it goes from there. You know how it is free to play, right? Yeah. The first hit’s always free. You said it on me, Greg.

You know, we talked about what this year looks like. We talked about where to find the program. Obviously you can buy tickets online and show up at v i r, the Glen and come check it out in person, which is always the best way to experience a race. But let’s talk about the future. I mean, none of us have a.

Crystal ball, but you mentioned some things that you wanna do short term for the 22 and 23 seasons, some changes that are coming. Not only that, what does the next five years look like and what’s your 10 year outlook look like for S Rro and SRO America specifically? It’s interesting you ask that question cause I’m doing a presentation to our board tomorrow.

About that very program and where are we gonna be three to five years and 10 years out, and what does that look like? And we know, especially all of us as petrol heads, there’s a fear of that. What does that mean? What does alternative fuel mean? Or Ross Braun said some really intelligent things about over a [00:43:00] billion vehicles that are fossil fuel powered on the earth right now.

You know, that’s probably not gonna go away overnight as much as we see these radical changes in some amazing things happening with alt fuel and, and alt fuel racing vehicles. Autonomous racing vehicles. The Electrify expos will have five of those running around the country next year. They did three this year.

The founder and promoter of that event is a good friend of mine. I enjoyed going down to his event at Circuit of Americas and seeing people who are looking at all electric future. And what does that look like? Uh, we’re gonna be mindful of that. We’re very active on it in Europe. We’ll bring it over to the states as we see that go on.

And I think that engagement and the automotive experience and the transportation experience, It’s gotta be more and more inclusive. There’s a, an expression that hit me at an a AWS event called Reinvent. They sat down and talked about diversity inclusion, what did that look like? And those are really, uh, interesting buzzwords.

But the lady who had up the panel, she had a very good comment. She said, uh, after a couple years ago, [00:44:00] we had a reckoning in this country. And rather than looking at it was for this reason, it was for this reason, it was, there was a reckoning. A lot of us faced it. And that was something for me as a chairman of the League of Old Fat White Guys that I could look at.

You know, when I started in the SEMA show in 1983, I was probably one of the youngest people there. Now I’m like the average age, and that’s old. So you know, we all want more people in. But when we look at it in that time period of almost 40 years of going to the SEMA show, does the SEMA show and our automotive world, does it reflect what our neighborhoods look like?

Does it reflect the communities look like? No, it doesn’t really. Before we all want to hold hands and seeing kumbaya, why I love motorsports. It’s like anything competitive. You don’t get there based on who your daddy was. It, it helps if daddy’s rich, you know? That’s great. Mom’s got a big checkbook, that’s awesome.

But at the end of the day, you get there by your talent. You get there by what you work and the passion on it. And I think America as an experience has been a melting pot. And an opportunity [00:45:00] for all of us to work together to get something done. I had mentioned to my board a year ago when we were starting some of these programs, I said, Hey, look in Motorsport, all of us got a hand.

In my case it was, oh, please don’t do that again. But you know, I mean it was still a hand, it was someone doing something that was absolutely unsolicited going, I’m gonna save you from either getting run over by a car right now or driving off the track. Let me help you. That’s how this works. So we wanna get people who maybe wouldn’t have that first opportunity, an opportunity to be involved in Motorsport.

And to see it. And so we’re working with Rob Holland, working with Samantha Tan, working with Sally Ulti. These would be people I know will be on your show in days and months to come that are just great individuals that are speaking out for the communities. They serve that passion. And I think one of the things that we want with our G T X series in Europe, but particularly here in the States, cuz we view a lot of times that SRO America.

It’s kind of an incubator. We were a rebel thing away from the mothership in around 1776 or so. So you know, we still have that spirit. Our Aussie division is even more so that way that [00:46:00] they don’t do it like they do it in Asia and Europe. It’s Australia, same way here in the States. But we think that sometimes we take best practices from Europe or we also bubble up things go, Hey, you know, we’ve got some really good luck with this.

Look. Look what we’re seeing here. And again, that’s what Motorsports does. It bubbles up, it brings new things in. Like everybody talks about disc, brake, seat belts, all these other things that. You know, came to be because of, you know, realizing the importance of a motorsport so that, you know, that’s gonna continue.

And, and again, it’s a fun time to see it. So that’s what you’re gonna see with sro. That’s the five year plan without telling it. You know what, Greg, we’re gonna follow up this conversation on our pit stop mini sewed, where we talk a little bit more about the balance of power when it comes to EVs and other things like that.

Fun. So let’s let, let’s hold that thought safety. And say, and many other things. Let’s put a pin in that. But I want to give you the opportunity here as we close out the episode and we kind of wrap up our thoughts for any shout outs, promotions, or anything else you’d like to share that we didn’t cover in the episode Thus far, veterans support is very, very important to us and we have Veterans [00:47:00] race with us and it’s something that we support Operation Motorsports, both individually and corporately and, and so if there’s things that are in that area, particularly if there’s veterans groups, That’s, you just know, even a small group, Hey, could you help these guys out?

Can you do something for ’em? Don’t hesitate. As far as I’m concerned, they have cart blanche for anything they need with us. They’ll be my guess and, and so anything that we can do to help that, we’d like to do that. It’s a team. It’s a team. I’m incredibly uncomfortable being the figurehead for this team.

I was given this opportunity by our board of directors. It was an amazing opportunity. You don’t turn down an opportunity like this. I get to go to work every day doing something that people dream of doing. And yes. Is it hard? Is it difficult? On some days, yes, but on the same token, it’s because I have a great team.

The shout out goes to the super staff that I have from Susan, Stacy, Robbie, Brian, Dean, Natasha Ray. I mean, I can go on and on of all the great people I get to work with, Jack, Jim, et cetera. But then, you know, you always have to go [00:48:00] back to, as we talk about a figurehead, Stefan Mattel, a guy had the courage to follow his dreams and put something together.

I get to play with her because that man had the courage. And when we looked at the pandemic, a lot of people were saying, well, should we shut down for a year? And Stefan and I had that conversation. He says, Hey, I’ve never stopped. I’ve never bankrupted a business. We’ve taken people’s money. What do we do?

I said, Hey Stefan, I think we race. Let’s find a way to race. And he did. I love that spirit of competition. Again, it comes back to it too. So I give the shout out to my team. I give the shout out to our teams of sponsors, certainly Pelli, who we wouldn’t roll without them. But on the same token, you can look at aws, CrowdStrike, VP Fuels be a new announcement of new partner returning to us down through the list of just great companies, Fantech that we mentioned.

These are all visionaries. These are all people who are committed to motor sports. And they’re committed to the success of the drivers that are participating in it. So it’s something that I’m just, again, incredibly blessed, very thankful. Can’t believe you gave me over an hour to talk with you guys today.

It is a great honor. Appreciate it. I hope we’ll have a chance to follow up and talk more again. [00:49:00] Absolutely, Greg. And you know, I wanna thank you because what’s really important here, and I hope people have grasped from this particular episode, is that your passion for Motorsport has come through and the stories that you’ve told and the way we’ve been talking about sro.

But more importantly, it’s organizations like yours, like SRO America that reinvigorate the Motorsports base. Every one of us can tune into the next NASCAR race to the next Formula One race and go, yeah, it’s great. It’s highly polished. It’s a great product, but it’s just that it’s a product. It’s lost.

Mm-hmm. That grassroots. Mm-hmm. That we have all. Either are still in or have come from. And I think S R O brings that back. And so I think this is a great reminder for people to return to their roots. Look for that touring, car racing, look for that door-to-door competition, even though there’s some balance of power in there.

But it’s still, it’s fun, it’s family, it’s all of the things that we miss about racing. And I wanna congratulate all of you for perpetuating that, for keeping that going and, and continuing to bring that enthusiasm [00:50:00] to the table. So best of luck this season, and I’m sure we’ll, Hear from you more, but as we close out, the 2022 SRO America season will see more than a hundred races under their banner.

You can follow all of the racing action by visiting www.sromotorsports.comortakeaquicklittleshortcutovertowww.america.us to hone in on SRO America specifically. And remember, just like Greg said, be sure to follow them on social media at Gt underscore America on Twitter. At SRO GT America on Instagram, GT OneWorld on Facebook, and their awesome YouTube channel where you can watch all the races live.

And remember, all of this information will be posted alongside this episode in our file along article on gt motorsports.org. So if you wanna learn more about SRO America, Go ahead and hop over there and check all that out. So again, Greg, [00:51:00] I cannot thank you enough for coming on the show. This has been an absolute pleasure.

Thank you.

The following episode is brought to you by S R O Motorsports America and their partners at a w s. CrowdStrike Fantech Pli, and the Skip Barber Racing School. Be sure to follow all the racing action by visiting www.sromotorsports.comortakeashortcuttogtamerica.us. And be sure to follow them on social at GT America, on Twitter and Instagram at SRO GT America on Facebook and catch live coverage of the races on their YouTube channel at GT World.

If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about gtm, be sure to check us out on www.gt motorsports.org. You can also find us on Instagram at Grand Tour Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, you can call or text us at [00:52:00] (202) 630-1770 or send us an email at crew chief gt motorsports.org.

We’d love to hear from you. Hey everybody, crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that G T M 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 subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies and GTM swag.

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