An Inauspicious Introduction to IMSA at 19 Years Old.

I can’t seem to find the few pictures my father’s friend took of me working on the Spice-Pontiac V8 IMSA GTP car back in 1990, so these lone shots of Racecraft International GTP Light’s Spice-Pontiac 4cyl cars will have to do. (If anyone has pics of the 1990 Racecraft GTP car, please email me!)

IMSA had been my favorite sportscar series for many years, and when the opportunity arose to join my then boss Bob Lesnett on the Racecraft team as a mechanic, I jumped at the chance to get my hands on my beloved GTP beasts. History will tell you that of the more impressive GTP teams on the IMSA radar, Racecraft International was cloaked in stealth bomber technology.

It wasn’t a team to be feared (unless you were lapping one of the barely capable rental drivers), yet for a pup like myself making his own debut in big time pro racing, it was a relatively safe environment to learn and grow my own skills. If anything, I was relieved to find that the past four years spent learning in the pro racing feeder series of Super Vee, the ACRL Sports 2000, FF2000, and Formula Atlantic had primed me to ease into joining a GTP team with few concerns.

Dealing with some of the paying drivers proved to be a major education for me; George Sutcliffe, a Barber Saab standout, soon learned that the skills that pushed him forward in Barber Saab were insufficient to bring anything like the same form in IMSA GTP. I recall being quite frustrated after he radioed in in the middle of a practice session, yelling the gearbox had packed up and wouldn’t shift into most of the gears. He said he’d have to coast in because the transmission was broken.

We met him at the top of pitlane, pushed the Spice back to the trailer, and tried to rip the ‘box open and get it fixed in time to get back out before the session ended. This was in the days before data acquisition was prevalent in all forms of pro racing, or for any of the privateer teams like Racecraft Int’l–we considered ourselves lucky to have a Stack “Tachtale” gauge that could recall peak RPM!

Without any data to rely on, it was common to rely on the driver for analysis and feedback from his time behind the wheel–that was the norm.

After opening the heavy, seemingly white-hot gearbox, we found everything to be intact, all the sift forks to be in place, and no bits of metal stuck to the internal magnet as we’d expected to find. Vexed and in pain from hands that were searing from everyone jumping in to collectively open the gearbox, I can still see the expression on everybody’s face when Sutcliffe wandered back from the bathroom to see what we were doing, and said “why’d you do all that? I just meant I had a hard time getting it into gear.” Responding to both his panic and conviction about the ‘box, we’d jumped on fixing it immediately. From then on, Sutcliffe’s opinions on the car were largely disregarded.

The English chief mechanic mumbled under his breath that he thought he might be able to kill Sutcliffe and get the murder charges thrown out on an insanity plea once the jury heard him re-tell the “broken gearbox” story. I seem to remember the rest of the crew offering to help him if he wanted a hand carrying out his plans…

Despite Sutcliffe, the rest of the team was a joy to work with–maybe not the best in their field, but at 19, I was by no means a star player yet myself. I dreamt of changing a tire during pitstops, or something equally as glamorous, but being the rookie, I was entrusted to an aerosol can of glass cleaner, a paper towel, and the highly critical task of making sure the windshield would pass for vaguely clean. Before I jumped back across the pit wall, I also cleaned debris from the front radiator inlet and helped to pull a front tire over the wall.

These were trivial jobs, but like any good apprenticeship, it was necessary for me to master the basics before being entrusted with anything more the following year. Racecraft was out of IMSA before the next season even started, and I’d moved onto more Toyota Atlantics with Bob Lesnett, and a championship in the 1991 ACRL Sports 2000 series with Cameron-McGee Motorsports.

The Sports 2000’s were just smaller open-topped prototypes, so it wasn’t too much of a letdown for me.

My IMSA GTP fortunes were limited to 1990, yet serve as one of the most prized eras of fulfillment and joy in my career. Wiping down the windshield of a Spice-Pontiac GTP car was about as minimal a duty as one could be given during a race, but between you and I, I’d keep one eye fixed on the windshield, and the other eye fixed on pitlane to capture the Nissan, Jaguar, Toyota, and Porsche GTP cars zooming less than two feet from my backside at triple-digit speeds. I’d have paid any price for those experienced if I’d been asked to.

Those images, sounds, and the raw excitement of standing on pitlane with the cars and hero’s of prototype lore screaming past me will never be lost.