A new organization, Historic Motorsports Productions, is seeking to raise the game of vintage and historic racing in North America to match its demographic. The group’s three principals—three-time National Champion and 1986 Indy 500 winner Bobby Rahal, Just Marketing founder Zak Brown, and longtime vintage racer and entrepreneur Peter Stoneberg—made their initial presentation to potential supporters at Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca on Thursday of the Monterey Historics weekend. During the meeting they outlined their basic plan for a series of premium vintage festivals to be held at historic motor sports venues across the continent.
“Basically,” Rahal told VR, “what we want to do—and we’re certainly going to walk before we run in terms of number of events—is to take vintage car racing to a different level. What I mean by that is we want to sell the series, sell the racing by bringing in corporate support. We want to make a real production out of it, à la Silverstone Classic or Goodwood, where it becomes much more than just cars going around the track. We want to do things as simple as organizing the paddock so it’s self-explanatory, help the spectators see things better by putting them in a proper setting with storyboards about the cars, and make it be a proper presentation so that people coming in can fully understand what’s going on.”
Although the overall concept seems to be fairly firm, the details are still being finalized, but it seems that the historic categories involved will include some combination of Formula One, Can-Am, Trans-Am, Formula 5000, GTP/WSC/Championship of Makes sports cars, IMSA GT production cars, Two-liter sports cars, and possibly Indy cars and NASCAR. Most of these groups already have individual organizations promoting them, but HMP would bring them all together as equal partners under a larger tent.
James King, spokesman for Historic Grand Prix, one of the organizations that would be involved, believes that “conceptually this is exactly the right thing to do. It’s a great idea from people who have a lot of credibility for what they have done and what they do. It all comes down to execution. They understand that they have to come out of the box with everything in place, and the proof of the concept has to be there in the first event and the first year. If they can execute, I think it’s going to be a winner.”
Rahal said the target for 2010 is probably two or three events, and that there never would be more than five or six such events during any one year.
By John Zimmermann
