The Gentleman Driver

[00:00:00] Gran Touring Motorsports started as a social group of car enthusiasts, but we’ve expanded into all sorts of motorsports disciplines, and we want to share our stories with you. Years of racing, wrenching, and motorsports experience brings together a top notch collection of knowledge and information through our podcast, Brake Fix.

What’s going on everybody. This is Brad, your host with me as always is Eric. In this week’s episode, we discussed the gentleman driver, a documentary that follows four tycoons who moonlight as motorsport competitors and examines what fuels them to succeed both at work and on the track. Now, some of you might be thinking, this isn’t new.

This particular film, it debuted in 2018. That’s true. And even then, the content was from the 2015 16 World Endurance Challenge, Le Mans, and IMSA season. But, it happens to be new to us, as a recommended to watch by Netflix. Right, Brad. But before we start, we need to [00:01:00] define what is a Gentleman Driver? The film frames the answer during the opening credits with a subtitle screen that reads, At the highest levels of sports car racing, teams are required to include at least one amateur driver in their lineup.

These men are often successful entrepreneurs who can afford to compete in this elite sport. They are known as gentlemen drivers. So with us tonight to discuss the film, outside of just me and Brad, your normal host, is a panel of GTM members from various regions. John, Tanya, Aaron, and Sam. Thank you all for joining us and being on tonight’s episode of Break Fix.

So let’s get into it. As you guys know, this is basically an 88 minute documentary that follows these four tycoons. So we have Paul Dallolana, who is a medical real estate mogul out of Canada. You have Ricardo Gonzalez, who is part of uh, Ricardo Gonzalez Racing now. He used to be part of G Drive and [00:02:00] he is part of the construction and architecture crew that built the University of Arkansas in Mexico City.

Ed Brown, who’s the Patron CEO at the time before it got purchased by Bacardi. And you had Michael Gauche, who is the head of MicroLabs, which is an e cig and vape company that makes the uh, Like what’s the chemicals that go inside of that? So you’ve got basically four millionaires or maybe multi millionaires sitting around at multiple times of the table kind of trading stories at this almost like business dinner as you go out throughout the film.

So I want to get your guys gut reaction on the film as a whole. We’re not going to talk about its cinematography, the style. It’s a documentary. It’s a modern documentary. They’ve interleaved a bunch of different stories together. from everybody. So we’ll start with John. What did you think? For me, it was interesting to see a part of the sport that I hadn’t really like paid attention to before.

Like I knew there were amateur drivers in with the pros in some of the categories, but [00:03:00] never realized it was a Component of what makes it successful and also how much one seat actually costs pretty crazy. Yeah. It’s just fascinating. Just learning, learning more about how that works. And especially with the, um, the one guy that ended up like starting his own team and then ended up winning the first race in Mexico for the WEC, that was cool.

Just to saying like. Them tie their business experience into the, the racing world. Aaron, what did you think? Similar to John thought it was really interesting to learn about this aspect of racing that I hadn’t known too much about before for me, uh, having just finished my business degree. I think the part that most entertained me was seeing all these.

Business people talking about doing this as a side thing and how they had to manage their business life around this aspect of their personal life. And that, as John noted, some of them chose to combine those two things. And I liked how the movie took us into some of their business life, like the Patron guy.

Touring his Patron [00:04:00] farm in Mexico. So yeah, I thought it was a really interesting view into that. Sam, what about you? I thought it was a really good documentary. I I’ve been very familiar with the gentlemen drivers and various racing series for a while now. Ed Brown from the extreme speed motorsport. I’ve followed him for a while because I really liked the team and the drivers.

And I met him a couple times at different IMSA races. Got his autograph on some ESM car posters up in the garage right now. Paul Bellilana, I’ve heard of. I didn’t realize he was a gentleman driver until I watched the documentary. I’ve just heard the name. Other guys, I didn’t really know who they were, but it was a cool look behind.

They’re really limited on time. So they couldn’t really, you know, smoosh in that much stuff with their businesses and racing and their work life balance and all that stuff. But they give you a good quick look in at what it’s like. So I liked it. Tanya. Thought it was interesting. I think within the first five minutes, they said something about how it’s.

[00:05:00] Meritocracy. And that implies that your wealth and privilege doesn’t get you a seat at the table, but that’s exactly what it takes to do it, in a sense. So, I thought that was interesting to start it out that way, but, but try to be the contradiction of that, I guess. I saw a lot of that later in the film, and we’ll get to that as we go through.

There were definitely some contradictions in terms there. But Brad, what did you think? I thought it was good, documentary wise, but I don’t know how I feel. About the concept of a gentleman driver or an amateur driver. Not just a gentleman driver. I mean someone who buys their way into the sport to compete.

I mean, they even said it in the in the film. You look around other sports and other disciplines, especially physically demanding ones like baseball or soccer or football or whatever. You can’t just buy your way onto the team. You can buy a team. But you can’t buy your way onto and be able to compete and be successful.

But in the [00:06:00] driving world, it seems to be par for the course. It’s normal. It’s a way these teams fund themselves with these contributions from these gentlemen drivers. I find it interesting that if I wanted to and I had the funds I could buy myself into a professional racing series, but if I was a professional, I don’t know how I would feel about that.

And since we’re talking about gut reaction to the film I think within, uh, like Tanya said, within those first five minutes, it really set the tone. And I don’t know that it set the tone in the right way. One of the immediate reactions I had to it was, even though I’ve been a fan of Lamont’s radio for a very long time, and we’ve all heard the voice of John Hindhoff for a long time, I’ve never actually seen his face.

And so, I actually thought I was being punked. Because I thought it was Paco Tos, who played Moscow on Money Heist, which is another Netflix show, and somebody was dubbing John Hindhoff’s voice over top of him. And I was like, this is, this is something I [00:07:00] cannot unsee. Because right now, John is wearing a beard.

And I’m like, this is not right. But then I started to put two and two together. And when you said that the announcer, we had heard him all the time, but had never seen him. And as soon as he came on screen and you said he looked like some guy that I’d never heard of, I think he looks like a dark haired version of Simon Pegg.

And I couldn’t figure out why Simon Pegg was narrating a movie about racing. And, and then He’s very versatile. I recognized the voice from Amazon. I’m like, this is that guy? And John was like, this is that guy? Have you guys not 24? He narrates, well, okay, Jason Statham does it, but he is a big focus in Truth in 24.

It shows him and shows his face. Is that movie better than this one? It’s got Statham in it. You haven’t seen it? All over it. I’ve seen it. I have a copy of it. Oh my god, it’s amazing. What are they about? So the very first one, it’s about Audi’s triumph during the Le Mans year where they had to replace [00:08:00] the entire rear end of the car.

And so it focuses all about that because that was actually a, a pinnacle turning point in Le Mans, because nobody had ever done anything like that before. Once you were screwed, you were out. You’re, you know, if you screwed up the back of the car, it was over. And they devised a way to basically, the car was like an erector set and they went done and back out on track.

Seven minutes. Yeah. And they figured out that it didn’t break the rules. And so they were able to do it and they kept practicing it and they needed to be able to make sure that if something went wrong, they could fix the car and get it back out. And it was the first time that ever happened. And that was the same year that the Audi cars finished one, two, three.

And so it follows that story. The second one, I didn’t end up watching. I don’t remember what it’s about their battle with Peugeot. That’s right. So basically if you like Lamar and you like Audi and you’re like, Jason, say some sexy voice. This is the documentary for you. You’ve checked all the boxes. Hey John, I know what we’re watching tonight.

We’ve actually watched almost every State of the Moon. My brother and I quote it [00:09:00] all the time. All the time, like Tom Christensen. All the time from it. Mr. Lamont. Obviously, that, that was all noise. I’ll go back to one of the other subtitle screens, and it reads, By regulation, racing teams must create a driver lineup consisting of one gentleman driver and two professionals.

However, they throw that up on the screen and they don’t clarify it right away. In reality, it only applies to two types of racing. It doesn’t exist in IndyCar. It doesn’t exist in NASCAR. It doesn’t exist in a lot of other sports. It only exists in WEC, which most of us know as Le Mans and then in IMSA.

And then from there, it only applies to two classes, LMP2. And GTAM, which we know consists of amateur racers. So I wanted to get your guys opinion on that whole construct. Why does it still exist? Are we continuing to do this for the sake that we’ve always done it for tradition? [00:10:00] Or is there really a reason to bring these guys in as gentleman drivers?

Yeah, the reason we do it, and we’ve already touched on it, is they’re necessary to the sport because of the money that they bring in. Without them There just wouldn’t be enough cars and teams out there. So, that’s why we do it, and, I mean, I think any one of us, if we had the means, we would do the same thing.

It’d be tempting not to, wouldn’t it? Like, if you have the money, like, spend it. Live your best life. Like, I think I would, but, if I was a professional driver that worked my way up through the ranks, I’d kind of feel like I got cheated. It’s like somebody, somebody played like Pascoe don’t like collect 200 or whatever from Monopoly.

I’m with you guys. I think they set the stage in such a way that it really showed racing as this extreme thing that only flamboyant, extremely rich playboys could be a part of. And that’s a, I think a, an ideal that we’ve been trying to do away with for a long time. So let me phrase it this [00:11:00] way. Do you feel that it might turn off the grassroots enthusiast to see racing portrayed in this way?

No, straight up no. I think the enthusiasts like it because it’s more cars and more teams on the track. I used to be a hater back in the day, like, oh, these rich guys get to do this. And I’m like, that’s awesome. I would do that too. That’s great. Good for them. So let’s talk about these rich guys. So Sam, you mentioned two of them.

I got a little confused partway through. Because I didn’t know if this was a story about them or a story about racing. And I thought the film started to lose focus when we spent a ton of time talking about building the University of Arkansas campus and these kind of things. For me, it drew away from what we were really talking about.

What does that have to do with The Gentleman Driver? Yeah, I, I 100 percent thought that it was a story about Those gentlemen drivers kind of bringing an eye to what a gentleman driver is through the eyes of those four men. [00:12:00] And I still found that interesting, but I agree that it wasn’t necessarily documentary about racing as a whole.

It was about this one. Subtopic within racing from those four viewpoints. What I find interesting was that all of them, when you listen to their backstories, they all had, I mean, for the most part, except for, I think Paul Dalla Lana, who actually coincidentally got his start. At a track day like we do. Yeah, I thought that was really cool I thought all of them had racing in their past, but it seemed like the general I guess commonality between their origin stories was that none of them were good enough to go pro.

So they found these I guess ways to make money as entrepreneurs, and then they bought their way back into a sport that they weren’t good enough to do on their own talent. I wouldn’t necessarily say they weren’t good enough, but you get a point where if you don’t have the right [00:13:00] funding at that time and those resources, you can’t go any farther.

Yeah, that seems to be the theme for. Ricardo, I think I remember him saying that, you know, he stopped at a certain point because he had kids and just wasn’t right in his life. And also like he ran out of funding is what it sounded like to me. A gentleman driver will spend anywhere from one to 5 million per race season to compete.

There is no prize money. Now we do have minimum drive time requirements, which I thought were pretty. Pathetic for lack of a better term. These guys only have to drive for an hour and a half. So I’m looking at value for seat time. And we do that a lot. So let’s say five to 10 million, as the subtitle said, part of the way through the film, and you’re getting an hour and a half of driving.

That’s fair. But five to 10 million to them. Isn’t the same as it is to us. And they’re also there with some of the best teams and drivers in the world. They’re not those guys. But they’re still out there and they’re still out at those events. I mean, small price to pay to drive at Le Mans with a chance to win.

And [00:14:00] they’re not also just paying for track time at like a DE event like we are. They’re not paying 5 million for an hour and a half at a DE. I mean, they’re paying to win the race, uh, hopefully for them, which comes with prizes and it comes with marketing for them. I mean, the Ricardo Gonzalez was looking to win Silverstone to help drum up sponsorship and marketing and I guess, interest in hosting the, the WEC race in Mexico.

So it’s, it’s, it’s not just about, Oh, I need an, I’m going to get an hour and a half of track time. It’s not just all about the track. It’s about the things that they can do to take this and merge it into their professional lives as well. So Sam, and you have a lot more knowledge about this particular facet of racing.

I don’t know that the argument holds a lot of water when you look at the overall percentage of funding that gentlemen drivers bring to the sport, I would make the argument that the sponsorships from the sports companies, let’s say it’s under armor or Nike or something like that, or even the [00:15:00] tobacco companies, whatever it might be, would bring in more than these gentlemen drivers would now on an individual team level.

On an independent entry level like at LMP2, I could understand that, but on the overall funding of the sport itself, it’s got to be less than 2%. I think it’s probably more than you think. So especially for things like IMSA and WEC that aren’t as big as Formula 1 and IndyCar, they don’t find a lot of big time sponsors and sponsorship deals because there’s just not the return on investment there.

So that’s where they have to rely on the Gentleman Drivers to come in and bring that funding to a team. I mean, there’s even paid drivers in Formula One. Nicholas Latifi for Williams, his dad’s buying him that seat. Lance Stroll, his dad owns the team. That was the funny part about Ed Brown. Of the four Gentleman Drivers, He’s the CEO of Patron.

Patron’s running the team, so it only made sense to put the boss in the car. So I kind of felt like he was the odd one out versus [00:16:00] the other three that really did, let’s say, buy their way in. And to Brad’s point, Paul Dallolana, he started lower in the ranks and worked his way up. And obviously he could afford to buy his seat on a GTAM team.

So for me, I really Disconnected from Ed Brown? I know, uh, Sam, you’re a fan of him, but what did you guys think about that scenario? I thought it was interesting how he framed his first involvement as someone like told him to get in the car. Like they brought the car to him and said, Oh, try this out and we think you’ll like it.

And okay, now that, now that you got in the car, we’re going to make you do this for the next few days and really like it. So I thought that was a little, it was much different than the other backstories, I guess, maybe most similar to. Paul Della Lana, who went to, you know, a track event and loved it, which I think, um, at least I got involved in the sport and could very much empathize with and, you know, see that path.

So it was just different. So at the end of the day, they’re taking home a trophy. You’re [00:17:00] correct, but they’re not getting money back from this. It seems like a loss leader. So what I don’t think the movie ever addressed. Which doesn’t flow with preconceived opinions or biases against when you see these rich multi millionaire billionaire folks that are throwing their money into this is there’s an ego there.

You, you can because you can, because it doesn’t you having all that money. Spending 5 million a race or per race season, what have you, you can still enter a competitive racing series. I mean, Sam’s doing it, right? I mean, there’s lower classes, but it’s an ego thing. You want to suddenly be at the very top because in your daily life, that’s what you are.

That, that’s what you’ve been training yourself for for decades. You, your type A personality, your go, go, go. They portrayed the gentleman in the movie as actually very. grounded and down to earth and [00:18:00] not having an ego, which I felt confused as I was watching, because I went in with an expectation that these guys are just going to be total.

The gentleman who was the CEO from L’Oreal, I thought he actually took away from the film because he contradicted what the other people were saying. And the biggest takeaway I took from him was. He said back when he was a gentleman driver, it really didn’t matter if we messed up. We were just there for fun and spending our money.

And so I thought that detracted from the overall message compared to these four gentlemen, because they were trying to be active parts of the team. You could actually see that they were struggling. They didn’t want to let the team down, but there is an exception there that I caught. And I don’t know if anybody else did when they were interviewing Ricardo Gonzalez early on.

And he’s telling his backstory on how he got his seat in LMP2. As Aaron highlighted, there was a gap there where he raced, then he gapped, and he came back. He said that when he raced on a lower scale, the [00:19:00] competition was just not there for him. And I, I, I, I actually paused the film there, rewound it, and I’m like, did I just hear you right?

Because there’s, to your point, there’s plenty of series out there, be it Spec Racing, be it Super Trofeo Lamborghinis, or Ferrari Challenge, all those crash fests that we’re all well aware of, that plenty of people buy their way into, and they’re plenty competitive. So, to your point, I actually thought there was ego there, and I felt it from Ricardo more than I did from anybody else.

I mean that we all have egos. There’s no question that you know That’s that’s just how they are. That’s Unfortunately, it’s kind of one of the side effects that comes with that level of success and moving up the chain Professionally, you know, it kind of happens and most race car drivers are going to have an ego too.

So successful businessmen, now you get to be a sweet race car driver. It’s going to happen. I just don’t understand the point of the gentleman driver because, okay, it’s great that you have all this money and you can go do it. I mean, more power [00:20:00] to you. Like John said, live your best life the best way you know how, but it’s like, okay.

So this clearly started as something maybe decades ago where rich people wanted to go do rich people things. And racing really fast with, you know, the top people in a series was that thing and now it just feels like it’s, you know, a heritage thing that’s carrying on and which is fine, but it doesn’t seem realistic or grounded and clearly not grounded in the everyday persons.

I think that’s really interesting and it’s making me connect to something that Eric said earlier about the L’Oreal CEO and how maybe that’s how it started and then these four gentlemen are trying to make it into something more serious than it either actually is or to move the gentleman driver into something that’s more serious moving forward to show that people are taking it seriously and giving it weight.

It has that weird dichotomy there. So I think the reason [00:21:00] it feels disconnected, and they very briefly just brushed over it very quickly, they mentioned some other famous gentleman drivers that are probably closer to our age group that we would recognize. People like Steve McQueen, Paul Newman. Patrick Dempsey and our favorite British baker, Paul Hollywood, those are names we can identify with.

And when you put a celebrity in a car, are they really doing it for ego? They’re already a celebrity. Everybody knows who they are. So somebody like Paul Hollywood, who actually talked about it in. His big continental road trip. He says, I wanted to go drive for Aston and he did. And he actually drove the same car, same team that Paul Dallolana was driving.

And I don’t know if they overlapped, but it was basically, if you look at the pictures, it’s the same car. That being said, I look at those guys and go, you know. They’re celebrities and I already look up to them. I want to be like Paul Newman. I want to be like Steve McQueen. But I don’t necessarily know I want to be like these guys, right?

They [00:22:00] didn’t inspire me in that same way. Why do you feel you want to be more like Paul Newman or Steve McQueen than these other guys who are just as successful, if not more successful, even though they’re not as famous? The image of those celebrities. We know Paul Newman gave back, he did a lot of other things for community and people and whatnot.

Paul Hollywood is supposed to be a really nice guy, despite the way he portrays himself on TV, sometimes Patrick Dempsey, you know, he quit acting to pursue racing and now he owns a team, all that kind of stuff, and even Steve McQueen, he was rough around the edges, but he was also a racer, he was passionate.

They’re, they’re different people, maybe because they’re more grounded in the motorsport for me, that says something to me. And I look up to them and go, man, I wish I could be rich and famous. And go drive race cars, but it’s not the same. I look at these four guys and I single out, let’s say Patron and the vaping thing, and I’m like, well, you’re capitalizing on people’s habits and vices, [00:23:00] and then you get to go play.

Aren’t you special and to me? I don’t know. It was just weird. Anybody else feel like that? No Thanks, you’re on an island eric, I guess I I really am I really am for me I don’t see any difference between these four gentlemen Or the guy from L’Oreal or the, the four celebrities that you mentioned, they were all successful.

They all had a lot of money and then they all decided to start a hobby of racing. Yeah. That’s all it boils down to, right? You get to a point in life where you have the resources to do this thing that you want to do. And now you can do it. So, that’s awesome. That’s great. I’m happy for them. I can do the same thing myself at a much, much smaller scale.

And it’s great and it’s fun. If I had more resources, I would do that too. I’d be like, alright, I guess I’ll just go get an F3 car and see what that’s like. I’ll just go start a race team. Let’s do it. Yeah, exactly. I mean, why not? If you can afford it, go for it. Send it. So when I asked about whether or not they detracted [00:24:00] from the sport.

There was that, there’s always that fear there. They talked about letting the team down. They really painted that picture of, I’m part of the team, but I don’t want to be, you know, a boat anchor. I want us all to be successful. Great. That’s very altruistic. However, I don’t know if you guys noticed or not, and this goes back to Ricardo, and I’m not trying to single him out, but they spent a lot of time with him because he is the centerpiece of the film when you kind of peel back everybody else because of bringing WEC to Mexico City and all that kind of stuff.

I don’t know if you guys noticed or not, but they threw up some other subtitle cards in there where it’s like, Gentleman Driver will travel the world to compete in 8 to 10 races per year, spending up to 70 days out of the office. Like, okay, like that’s supposed to say something to me, right? But they showed that scene where they’re walking the course at Coda.

I kind of sat back, and I’m like, Okay. And there was this whole other thing where they threw up another slide and it said a gentleman driver must learn and be mentored by his younger and more experienced professional teammates. And I’m like, what? I’m like, how [00:25:00] come this guy doesn’t have a coach? How come he’s not getting right seat time?

How come we’re talking about a track walk? And I understand the importance of a track walk, but shouldn’t we talk? About this guy’s training and how he is contributing to the team. He is going out of his way to spend extra cycles to, to be part of the team. Or is it just, look, I can fly in and drive my LMP two car, and then I can fly out and go about my business.

And they showed that with Paul Dalla Lana, where they had to coax him. Into staying after the race was over to get his trophy and I was like, ah, you know, I don’t think the movie did a very good job of actually explaining all the details, if you will, around the gentleman driver, like I still, because I honestly hadn’t really.

known about it till seeing this movie. I didn’t know it was a thing. And then I was curious, like, oh, how many gentlemen drivers per team are there? And you know, are there levels and rankings? Like, is this guy competing against himself? How many people is he competing against? Because they just highlighted all the highlights these [00:26:00] guys were having.

Oh, they won or Oh, I guess they showed low lights. So they crashed, but it was, there was nothing about, Oh, but he’s competing him out against this other gentleman driver who is so and so and it works this way and it works that way. And they do get training or they don’t get training. They showed the one guy doing his thing on his simulator.

And I said, okay, good on him. He’s practicing, but I just still don’t have an understanding of how the whole thing works other than you write a really big check and you get to sit in the seat. Yeah, I agree with Tanya. The track walk was really confusing for me because it read exactly as Eric said. I was like, he just flew in his, in his, Never, like, looked at this track before and doesn’t understand how to drive it?

Is that what’s happening here? It was very confusing. They obviously don’t spend hours watching YouTube videos of other people on track like we do. Clearly. Because I would like to hear how competitive are these guys really versus You know, the, the more pro amateurs, if you will, [00:27:00] the, the people really working through their ranks that have been doing this since, you know, they were go karting at five years old or something like that.

I didn’t get any sense of how this all really works other than you got money. So you go and okay, great. I mean, that’s essentially what it is. It’s. Almost like a straight up arrive and drive and obviously a gentleman driver is going to be nowhere near as quick or competitive as a professional because a professional that’s their job.

It’s what they do and they’re really good at it. Which is why people pay them to do it. I, I agree they didn’t do a good job kind of showing the behind the scenes and what kind of training goes in. They just quickly, you know, he shows up to CODA and is like, okay, track walk with Tipo Durrani, professional driver, you know, just showing him lines.

I think that was just kind of, they threw it in there for fluff. There’s, you know, there’s a lot more going on behind that with the engineers and the data sessions, which they glossed over real quick. I mean, there’s more to it than that. They’re not just showing up and getting in and [00:28:00] it could be a track they’ve never been to, which is fine.

Everybody’s going to go to a new track at some point, right? So I just think they didn’t do a good job there. But to your, to your point with the setup and the race engineer, they’re not going to listen to these guys. They’re going to listen to Felipe. They’re going to listen to Bruno. They’re going to listen to all these other guys because they’re the professionals at the end of the day.

They’re going to say, Hey, the car’s loose. The car’s doing this and they did touch on that a little bit where the pro would pull them aside like, uh, yeah, where overbeck would pull them aside and say, Hey, the car’s doing this. You’re just going to have to drive through it. You’re just going to have to deal with it.

This is the way we set it up. And so to your point, I don’t even know that it’s in a drive, arrive and drive. It’s a pay to play. So do they really have any input? Are they really helping the team or are they just dragging those teams down? And so that was what left me sitting there going, I don’t know. And this is where I draw the difference between the other gentlemen drivers.

We talked about where Paul Newman is an example. He raced a lot and so did [00:29:00] Steve McQueen. They were racers, although they were celebrities. So it’s a little bit different. They weren’t just, Oh, you know, I’m Bruce Wayne by day. And by night I’m Batman. it, you know, and fly in, do their thing and fly out. They were dedicated to the craft.

They were dedicated to the sport and they knew how to drive and they knew about the mechanics of it. Now, I’m not saying that that’s for everybody, but I just felt that it still painted this in the completely wrong light. And I don’t think they gave enough credit to the teammates. We spent more time with the publicist.

And the marketing guy than we did with Bruno Senna and the other teammate. And I looked up Bruno Senna because I was a little bit confused, you know, knowing the last name, it’s a famous last name, right? Being related to Ayrton. He was born in 83. He’s a professional racing driver. He currently races for rebellion.

He’s the nephew of Ayrton Senna. His mother is Ayrton’s older sister, Vivianne. And he’s also the first driver. To win every WEC class. [00:30:00] So that guy has a lot to say. I don’t think he spoke a single word in the whole movie. And in that respect, I felt like it took away from the, the, the bigness. You know, they, as they set up the film, how, how amazing, you know, WEC is.

And then we never really got to hear anything about it. Oh, gentleman driver, not professional driver. Yeah, Senna, Senna’s not a gentleman driver. So do you guys separate? Gentlemen, drivers from drivers who bring sponsorship backing with them who otherwise wouldn’t have a seat, wouldn’t have a ride, but they bring sponsorship to the team that allows them to get that seat.

They’re not being picked because of their skills and their merit on the track. They’re being picked because they’re bringing sponsorship. They’re not writing their own check from their own personal bank account. This Venezuelan oil company or whatever is their backing is writing that check. I mean, feel about that because there are a lot of female drivers that do bring their own sponsorship.

And as soon as [00:31:00] that sponsorship runs out, same thing, they’re gone, too. They’re just not writing their own checks. So if they don’t bring their own sponsorship, they’re gone. So I think the clarifying question there, Sam, is what is the aspiration of that person? Are they attempting to become a professional driver?

And so therefore they’ve harvested this sponsorship in order to reach that ultimate goal. And maybe they never get there and maybe they do. Or are you saying they’re on the same level as these gentlemen drivers where it’s just, I’ve yielded enough cash that I can come in, buy my seat. Win Le Mans and go home.

Which is it? I would argue that the people that are bringing sponsorship are probably the more talented drivers. They’re usually, technically, professionals because their sponsorship is paying them. Without that sponsorship, it’s not like they’re just getting picked up off the street to get a ride. Like, you gotta bring money to the table, whether you’re writing the check.

Or you’ve got backing to do it. So the case in point, right. If you watched uppity, that was [00:32:00] exactly the scenario that Willie T ribs went through, he got backing from Cosby, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, to, to get his seat and all that stuff, to get a car, to get going. And I understand that, but his goal.

Was to, you know, and he already was a professional racer in Trans Am, et cetera, et cetera. And he wanted to work his way up. He wanted to win the Indy 500. He is someone you can look up to as a mentor, but these guys are not them. I want to fly in. I want to win Le Mans and I want to take my trophy and go home to your point of very earlier on in this podcast where you said professional drivers and gentlemen, drivers are not the same thing.

If we classify these sponsored drivers, as you’re saying into the professional category. Then it pretty much answers itself. The Gentleman Drivers, it’s their hobby. They have a lot of money and they want to go do this cool thing. I mean, that’s how I am perceiving it. Until convinced otherwise. Because they’re, they’re already years into their life.

The reality, they’re not going [00:33:00] to suddenly be the next Ayrton Senna or Lewis Hamilton in their particular series. They’re doing this for fun because probably partially they’re bored and it’s something that they’ve always wanted to do and they’ve got some talent. They’re not completely talentless because I mean, there’s a lot of people in the world that they have tremendous talents and they never actually get to pursue them or use them and no one sees them.

It doesn’t mean they’re not talented, but I mean, honestly, you don’t. It’s a hobby for them. I don’t think it’s on the same level as somebody who’s, who’s, who’s end goal, who’s aspiration, as you said, is to actually go be the top in their sport because this is their job. This is what’s bringing them money.

They’re not, it’s not a side thing. The point is we lost something in translation here. We lost the difficulty in the driving itself. These guys can’t communicate it. They just show up. They do their thing for an hour and a half and they go home or whatever, you know, their stint is. [00:34:00] So again, does it take away from the sport?

Does it really paint the sport in the right light? Yeah. And based on the conversation about money earlier, I would ask, would the money still come in from rich fans through things like team ownership and sponsorships and, and other ways to be involved? If actually being able to drive the car didn’t exist, I would dare say that yes, that not maybe in the same quantities, but enough to keep the sport going.

Maybe if the sport was more profitable to the teams, but it’s, it’s a money pit. I mean, you listen to any professional, like any team owner or anybody, the gentleman drivers just joking. They mean, they even said it. How do you make a small fortune at a racing? You start with a large fortune. You start with a billion, you end up with a million.

I don’t, I don’t think this it’s not like the NFL where teams are making money, hand over fist on merchandise and in paraphernalia and all, and all that stuff and fans are rabid for it. Then the motor sports community, I think it’s a [00:35:00] very small niche group of fans. It’s not. It’s not a moneymaker. If I’ve got 10 million dollars sitting around, I’m not just gonna give it to a race team out of the goodness of my heart and be like, here guys, have some sponsorship money.

I’m gonna be like, here guys, make room. I’m hopping in. Yeah, but how much did Ed Brown make off of Patron cars running around and sponsoring the, the lounges and the, and the happy hours and all that kind of stuff? So the return on investment was probably pretty good. So I don’t know that the argument really holds water.

I’m feeling what Aaron’s saying here. I don’t know because once Bacardi took over, they pulled the plug on that pretty instantaneously. Their accountants probably went over the books and were like, Hmm, we’re spending how much on racing? That drives right to the point. If you weren’t making money, why do it?

So if racing is a loss leader, why does racing continue? And I’m not advocating for racing to go away, but at the end of the day, somewhere along the line, and you can make this argument [00:36:00] about Bernie Ecclestone, somebody’s making money. If not, it wouldn’t happen. So I don’t think WEC is a loss leader or they would have shut it down.

That being said, there’s another big weird part of this movie that I’m sure you all caught on, which was the psychologist. And I see you all smiling. It was from Austin. Yes, Dr. Art Markman. And he spent a lot of time talking about The, the risk and the entrepreneurs and how difficult it is for them and the challenges and all.

And he implied a lot of different things. There were two things I was really confused about. The first one has to do with risk. He made it seem like only entrepreneurs, only people that are anointed with that gift are able to take and manage risk in life. Well, he said it very, in an interesting way at some point, something to the, I don’t remember how exactly he worded it, but it was.

To the effect of because these guys had learned all that they needed to learn, it’s not that there’s not risk is that they learned [00:37:00] the risk away. And I’m like, wow, that is completely inaccurate. The risk is still inherently there. And these guys have not been doing it as long as the professionals. So they, so the real problem is they don’t know what they don’t know, and they don’t know the risk.

That they don’t know, if you will. So that it goes back to their ego that they’re gods and what they do on a daily basis. And so therefore that’s going to translate into anything that they. I don’t know that I agree with it. I was amused by that, about how they, uh, you know, the psychologist said that they essentially reframe how risky they see something, and do that reframing by learning more about it.

And I think there is some semblance of truth to that. I think situations can seem risky that once you actually You know, document what’s going on with the situation. You can get to a point where it’s like, okay, it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be. I’m more comfortable approaching [00:38:00] that situation down.

I agree with Tanya that they weren’t learning the risk weights. How much did they learn? They’re not a professional driver. They’re essentially have enough money that the risk doesn’t matter or that they don’t care about it. Because they’re doing it for different reasons that are not monetary with that.

I mean, they showed Paul Dalla Lana putting that Aston in the wall, how many times it almost became comical. And then they never talked about the repercussions afterwards. Like, Oh, well, well, we, we bend it. Well, we’ll move on. There was another part of that, that really got under my skin that I didn’t understand.

And to your point, we’re talking about risk mitigation here. And then if you notice, he switched gears. And he went on this tangent about imposter syndrome. And I, again, I had to pause and I’ve only heard one other person in my life bring this up and I’m not going to call them out. And I was like really confused because now they’re trying to say that they have a self esteem or confidence problem where they’re putting on a face.

And if you really knew them, that they aren’t the way they come off as you see them in [00:39:00] real life. And I’m like, Excuse me? I felt that they probably weren’t being portrayed how they really are in real life in this film. Because it goes back to what I said in the beginning, as I entered this, and maybe it’s wrong of me to have entered with a bias, of most billionaires, millionaires, are just egotistical tyrants, jerks is the nicest way to put it.

And they, they didn’t quite exude that during the interviews and during their conversations. They felt more like, you know, the everyday guy, you know, walk down and have a beer with or something. And I’m not sure that that’s, that’s entirely accurate. So there was a lot of what seemed like misportrayal and maybe I’m just being unfair.

I thought the imposter syndrome was specifically speaking to them as gentlemen drivers coming into a sport with professional drivers and they’re the imposters pretending to be professional [00:40:00] drivers for the weekend or whatever professional drivers think of them as imposters. So they feel like they have to put in more work.

To overcome that imposter designation that that stereotype, because they’re buying their way in and they haven’t earned it. The imposter syndrome definition, psychology is exactly the that person, so it would be the gentleman drivers because they’re not truly the person of that sport, right? Fosters in it.

They feel inadequacy because they haven’t been through everything. Right, but isn’t that a contradiction to everything we know about these entrepreneurs? Yeah, it feels contradictory to the previous discussion on risk. They essentially bought down their risk because they learned their way out of it and and then are convincing themselves that it’s not risky.

That doesn’t necessarily align with the fact that they feel as an imposter to be able to perform in that realm. So I think yeah, They like presented two [00:41:00] psychological pillars that don’t necessarily, um, align with each other inside. You know, the gentleman driver’s head, I think you get a lot of their true nature that they’re really kind of shows you like pulls back the curtain on everything at that like round table.

They do. They kept going back to because there are times where they started like, you know, talking like, would you have done all of this again? Or would you become like a pro driver or something? Or would you rather have the money you’ve made in your business? And all of them just kind of like chuckled to themselves and like money, like.

I don’t know. I think that was like really revealing on who they were personally. Imposter wise, like I could see like you come to something that’s new and you definitely bought yourself on the team. You definitely feel inadequate, which you could just get rid of by getting more experience. But we’re all told to be confident in ourselves.

We’re all champions. We’re all winners. We’re supposed to have, you know, that gusto inside. And these guys have that. Entrepreneurs exemplify. That particular characteristic to show them as vulnerable and whatever, to [00:42:00] me, didn’t make a whole lot of sense. And so with that boost of esteem, with that boost of just boldness that these people are supposed to have as entrepreneurs, wouldn’t it be more appropriate to say, fake it till you make it?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, that’s how you do it as an entrepreneur to begin with anyway. I mean, I guess it could be imposter if you think of it in the way I do. It’s like you have the same skills, you feel like you can’t perform at the same level for some actual psychological reason, like it’s just like a block.

I have that professionally every once in a while, and I think it could apply here. Yet another contradiction in the film. They’re trying to portray these fragile eggs, and it’s like, you know, you have to. I don’t know, coddle them or baby them. I don’t know what the term is right now, but it just, to me, it just, as, as we progress through the film at first, I was like, Oh, this is going to be really neat.

I’m going to learn something. And then I kind of got further and further disillusioned and disenfranchised with the film. [00:43:00] And then the biggest problem arised as we got to the end and to your point about them sitting around the table. I also noticed how. Like Ed would kind of bite at some of the other ones or he would just cut them off and I’m like, oh, that’s interesting, right?

So there’s a little power play there alphas, you know, four or five alphas in the room together. No big deal I don’t know why it took 88 minutes to dawn on me There’s not a single female in the entire film other than Paul Della Lana’s wife Mic drop. To extend on that, I said at one point, they were talking amongst themselves, I was just like, la la la, four powerful rich white men doing their own thing.

Oh, that came to my head at the very beginning. And I was like, it was maybe Ricardo. 88 minutes to see that. Ricardo is, I guess, is the one, the one man out, and he was kind of definitely I felt overpowered by the rest of them in that little round table. He’s like, I’m actually like trying to do things. You guys are just bitching about your eco.

Like, I don’t know. Yeah, I agree on that. But also that’s unfortunately the demographics of racing as [00:44:00] well. Is it though? There’s plenty of diversity out there with deep pockets. I’m just going to phrase it that way. There’s plenty of very rich and powerful women out there. Why aren’t they signing up to be gentle lady drivers?

They have those. They, they run another series, like Super Trofeo, Ferrari Challenge. Why can’t they run WEC? They don’t have enough money, maybe. Oprah’s got plenty of money, bro. Maybe Super Trofeo and Ferrari Challenge. So you gotta, you gotta have, you gotta tick all the boxes. You gotta like racing. You got to want to race and you got to have a lot of money.

I mean, that eliminates me from being a gentleman driver and be able to deal with culture, right? I think the thing missing from this conversation is that, yes, those might be the demographics of racing more generally, but that inherently might be one of the reasons you don’t see it being the only person in the room that is different in a specific way.

Can be challenging, and can be culturally [00:45:00] shocking. So, I mean, I think John pointed out that that was kind of evident just amongst the, you know, four or five men at that round table. One man stood out, and I noticed early on that he wasn’t talking very often at that table. And that could have been for a variety of reasons, maybe he’s more introverted.

They’re, you know, they were all in this documentary together, they were all, all their stories were being told. Yeah. You’re talking about Michael Gauch from Molecule Labs. They kind of wrapped him up at the end like, uh, yeah, here’s this thing. No, I was talking about Ricardo. Oh, gotcha. As soon as they told me that guy made vaping liquid, I wrote him off as the killer of numerous innocent children.

He’s probably broke now too. I was also wondering, I was like, when is this date? Definitely before 2019. Yeah, and that’s just it, right? So we’re catching this thing two years later, and even when it came out on Netflix, the material that was provided was already two to three years old. So it’s really out of date.

I understand what they were trying to do, but again, diversity [00:46:00] aside, I thought it was unfair to women. Yeah, and If I could bring up a point of like related to the diversity issue, I mean, it’s called gentleman driver, right? Do they call a woman who’s in that position, a lady driver, or do they call her a gentleman driver?

And I think it also gets at a deeper point of language, right? I go back and forth about, well, do the words we use really matter all that much? Like, why should we care? But if you think about the origin of the word gentlemen and how gentlemen is like thought of in. societal context, the way they’re referring to it is like a rich white person who owns land, right?

And that, that they’re gonna come down and race in this, in this race and, you know, get a seat in this car. And so that has many more connotations than just that they’re a, a man. It has a connotation that they are white, rich, and also a man. And so I think the name itself has many implications. that the movie just hit home again and again and again.

Like every, every part of that movie [00:47:00] confirmed what I thought A Gentleman’s Driver would be in terms of demographics throughout the entire 88 minutes. If I’m a casual watcher and I see this, maybe I just got done watching Formula One Drive to Survive, and this comes up on my recommendation list, and I watch this, and I’m not a motorsport head, or it just comes across my recommendations, I watch it.

Does it really paint motorsport in the, in a good light? Uh, I think it shows the realities of motorsport, being that the resources that are required to have the sport exist. I think it brings that to the surface that a lot of people probably don’t realize how expensive this is and what it takes for a team to get funding and run.

I think that’s really what it highlights. I mean, I agree with that. It just reconfirms what I think the majority of people already know is that it’s a very expensive. Profession, sport, hobby, whatever you want to label it as, it takes money to go do it, even whether you’re the Lewis [00:48:00] Hamilton level, or you’re a junior level, or you’re even if you’re just going out for a track day on a weekend, it’s expensive.

It’s not it’s not cheap. There’s less expensive sports to go do, you know, basketball doesn’t cost very much and you can get a group of friends and go on a court for free, you know, it’s expensive to go racing. And I think it reconfirmed that in the movie. And I think. You know, in the first five minutes, they pushed me away my interest when they said that it’s, it’s, it’s a complete meritocracy.

Well, no, it’s not. Yes, once you’re inside it and you’re competing against your peers, the better driver with more skill is going to be rewarded. But it takes money to enter that meritocracy. And they made it sound like, oh, no, you, you can be whoever and have the talent and suddenly be number one. I don’t personally feel that that’s how it works.

I mean, I agree with you, but I didn’t get the aspect of you can get in and be number one. I saw it more as you can get in and you’re in. That was it. It wasn’t [00:49:00] like, okay, well, I’m in now. Now I’m going to compete and be the best. Gentleman drivers get in and they’re going to do their best. But they’re not going to be the best, right?

But he gets to go home with a trophy that says LeMans winner. He won LeMans. Did he? I’m wrong. I guarantee you, Bruno Senna did more work, more laps, and put more effort in than Ricardo did at the end of the day. And Bruno Senna wouldn’t exist without Ricardo’s checkbook. But hey, that’s not necessarily true because Ricardo, because Ricardo’s not racing anymore.

And Senna still is. Yeah, but the other guy could race whenever he wants, too. I mean, true. I’m just saying it’s a symbiotic relationship, right? The professionals need the money for the team to operate. These guys bring the money. I mean, that’s all it is. It’s a completely symbiotic relationship. They need each other.

It would’ve been nice if the movie maybe explained that more, or kind of Dived into that, which it didn’t do [00:50:00] at all because I still really don’t have an understanding of how this whole thing works. Like, cause clearly they, these, these guys are, are on a team within their, their car class. It’s not just them doing lap after lap and winning it, um, but you didn’t get to hear about how that works and the relationships and who really is contributing.

What are these guys really doing? It was, I was waiting for it and it got glossed over. I’m with you. I was waiting for a team manager to step up and say, this is how we run the team. This is why we do it this way. Let me break it down for you. Or something like that. It just was never there. Yeah, they didn’t have the Howden like in Truth in 24, right?

They didn’t have those people. To step in and do this and I mean they were constrained by how long this was and they were trying to follow four different people and four different teams and they just kind of bounced around and glossed over a lot of things that probably would have been really interesting that explained how this worked and it came across kind of [00:51:00] half assed.

I mean I’ll make the argument that we didn’t need to watch Ed Brown sipping tequila. We could have filled that time with an explanation of what the heck we were watching. I couldn’t care to less. Delicious. It is. It is. Granted. But I couldn’t care to less. I don’t want to watch, again, a room full of white guys drinking liquor.

It had no point to the movie whatsoever. To the message that they were trying to convey. Did you scope out the watches they were wearing? Man, pretty sweet. Maybe that was part of the deal of the documentary. They wanted coverage of their products, their companies, their life success. Who was the executive producer for the documentary?

Which one of the, the billionaires was the executive producer? I didn’t watch that far enough to the credits. Guaranteed there, one of them was. I have to go look it up though. Tony Calderon? Wasn’t that the uh, producer guy? The guy sitting in the middle of the table? The manager. So he’s their manager, so yeah.

So he’s gotta fluff ’em up and all that stuff. So yeah, you’re mani manicure. [00:52:00] So I guess at the end of the day, we understand it takes money to go racing. It’s considered a rich man sport. It always has been like a lot of other things, like if you wanna be good at golf and you boats and airplanes and, and even shooting, right?

They’re all expensive. All hobbies are expensive at the end of the day. But what I didn’t understand, and what I’m gonna leave you guys with is would you share this? Movie. Movie with someone else to say, this is what racing is like. And the second part of that question is, did it leave you in any way inspired both in the business world and in the racing world, or could you have cared less altogether?

I think I cared more about it from a business and leadership perspective than I did about the racing. Side of it. It was more fascinating to me how they ran their businesses and were successful and then also handled racing at the same time Well, I wouldn’t actually recommend it as a view into racing to anyone because like especially at the end It was just it was basically like a crazy dramatic Movie ending so [00:53:00] they’re just going for the effect and not a message which I was kind of like pretty bummed about But also entertained by, so it’s kind of conflicting emotions there, but now I’d say come out to a track day.

We’ll show you how it’s really done. I mean, to be very honest, I lost interest in the movie very early and I only kept watching it because of this podcast.

So no, I don’t think I would recommend it to anybody. I don’t think it did a good enough job of explaining anything. You could argue there was potential that had been done differently, but as it stands. I don’t think it really explains much about racing and I wasn’t inspired by it. I mean, it must be nice to have that much money.

I think it would have been better if it was less about entering the mind of the entrepreneur and more about, this is what it takes to keep WEC and IMSA running. I wouldn’t share this with anybody just because I was bored. Yeah, I, I agree with. Everything that’s been said so far, I think, uh, you know, I wouldn’t recommend it as a view into racing.

I [00:54:00] think it was a view into the lives of these four men with a slight, strange, uh, contradictory commentary on what a gentleman driver actually is. I found tidbits here and there of their discussion on leadership and entrepreneurship interesting. I almost felt like it was forced in some ways, like. The one guy who was talking about, you know, I treat my employees with respect and the people that I work with with respect.

And I’m like, yes, that’s what a true leader actually does. Great. But I kind of feel like you’re just saying that’s, you know, like you can asshole on TV. Yeah. So I thought it had some interesting leadership messages that felt very forced. Yeah, I definitely would not recommend this to somebody who’s new to motorsport and wanted to learn more.

Far better ones out there that they can watch. Uh, some that we’ve already touched on on this podcast, you know, I think they did an okay job, but that’s from my perspective of knowing about gentlemen drivers and, you know, kind of how the sport operates. And what these guys do and come in and write these [00:55:00] checks and, you know, I used to be a hater on that stuff, but now I’m like, you know, if I had the resources, I would do it too.

I would be walking around like the Monopoly guy in the paddock or like Ted DiBiase or dressed like Apollo Creed, just being obnoxious, showing how much money I have and be like, Hey, I’m paying to be here. So what? I’m rich. Then why not? That’s what they’re doing. I would do the same thing. So I, I can’t hate on them for it.

I thought there was just so many things wrong with it. By the time I got to the end, I was really excited at the beginning, like, Oh, this is going to be really cool. I really appreciate and enjoy WEC, Le Mans, IMSA, everything that goes with that. I was like, man, this is going to be a great little filler because we didn’t do Le Mans this year.

I’m going to watch the film. See where it goes. And then by the end, I was just like, you know what, if I was not a racer and was not invested in motorsport, I’d say the hell with this. Just make them all go away. And on that note, I think it’s time to end. All right, everybody, I thank you so much for joining us tonight.

It’s been an interesting [00:56:00] conversation. And I look forward to doing this again soon.

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