The man behind the curtain – Dean Case

Dean Case - Public Relations - Press Officer for SRO Motorsports America

Public Relations manager for SRO Motorsports America, where he works to promote the premier GT and Touring Car series in the U.S.

Contact: Dean Case at dean.case@sro-motorsports.com | 531-444-6639 | Visit Online!

    

• The answer is always Miata – let’s talk about your work on the Miata team #zoom-zoom
• You were at the height of TransAm at Ford; tell us some of those stories?
• Famous Friends: Lyn St. James, Tommy Kendall, Sylvia Wilkinson, Paul Newman, Jay Leno, Garth Stein, Tim Considine and others.
• Your time with Nissan and NISMO.
• Your work with Formula SAE – why is SAE so important? 
• We had Greg Gill on the show talking about SRO > How are you connected? and how did you end up at SRO? What are your plans for the program? The Brand? 
• What other super cool things don’t we know about Dean Case?

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. After graduating Cal Poly San Luis Obisbo with a mechanical engineering degree, our guest joined Mazda Research and Development in Irvine, California.

And while at Mazda, he worked on the original Miata. Second generation MX six, first Gen M P [00:01:00] V, and the third Gen RX seven. While he loved the people and the work at Mazda, he wanted to try something new, working at a larger car company. That opportunity came in 1993 when he joined Ford as a layout engineer in the electric vehicle department, and in 1997, he was able to transfer to the Ford Motorsport effort in the S C C A TransAm Championship.

While the Ford experience was professionally rewarding, he wished to return home to Southern California a little later, acting as the EV q and a technical expert on a Nissan Media event in 2000, a life-changing event that would lead him from engineering to communications. He became the Nissan product PR manager from 2001 through 2006, where he worked on every Nissan brand product launch, including the return of the Z, the launch of Mismo, and the first Nissan 360 global event.

Fast forwarding to today, our break Fixx guest is one [00:02:00] of those legendary behind the scenes people in motorsports. Mr. Dean case. Public relations manager for S R O Motorsports America, where he works to promote the premier GT and touring car series in the United States. And he’s here to share some of his most fascinating paddock stories with us as if this intro wasn’t enough, right?

So please join us in welcoming Dean Case to break fix. Thank you. Thank you. Glad to be here. So Dean, let’s jump into it. That intro, it stands alone. Let’s talk about Mazda. You know, we joke all the time, the answer is always Miata, but let’s talk about your work on the Miata team. Well, actually it was pretty funny cuz I, it was the only automotive offer I had when I graduated, and actually it was months later.

I didn’t get the offer right when I graduated from school. And I had one non-automotive offer, and I was about to take it. My dad said, why would you do that? You worked all this time again into automotive. You know, we can put you up for a while until you find something. And then I got the opportunity to interview with, uh Mazda, [00:03:00] October of 86.

I had just graduated, I guess it was August. I didn’t finish up in June like I was supposed to. I had one more quarter to finish at Cal Poly. I was a little bit behind. It was a layout engine. I didn’t even really know what a studio engineer did. They offered me the job and I took it. And so I show up the first day and once you sign all the paperwork, then I go back, they take me back into the studio.

There was a full size clay model of a two seat road center that was still about two and a half years away from uh, launch. That was me August. You know, I wasn’t there really at the birth. I was there during the development of it. It was still an incredible. Opportunity to be right place, right time. You’re talking the late eighties at this point.

You said the debut of the Miata was a couple years later That came to our shores in 1990. What were they having you do on the, on the Miata at that point? Mazda, r d and Irvine’s, a relatively small group. There was a manager, a senior engineer, and myself, just three of us in the engineering group. And then we had the design studio, and then there was a various testing function.

So what would happen? An early layout, you know, a concept that came out of the California studio would be [00:04:00] sent to the mothership in Japan for development. It would come back to us in various times, so we would be involved in some of the early drives. So I got to go on some of the early drives with Miata.

So it was kind of the tail end of it, but I was there for the launch when we were at Chicago Auto Show in February of 89 there. Is it really true that the Miata was modeled after the Lotus Ilan? Is that where it’s got its inspiration from? Well, some of it, not entirely. I mean, they had a try and spitfire and they had other British cars and even a couple, I think we had an alpha one time, Mazda went out and bought a number of cars, including a, an Ilan.

The Ilan was at a higher price point, so a lot of it was looking at the cars that were available to everybody. And conventional wisdom at the time is there was no market for a small two seat sports car. And the reality was there was no market for a unreliable two seat sports car like most of the British cars were.

The reality is most of the triumphs and things, they failed on the US shores cuz they weren’t particularly reliable or comfortable. The Miata was kind of trying to improve on that. Yeah, you could say spiritually, a little bit of a lawn, but there [00:05:00] was a lot of other cars that they were targeting. They wanted to make sure the price point was affordable.

Keep in mind, that car launched, I think it was $13,900. That was a screaming deal for what it was. There’s some names that surround them, yada. Folks like Jeffrey Barnes and Bob Hall. Did you get to work with them as well on that project? Did that come later at Mazda? No. Well, actually, Jeremy, I think at that time, worked for Toyota.

He came in later. Jeremy joined. I’m not sure what the year he joined Mazda, but Bob Hall was there. I mean, the original nucleus of the Miata, you know, a lot of people claimed to be the father of the Miata. I would say Bob Hall was the father of the Miata. There was a lot of other people involved. Mark Jordan, Wuhan Chin, Mr.

Hayashi. But ultimately it was an American concept. The original three people who really led the pitch to Japan was Bob Hall. Mark Jordan and Norman Garrett. Norman Garrett, who was the engineer who hired me. You know, a lot of other people were actively involved. Amazing talent in that studio, Wuhan Chin, who really led the design of the [00:06:00] final generation.

RX seven was one of the most amazingly talented people I’ve ever had the privilege to work with during this whole time, working on the MX six, working on the minivan, and then the RX seven, an iconic vehicle. We still talk about the third gen RX seven today as a timeless design by Mazda. You look at it and you go.

What year is that car? I don’t know. Yeah. What were the different pieces? What were you working on? Or were you already in your head kind of thinking about the marketing side? Or were you still just bogged down in, in the mechanics of vehicles? Well, of what we did was, we joke that a studio engineer was more like the physics police.

You know, the designers would come up with this incredible shape as like, well, you know, we’d really like to have someone who’s over five foot five be able to fit in the car. Yeah. And, and so a lot of it was making sure that we could fit a 95th percentile American male into it, fifth percentile. Asian female and making sure that things like headlights are in legal positions.

A lot of what we did was, you know, on our standpoint was to support the creative efforts of the students. Interesting. We had to make sure that when we sent the proposal to Japan, they didn’t laugh [00:07:00] at it and say, yeah, we can’t build that, and we’re gonna talk about more about your history as we go along, but there’s a big gap and then there’s a return to Mazda way later in your career.

Yeah. So let’s jump forward and then jump back a little bit and try staying in the topic of Mazda in general, and so. When you came back to Mazda on the second go round, now you’re in a position of communications, you’re in the media department, public relations, et cetera. So I gotta ask you, it’s a loaded question.

Zoom. Zoom, was that your, was that your doing? Was, is that you Dean? No, that was, uh, a previous agency donor, I think. Did that, that I think that was, who came up with that? It was a great slogan. I. I mean, there’s a lot of uh, Mazda fans out there who still embrace that over some of the more current ones, but anytime you change agencies, they have to burn everything.

Ultimately, the fact I was able to go back was don’t burn bridges, you know, leave on good terms anywhere you go. And I have to thank Michael Jordan from Automobile Magazine. He’s the one connected me with Jeremy Barnes in the end of 2005. Cause I was working at [00:08:00] Nissan at the time and Nissan was relocating from Los Angeles to Nashville, Tennessee.

And that didn’t work for me from a family standpoint. I wasn’t bashful. I told everyone I knew I’m looking to find something else to stay in California. And Michael used to bust Jeremy’s chops about, you’re doing all this racing but you have no PR support. And Jeremy’s response to him was, well, I’m never gonna get headcount approval.

It’s gonna have to be contract. The only motor sports PR people I’ve met, I don’t like. And Michael said, I know the exact guy you need to hire. He knows your products cause he used to engineer ’em. He knows the media cuz he is been doing PR for Nissan and Best for you about to be unemployed. So when Nissan leaves, so I sat down with Jeremy at the 2006 LA Auto Show over coffee and got to know each other and he says, what’s your timeframe?

I go, well, I’m working on this formulas SAE project right now. So I’m not even available until uh, June. He goes Perfect cause it’ll take me at least that long to find budget. And he ended up calling me in August and said, I’ve got budget. And actually I think I did the first three [00:09:00] races on a handshake agreement cause I trusted Jeremy and then ended up 11 one year contracts.

So you mentioned that to me behind the scenes that you worked on the Mazda Road to Indie project. So do you wanna talk about that a little bit and what that was all about? Mazda at that time, you know, they were getting into more and more series. You know, they had the MX five cup. Such a strange time on both sports cars and Oakland Wheel because when Mazda started out, you know, when I joined him in 2006, we still had Champ Car and I R L.

What happened was there was already the Star Mazda Championship with the rotary powered cars. The origin you can trace back to the original Russell Mazda car in 1984. Gary Rodriguez was running that series very successfully, and Mazda signed on with Skip Barber. Also, Mazda had the engine for the Atlantic Championship, the beautiful brand new Swift car, which could have been a Ford, it could have been a Mazda, ended up being a Mazda.

So now all of a sudden there was three open wheel series, so you had. Skip Barber, which would feed into Star Mazda, which would feed into Atlantics, which would feed into Champ Car. Then [00:10:00] 2008, champ Car imploded, you know, it got sucked into I R L. We lost the Atlantic Championship, which was a shame cuz the Atlantic cars were just incredible on multiple levels and current cars were great and the history of uh, Atlantics was great, but that disappeared and then all of a sudden it became Skip Barber, the F 2000, the Star Mazda, the Indy Lights.

And the lights was never a Mazda engine, but just kind of worked out to where it kind of morphed into this thing we had with Champ Car to the Mazda Road to Indy in conjunction with Cooper Tires was a key player in that as well. There was so much going on and lucky that it survived through the recession.

You know, that time period. So we’ll talk more about your transition from engineer to PR as we go along in the conversation. But one thing I wanna ask while we’re still talking about Mazda, how did you find yourself when you came back in 2006? Did you find yourself still kind of wanting to be in the shop, looking at the designs, working on the cars or at, at this point because you had changed careers, you came at it with a whole different set of [00:11:00] eyes.

And I bring it up because a lot of people go through these metamorphoses in their life where they do career changes and things like that. But in your case, You were still in the automotive world and you went from one end to the other, so I just wanted to expand upon that experience for you as you walked back through the gates of Mazda with a different role.

Well, I still knew some of the r and d folks. Some of those were still there. Actually, one of my best friends from Mazda r and d just retired a few weeks ago. Kelvin Hii. He was the director of r and d, and he and I had worked together in the late eighties. You have to be honest with yourself about what you’re good at and what your strengths are.

And I used to get this really strange compliment Early in my career, my writing was excellent. Pause for an engineer. It’s kinda like being told you’re the healthiest person in the intensive care ward. You’re not really sure if it’s compliment. My real niche was explaining technical topics to non-technical people, and most engineers hate doing that.

And so that was a niche that I could kind of explore. You know, we did a lot with Mazda and it’s like, yeah, I, I like to think I was a competent [00:12:00] engineer, but I was not a brilliant engineer. My first engineering boss at Mazda Jro Mahi, he had over a hundred patents to his name. I was never at that level, and I could admit that, you know, I’m honest about it.

I like to think that, you know, I was competent, but I wasn’t the rockstar engineer like some of those are, and most of the ones in motorsports, you know, you gotta really be good, otherwise you just don’t laugh. So I like to help tell those stories of the technology and things, what Ford did, what Nissan did, what Mazda did, and now what SRO does.

Let’s talk about Ford. You wanted to go on to bigger and better things. So obviously at some point during this entire journey, Ford and Mazda were partnered up, or Ford bought Mazda, if I remember correctly. So was that a natural progression to go from Mazda to Ford? No, actually it was pretty funny. Ford had historically owned about 25% of Mazda dating back to the seventies, and there was a lot of, you know, If you bought a Ford Courier pickup, it was actually a Mazda.

And then much later years, you know, you buy a Mazda B series and that’s actually a Ford Ranger produced in Edison, New [00:13:00] Jersey. When Mazda ran the, some economic problems in the early nineties, Ford increased their ownership to 33% and basically put their management in place. But when I left, I basically gave up all my seniority at Mazda and started, uh, ground zero for, there was no.

There was no opportunity to to make a transfer and keep any of my seniority or anything, but it was a good move. But it was really wild to do electric vehicles in the nineties. The F-150 Lightning’s amazing, but it’s not for his first electric pickup truck. There was a 1998 Ranger Electric. I worked on it, and this was all back because California Area Sources board had a a mandate.

They were pushing for 2% zero emission vehicles by 1998. This is a great trivia question for people who are like EVs. Can you name all of the EVs that came out in 1998? There was eight of ’em that came out and virtually no one can ever guess them. I mean, other than the gm, EV one, I can’t think of too many others that are in the popular media at least.

Right? Well, most all of [00:14:00] ’em were fleet only. They were never sold at. Consumers, but Toyota had the rav4, ev Nissan had the Ultra ev. I drove one of those for eight years. Chrysler had a Pacific, a minivan electric, so there was a bunch of these out there, but they were all test fleets. Only virtually all of ’em were brought back and then crushed.

If you saw the movie, who Killed the electric car, they talk about the EV one. You know where all those were destroyed. But it basically happened with most all the other ones. And it was all beta software. The technology just wasn’t there. One of the really great things I loved about Ford was they had a lot of career development process.

You know, I encourage students to consider employment at a Ford, at GM or something right outta school because there’s just so much training opportunity and mentorship available. Ford, uh, you get your annual performance review, but you’d also get your semi-annual, I guess it was little bit of a review. It was more of a coaching session.

The joke is what they want you to say is, well, I’d like to be a design release engineer, get my MBA, and move into product planning, and they got a path for that. It’s easy, but if you say, I wanna be transferred to Ford Australia [00:15:00] or transferred to Ford Motorsports, they look at you like those are not normal goals.

And I finally got a boss who said, let me ask, and he called up the head of Ford Racing and he asked, how does someone move into your department? He says, well, all of our junior program managers are on loan for other departments. So if you’re willing to. Continue paying his salary out of your budget, we’d be happy to have him for a year.

So when I worked on Trans Am I was being paid by the electric vehicle group. What was that transition like? You go from EVs to race cars, what did they have you working on at Ford Motorsport? A lot of it was making sure that we didn’t, didn’t have bad things happening to us B O P wise, you know, good, good old balance of power.

Balance of performance? Yeah. Or blaming other people. You know, actually it was 25 years ago, just a few weeks back, St. Petersburg, Florida, the season opener for the Trans Am series. It was kind of funny, the strangest job title I was the Trans AM Program Manager at Ford Motor Company. People would say, wait, I thought Trans Am was a Pontiac.

Yes it is. General Motors licensed the name from the S E C A. So I have [00:16:00] that strange job title there. But a lot of it was just making sure that our teams had what they needed. Helped facilitate some of the uh, pre-race testing. We tested Dearborn Proving Grounds. That was a special one cause we got the test with Newman Hos and Paul Newman was there at the same test.

So that’s some good things there. But a lot of it was just making sure that we were staying equal and trying to support a couple of the private tier Mustang teams. Mike Lewis and Auto Con. And we had the deck stacked that year. You know, we had. Tommy Kendall and Danny Banks prepared Roush Mustangs, and that was the magic year where Tommy won 11 straight races.

It’s kind of funny because that period in TransAm, imsa, A L M S, let’s call it what it is, it was a weird, turbulent time. I call it the dark ages of touring car and GT racing because there were so many programs, so many series going on at the same time. And then eventually they would, let’s use a racing term Homologate and get together, right, and And it became imsa.

And then sro now, Today as a separate for GT three and GT four, there’s a [00:17:00] lot of names that were still lurking around. You know folks that like, you know Willie t Ribs and Lynn St. James. Yeah. And you mentioned Tommy Kendall and Paul Newman. And you know, Tom Cruise ran with Paul Newman and things like that.

And so there’s a lot of celebrity during that time that you came across. And what was that like? A few times I met Paul Newman during the 97 season. The one thing I’ve been warned ahead of time with Paul, you can talk to him about racing if you ask. Anything about entertainment, he will just walk away from you and never speak to you.

Don’t ask for an autograph, but if you want to ask him about how the team’s going, you know, a race, fine. He’ll talk to you like anybody. You know, he was legendary for when he clubbed race. He would drink beer with the coursework on Sunday, uh, after the races. I mean, really, genuinely. Nice guy. Very serious about racing, but.

When he was there at the racetrack. That’s all you want. Do not talk to me about movies. Do not talk to me about tv. So that was pretty cool. Lynn St. James got to know a little bit while I was at Ford. We formed a group, a club, Ford Motorsports, enthusiasts. You know, it was actually, it was kind of funny cuz we were frustrated [00:18:00] as Ford employers.

We weren’t really getting Ford news of race results and so we actually ended up getting in trouble by posting race results that we were told we weren’t authorized to post on the electronic bulletin board. So we formed a club so we could have an electronic B board. Legit. We ended up inviting a number of people to speak.

Uh, Lynn St. James being one of ’em. We made her an honorary Ford Motor Sport enthusiast member, and we had the legendary John Fitch as a speaker and some other folks like that Never met Willie t during that time. He had really finished his Trans Am era. By that time, I mean, Tommy’s only real challengers that year were Dorsey, Schrader, Brian, cmo, Paul Gen, Greg Pickett, that generation.

So we’re name dropping all over the place. But you have some other famous friends that you’ve influenced and, and partnered with. I’ll, I’ll drop a couple names here. Looking at your bio. Sylvia Wilkinson. Got Jay Leno. Gar Stein. Tim Considine, yeah, yeah, yeah. Tim Considine. Garth Stein’s a good Mazda story.

John Dunn, who was the director of Mazda Motorsport at the time, back in 2008, he was [00:19:00] flying to Lama, so he picked up Starbucks at that time, used. You could actually buy books at Starbucks. Remember that, and they would like to feature Seattle based authors. Many times John picked up those books, the Art of Racing in the Rain, just cuz of the title.

It was like, okay, you know, I need something to read on an eight hour flight to Paris. Bought it immediately. Emailed all of us, Jim Jordan, Steve Sanders, and I, it was like, you gotta go out and buy this book. It’s amazing. And so we, we all did. It was great. The racing was very accurate. It wasn’t a racing story, but racing was the backdrop.

Patrick Dempsey was racing with us at the time. Couple things happened. One, we reached out. Jim Jordan sent a note to uh Garth on his website. Posted a little comment like Love the book. You either did amazing research or You must erased. And he responded like 30 minutes later. Oh yeah, I used to Club Race is Spec Miata.

Everything I learned about racing, I know I learned from Spec Miata and it just so happened we were gonna be racing at Portland six weeks later with MX five Cup. We had a guest car at the time, so we called him up and said, would you like to race a pro [00:20:00] race with us? And then we added, uh, Sam Moses, who wrote Fast Guys.

Rich Guys and Idiots back in, I’m not sure of the nineties when he wrote that book. So we had fact versus fiction and we had the, uh, motorsports journalist against the fiction writer and they both thought they were gonna come in and do great. And they had a, I think, a pretty spirited battle for 21st and a 24 car field.

That’s a talent in MX five Cup is astounding. But we got the book, the Patrick Dempsey. Dempsey bought the movie, right? And it took Patrick then 10 years to get the movie producer. Yeah. We’re pretty proud of the fact that we helped make that happen, but it was a collective effort. John Dunn and Jim Jordan, myself and others.

So that was pretty cool. Uh, Sylvia Wilkinson is just one of my favorite authors. I mean, when. I grew up reading car books, you know, as a kid. And you know, you start with the little ones, the juvenile books when you’re 10 or 12 years old. And the first serious one I read was the stainless steel carrot by Sylvia Wilkinson and Sylvia turns out she was a genre of rider, young southern woman novelist who happened to really like racing.

And her publisher said, you should do a racing [00:21:00] story. She said, well, I don’t wanna do a conventional one. Maybe I can do a fly on the wall with a young up and coming driver and do it in the style of a novel. And she did the stainless steel carrot, just a fabulous book. It was outta print for many, many years.

It, it followed John Morton in the b r e Dotson’s. I got to know John and Sylvia when I was at Nissan. It was after Sylvia a little bit. It was like for the 40th anniversary of the, um, championship. Why don’t we redo the book? And Sylvia’s like, no, I’m not interested. I, I’ve worked on a new novel, Sylvia’s written like 20.

Eight books at least. She didn’t wanna revisit the past. After I got to know her and John A. Little bit better, I, I figured out how to exploit her weakness, which her weakness was animals. And I said, what if we did this as a fundraiser for some animal groups? I’ll do the PR for you for free. Let’s put it back in the print.

But you need to write a new chapter. Where are they now? Because if you found this book on eBay, it’d been like 150 or 200 bucks to find a copy of the original book. And so we put it back in print at $46, which was John’s car number, and we ended up raising a lot of money for animals. But Sylvia’s [00:22:00] a brilliant, brilliant writer.

She’s just re-releasing one of her other books. I think it’ll come out next month or sometime in the summer. Dirt tracks to Glory if you like. Stock car racing. She wrote a really fabulous book on that, the early days of stock car racing, and she added some new stuff on. This reissue as well. Tim. Cons and I, he just sadly that one came to mind cuz Tim passed away this past week.

Tim was a child actor. He played on my three sons and then was very interested in sports cars and became one of the foremost historians on sports car racing. He did a book on all the Americans who raced in Grand Prix racing that book’s long since out of print and very expensive two or three years ago, he finished a multi-volume set on.

Every American who ever raced at Lamar is a really, I mean, substantial work. I mean, it was one of those that he didn’t do it to make money. Books like that are a niche, but it was just his passion project. And what about good old Jay Leno? Since I have automotive historians used to have an annual literature fair in the pre eBay days.

This was a big deal. If you liked [00:23:00] car books and magazines and models and other stuff, Pasadena City College would host a swap meet once a year. It was so big. Dealers would drive cross country. Sell books there and Jay would show up and just a regular customer and buy books and I’d sometimes clear out my uh, some of the things outta my collection.

Got to know Jay that way. When we launched the three 50 Z, there’s a funny story. A guy called me was trying to get one of the Z press Kitts. We did kind of an over the top press kitt for the launch of the three 50. I was trying to make sure they weren’t just any upon eBay. It’s like, no, these are very expensive to produce.

I want them in the hands of media. This guy called me and just. He goes, what if I told you I work for Jay Lano as a sound engineer, and I’ll get one to Jay. I go. Okay, done. So I sent him two press Kitts. Jay called me and we ended up talking. We put him into a three 50 Z for a week before the car launch.

His guys told me it was one of the few times they’d ever seen Jay drive the same car five days in a row. Jay, pretty much every day would drive something different. It’d be a Bugatti or just, you know, all those strange cars that Jay has. But we ended up being able to [00:24:00] take Mr. Kama up there. Mr. Kama was the guy who founded Dotson in America in the 1950s.

An exceptionally amazing person. He would come over for the Z Convention in the early two thousands, and I got to travel with him. The timing just, it was magic. It timing worked out where we were able to take Mr. K up to a taping The Tonight Show when we picked up the Z after Jay had driven it a week and it got a private tour.

Jay’s collection. Now Jay’s collection is astounding and he is definitely a hands-on guy. I mean, he has guys who work on his cars, but you look at his hands, definitely gets his hands dirty and knows how the cars work. You know, if. If his Bugatti breaks down the road, odds are Jake can probably fix it.

Before we move on, I have a couple questions about your time at Nissan. So we’ve covered Mazda, we’ve covered Ford, you’ve mentioned Nissan a few times and, and the Z program and things like that. So when you came in the door at Nissan as the new PR guy, one of the things you probably had to do was go back over old ads, ideas, things like that.

What can be used, what can’t, you know, where have they gone? Yeah, what have they [00:25:00] said? All that kind of thing. So I gotta ask you a pointed question because we reviewed. This little gem in the Nissan marketing world. A few drive-through episodes back, and that’s the 300 ZX Turbo, Ridley Scott, Superbowl commercial.

It was all controversy and it was subsequently pulled right after it aired. What are your thoughts on that? And, and let’s answer the big question, why lawyers? Why is anything pulled like that? We ended up, when we did the three 50 Z launch, we had four discs in the press kit. Cause I had started out in 2001, we were still doing eight by 10 glossies and 35 millimeter slides.

It was right at the beginning of shifting over to digital. And so when we launched the Z, we had the full CD of press images and press releases. But then we did a D V D that had, I think about 26. Minute history reel. That was really good that Shai had produced for the retirement of the Z. When the [00:26:00] 300 ZX ceased production, they did a retirement party, I think the last one ever went into, uh, the Peterson, and they did this big party in this video.

So we put that video on. The D V D technically, I don’t know if we had permission, but it was one of those things that if you don’t ask, no one can say no. Well, Ridley Scott didn’t come knocking. Right. So it’s all good. No, no. And you know, it, it is funny that some of these things that we’ve got these old images, what’s really a challenge for a lot of car companies preserving their history because.

You got records retention, you’ve got, what were the rights to it? What was fascinating, some of the photography that Nissan did in the sixties was just astounding. Two of my favorite shops, one at the Portofino Inn in Redondo Beach, which is where the original cannibal run ended, but just the shot of this Nissan sedan there and a woman standing next to at the Portofino Inn.

Well, that place still exists. A bunch of other places don’t exist. But there’s also one, a picture of, uh, a Dodson Roadster parked by the LAX theme building. Just some really cool stuff. So it’s a moment in history, not just of the [00:27:00] car, but of the location in Southern California. Back then it didn’t seem to be, there was advertising photographer, pr, photography, there was just photography, you know, but you look back through some of these old finals, it’s like, okay, I can’t.

Find any record of who shot it over 50 years old. Odds are the person who shot it probably isn’t alive. You know, Nissan bought the rights at that time and there’s no records. So we kind of assume, you know, hopefully I don’t get anybody in trouble by talking about it here. But you know, it’s kinda like, you know, there’s no one who can claim it’s theirs.

And that’s kind of how we looked at some of the stuff. Actually, here’s a funny one, you know, thinking about cuz Newman, Paul Newman used to race Nissans. Nissan Legals, you know, they were really good. I mean, I had no problems with ’em, but they were very cautious on things. All claims had to be backed up with fact.

If you said it was X horsepower, you better have documentation that backed it up. You’re not gonna inflate anything. We did a press release about all the S E C A runoff champions in Dotson and Nissan products. There was like 75 of ’em in legal. I asked, do you have permission from all [00:28:00] 75 people to list their names in the press release?

And I was like, no. You know, some, I go, I know some of these people aren’t alive. And I went to my boss and said, look, this is history. But you know, the legal thing was like, you should be cautious and you don’t put someone’s name in a press release unless you have permission. I was like, well this is racing.

If we don’t put it, they’re gonna be insulted. And at one point they said, well, you can list everyone except Paul Newman. I go, well no, Paul’s gonna be pissed if we do that. If you notice, I didn’t listen him as Paul Newman. I listened to him as Pl Newman cause that’s how he raced. And as long as we listen him to pl Newman, I go, I will stake my reputation on this.

We will not get in trouble if we omit him. We’re probably gonna get a nasty note. You know another one that they airbrushed out a B R E logo on a two 40 Z. In an ad, and I never saw it for approval or anything. Pete Brock called me. He was very annoyed, you know, steamed would be better word. And it was some junior person who’s like, okay, there’s a Goodyear sticker on here.

We, we got permission from Goodyear to do this and we got permiss, but we don’t know what b r e is. [00:29:00] Cause it was someone who was too young to know. And then remove the logo. It’s like, oh, you shot the credibility of that photo down. You know, everybody who knows what they’re looking at knows it’s missing.

So, exactly. For the folks that are maybe young enough to not remember when the three 50 Z launched, it’s been 18 years since that car, yeah. Hit our shores, right? 2003 and three 50 Z came out. Obviously it was out. A little bit earlier overseas, things like that. But this was also the time when Renault had ushered itself onto the scene.

Right. At Nissan. A lot of people don’t realize that Reno is behind the scenes at Nissan and they share a lot of their technology. Mm-hmm. And then the folks that do know, say the VQ engine, which is a Reno v6, Save the Z. Right. Even though it had, it hadn’t even launched yet. It’s like it was the crown jewel of that car and it, and it’s kind of funny when we look back over 20 years of evolution from the three 70 and now the 400, and we’re gonna talk about that in a second too.

I’ll have to double check. I I will correct it. I don’t think the engine in the three 50. Had anything to do with Renault. I think that was a pure Nissan engine. [00:30:00] You know, Renault obviously stepped in and brought a lot of cost containment and they did a lot of things to help steer the ship in the right direction in the late nineties, early two thousands over in Japan.

But I. Pretty certain that is a pure Nissan engine. Well, what I wanted to highlight was something interesting that I remember about that time period at Nissan, which was when they had announced they wanted to do the heritage cars where you could send an old two 40 or two 60 Yeah. Back to Nissan. Yeah.

For f p. Yeah. And get a completely factory rebuilt. Now we look at. Companies like Singer that are doing that to nine elevens and you know, other companies and I’m like, how were you involved in that? And correct my history if I’m wrong, but was that a flop or was that a success for Nissan? I think from a publicity standpoint, a success financially a flop.

That was right before I joined. So what happened when they ended the 300 zx, they still wanted to keep some Z alive. So they came up with this idea of. You could buy a brand new factory rebuilt [00:31:00] two 40 z Nissan was going out and buying up old two 40 s, trying to just find one that were all straight, no rust and they would rebuild them.

I think there was a little bit of a flaw. The joke on this was, you know, they asked someone, you know, would you pay $30,000 for a a perfectly restored two 40 z? Is that a good price? Oh yeah. You with a warranty, you know, one year warranty. That’s great. But they didn’t buy it because the joke was most of the guys who were restoring Zs, let’s be honest, it’s usually guys, their wife doesn’t know how much money they’re dumping into the car.

And so he goes, I can spread this restoration over five years. My wife doesn’t know how much is in it. If I spend $30,000 for an old Z, she’s gonna divorce me. There just wasn’t the take rate. It did a lot to show Nissan’s commitment to heritage. The director of Nissan PR these days is a good friend Dan Pass, who he and I have zigzagged.

He was at Campbell Company managing Motorsports for Ford when I was at Ford and then he was at Nissan and he is back at Nissan. And so there’s guys like Dan and a lot of others who [00:32:00] really care about the heritage. So the nice thing is, you know, I think Nissan does a lot to preserve it. That one just didn’t turn out to be economically viable because the parts didn’t exist.

So they had to go back and recreate tooling for things like weather stripping. And you know, there’s a lot of the boring parts that you still need to do. If you’re gonna make it really proper. Renault was good for Nissan. Nissan’s good for Renault. There’s been a lot of change, a lot of progress, and a lot of awesome things, even in the racing programs and whatnot.

I mean, we’ve seen oddball things like the front wheel drive l and b car at Lamont’s. Yeah. You know, a few years back. All sorts of craziness. But that’s the part about racing that we love is those ridiculous, you know, six wheeled. Formula Cars and Chaparrals and all these kinds of things. Right? Here we are 20 some years later, the resurgence of the Z and all that and the three 70 was a great evolution, but I wanna get your take, let’s call it the 400 Z, right?

The new one that’s about to come out. Although it, it feels like it keeps getting delayed a little bit and I’m really excited to go drive one, but I wanna get your thoughts on it. Well, I’ve seen it. I was able to go visit one when a friend of mine, Mike [00:33:00] Dit, was uh, doing some photography. So I got permission from the Nissan folks to go.

Take a look at it. It looks great. So I haven’t driven it. I think from an aesthetic standpoint, they did a great job. So it really looks good. It looks good in pictures. Some cars photograph really well, don’t look right in picture and vice versa. So how does it look in person? Is it as good is we think it is?

Yeah, I think so. I think so. I, I think it’s a very good looking car. I, I would consider buying one, so I’m right there with you on that. Yes. And I think that, you know, the Z has such an awesome owner base loyalty. I mean, having gone to some of the Z conventions, I think it’ll do quite well. I think there’s people who realize you don’t need 800 horsepower to have a good time in a car.

It’s more fun to drive a, a slow car fast and a fast car slow. It’s more than adequately power, I believe, as all of ’em have been. The three 50 and. The three 70. I also heard there was a bit of tug of war politically introducing the new 400 with a manual transmission. It’s one of the few cars being released in the [00:34:00] 20 22, 23 sales year with the six speed manual.

Well, I don’t have any, uh, firsthand knowledge of how Nissan came to that decision, but I believe that. Here again, they want it to be viewed as a real sports car. And you know, we joke that one of the best ways to weed out the non enthusiasts is make ’em drive manual transmission, get, you know, more power to ’em for making sure that, you know, the take rate on manual transmission is keeps getting lower and lower and depending on where you live, I mean, Los Angeles traffic, you know, if you were stuck.

Using it as a commuter car on the 4 0 5. A manual transmission is no fun there. If you can get out up to Santa Barbara County or you know, drive up to Ojai or something. Yeah, spectacular. But I understand why the take rate keeps getting lower and lower. It’s sadt true, but you know, more power than Nissan for keeping the manual transmission in the the news Z.

So let’s transition a little bit. One of the other things that people don’t know about Dean, or maybe they do if they know you outside of the motorsports and automotive PR world, is that you are big into Formula. S a [00:35:00] e. I know you go around talking to different universities and schools and things like that, and so I wanna give you an opportunity to explain to our listeners what formula s e e is all about, why it’s so important and so on.

S e E has really been pivotable to my career, so. I mean, when I went to Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, the first I showed up and then here again, I never even visited the campus before showing up there for freshman year and there was no online research to do. All I knew the S SAE was, was SAE is the letters on the top of the oil, can s AE 20 W 50, or you by s SAE grade eight bolts.

So I kind of knew that they were something, but I didn’t really know what it was. Until I got to school and discovered SAE Society of Automotive Engineers. It’s the professional association that automotive engineers belong to. You know, a lawyer belongs to the Bar Association, a doctor of the American Medical Association, automotive engineers, if they’re good, belong to S sae.

They do a lot of things. A lot of it’s standards developed on the, like the oil can, you don’t have to worry if the mobile 10 W 50 [00:36:00] is the same as. The, uh, Texaco or the Arco or whatever Visco is measured the same standard. So SAE kinda works out the kinks on things that are neutral. Like now with electric vehicles, the charging structure, you don’t have to worry whether you can plug your vault into the same place, a Fiat 500 E, it’s a standard charging plug, except if you own a Tesla.

But that’s, yeah, I know. I don’t, I don’t, I don’t wanna talk about Tesla. Yeah, they don’t play nice with others with Formula SA and S sae. Uh, SA developed these student design competitions and really they to showcase talented students in front of people can hire them. And they started out in the seventies.

The first one was actually sa Baja in Briggs and Stratton with donating eight horsepower lawnmower range students were making basically doom buggies out of, and then some students in Texas. In the late seventies said, well, we’d rather race on pavement. And that’s how Formula SA started. Competition grew.

When I was a student, we did Baja cause we couldn’t get the critical mass to do a formula car. And there was only, I think, 15 schools in the country building cars at that time. Now there’s at least 250 in the [00:37:00] US and another three or 400 internationally in these competitions have gone global. If you don’t have Formula SA or Bajas SAE on your resume, You almost cannot get an interview with a race team.

You look at Honda performance development for the career thing. For an entry level engineer, they expect to see Formula SA or SA Baja on your resume. If not, you’re four years behind. And so it’s amazing what this has done to showcase talent in front of people can hire them. So if you have any, uh, listeners who have anyone in the K through 12 world at home, if you want to have an amazing career in automotive, please consider picking a college as a formal SA or a SAE Baha team.

And even if you’re not an engineer, The best teams now also recruit business majors and graphic design majors. You know, let the engineer design the suspension, don’t let ’em pick the graphics for the car and get some business majors to help do the business proposal. So it has launched hundreds and hundreds of careers, and now we have students who go straight from formula, s a e.

They’re working for Formula One teams, IndyCar teams, nascar, as well as [00:38:00] obviously the major automakers, whether it’s bmw, Toyota, Ford, Honda, they all recruit from these events. And the events themselves are akin to an autocross, if I remember correctly. They’re basically a three day event. And the first day is the static events where they do the design presentation.

Cause ultimately we wanna say, how did you engineer the car? Tell us about the engineering of the vehicle. And they have to do a business presentation. Cause it’s not just. Can you build a one-off prototype? You’re supposed to build a prototype of something that could be put into low volume production, cause that’s what’s more important to industry.

And then we have this, also the safety checks. We make sure that the brakes work and all this before we put ’em on the track. The second day is the preliminary events, which is an autocross acceleration runs Skid pad. And then the third day is the endurance event. And the endurance for formulas run like a solo event.

And we’ll have multiple cars on track with designated passing zones cuz you know, experimental student vehicles that have a pretty surprisingly high powered weight ratio. I mean, these cars will weigh under 400 pounds. Be putting out, [00:39:00] uh, close to a hundred horsepower. So power to white ratio is really strong.

Uh, on the Baja one, it’s kind of more exciting. I think they’ll put all the cars on like a motocross track at once for four hours. Then you really see what breaks on the car and can the students, uh, repair it in time. It, it’s been an exceptionally, uh, good thing, the launch career. So I’ve been doing a lot of my work.

I go and speak at universities and I talk to ’em about, you’ve killed your GPA by working on this project. So now let me help you figure out how you get a job out of it so you don’t end up graduating unemployed. A few weeks back we talked to your current boss, Greg Gill. About the history of S Rro and SRO America and and plans for the program, but obviously you guys have a longstanding connection.

He mentioned he’s known you for a couple decades now, and I wanna know how you ended up at sro, but also talk about what your plans are for SRO America and the program, the brand, where things going. Well, Greg and I first met when he was a magazine publisher and we were launching Nismo, I believe. And I met Greg cuz he was, had a magazine [00:40:00] called Tuner Performance Reports.

They were a very serious magazine that they didn’t just say, these chrome bits will make your car look good. It’s like, no, we put it on the Dino and decide whether to actually increase the power or put it on a skid pad and see if it improved the handling of the car. So I got to know Greg as a publisher, and here again, if you get into the world of motorsports or automotive, you find that you see a lot of the same people, and so I would.

Reconnect with Greg every couple years. He was the publisher racer for a short while, which was just literally down the street from Mazda r and d. And so when we were having our, uh, media events at Mazda Motorsports, we’d have Greg down there. So he and I have run into each other many, many times over the years.

Jim Jordan was my. Compadre at Mazda. He’s working on the touring car side of sro. And so a lot of it was just, they wanted a little bit of help and asked if I was available. And part of it was just, I’d been out of motorsports for a couple years, but it’s like, I like Greg, I like Jim, I like some of the people in the paddock, but I actually out now have a new learning curve myself.

I, again, up to speed and you know, sro. A lot of it’s just [00:41:00] as a sport, we always have this challenge. Sponsors kind of come and go, names change, and hey, whatever happens that Speed World Challenge, well, speed TV doesn’t exist. It became Pelli World Challenge and then, you know, SRO stepped in. So the series has existed for 30 years, but we have to kind of educate it.

But the reality now, we have to look at this from the standpoint of what the internet and TV has done to our sport. Now, TV’s helped grow the sport, but also a lot of times people say, well, Why do I want to go to the event when I can watch it on tv? And the internet has kind of blown away a lot of the print publications that used to cover it.

As a kid, I used to subscribe to Autoweek and Auto Sport, and you couldn’t wait to read the Pete Lyons F1 report. It’d be like 12 pages long because, and even though it was like six weeks later, that was the first you knew of what happened at that race. Now you’re watching it live, or you got it online, you read it.

So a lot of that’s disappeared. So, A lot of what I plan working on is a lot of the feature stories, the interesting people in the paddock and the cars that I don’t [00:42:00] expect a journalist to come out to an SRO weekend and write a race report. You know, these were the four races I saw on this day, and here’s who won.

No. That’s just not gonna happen. Everyone wanted to know that, watched it on the, the YouTube stream, but they might wanna know, wow, that’s a really interesting car. I wanna know more about that. What I’m gonna focus on is trying to go after a lot of target audiences, including SAE groups. I mean, I wanna try to work with some of the SA students, come out to the racetrack.

Bring your formula car, help promote some ticket sales for us. And you know, we’ll have a lot of people in the paddock coming by offer you words of encouragement. Looking at some of the more of automotive press cuz one thing I learned back when I was doing the Mazda stuff, 2006 and 2007 is if you wanna stereotype a little bit, if you walked into Road America, you got a bunch of hardcore motor sports journalists there at the time.

Who may or may not even knew what we were selling in the dealership. You go to the New York Auto Show, you got some of the smartest business riders in the business. You guys still race that, uh, RX seven GTU [00:43:00] car in imsa. It’s like, well, you know, they don’t follow it. And so trying to educate the motoring press on what we race and why we race and the motor sports press on the cars that these things are based off of and why it’s important to race, that’s a lot of emphasis here because.

The nice thing about the SRO paddock, it’s wide open, so you know when you buy a general admission ticket, you can go in and look at the cars. There’s no restrictions on that, whereas some amazing tracks. This year, I’m really looking forward. I got two new tracks I’ve never been to, which is rare. The new one at Ozarks, which if you look at the photos, looks like a spectacular facility.

Serious elevation change. And then the Nashville Grand Prix, so I’ll get to reconnect with my old Nissan buddies when I’m in Nashville. One of the things that we didn’t ask Greg about on the episode we did with him, and because I saved it for this particular episode, because it’s more your area of expertise, which is what’s the vibe like at an SRO event?

Some of us are used to going to NASCAR events or CAR or Formula One or even, you know, INSA events. What’s it like when you go to an S R O event? [00:44:00] What’s the expectation as a spectator? You’re not gonna be locked into a grandstand like a most nascar, you know, it’s a different animal. I don’t wanna dis NASCAR or IndyCar or anybody else.

We’re our own product. But the nice thing is, I think the key word is accessibility. You’re at a natural terrain racetrack. I mean, road America is just a beautiful racetrack to see anything run. Anybody who lives within four hours of Road America should add that onto their bucket list to go. If they haven’t been.

V i r is a gorgeous track, Watkins Glen. It’s one of those things when you can say, since it won’t be a hundred thousand people there, you can drive around a little bit, walk around, you know, watch, uh, from a couple different terms. You can enjoy different aspects of spectating. And the nice thing is if you go in the paddock area and ask questions about the car, most of the crew guys love to talk about.

So I, I would say accessibility. There’s certain other forms of the sport that has a perception of accessibility. But it is really true in sports, car racing in general, and SRO in particular. So if you’re [00:45:00] accustomed to an INSA race, like let’s say going to Petite Lamont’s or the Salans up at at Watkins Glen, is there the same sort of, let’s call it circus, that you would come to expect at an INSA race where you’ve got the booths and the vendors and the swag and all that kind of stuff as well?

Not nearly as much. Honestly. It’s a different business model, you know. You know, we hope to grow the spectators, but. We are looking at how do we get some targeted people in there. You know, a lot of it is getting more car corrals. Get a Ferrari car corral. We got Ferrari’s racing, get all Lamborghini car corral.

Cause a lot of that we can do at a much more affordable rate for folks than like an IMSA race at Petite Lama is a fabulous event, you know, and it is crowded and so it draws that, you know, we have a different product. Predominantly sprint races except for the, you know, the indie where we get the intercontinental GT and they’re coming over.

But I would just tell people, look at the calendar, look at the map, and come and experience it. I think you’ll have a really great time. And also with the touring cars, there’s that aspect of it. The sro, TC America powered by Skip Barber Racing [00:46:00] School. There’s no less expensive way to get. Into professional racing.

And if you were to go take a Skip Barber class, no racing’s cheap there. There’s gonna be expenses. And you know, key is you don’t ever quimp on your safety equipment. I think Bell used to have that slogan decades ago. If you have a $10 head, buy a $10 element, uh, say in a cheap motel, but buy the best safety equipment you can.

But if you could do something like with Skip Barber, You could run some of their school races and then graduate and you could run a full-blown TC America weekend on a pro weekend, which is pretty cool. So that’s something also that is, uh, unique to sro and that’s something else that people may not realize.

It lays out similarly to other multi-class racing programs. It’s a full day schedule. There’s racing going on all day. So even though it’s sprint racing, it’s different classes. Yeah. And the track is busy all day long. So there’s something for everybody to. Watch. Yeah. Most of our race weekends, we will have four different classes, three different GT CL races [00:47:00] and a touring car race.

And each one’s a double header. So there’s gonna be four races on Saturday, four races on Sunday, on a typical weekend. So let me ask you this other question, which we talked about with Greg, and that was, In the guise of balance of power and this and that, but you, with your background in EVs, I wanna get your take on the evolution and how SRO America is gonna maybe in the future, adopt EVs into the GT Racing series.

What do you think about that? I honestly don’t. I think they are looking very seriously at it. I’m so new to the organization. I don’t know what s R O brings to the table is looking at this not just from a US perspective, but a global perspective. And one of the things is it is nice is if you buy whatever, Porsche, Toyota, supra, whatever, you know you’re gonna run in GT three or GT four.

You know that if you’re racing with sro, that same car will not have to be modified if you sell it abroad in one of the other markets. That you’ve helped ensure the value of the car. So SROs, adamantly looking at electrification, [00:48:00] what makes sense, but they’re looking at from a big, global perspective. I honestly don’t know where we stand right now.

I, you know, my first race weekend was at St. Pete. We only had the, uh, GT America class. So I’m getting ready for Sonoma and, uh, I’ll know a lot more if I come back at future visit, but I know that SRO is looking at it. Everyone’s looking at electrification. And it does lend itself quite well to sprint races.

You know, the reality is you still can’t put as much energy density into a battery as you can, a gallon of gasoline. Going back to the nineties, my Ford experience, we had a ranger that had a 50 mile range and the battery weight almost 2000 pounds, cuz battery technology back then was really, really bad.

Compared to all you would need would be 20 pounds of gasoline, go to that same rain. Batteries are still not on the level of energy density is gasoline. So you know, we gotta figure out where we don’t look stupid. I mean, I was not a fan of Formula E when they were switching cars halfway through the race.

What message are we telling people? You need two cars to do the job of one. What was [00:49:00] interesting Formula E I went to the two races at Long Beach and it was bringing out new fan people who probably would not have gone to the regular IndyCar race at Long Beach. And if you look at things like Formula D that’s expanding the footprint of motor sports, I don’t know, uh, what’s gonna happen.

But, you know, it’s nice to see a lot of growth in other areas. You know, formula D has brought new fans, a younger, more diverse fan base into the sport. So hopefully some of them will come to some SRO races. You know, formula E. You know, you could bring young kids, not worry about their ears getting blasted out at a Formula E event.

So normally we would ask people, you know, about the evolution and you know, what would be missing for promoters Ford if EVs came. But I think I wanna ask you a different question, which is with your background in EVs, if you could pick one EV today. To run against, you know, the classics, the Ferrari, the Corvettes, and the Porsches, let’s say all things being equal, balance, power is all taken care of.

What brand would you like to see come to the checkered flag as an ev? Right now, you’d have to look at Porsche. I live right by the Porsche Experience Center here in [00:50:00] LA and it’s like, it’s interesting to how many of the classes they’re teaching in the electrics there. So I mean, they’re really putting an emphasis on the performance of Porsche electric vehicles, so that’s pretty impressive.

So I could easily see that That’s a good choice. That’s a solid choice. I mean, and, and Porsche has a long pedigree in, in racing, so it only makes sense that they continue to carry that torch. Right. As we kind of wrap up here, Dean, I wanna ask you what other super cool things maybe in the automotive sphere do we not know about?

Case, uh, my obsession with weird car songs. Is that what you’re getting at there? I, I am. So let’s go. I, um, I used to make these mix tapes, my friends at Mazda back in the eighties, and the first year it was like, okay, you put all the obvious ones, little deuce coop, shut down 4 0 9, and all that. But then I just started getting more and more obscure and finding just really wild things.

And people were asking you, you should sell these. I go, no, I’m already in the gray area, giving ’em away to friends, you know, a mixtape, I can’t sell them. That would be a copyright [00:51:00] violation. And then in, um, 97 when I was at Ford, I had a friend who was a musician, Kristy Callen, who’s Bandon was Wednesday week, and I knew she knew the folks over at Rhino.

And I asked Christie, I go, do you know the folks at Rhino? And she goes, yeah, I know the VP of, uh, a and r. I go, can I get an introduction to him? And so I uh, called and said, I’m Dean Case at Ford. Cause I was hoping to do a Mustang CD to celebrate the championship. And so I left a message for, uh, the VP of a and r at Rhino Records.

And like an hour later, this guy James Austin calls me. He goes, Gary Stewart said to call you right away. You had a good idea. I was like, okay. And, uh, told him what I was thinking and I sent him some of these tapes I had made before. He goes, these are great. We should do this. Turned out we Ford, we didn’t have the budget to do that.

For the championship celebration when it launched, you bought a, this was a 99 Mustang. It was right after I left. There was a 35th anniversary, three CD box set that came with the car, but it was the epitome of don’t let music be done by committee. They took out all the [00:52:00] car songs and just made it like a 60 seventies, eighties greatest hits package.

But James said, you’re gonna hate what Ford did, but we’re gonna do this as a rhino thing. So, They went ahead and produced a, uh, four CD box set. I was the associate producer on called Hot Rod Hits and Cruising Classics. It came out in 99. We got nominated for a Grammy for Best box set. That’s awesome. 87 car songs.

But so I like to find the really obscure ones. Like, did you know there was a car song about gremlins? In my gremlin. No, I didn’t. My my bloody Yugo. That’s gotta be a good one. Yeah, I’d kill for a green Miata by the gutter sluts. That’s awesome. So I got a whole bunch of these. I remember at the DC show years ago when Scion, you know, the division of Toyota that they were rebranding for the young kids was coming on the scene.

They used to do this. Thing called the Scion Mix and they were giving out CDs at all the auto shows like Baltimore, DC and things like that. And so I’m wondering if again, you know, by proxy Dean, you have influenced the automotive world yet again [00:53:00] to create these mix tapes. I’ve got a bunch of those and I do too.

I have a small collection of ’em as well. Yeah. Well actually I think I did have an influence. A friend of mine at General Motors asked me to make a mixtape cuz he wanted to show GM management about car songs and the fact that, you know, there’s so many car songs about General Motors. Particularly Cadillac and Chevrolet, but I found ones for Pontiac and Buick and Oldsmobile and everything else.

So I did this mix tape for gm and a couple years later they did an ad that I think may have been indirectly inspired by what I had sent them. The funny one is they also, GM did a um, poster. He says they don’t write songs about Volvos with a Corvette, and it’s like, Bullshit. I’ve got four Volvo songs. You know what, Dean, it would’ve been awesome if you had been on an earlier episode of Break Fix called Cruising at the Speed of Sound.

I think we could have used your opinion when we reviewed all of these car adjacent songs and whatnot. So maybe next time, maybe we’ll have to do a reprisal of that and bring you back on as a subject matter expert. Oh, that’d be good. [00:54:00] I, here’s one. Have you listened to Mark Knopfler? The car was the one. I guess it’s on my list on Spotify now.

I’m gonna have to, you gotta listen to that. And what was amazing is a backstory. I listened to the song and I was like, wow. And so I read the liner notes. That’s why I love still buying CDs cause you don’t get liner notes with streaming. He was inspired by Mark Donne’s book, the Unfair Advantage. Ooh, that’s a good one.

Yeah, that’s a deep cut. All these fun things that we get into and what we call the car adjacent world. And so, you know, speaking of that, Dean, I wanna give you the opportunity now. Any shout outs? Promotions. Anything else you’d like to share that we didn’t cover? Probably some of the best stuff I ever did from a PR standpoint was we were promoting shelter animal adoptions on race cars.

And we did a lot of work with SP c a for Monterey County, which anyone knows, uh, Laguna Seka Raceway directly across the street driveway to driveways the SPCA for Monterey County. So we would do just shameless promotions. We would have bf Good Kitty or per la. And we would name animals after the [00:55:00] drivers and stuff.

So Jay Estoy and Robert Davis at Moz were very supportive of this, and we managed to donate quite a bit of money to the shelter and do some fun there. We even did one when we had the Playboy MX five Cup. We had bunnies helping bunnies, so we were promoting bunny adoptions with Playboy playmates. That was fun.

And then another one I would, uh, give a shout out to another project we did was, uh, distracted Driver Awareness Project Eloy. If you got. Anybody in your audience who’s in high school or college doesn’t have any graphic arts thing, project yellow light.org. I’ll send you the links on this. They could win a scholarship if they could produce a 25 second video or radio PSA on distracted driver awareness.

So we are working with some of our young drivers to get them to promote. The teenager doesn’t wanna hear me now. I’m 59, I guess now. Tell ’em to put the phone down, but they’ll listen to someone who’s an aspiring race driver. And it also gives the race driver an opportunity to do some good in the community.

If you’re racing in Formula 2000 or something, you call up the local TV station in wherever, Albuquerque or El [00:56:00] Paso or wherever you might be from, and say, I’m in the next Joseph New Garden. Sadly, they’re gonna probably say who? And then say, why do I care? But if you say, I’m a teenage race driver and I’m saving lives on the highway, really?

How you doing that? So it gives a, a, a launch point to talk about what they’re doing. They have the credentials to talk about that safety. So that’s just something that, uh, has been kind of a passion project. And I working on that with, uh, Julie Garner from Project Yellow White, and we’re hoping to reactivate that with, uh, SRO this year.

So folks, Dean has remarked that the only topics he’s somewhat qualified to talk about are cars, motorsports, animal welfare, and his strange obsession with music related to cars. So if you’re into that, you can follow him on social at. You can find me on Facebook or LinkedIn and be sure to check out all the changes coming to our favorite touring car series, S R O America, sponsored by AWS and CrowdStrike coming very, very soon.

And thanks in part. To Dean’s hard work now that he’s on board at S R O. So congrats on the new gig and best [00:57:00] of luck in this 22 and 23 season and we look forward to some more epic stories. Thank you. Cool. I, that’s it then. Okay. Thank you.

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.

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