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The Trouble with Howard and the Triumph of Lee Anne Patterson

July 11, 2024

In motorsports, the roar of engines often drowns out the quieter stories – the ones built on grit, humor, and a whole lot of heart. But Lee Anne Patterson’s journey from rock radio to race director, team owner, and now children’s book author is anything but quiet. It’s a full-throttle tale of breaking barriers, building brands, and raising a pet skunk named Trouble at the track.

Lee Anne didn’t grow up in racing. Her early career was in Atlanta’s rock radio scene, voicing ads and wrangling promotions. But love – and a leap of faith – landed her at Sears Point Raceway (now Sonoma), where she introduced NASCAR Winston Cup to the Bay Area. Her Southern charm and storytelling chops earned her credibility in a garage she’d never set foot in before. Michael Waltrip’s hug sealed the deal.

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Her next chapter? Working directly for Carroll Shelby. As series director for the Dodge Shelby Pro Series, Lee Anne found herself in McKinney, Texas, surrounded by chili-scented part boxes and legendary cars. Shelby’s office was equal parts museum and prank zone, and Lee Anne held her own in a world where few women had ever run a racing series. She even gave Chris Economaki a pace car ride – after surviving a wildly inappropriate comment with grace and grit.

Lee Anne’s move to IndyCar came with marriage and a new role as team owner. She was one of the few women in the paddock, often the only one in the garage on move-in day. But she wasn’t alone for long. She met Anita Milliken, the first licensed female IndyCar mechanic, and documented the lineage of women who turned wrenches, built composites, and engineered winning cars. From Eloisa Garza to Kate Gundlach, Lee Anne helped shine a light on the unsung heroines of the sport.

Lee Anne’s soapbox moments are legendary – and necessary. She’s a fierce advocate for understanding sponsorship not as charity, but as ROI. “Your race car is the ultimate promotion vehicle,” she says. “It’s not the promotion.” Her insights into why female athletes are undervalued – and how brands miss out by ignoring women in motorsports – are both sobering and inspiring.

Spotlight

Synopsis

In this episode of Break/Fix podcast, the focus is on Lee Anne Patterson, a notable figure in the motorsports industry with over 25 years of experience. Lee Anne has served in various high-profile roles such as promotions director for Sonoma Raceway, series director for Carroll Shelby, and a team owner and manager in IndyCar, including running the prestigious Indy 500. The discussion covers her unique path into motorsports, beginning with her unexpected transition from rock and roll radio to becoming the promotions director at Sears Point Raceway. Lee Anne shares enthralling stories including her interaction with NASCAR, her work with Carroll Shelby’s Dodge Shelby Pro Series, and managing a small IndyCar team. She also delves into the challenges women face in motorsports and emphasizes the importance of marketing and sponsorship in the industry. Additionally, Lee Anne talks about her latest project, a children’s book titled ‘The Trouble with Howard,’ based on a true story involving a rescued skunk that became part of the racing team’s life. This episode provides an insightful look into the intricacies of motorsports, the strides made by women in the field, and the significance of effective sponsorship and marketing.

Like all good break/fix stories… there’s an origin: The who/what/where/when/how and why of your entry into the Motorsports World – how did you get wrapped up in all this?
Working for Carroll Shelby?
The Indy Car Team – The good/bad/indifferent; and after a decade at Indy Car, what came next?
You’re friends with one of our previous guests, Anita Millican – how did that come to be?
And because of your relationship with Anita, you put together a book about her adventures, tell us more about your new book “The Trouble with Howard” – what’s it about?
One of the questions that comes up often is “how do we make racing (real or virtual) more diverse?” – If a little comes up to you today, and says “why racing?” what do you say?
What’s next for Lee Anne? Any other books in the works?

Transcript

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] BreakFix podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from all over the autosphere, from wrench turners and racers to artists, authors, designers, and everything in between. Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrolheads that wonder, how did they get that job? Or become that person.

The road to success is paved by all of us, because everyone has a story.

Crew Chief Eric: With over 25 years of experience in motorsports, our guest has worked on projects like being promotions director for Sonoma Raceway, series director for Carroll Shelby, and a team owner and team manager in IndyCar, running full seasons for many years at the famed Indy 500.

Lauren Goodman: Lee Anne Patterson now owns a boutique promotions agency. Working with select clients that have stories to tell, but she’s also produced her first children’s book, the trouble with Howard, based on the real life story of Howard and [00:01:00] Anita Milliken. And she’s here to tell us all about her automotive and motorsports journey.

Let’s welcome Lee Anne to break fix.

Lee Anne Patterson: Hi everyone. Thank you so much for having me on today. I appreciate it.

Crew Chief Eric: And joining us tonight, returning to Break Fix is my cohost, Lauren Goodman, supervising producer of media and exhibitions from the Revs Institute. So welcome back, Lauren. Good to be back. Well, Lee Anne, like all good Break Fix stories, there’s a super heroine origin story.

So tell us the who, what, when, and where and why of how you got mixed up in the world of motor sports.

Lee Anne Patterson: I did not grow up in racing. I actually grew up bicycling in the Southern Bicycle League. So racing was not in my purview, but rock and roll radio was. And so I got my start actually through rock and roll radio.

I was working for 96 rock in Atlanta and most Atlantans will go, Whoa, that was like a huge number one rock and roll station in the country. And I was the continuity chick and then I was responsible for all the commercial air, which group copy did a lot of voiceover and got paid to say things like super shops because everyone deserves [00:02:00] performance.

It’s really fun. Anyway, from there, I fell in love with a promotions director, and the place that gave me a shot was at Sears Point Raceway, now known as Sonoma, and so I became the promotions director, and it just happened to be Motorsports that gave me the shot. And my very first job was to introduce NASCAR Winston Cup to the San Francisco Bay Area.

It was their very first job out there. And I remember going and having to tell the DJs that milk was a two syllable word from the South and that moonshine was no longer an appropriate question. But there was a guy named Bob Weeks who worked for Bill France Sr., had been working for him since the 50s.

Because one of the things I had to do was actually give garage tours in a garage I had never been in. Two days prior, I had helped the PR staff. With the media day, you know, it always is an embroidery was a new thing back then. And there’s a guy wandering around. I’m like, can I help you? And he goes, Oh, I’m Michael Waltrip.

I’m like, great. I’m Lee Anne. Do you need anything? He’s like, no, no, no. I’m one of the drivers. I’m like, Oh, okay, great. Do you need anything? I mean, I was just there to [00:03:00] do a job, right? And then Bob Weeks took me on a garage tour and gave me some stories about Smokey Eunick and Richard Petty and he goes, these stories, your accent, you’re going to be fine.

And so I did, I took all these people and how y’all doing? Welcome to Sears Point. They all elbowed each other and said, listen, honey, she said y’all. We took him on a tour and when we got to the haulers who walked out, but ladies and gentlemen, this is driver Michael Waltrip, who looked at me like you were so full of it.

And then he came over and gave me the hug of credibility. It was great. And that’s how I started a career in racing.

Crew Chief Eric: Did you live through the many name changes of Sears Point? Cause I actually still call it that even though it’s Sonoma and there was a brief period where it was Infineon. Infineon.

Lee Anne Patterson: I was just there for about two and a half seasons.

And it was, it was always Sears Point at that time. When it went to Infineon, that was slightly after my time. Of course, now it’s just Sonoma. So I still have stickers since I get to the point.

Crew Chief Eric: So how do you get involved with Carroll Shelby?

Lee Anne Patterson: One of the first things I did when I was at Sears [00:04:00] Point. Not only did I launch a race I’d never seen before, but I helped liaison to a film crew, which was Tim Conway’s Dorf Goes On.

And Budweiser had paid for the movie so they could have the commercial footage of the Budweiser car going around Sonoma Raceway. There’s a producer named Michael Collier, he’s a Brit that lives in California. I mean, I was living with the crew in the hotel, so it was great. Tim Conway got all the dailies, just, I mean, like a ton of fun.

But after I had left Sears Point, I moved back to Georgia and I made the decision, really wanted to stay in racing. So I was at Atlanta Motor Speedway. I’d done pre race ceremonies for them that day. After the race started was walking down the middle of the infield road. Nobody else is on the road except Michael Collier.

From California who really shouldn’t have been there and the races started were the only two people on earth in the middle of this infield road. He’s like, what are you doing now? I’m kind of looking for my next gig. He goes, have I got the job for you? And he called Don Landy and told him he’d be an [00:05:00] idiot if he didn’t hire me.

And Don Landy was Carol’s guy. So I got an interview and I became the series director for Carol Shelby’s Dodge Shelby Pro Series.

Crew Chief Eric: So did that require you to head back to

Lee Anne Patterson: California? The Shelby Can Am series was based in Texas. It was actually in McKinney, Texas. And you walked into this ranch style house and there was a big pot of chili in the front lobby because of all the Carroll Shelby chili.

And then right next to it was one of the Daytona Coupes and everybody’s like, what the hell do you people do here?

Lauren Goodman: I got to tell you, that makes so much sense because Carol Shelby said the best thing about winning Le Mans, it helps you get deals together. And McKinney, Texas is a little more where my people are from.

Yeah. That’s what you do out there in the middle of nowhere, Texas. You get deals together. How else are you going to get by?

Lee Anne Patterson: And the packing plant for the Shelby chili was in the brown paper baggage at the time with little seasoning packages. Every Shelby can and part box of parts that we sent out to all the special vehicle reps and the teams smelled like chili.

I mean, you would open up the box, you’d be like, woof, you know, cause the little chili parts were [00:06:00] everywhere. So, also a little known secret, every single one of Carol’s cars that was in the collection at McKinney, including Cobra 001, Smells like chili. When the Daytona was going across the auction block and Bob Bondurant was going to drive across the block, like, I wonder if that was the one at Carol’s, you know, because there’s a couple of them, right?

I’m like, all I have to do is sniff the inside and if it smells like chili, it really was Carol’s, right? But in order to do that, it would have looked like I was trying to kiss Bob. So I just, I didn’t know, Bob, you don’t understand. Yeah, they did have the car completely wrapped in plastic, but we had this little Dodge Omni that you had to drive Carol around in.

And literally you’d stick your head out the window and take a deep breath and then put that piece of drum a little

Crew Chief Eric: bit. So Dodge Omni GLHS Turbo Shelby edition. It’s got to be right. He’s got to drive in his own stuff.

Lee Anne Patterson: Yeah, that was it is. And I was out in Carol’s office. big L shaping California at one point.

And we were just, you know, just too in the bat one day about stuff. He had just kind of put the heart recipient, heart fund in [00:07:00] place. And so we were talking about his heart and we were talking about Lamont’s and at the time, nobody really knew that he won Lamont with a nitroglycerin pill underneath his tongue.

And that story’s kind of gotten out then, but nobody seemed to know that at the time. But we were talking about the GOHL and it goes like hell. Oh, okay, that’s what it stands for. How’d you come up with the number? How far is it to that telephone pole? Okay,

Crew Chief Eric: 50. Let’s go. Wasn’t it the GLHS was goes like hell some more?

Lee Anne Patterson: Probably. He was just so matter of fact.

Crew Chief Eric: So that puts us basically square in the early part of the 80s when those cars came out and they were being campaigned and there was a coupe version like a Charger slash Daytona coupe GLH and then the Omni GLH and all that. So that was part of that Shelby in conjunction with SCCA type of racing series.

Right. And I heard from people like Cindy Lux who got started racing those cars when she started her career. Right.

Lee Anne Patterson: This is later 80, early 90s. The Shelby Can Am series actually got its start in 1992. [00:08:00] They had a abbreviated season in 92 and I stepped in as a series director in 93. So it had a very short run.

It was a gift from Lee Iacocca, the Carol, the Dodge sponsorship. Got three years, buddy. We’re not going to renew. You got three years, make the most of it.

Crew Chief Eric: Because at this point he was involved in the quote unquote skunk works project, which was the Viper.

Lee Anne Patterson: Yeah. And so the Viper was our pace car. In fact, we had it at Road America.

And we usually had the red one, but at one point we had the first black off the line that was brought to us as a pace car.

Crew Chief Eric: Oh, the one that Jay Leno argues about all the time, whether it’s his or

Lee Anne Patterson: I don’t know that story, but they tossed me the keys and said, have fun. I’m like, yeah, yeah. But I offered a pace car ride to Chris Akanemaki at the time.

Because I got to pick a media specialist and he had already been very, very kind to us. But can I say on air what he said to me? Probably not. Absolutely. He said, Oh, are you offering to take a ride in your ass? Welcome to the chauvinism of the nineties, right?

Crew Chief Eric: You know, a lot of us [00:09:00] only got to experience Carol Shelby through that last film that was produced.

It shall be American, right? Where he’s doing the voiceover, he’s telling the story, he talking about all the different cars and the projects. And he does talk a little bit about Lamont in the early days, like you were mentioning. So what was it like working for Carol?

Lee Anne Patterson: You heard him come in the room or the office before you ever saw him.

He was very loud, very boisterous, very much a prankster, very much a jokester, which was great fun. You had to hold your own with him though. And mind you, at the time, I was the only second woman to run a series. Vicki O’Connor, she’s the blueprint, you know, with the Toy Atlantic series. The most successful support series ever in motor sports.

And that was all Vicky. And she gave me some sage advice and said, see if you can hold your own. Right. When I first went to work for Carol, somebody had arranged a Boy Scout breakfast for him to attend. Bobby Rayhall was the keynote speaker and Carol was just supposed to make an appearance. So I had to go along and manage Carol like, haha, anybody’s going to manage Carol, right?

I’m pretty young at this [00:10:00] time. I’m still not quite 30 yet. So way too young to be doing the job that I’m doing. So we go into this Boy Scout breakfast. We’re in the backstage and the guy comes in, Mr. Shelby, we’re so glad to have you here. Thank you so much for being here. And he’s like, great. He goes, we’ll get you up.

We’ll say a few words and then just have a seat, you know, to the left. And Carol’s like, okay. And the guy walks up and he starts turning to me, cussing me out like a sailor. I am unprepared. How dare you put me in this position? I don’t have your remarks, blah, blah, blah. I actually tried to give Carol Shelby talking points.

Yes. You may laugh at that. So, I’m like, but, you know, dah, dah, dah. And Sig says, I’ll be fine. And he goes on up to stage and I take my room at the back at one of the tables. Now there’s 700 little Boy Scouts in this room. Carol gets up on stage and proceeds to give the 20 minute funniest speech I’ve ever heard in my life.

Everybody’s holding onto their belly. We were laughing so hard, tears running out of our eyes. And when it came Bobby Rahal’s turn, he spoke for two minutes and sat down. And I watched. 698 little Boy Scouts run to Carroll for an autograph afterwards. [00:11:00] And two chased Bobby Ray Hall out of the conference room.

Then when we got to the little Omni, we get in the car and we belt in, we stop. And before I turned the key, I turned him and went speechless. Really? And we both started laughing. So that’s how my relationship with Carol started. You know, the words, I can take the joke. I can take the hit. It was really funny.

I mostly worked with Don Landy. I worked there for full season and we took the car count from, not that it was credit to me, it was certainly a lot of momentum. But by the time we got to Road America, we had gone from 20 cars to over 48. And counting. So it was explosive time and we did a lot of things right.

But then I received an offer to get married and go to Indy. And that’s a team that was running Shelby Can Ans. And then when the IndyCar IRL split happened, we were one of those little teams that could. And we took advantage of that opportunity and became a small team in the IndyCar that, frankly, one of those that supported the IRL didn’t have to get going.

Crew Chief Eric: We will [00:12:00] come back to that, but I think there’s another question Lauren wants to ask before we transition off of your Carol Shelby part of your story.

Lauren Goodman: I think it’s super fascinating. I, you know, I’m a car history nerd, and whenever I see these adaptations in film, right, about some of these characters, by the way, I don’t beat up on Hollywood.

I have an MFA in screenwriting. I I know sometimes the screenwriter has to do what they have to do.

Lee Anne Patterson: That’s right. To read the

Lauren Goodman: story forward. You gotta fudge some things. And we have a few GT40s at our museum and the tour guides always say, well, that’s not what really happened, what you saw on Ford versus Ferrari.

And I want to say, okay, we know, but it was a good movie.

Lee Anne Patterson: Yeah.

Lauren Goodman: I’m trying to imagine what it would be like to see my own former boss on film and to see Matt Damon. playing my former boss on film. That must’ve been kind of weird.

Lee Anne Patterson: I was skeptical that Matt Damon wouldn’t be able to pull it off because he’s short.

He’s a little New Englander. No offense to Matt, but I think he actually did a great job. He got lost in the characters. You didn’t see Matt, in my [00:13:00] opinion. I think he did a pretty good job of getting the essence of Carol. His pace, his walk, his intensity, and his sense of humor. Would he have thrown lug nuts out on the track?

Abso friggin lutely. You know, he absolutely would have done that. There are other stories I’m not sure I can tell, but he was a guy because as Carol told me, look, I spent every single day of my life, not expecting to live to the next day. Okay. That’s how bad the heart was. And so every five years long, modern medicine would come along and do something and kept him going.

He didn’t expect to grow old to 80. He didn’t expect to make it to 40. And so he truly lived his life as what are you going to do to me? Kill

Lauren Goodman: me? I think that’s actually kind of almost endemic among that generation of racers because it was so deadly. I think so, too. They just said, I may not be here next week.

So you know what, tonight, my friends and I are going to get so drunk after the race. We’re going to have to maybe roll back into the hotel room, not remembering how we got there. I [00:14:00] just thinking about some really good stories I’ve heard from some folks who drove in the 60s and 70s. I won’t name any names because they’re guilty.

They’re not protecting the innocent here. I went to the motel room and I tried to get out the next morning and my crew had nailed me into my hotel room, had just nailed the whole door shut and I had to get out naked from my motel room window. And run down to my car. Yeah. And that was just a normal weekend.

Lee Anne Patterson: Yeah. There, there was the guy who took the girl back and the roommate got tired of it. And it was at the motel, you know, where it opened up to the outside parking lot. Mm-Hmm. . So he just opened up the curtains, turned on the light, shut the door, and locked it. And they were both sprawled out, naked on the bed, passed out.

You know, everybody’s Googling and you know, but those were the racing of the really fun eras when there weren’t any cell phones to get anybody in trouble.

Lauren Goodman: Not that they weren’t athletes, but it’s not like. Quite like it is today. We’re like, they’re all on a special diet and have 20 trainers helping them.

Well, we could die tomorrow. Let’s have a cigarette and then go driving. Well, they also stayed in shape

Lee Anne Patterson: [00:15:00] just by doing it because not only were they driving, you know, IndyCar or stock cars, but they were driving the late model on Wednesday night and they were driving a Sprint car race on Thursday. And they stayed in shape physically just by driving the cars.

But Carol would have, I think, loved that movie. Mostly because it honored his friend and I think it did do a really nice job capturing two things one his sense of humor which is Epic. And two, I think the editing of the musicality of The Perfect Lab elevated driving to an art form in a way that we’ve never seen before.

I went to see the movie by myself, I didn’t want to be distracted, and I listened to the crowd around me and there was a young mom and a daughter who said, you know, I’ve never really gotten racing, but I get this. This is an art form. And I thought, yeah, I thought they nailed it.

Lauren Goodman: I was not a car person until the pandemic.

Like you, I didn’t grow up in a car family or a racing family. I was a film student. I love movies and I saw Ford versus Ferrari. And that was my reaction too. I said, I grew up learning how to play music. Oh, I get it. Now a car is an instrument and a track [00:16:00] is like a piece of music.

Lee Anne Patterson: And

Lauren Goodman: so you play it.

What’s really fun about the way you play this. Somebody wins or somebody

Lee Anne Patterson: loses.

Lauren Goodman: And then it just adds to the drama. Now, of course, there would have been plenty of sexism going on at the time, but they conveniently leave it out of the movie because they realize women are going to watch it, too. And they want women in the audience and I’m seeing that a little bit, too.

And honestly, I really like what Liberty Media has done with Formula One. They said, instead of it being Bernie Eccleston’s, uh. Little fantasy, why don’t we put women in the engineer seat? Why don’t we promote that instead? Which I got to tell you, if I had come upon formula one earlier, I would have been really turned off by its approach to using women as decoration, which still happens in some forms of racing, some categories, and it’s changed a lot, not completely, but it’s changed hugely.

I’m sure you’ve seen it from day one. Oh,

Lee Anne Patterson: yeah. I mean, when I was in the garage in the IndyCar days. There were still literally days, and this is in 1995, this isn’t the dark ages of the [00:17:00] fifties or the sixties, and there were times on move in day, I was still the only girl there, and the ladies restroom was locked, you know, and I had to go find a key.

I was also the only female owner in the group at that point. And so we’d have owners meetings and under 30, you know, here I am actually, I was right at 30 at the time, but obviously very young compared to Leo Mel and, you know, some of the other guys that are there. Okay. And yeah, there was a lack of understanding, but I’ve documented, which is how I got to the whole Anita thing when I met Anita.

But we started understanding, and Marshall Pruitt from Racer Magazine, he was my data guy at the time. And we were just talking about, because I came into the garage area eight years after women had first been allowed in the garage area. 1980, before then, women couldn’t even go in the garage area and hand the guy a sandwich.

Couldn’t even hand them the car keys, right? And so in 1980, this all changes when they need it. And by the way, the threshold that made that possible was the media gals. Media always is the first in, because the gals can come in and say, I’m covering this, I’m reporting this. And that’s [00:18:00] exactly what happened.

The Indy 500, a reporter female. Came in and said, I want to be at the driver’s meeting and she sued and Tony Coleman said, okay, let’s have a conversation. And so he acquiesced to any official licensed journalist, female could come in and get credentialed. And so that’s why she got in. And when the Indianapolis star covered that women wants to get into driver’s meeting, they posted a photo of Mario Andretti telling Johnny Rutherford a joke and they’re laughing their heads off.

That’s the photo underneath the caption. And I’m like, okay, this is kind of horrible. But I also know that it took less than 12 hours for non credentialed women to suddenly get a pass. And I once asked Tony Holman’s gal, who was his secretary, I said, so what’s the deal? Chauvinist, what was up with the women?

Why didn’t he like us? And she goes, it actually had nothing to do with that. I’m like, okay, I’m listening. She goes, it had everything to do with, he didn’t want the garage to turn into a party. And there were some men that didn’t need to be in there either. [00:19:00] People’s lives are at stake. One of the reasons why you had to wear sleeves and you had to wear long pants and things like that in the garage wasn’t necessarily for insurance and protection, because the girls were so scantily clad that the guys were dropping wrenches and making mistakes on cars, ogling the girls.

They need the girls to cover up. You know, there’s that aspect to it. I once asked one of the wives who was divorced from one of the big time guys, the era, and I said, how did they put up with it? She said, but you need to understand back then hundreds of women were throwing themselves at them. Why would they respect us?

Excellent point. There’s a lot of girls, their only way they thought to get in was to sleep their way in. And certainly there are tales of the girls that went around this circuit and went up and down the pit lane until they got to a driver or crew member or whatever that went up to the next level and then they slept up and down that pit lane until they finally got to the top level, right?

So that’s happening and yet there’s girls that want to do the job. can do the job, or capable of doing the job, but we’re being compared to the girls [00:20:00] that are not doing the job. This is part of the battle, but I started trying to figure out, okay, well, who got here first? Because I had met Anita, and I started asking the right questions, and that’s when we went through and documented the fact that Anita was, in fact, the very first woman ever licensed as an IndyCar mechanic.

Lauren Goodman: And when she came in, she kept her head down because there was no diversity executive watching out for her.

Lee Anne Patterson: No, no, or intimacy specialist on the film set. I mean, that didn’t exist. And some of the women were not happy with her being there either. Why do you feel like you have to go to your husband’s office?

I don’t go to my husband’s office. And they called her names and people tried to pull her crew shirt off of her. And they tried to steal her heart card. And, you know, Howard really defended that. So in the book, The Trouble with Howard, which we’ll get to, the dedication is to Anita for the first to walk through the gate, and it’s to Howard for holding the gate open for her, because for every rat jerk face there was that was trying to keep us out or trying to sleep with us to do a [00:21:00] deal or whatever it was that was a me too moment of du jour, there’s also the guy that said, know what?

You can do this. I think you’re gonna be great. Let me help you. And open up the door. And you have to acknowledge that, and you can’t say, you know, only women should be doing this either. We need men to be men. But we just need everybody to be able to do what they are passionate about doing regardless of gender.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s the goal. We’ve stepped back into your IndyCar era. And you’ve mentioned Anita. So if you’re listening to this the first time and you didn’t listen to the episode that Lauren and I were on that Lee Anne helped get organized with Anita Milliken and Caitlin Brown, I highly recommend that you go back and listen to Anita’s story to kind of put the context and the reference back into what was just discussed because it’s extremely important to motor sports, especially women in motor sports in North America.

That being said, as we bring the audience back into sequence here, we’re talking about your IndyCar time. And so you said Anita predated you for about eight years, but she worked in the IndyCar [00:22:00] world for many, many years. She said she retired in the mid 2000s or so. And so she had a good long run there. So did you encounter her as part of like the shock support that she was giving or working at Penske and that as a team owner?

Lee Anne Patterson: Yes, we knew Howard at the time too. He was very sick at the time, but by that time they had opened up their shock shop, say that three times fast, in Danville. And she was handling shocks for us for the Can Am cars. And she was caring for Howard at the time. And then I didn’t get really close to her. She ran the shock business by herself for a year or two.

So she was just down there working her tail off. And then Jeff Ryan, who had founded Penske Shocks and had been kind of a son to Howard and Anita, inventing the first two way shock, the first three way shock, and asked them to do the shock dyno, pulled her up to Penske. And so she went up there for a couple of years, but when she came back to Indy, that’s when the women that were part of our racing sorority just really absolutely embraced her.

And that’s when I actually [00:23:00] got to know her.

Crew Chief Eric: But she was still doing shocks at the time, Fred. So as a team principal, you get to see a lot of different angles of how the motorsports world works, not just from the drivers out there competing, but from the business side behind the lines and in the pit boxes and everything else like that, you’re there in the late eighties, early nineties, as you said, you mentioned the media teams coming in and kind of breaking the barriers and opening the doors for women to be allowed at Indianapolis.

And I remember the first time I interviewed Lynn St. James, she talked about being one of the female journalists in the middle eighties period. And her goal was always to get behind the wheel of an Indy car. And that happened in the early nineties. So that would have overlapped with your time as a team owner.

Yeah.

Lee Anne Patterson: Lynn raced when I was there.

Crew Chief Eric: What was that like? I mean, she was the first woman behind the wheel to win rookie of the year.

Lee Anne Patterson: I met Lynn actually at Sears Point. She was in the Trans Am series and we ran a women’s racing 101 day with the Bondurant school. 60 winners on the radio station got to come [00:24:00] up and get behind the wheel with the Bondurant cars and they got hot laps with Lynn, which was great for Lynn because she basically got to drive a Trans Am car around the track.

A whole lot of track time but in front of the race. But that’s when I first met her. And then obviously she came in and she was running at Indy while I was there. She was running for Dick Simon. In fact, she and my driver got tangled up at one point. So I’ll defer that part of the question. Lynn has done an incredible job dealing with women drivers, but there was a void in supporting the girls in the pits, you know, the ponytails in the pits and in the fire suits.

That wasn’t happening. This is where we went and documented. Anita is P1, 1980. Right on top of her was Eloise Agarza. Eloisa Garza built the chaparral car for Jim Hall, Dale, the carbon fiber work. That was Johnny Rutherford’s car in her first race ever. She got flown in a private jet to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway on Jim Hall’s team.

And believe it or not, Eloisa was the first woman paid. Anita just got a portion of [00:25:00] Howard’s check. So she didn’t actually get a paycheck. Eloisa was the first woman actually hired and paid as an appropriate crew member. And then she ended up opening up her own shop, E. G. Composites, in the most inventive era of all of IndyCar, and she’s doing all the composite work.

So she’s P2. We think P3 is Linda Connie. Linda Connie went to small engine block GM school, and then she went to the Russell Mechanics School, and A. J. Foyt hired her on her crew. There’s a whole lot more to that story, but she ended up going into Simpson Helmets and getting to know all the drivers and all the helmets, but she could disassemble a small engine block in a pair of chinos looking dapper.

Faster than any man I know and then from there, you end up, I think, with Rosella, who was the engineer at Indy lights. There’s 1 or 2 other girls in there that don’t quite know their name. They were rubbing on body work over here. And there’s a couple of others in there. That’s a little bit sketchy at that era.

Right after Rosella, you get Kate Goodlock, and of course, Kate’s now a championship winning engineer, but understand that [00:26:00] by the time Anita starts in 1980 and you get Kate, it’s almost 15 years, so you’re talking about five, maybe seven women that are working on cars, turning wrenches on cars in a 15 year period.

I’m management, so I’m not making any executive decisions about performance. I’m doing all the team stuff and marketing and hospitality and PR and paying the bills and transportation and all that kind of stuff. I once figured out that Michael Andretti had six people doing the same job I was doing. I’m like, Oh, I should get some help.

But I was tired and there were a lot of PR chicks, polite term, respectful term, because that’s a hard job too. There were certainly ones that made their way up into the upper echelons of the media. May was there when no other girls were there. There was some girls working, uh, hospitality in Penske that were doing just fantastic work.

But that engineering squad was a really, really, really small number. And it didn’t explode really until the last five years.

Lauren Goodman: I was at the season opener for IndyCar at St. Pete. And you know, I got a pit lane pass. If you’re [00:27:00] coming from European Grand Prix racing, you go to IndyCar race. And it’s like, wait, it only costs me how much, and I can just walk around.

I spent that on beer at the Miami Grand Prix. This is amazing. So my sister and I are just like walking around. We almost get run over by Mario Andretti on a scooter. That was worth the whole price of admission. Everywhere I looked on the pit wall, in the engineer’s chairs. I saw women and I was like, well, that’s how it should be.

It shouldn’t be a, like a little example. Like it should just be like, well, why wouldn’t a woman want to do this? And that wasn’t historically I know the way it was.

Lee Anne Patterson: Yeah. But now it’s gotten cool. Now it’s gotten popular and the women are doing the job. And I will say from the girls back in our era, we were women that didn’t really want to be singled out as quote women.

Now it’s cool to talk about it. Right. But back then I just wanted to be able to do the job. Because I love the work. Racing was my sport too. Okay. And so that’s what everybody forgets. [00:28:00] It’s like, why do you want to be there? And because I love this job, I’m good at it and I can balance it and it’s competitive.

I mean, out of all the jobs I had, promotions director, series director, team, I’m actually one of the few people that’s worked in all three of those components, which is what racing has. You got to have a track, you got to have a sanctioned body and you got to have a team. Some people have gotten two, I’ve had all three.

By far, the hardest was the team, but it was also the best because you got to compete. And I know that I made decisions and I put drivers in seats that held their career, put us in a winning position, got us a poll at Richmond. We outperformed Penske that day and we were a little team. It’s very cool to do that.

It’s a thing where we just wanted the chance to do the job. We weren’t there to prove that women could do it. We weren’t there to flirt. We were there to get a job done. Once you get that credibility and you’re not dubbed a Pit Popsie, that’s what they’re called in California, then it’s okay. You get a lot of big brothers and uncles [00:29:00] that are going to defend you and take care of you and help.

Lauren Goodman: Having experienced motorsport in all of these different areas, these three main legs of motorsport, you’re dealing with sponsors. At every single level, even though I like historical racing, I’m very interested in women’s participation in the history because once you look into the history, you realize, oh, wait, women have been here since day one.

Lee Anne Patterson: Oh, 1895.

Lauren Goodman: They invented the car. They built the second car. They went racing and a woman showed up and said, Oh, I could do that. That’s not that hard. What I find really interesting is, I think for a while, it seems to me, like if you’re talking about the 60s and 70s, you are talking about women having to prove they could even do it.

Men saying their brains and their wombs make them too unstable to drive a car. No, I know. Okay. Hold on, their hysteria has calmed down. I feel like now they can drive a car effectively. But now I think the big discussion, and I’m, you know, I’m talking about WMNA, I’m talking about our friends at Shift Up Now, I’m talking about our friends at More Than [00:30:00] Equal, the sponsorship dollars have to be there.

Lee Anne Patterson: Now you’re in my wheelhouse. Sponsorship is my bread and butter. And here’s the big thing that people miss. If you go in and sponsor a female driver, let’s say like when Sarah Fisher was knocking this out of the park, why can’t we get Sarah more money? And why can’t we put her in a female program? And like Secret came in and did Danica Patrick.

In order to back a female driver, you’re not just talking about the money that you’re going to put on the car. Let’s just talk round figures. I don’t care if you’re talking IndyCar or NASCAR about the time, six to eight million, okay? In order to activate that sponsorship, you’re going to put another 10 million, 20 million in it.

So this is a 25 million decision to now make your sponsorship a female based centric program. Taglines, marketing, colors, comprehension, product, et cetera. It’s all going to be female oriented. What happens if Sarah gets hurt? There’s no female at that time to back her up. There was no other female that could step into the seat.

And now you’ve got a 30 million dollar campaign [00:31:00] and no female driver that can actually do what Sarah did. That was the problem.

Lauren Goodman: So Tampax can’t sponsor a car. Their driver gets hurt and Jeff Gordon steps in and says, Hey, why don’t you try Tampax?

Lee Anne Patterson: That’s a huge problem. It doesn’t work. And understand this happened with the boys.

The example here is Texaco Haviland. It’s Davy Allison. Texaco Haviland came in and wrote a check for 2. 5 million. We were at Sears Point at the time. Huge money. Nobody spends that kind of money. That’s crazy, right? Davy Allison was killed shortly after that. And they had centered everything around Davy Allison and suddenly Davy Allison isn’t with us.

Now what do we do? So Texaco Haviland changed their marketing message to Team Yates and suddenly it was about the team and while there was a little focus on the driver, suddenly it was about the team. It wasn’t just about the driver. They had to pull. So here’s the other soapbox. NASCAR’s audience has usually been 50 percent female.

Has been for years. But the machismo of the sport never wanted to acknowledge that. [00:32:00] And if you don’t have cute drivers in the seats, you lose market share and you lose viewers. And you can see that in some of the classes as they’ve come along. The cuter classes of rookies puts the ratings up. But NASCAR themselves, up until, gosh, maybe this year, treated females as eye candy.

Do you remember when we had the very first beer commercial where a woman came home, kicked her heels off and grab a beer out of the fridge? It was only like three years ago. Up until that point, women had only been eye candy in a beer commercial, short shorts, make them guy look good, all that kind of stuff.

They had never actually done a beer commercial where a girl comes in, you can see the bandaid on her heel. She pops off her bra underneath her shirt, goes and grabs a beer out of the fridge. She’s suddenly the target of their beer commercial. That’s the first time we had that. Okay. That changes everything because at this point, MLB national football league and stuff have groups of women in their ads in football jerseys going to the game as a group of women.

NASCAR [00:33:00] doesn’t even acknowledge that. So if NASCAR isn’t talking to 50 percent of its fan base, if IndyCar is not talking to 35 percent of its fan base, why would a sponsor come in and try to talk to that audience? Because the sanctioning bodies aren’t, which is so stupid because guess what? How many sponsors with women who decide the consumer spending dollar, by the way, we decide who drinks what beer at home.

Women choose that, not the men. We decide everything at the home. Why would you not gear your campaign toward the women and 50 percent of that audience? It doesn’t have to be cosmetics. It doesn’t have to be beauty products. It doesn’t have to be a skirt product marketed to a female. You should talk to females about all your products.

Lauren Goodman: When I was at WMNA last year, you know, you hear from racers, you hear from owners, you hear from sponsors, but I love especially hearing from people who study the marketing. This is probably my background in TV commercials. I’m like, show me the money. Where’s the money? The research they’ve been doing at places like More Than Equal to be like, hey, guess what?

[00:34:00] People who are fans of female athletes and women’s sports, spend more money, are more likely to change their buying habits based on an endorsement from the sports they follow. And women athletes are incredibly undervalued. You’re getting more from the sponsorship. Way more

Lee Anne Patterson: bang for your buck.

Lauren Goodman: This is the best deal on the planet.

How are people missing out? But you’re right. It’s exactly the people in the big leather chair saying, well, it doesn’t appeal to me. So it wouldn’t appeal to other people. And that’s true in Hollywood too. This isn’t, I’m not just pointing fingers at sport.

Lee Anne Patterson: Yeah, absolutely. So now you have Elf that’s come out for Catherine and they actually did a marketing deal that was geared toward women at the racetrack.

The booth actually looked like something women want to go in, but it made a couple of assumptions. It assumed that all women wanted to look pretty and have their nails done and have their makeup done. Okay, that’s kind of a wrong assumption. You know, there’s girls there that, you know, are perfectly happy, not worried about having their nails done, and they’re beautiful [00:35:00] and they’re powerful and they’re smart just because they’re not worried about their hair product.

So again, we’ve backed ourselves into a corner thinking that the only people that should sponsor women are actually female products. No, you know, BMW should really not just put Jamie Chadwick in commercial. They should put their damn logo on her car because she’s brilliant and she’s technology savvy and you need female people to have diversity because we know that a board of directors with diversity is a more profitable company.

We know that statistically. You got to get yourself out of the thinking that the only sponsor I should go look for is a female sponsor. We used to talk about with the girls that if you were going to actually have a female sponsor, when you took Sarah Fisher and she was in the middle of IndyCar, she’s kind of your standard racer, but the minute you took Sarah Fisher and put her in Cosmo, put her outside the racing world, now she was an enigma, right?

And something interesting. And that’s how some of the sponsors looked at it. But again, if their only thing was, [00:36:00] hey, we should only have her talk to women. I once asked the Gatorade lady, I said, so were you going to put Propel on Sarah’s car? Because that was a more women’s centric product. She goes, Oh no, she’s an athlete.

She actually needs the Gatorade. I was like, Oh my gosh, I love you. That was the right answer because you needed to treat her like the athlete that she was. So we need to, Stop pigeonholing our women and recognize that they are powerful for any product, not just the feminine. Sorry, that was a bit of a soapbox.

Lauren Goodman: I could go off on a tangent and I won’t. There’s so much I want to know about what it’s like to run a team. What do you wish you had known before you ran a team that you would tell yourself? Going into it. I

Lee Anne Patterson: mean, we were a small team. We were nine guys and we bloomed up to 16 on a weekend when we ran Sam Schmidt and helped Sam Schmidt become Sam Schmidt Motorsports, which is now Aaron McLaren.

We had 1 car, we had an engine and a half and the backup car on the track was a car that we put [00:37:00] together. Dallara allowed us to carry it for all the teams, but nobody could use it till they wrote a check. That was the backup. for all the small teams that couldn’t afford a, a backup, there really wasn’t the opportunity for me to go get help.

You’re running 18 hour days and you’re working seven days a week. You take Christmas and Easter off ’cause nobody will talk to you. I mean, it was a lot and you run very, very hard deadlines. Green flag will drop at noon on Sunday, which means the truck to get to Texas has to leave at 10:00 AM. Doesn’t matter that you didn’t get your uniforms back to the dry cleaner until Monday at 8 a.

m. They still have to be locked and loaded and on that truck at the end of the day as a small team It would have been nice to have a bigger knowledge of having people that could help manage that But i’m not sure we could have done it any differently because we were small So I took care of everything that didn’t have to do with putting the performance of the car on track literally everything else So whether it was PR or marketing or hospitality or whatever, I think the other thing that would have been nice is there were no [00:38:00] girls doing marketing at all.

That just didn’t exist. There were no girls on any marketing department of any track, any team, any corporation. There were no females in marketing. There were girls doing activation, in other words, asking as hostesses for hospitality, but there were none in the boardroom, none making decisions. And so I can literally go in the boardroom and if I had an intern that was male, they would ask the intern the questions and not me, even though my title was director.

It was very difficult because I would go in and pitch an idea and they would literally stop about five minutes in and go, Oh, you know what you’re talking about? I’m like, would you like for me to start again? Okay. I actually did a lot of work laying out strategies and proposals, but because I couldn’t play golf with the CEO of Home Depot, what I pitched to Home Depot ended up being the program that they ran, but Mr.

Joe Gibbs got that program. So I laid it all out and explained it to everybody at Home Depot, and now they understood how to do it and how to make money out of it and how to turn an ROI out of it. But I didn’t get that because I was really a [00:39:00] nobody. And so that was probably my most frustrating deal is that I couldn’t get into the boardroom.

I once asked the former CEO of McDonald’s, Ed Renzi, really, really nice guy. He was from an Abish program at the time. And we were just talking and said, how does a gal like me get to a guy like you? Because you don’t. And he was really nice. He said, you would do much better if you were selling for the LPGA for ladies golf.

But I was the, to the best of my knowledge at the time, the only woman trying to actually sell and market sponsorship for racing at the time. And that I don’t think has changed a whole lot, but we now have women that are in the heads of boardrooms and, and are marketing managers and communication with self, because there’s now a female on the other side, which there was none.

And if I had known going in that I had that big of a barrier to go through, I probably would have done something differently to change my position so that I could have had more success. I didn’t know that. I didn’t fully get that.

Lauren Goodman: I think it’s an astounding thing to think about. I think anybody who’s coming from any kind of [00:40:00] minority in a business will experience this, is that as much as we tell ourselves, Oh, we live in a meritocracy and cream rises to the top.

That’s actually the biggest lie in Hollywood. I can’t tell you the number of times I have been to some God awful. Ugh, some panel and some producers get up there and say, well, if you’re having trouble as a writer, you should submit to some screenplay competitions because then you will win them. And then we will find them, because of course, good screenplays get found.

First of all, I know as many great screenplays that will never get made as, you know, great drivers who will never get to a top series, who will never have a

Lee Anne Patterson: shot. Yeah,

Lauren Goodman: and I remember at one of these panels, I got up and said, how many screenplays have you purchased? Based on a screenplay competition and they go, Oh, well, then there’s usually some nonsense about, well, my assistant looks at those.

I said, is your assistant also a writer? Why would your assistant slip in a great screenplay and not their own screenplay? If this is the deal, if what you do is you hire these struggling writers to be your [00:41:00] assistant. This was also true at some panels about women’s sponsorship in motorsports and women have gotten asked, Hey sponsor, How many women do you sponsor right now?

And they go, Oh, well, well, well, it is a lot of talk. Talk is cheap. It’s almost like, well, if we don’t see any women here, it’s because they didn’t work hard enough as opposed to it being like, I love that CEO was so honest with you. You would just never get in the door.

Lee Anne Patterson: The funny thing is, is that I then pitched him an idea and he looked at me like, Oh, well, that makes sense.

Can I set you up? And I ended up getting a meeting with the McDonald’s people who I presented things that they hadn’t thought about. Did I get the work? No, I did not. Did they make changes internally in the house? Yes, they did. That’s a piece of it. The other thing that you have to remember, a lot of racers also don’t get sponsorship.

So I remember sitting on a panel when I was working for Carroll Shelby, and it was an SCCA panel, and it was like me and the tire guys. I mean, that was kind of who they brought in. They were asking questions and everybody said, well, how do we get money? And we present this and we present that. And you should do this because I’m a great [00:42:00] driver and blah, blah, blah.

And I kind of heard enough of it one day. And I finally stepped up, ma’am. She was a driver in the back. I said, you’re missing the point. It’s not what we can do for you. It’s what you can do for them. It’s how many tires can you help them sell? It’s how many distributors can you grow the product for? It’s how much exposure can you get them in a newspaper?

And the guy who was at Goodyear at the time, it turned out we became really great friends, came up, give me a hug afterwards and goes, Oh my gosh, somebody that finally gets it. Because a lot of racers don’t get that. I remember being in the head office of the guy from all of this major beer companies office, and we were talking about it.

He opened up a cabinet door, 500 proposals fell out on the floor. And that was just like the last 3 weeks worth. And every last 1 of them had a bill. pretty picture of a race car on the cover of why they were a great race car driver and you should sponsor them. Not one of them said how I’m going to help you sell more beer.

And so a lot of racers miss that. And so that’s where, you know, when you get to these upper echelon levels, you got smart marketing people that understand [00:43:00] that kind of stuff. But kids coming up from the grassroots that are trying to get into this sport, they’re not getting that. Because nobody’s had a conversation.

In fact, you can’t even find a sponsorship class in any of the universities. Nobody talks about it. They talk about marketing, but nobody talks about sponsorship. And sponsorship is the ultimate promotion vehicle. I try to tell people and I tell for any racer out there that’s trying to understand what sponsorship is, Understand that your race car is the ultimate promotion vehicle.

It’s not the promotion. So if you buy Radio Time and now you have this Radio Time and you’ve paid for it, now what are you going to say with it? Well, the race car is the same thing. You’ve bought the car. Now how are you going to leverage it to get more distributors, retain your employees, build your PR?

How are you going to use those toolboxes to get that ROI? So the car is the promotion vehicle. It’s not the promotion. If you can get that in your head when you’re pitching a sponsor. Then you’re going to do so much better. It’s what you can do for them. It’s not what they can do for you. So if you flip that conversation, you’ll be much better off.

But most drivers [00:44:00] don’t understand that. I’ve seen so many people at the upper echelon that still didn’t get that. And I thought, Oh my gosh, you’ve been in motorsports for 30 years. How do you not understand how this works? But a lot of people really just don’t understand the psychology involved there.

And therefore they end a lifetime of trying to chase sponsorships, but all they’re trying to do is say, Hey, I’m great. Give me money. As opposed to how can I help you sell more products? And that’s really key to help some of our gals and guys get that right sponsorship. So to all those women raisers out there, first, understand you’re the promotion vehicle, not the promotion.

And two, quit trying to go down the rabbit hole with finding something pink. We like orange, too. Go find a company that needs women in their sport. Did you know that if you use a female voice in the automotive promotion spectrum of commercials and stuff, you will increase sales by 40%? Girls, go after that automotive market because you will increase their sales by virtue of your femininity.

Go find products that, you know, you think the men should only be male because [00:45:00] they need girls, too.

Crew Chief Eric: After a decade. What came next? And you alluded to this earlier, your new book that just came out. So fill in the gap. How do we get to the trouble with Howard? What happened after IndyCar?

Lee Anne Patterson: Okay, so I ended up managing drivers after we stopped running a team.

I helped a lot of drivers make their way on the road to IndyLadder System. Getting them into the right teams, the right placement, finding their sponsors, managing their media. I had three or four drivers that I was working with. The key is that Anita retired. And she moved to Costa Rica and when she moved to Costa Rica, she left me with a giant crate filled with all of their memorabilia, press releases, photos, personal photos, stories about their life, et cetera.

And I’m going through this scrapbook of Polaroids, you know, you got to shake it to make it kind of thing. There are all these Polaroids of a skunk. And I’m like, Anita, what’s up with the skunk? She goes, Oh, that’s trouble. I’m like, yeah, it’s a skunk. And she goes, no, no, no, that’s trouble. He’s our pet skunk.[00:46:00]

Like, you’ve got to be kidding me. And then she told me the story about how they really rescued Trouble on the way to the racetrack and found a little baby doll bottle and started feeding them at the track. Well, because they were running sprint cars every single weekend, they raised Trouble at the racetrack.

And I sat there and went, The Trouble with Howard, that would be a great children’s book. That’s where the seed gets to.

Crew Chief Eric: So what is the book about for those of us out there with little kids that might want to read the story to them? Or maybe, you know, they’re old enough to read it themselves. What’s the premise of the book?

Lee Anne Patterson: So the premise is based on the fact that we use a kid version of Howard and Anita. Howard. gets punted off the track by Jack. It’s a very bully kind of tacky move. And he gets punted off so far he’s in the shrubs and there he hears a little whimper and he gets out of his car to explore. The racetrack is done, it’s quiet, sure enough there’s a whimper and there’s a little baby skunk in the weeds and he needs help.

And so he puts him in his driver’s suit and he brings [00:47:00] him back and introduces him to his very best friend and awesome mechanic Anita. And they end up taking care of Trouble and having him at the racetrack. And of course he lives up to his name. He dug in coolers and jumped into toolboxes and got into Trouble.

And not everybody liked Trouble, which was actually true of the real Trouble too. Jack the Nemesis decides to come into the Hauler one night and starts messing with their things and instead he finds Trouble. The double intenders will never end. And from there, trouble gets lost. That’s where he ends up finding his cozy place to sleep, his favorite place, which he thinks is in Howard’s car, but he’s actually in Jack.

And this is the night before the race. After that, we get a big finish and there’s a happy ending, but Jack does get sprayed in the end. But it is based on a true story and we cover themes of sportsmanship. And we cover some themes on how to deal with bullying and taking the high road. And I don’t shy away from racing terminology.

We talk about sanctioning bodies and officials [00:48:00] and being online and inline and pits and paddocks and all those kind of things. And then the illustrations are done by Roger Warwick. He was an extraordinary illustrator. He does all the cartoons for Marshall Pruitt. And he did those posters for Seneca Lodge and Seepkins of all the Last Call stuff, which is so great.

He really brought this book to life. But the race cars look like race cars. And inside the hauler, you see fuel jugs and bungee cords and coolers that say Gurney for President. So we got a lot of Easter eggs on it too. And so when Roger stepped up, it just made it a magical thing because he understood the racing.

He’s a racer too. So it’s really a book created by racers about racers.

Crew Chief Eric: You’re the first children’s author that we’ve had on the show. When I have other authors on, I usually ask them, when you set about a journey of 80, 000 words, you know, how do you get off the blocks? What’s your first step? You know, how do you put it all together?

But a children’s book is very different. Had you written any books before this? Was this the first book you’d ever written? And what kind of [00:49:00] challenges did you face? Did you find trying to distill down the motor sports world in a way that kids could ingest?

Lee Anne Patterson: Well, first off i’ve been telling stories to vintage children for a long time in the paddock area I mean i’ve probably given more garage tours than anybody I know i’ve probably talked to more fans than most drivers You know, I understand how they think and the things that they like but for me it was It’s taking reality and creating something fun out of it.

I am a visual person, so I too have written some treatments in movies and videos and things like that. And so when you visualize the story almost as an animation first, then it was much easier for me to then to go into a children’s book. So I actually wrote it as an animated story, and then I actually paired the language down to a children’s book from there.

But we made some calls and we broke all the publisher’s rules. If you want to publish a book today you’re supposed to only have two and a half sentences per page and if you’re supporting STEM the book’s supposed to be pink. They wanted me to cut the story in half and I’m like, uh, no [00:50:00] because I wanted to do a real racing book.

I mean it needs to look like a race car. An oversimplified race car doesn’t really help us, does it? With this book, you can actually say and see this is the roll bar and this is a chassis. You can explain that to a younger kid. You can see shop images. Everything about the racing experience in this book is very authentic.

And that was important to me. That’s how we did it, just one step at a time. Went from an animation to the children’s book,

Crew Chief Eric: and then I self published. Because that seems to be the craze these days, especially with providers like Amazon, where you can bend the rules of publishing and get something to develop the way you want it to.

Is that the route you’ve gone down? And if so, how do you go about getting a copy of The Trouble with Howard?

Lee Anne Patterson: We did go the self publishing route because we got to control Our art and the length of the book and the story and all these kind of things. I even have a brief bio of Howard and Anita in trouble, the real trouble in the back of the book, again, to just inspire those ponytails in the pits and encourage the boys to [00:51:00] be encouraging too.

And if you want to get it, you can go to the trouble with howard. com. So it is on the website and we’ve had some fun. We actually have an official trouble team t shirt that is, uh, an H and a hot. Racing and it says Danville, Indiana, which is where their actual shop was. So again, lots of Easter eggs and troubles hanging off the back of that shirt.

We also did a trouble car air freshener because why would we not?

Crew Chief Eric: What does that smell like? The sweet smell of victory. Glad you didn’t say skunk.

Lee Anne Patterson: It doesn’t smell like it’s gum, but we have some stickers and we have all that kind of stuff on too because, you know, this is, this should be fun. We’re getting into trouble together.

Crew Chief Eric: Let’s say one of my daughters reads the book and stumbles across you in the paddock and says, Lee Anne, why racing? Why should I get involved? What do you say to them? You have to

Lee Anne Patterson: only decide that from your own heart. What I will tell any young girl is that don’t be afraid to dream big. It doesn’t matter what you dream.

As long as you’re passionate about it, and you’re excited about it, [00:52:00] and it comes from the heart. All the really good things come from within. If you try to do something just to prove a woman can, you will fail miserably. But if you decide you want to go racing because you’re a driver, or you have a perfectionist attitude toward a car prep, or you love sponsorship because you’re a dork like me, then as long as you’re passionate about it, and you want to just dream big and go for it, but it has to come from your heart.

It doesn’t matter what it is, but it has to come from the heart.

Lauren Goodman: So with ground effects marketing, what’s next?

Lee Anne Patterson: If this is successful, if it catches on, I do have a way to expand the series so that I can bring in other different jobs and different types of racing that trouble can get into and we can introduce other different types of jobs because gosh, we need people in all different kinds of jobs.

We just don’t need drivers. We need mechanics. We need engineers. We need PR people. We need marketing people. We need people that just. Love the sport showcasing all the different jobs. Like, you know, I’d love to bring in a little Eloisa [00:53:00] character. I’d love to have different characters to that are all centered off.

Somebody very likely that, you know, really did something kind of cool that maybe somebody hasn’t heard about and bring in the different types of jobs. So we’ll see if it takes off so far. All the feedback has been great. And a lot of kids have already sent me videos of themselves reading it, and it was a great story.

There was one mom who bought the book for her daughter who was sitting right there, and she showed her the book and she studied the cover. And the minute she found trouble on the cover, she went, Oh, and she got super excited. And another lady told me that her daughter loved it so much that she had to go buy a stuffed skunk.

By the way, we will have a plush trouble available in about 35 days online. So you got to have a stuffed skunk, right? And he’s adorable and he looks like trouble and quality’s really nice. My designer was Alex Guiadas of Castaway Design. He’s been my partner in design crime for 30 years in racing. He was the first to actually do an autograph card.

Happened for the longest time. Photographers sold pictures. They printed off the black and white pictures, [00:54:00] and then they would sell their pictures. Alex is like, well, why don’t we put information on them and print them? It really hurt the photographers because they stopped selling photographs, but that’s where the autograph card evolved from.

So he did the design work on the book and really brought things to life, just really made Rogers again, leap off the page. And it’s been a wonderful, wonderful project to work on.

Crew Chief Eric: Talking about the future and what’s next for Lee Anne and things like that. You know, we talk a lot about diversifying the paddock, and we mentioned some of that throughout this episode, but Lee Anne, if you were queen for a day, and you could change one thing about motorsport right now, what would that be?

Lee Anne Patterson: You know, I think the biggest in my world, the thing that I found that I could change and make the most impact and difference with is helping the parents understand what it takes to get your kid there. If we can help the parents understand that you’re going to put your kid in a quarter midget at age 5, and what it’s going to take to get him all the way there, and to be honest with you, explain the [00:55:00] darn business model.

I can’t tell you how many parents call up and say, hey, can you just kind of give me some pointers? I’m like, great, hit play on the recorder, and an hour later I explain how sponsorship works and I’m like, oh, can you just do it for me? Probably the most difficult job in the garage area outside of battling 33 guys into turn one at the Indy 500, in finding the money, because so many people actually don’t understand how the ROI works, how you actually fund it, and now you have managers that change every year and a half, and the average lead time of sponsorship is 9 to 18 months.

So you have to be racing to find sponsorship. And you have to be looking for your sponsorship in the spring for the following year, you’ve got to have so much lead time and you got to make sense when you do it and you have to take care of your sponsor. It’s a service. It’s a job. First and foremost, parents of younger drivers need to understand that and younger drivers need to understand that.

And until you understand that, I don’t care how fast you are. You’re not going racing. [00:56:00] Not today’s world, you’re just not. And so Queen for the Day says, you got to help these people get educated, and you got to help even the sponsors. Companies today who do sponsorship, a lot of them just chunk it off and say, okay, go get that social media.

I remember when social media started, and we had girls doing social media, and they didn’t even know where the media center was. And at that time, the Atlanta General Constitution still had a million people. So there were still more people in the media center to reach than just your driver who’s got 10, 000.

So now you got some drivers that are at 400, you know, like the Chase Elliott’s of the world and Coase Junior’s got a million and the Atlanta Journal Constitution only has 300, 000 readers. So technically Chase Elliott is more powerful than the Atlanta Journal Constitution. And so you got to keep up with those numbers and you got to keep up with that and how you make that happen.

But. I think that’s probably the biggest fault we have in the whole system right now is most people generally don’t understand how sponsorship works. Well, with that, Lee Anne,

Crew Chief Eric: I always like to invite our [00:57:00] guests to share any shout outs, promotions, or anything else we haven’t covered thus far.

Lee Anne Patterson: In the back of my book, I have a dedication and in it, I thank Roger Warwick for his fabulous and inspired illustrations.

My designer, Alex Boyadis, who owns Castle White Design, he’s my longtime business partner and it’s intelligent work is always amazing. I also want to send a personal note of thanks and gratitude, not only to Anita Milliken, but to Eloisa Garza. Linda Connie, Marty Humphrey, Alexis Liras, Linda Mansfield, and Vicki O’Connor, because these are the shoulders that I stand on.

These women, a handful of others, truly open up the garage gates for all the women that are enjoying career racing today. And while it’s always hard being the first, it doesn’t mean it isn’t great.

Lauren Goodman: Lee Anne Patterson’s expertise includes designing and building turnkey programs, Developing visionary business networking strategies, designing results oriented marketing programs, and coordinating activation with measurable results, including good cause marketing elements.[00:58:00]

The Trouble with Howard, Lee Anne’s first children’s book, a book created by racers, about racers, and for racers. is now available for sale, and you can pick up a copy at troublewithhoward. com. To learn more about Lee Anne, be sure to follow her on Instagram and Facebook at Lee Annepatterson. author, or you can follow her on LinkedIn, or reach out via email Lee Anne at BgroundEffects.

com

Crew Chief Eric: Lee Anne, I can’t thank you enough for coming on BreakFix and sharing your road to success story with all of us. And I have to say you are a prime example of the type of individual in motor sports that when you see you walking down the paddock, stop, say hello. And ask, what do you do here? Because there’s so many folks that make this autosphere turn and you’re one of them.

And not only that, an agent of change that I think we get lost in the moment and we need to learn these stories. And your story is super [00:59:00] important and an inspiration to other women out there that might be going, how do I do what she does? So thank you for what you’re doing and continue to do for motorsports.

Lee Anne Patterson: Oh, thank you. We really delved in deep on a lot of fun subjects. You put me on my soapbox a couple of times, so that was great fun to do because you don’t really get to do that quite a bit. Again, it’s a passion. It’s my sport, too, and I’ve loved it and it’s been very, very, very good to me. So I’m happy to help any woman or anybody that wants to actually get involved in the sport because it’s a good ride and it’s good people.

Fact is, people in racing are really good people.

Crew Chief Eric: We hope you enjoyed another awesome episode of Brake Fix Podcast, brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports. If you’d like to be a guest on the show or get involved, be sure to follow us on all social media platforms at GrandTouringMotorsports. And if you’d like to learn more about the content of this episode, be sure to check out the follow on article [01:00:00] at GTMotorsports.

org. We remain a commercial free and no annual fees organization through our sponsors, but also through the generous support of our fans, families, and friends through Patreon. For as little as 2. 50 a month, you can get access to more behind the scenes action, additional Pit Stop minisodes, and other VIP goodies, as well as keeping our team of creators Fed on their strict diet of fig Newtons, gummy bears, and monster.

So consider signing up for Patreon today at www. patreon. com forward slash GT motorsports, and remember without you, none of this would be possible.

Highlights

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

00:00 Meet Lee Anne Patterson
01:20 Lee Anne’s Early Career in Motorsports
02:02 Transition to Promotions Director at Sears Point
03:55 Working with Carroll Shelby
07:55 Challenges and Triumphs in Racing
16:08 Women in Motorsports
21:21 Lee Anne’s IndyCar Era
28:40 Breaking Stereotypes in Motorsport
29:52 The Importance of Sponsorship
31:49 Challenges and Misconceptions
36:34 Running a Motorsport Team
45:01 The Journey to Becoming an Author
46:23 The Trouble with Howard: A Children’s Book
51:38 Advice for Aspiring Racers
52:27 Future Plans and Final Thoughts

Bonus Content

There's more to this story!

Be sure to check out the behind the scenes for this episode, filled with extras, bloopers, and other great moments not found in the final version. Become a Break/Fix VIP today by joining our Patreon.

All of our BEHIND THE SCENES (BTS) Break/Fix episodes are raw and unedited, and expressly shared with the permission and consent of our guests.

Learn More

“The Trouble with Howard,” A Children’s Book Based on a Real-Life Racing Story

What could possibly go wrong if a skunk was in the pits at an auto race?

“The Trouble with Howard,” a children’s book based on a real-life story about auto racers Howard and Anita Millican and their pet skunk, is available now through the website TheTroubleWithHoward.com and at select retail outlets.

The 48-page hardcover book is a collaboration between author and motorsports veteran Lee Anne Patterson, a native of Atlanta, and acclaimed racing illustrator Roger Warrick of Hamilton, Ohio.

The story is based on the experiences of driver and mechanic Howard Millican and his wife, Anita. The latter became the first woman licensed IndyCar mechanic in 1980. She was also the first woman to go over the pit wall during pit stops at IndyCar races as a pit crew member. She was the jack “man.”

The book promotes gender equality and encourages girls to tackle STEM careers. It also suggests how to handle bullies and ways to display good sportsmanship.

In addition, it inspires compassion towards animals. A portion of the proceeds will go to animal rescue operations.

Patterson wrote the book for children who are 5 to 8 years old. Each page carries Warrick’s colorful illustrations like a picture book. It is sure to resonate with auto racing fans of all ages as well as others with no knowledge of the sport.

The book chronicles the story of an injured wild skunk who was treated and adopted by Howard and Anita Millican before they were married. They named him “Trouble.” He travels with the couple from race to race, but never sprays anyone. Most of the racers learn to like Trouble with the exception of Jack, a driver who uses not-so-nice moves on and off the track.

One day Jack scares Trouble out of the tractor-trailer the Millicans use to transport their race car to events, and Trouble becomes lost. Scared and tired, he eventually finds a hiding place in the cockpit of Jack’s race car. He’s still hiding in it when a race starts.

On the last lap Jack gives Howard’s race car a shove in an effort to win. Terrified, Trouble runs up Jack’s chest. Jack loses control of the car and they crash.

Howard wins the race. Trouble and Jack are both unhurt, but Trouble sprays Jack.

Howard, Anita and Trouble celebrate in victory lane. Showing good sportsmanship, Howard gives Jack several cans of tomato juice to use to try to alleviate the odor from being sprayed.

Now Available Online and at Select Retail Outlets!

The book is available to ship now. It carries a suggested retail price of $18.50. Retailers who would like to carry the book are encouraged to contact M.L. Padden at REV Branding in Louisville, Ky., at mlpadden@revbranding.com or by calling (502) 727-4226.

“The Trouble with Howard” is published by Ground Effects Marketing, Inc. Its ISBN number is 979-8-9902067-0-0. For more information visit TheTroubleWithHoward.com.

To learn more about Lee Anne, be sure to follow her on Instagram and Facebook @Lee Annepatterson.author, or you can follow her on LinkedIn, or reach out via email at Lee Anne@thegroundeffects.com.

Lee Anne’s latest venture is a children’s book based on a true story: Howard and Anita Millican raised a pet skunk named Trouble at the racetrack. Illustrated by Roger Warrick and designed by longtime collaborator Alex Boyadis, The Trouble with Howard is a love letter to racing, sportsmanship, and the joy of getting into a little trouble. It’s packed with Easter eggs, real racing terminology, and a plush skunk on the way.

If Lee Anne could change one thing about motorsports, it would be educating parents and young drivers about the business model. Sponsorship isn’t just about speed – it’s about strategy, service, and storytelling. And she’s here to help anyone who wants to learn.

Lee Anne closes with gratitude for the women who came before her: Anita Millican, Eloisa Garza, Linda Connie, Marty Humphrey, Alexis Liras, Linda Mansfield, and Vicki O’Connor. These pioneers opened the garage gates for generations to come.

To learn more about Lee Anne Patterson and The Trouble with Howard, visit www.troublewithhoward.com, or follow her on Instagram and Facebook at @Lee Annepatterson.author.

Reading List

Don't miss out on great book like this one, or other titles we've read and covered as part of the GTM Bookclub on Break/Fix Podcast.

My Travels On Racer Road: Can-Am and Formula 1 in their golden age

DeLorean: The Rise, Fall and Second Acts of the DeLorean Motor Company

Driving to the Future: Living life following Formula One racing

Geared for Life: Making the Shift Into Your Full Potential

Fenders, Fins & Friends: Confessions of a Car Guy

Racing While Black: How an African-American Stock Car Team Made Its Mark on NASCAR

The Last Lap: The Mysterious Demise of Pete Kreis at The Indianapolis 500

Performance Thinking: Mental Skills for the Competitive World...and for Life!

The Other Side of the Fence: Six Decades of Motorsport Photography

Little Anton: A Historical Novel Complete Series

Lone Rider: The First British Woman to Motorcycle Around the World

Colin Chapman: The Man and His Cars: The Authorized Biography by Gerard Crombac

Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World

Shipwrecked and Rescued: Cars and Crew: The

Gran Touring Motorsports's favorite books »

Goodreads

Guest Co-Host: Lauren Goodman

In case you missed it... be sure to check out the Break/Fix episode with our co-host.

This content has been brought to you in-part by sponsorship through...

Hot Rod Dreams and Le Mans Realities

Gran T

July 9, 2024

In the pantheon of endurance racing, few names evoke the blend of grit, ingenuity, and storytelling quite like Jim Busby. His path to Le Mans wasn’t paved with privilege – it was forged in body shops and street races.

A self-described “hot rod guy,” he grew up modifying cars in Southern California, dreaming of European circuits like Mille Miglia and Le Mans. That dream became reality in 1978 when Erwin Kremer invited him to drive a Porsche 935 at Le Mans. Busby’s response? “Do I leave tonight?”

Tune in everywhere you stream, download or listen!

Jim’s Le Mans debut was more than a bucket-list moment – it was a calculated leap. He insisted on assembling a team that could win, recruiting Rick Knoop and Chris Cord, and securing sponsorship from Andial Computers. Their Group 5 Porsche wasn’t just fast – it was resilient. “You don’t win Le Mans unless you bring the car back alive,” Busby emphasized.

Spotlight

Synopsis

This episode of Evening With A Legend features Jim Busby, a race car driver noted for his participation in the prestigious race. Busby discusses his debut at Le Mans in 1978, his enduring relationship with BFGoodrich, and his notable win in the 1989 Daytona 24 Hours. Hosted by David Spitzer, Busby recounts various experiences and stories from Le Mans, highlighting the mystique and dangers of the race. He shares technical details, collaborations, and anecdotes about his career, relations with team members, and the motorsport culture. The episode also touches on Busby’s views on modern racing politics and technical advancements in hypercars.

Hosted by David Spitzer of ACO USA, Jim took fans on a vivid journey through his racing life – from hot rod beginnings in Pasadena, California to the high-stakes drama of the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

and much, much more!

Transcript

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Evening with the Legend is a series of presentations exclusive to Legends of the Famous 24 Hours of Le Mans, giving us an opportunity to bring a piece of Le Mans to you. By sharing stories and highlights of the big event, you get a chance to become part of the Legend of Le Mans, with guests from different eras of over 100 years of racing.

Crew Chief Eric: In 1978, Jim Busby debuted at the 24 Hours of Le Mans in a Porsche 935 from Crema Racing and finished in 6th position overall. His enduring association with BFGoodrich began with the 1982 Le Mans 24 Hours when his Porsche 924 Carrera GTR won the GT class using BFG’s road specification tires and they remained his sponsors and tire suppliers during [00:01:00] his 1984 return to Le Mans with a Group C2 Lola Mazda.

In subsequent seasons he concentrated on managing the team and perhaps his finest victory came in the 1989 Daytona 24 Hours when John Andretti, Bob Wallach, and Derrick Bell shared the win in the Miller Hi Life Porsche 962. Jim sold his team in 1990 and moved on to other projects and racing. Busby himself may not admit it but he’s regarded as one of the world’s best Porsche specialists for the 1970s and 80s.

Jim now spends his time in Newport Beach, California with his wife. This Evening with a Legend was hosted by David Spitzer, a member of the ACO USA and who you might recognize as one of the Pitt reporters from the 24 Hours of Le Mans.

David Spitzer: Welcome to everybody and an exciting night and this has been quite a series that David has helped put together already with multiple esteemed guests tonight.

We’re very honored to have Jim Busby. I’ve spoken to Jim several times now, and I know that tonight my job is probably the easiest job in all of motor sports. All I need to do is kind of get him started. Jim. You’ve got such wonderful stories [00:02:00] and I’m looking on the backdrop right now on my screen is David Lowe and some of the artwork that was done by Eric for different cars.

You’ve been involved in so many amazing cars over the years. So many memories for us. For me growing up around Watkins Glen and going to sports car races every year. And so I’m sure I speak for all the fans that are on the line to say, thank you for your time. And let’s start you off with a question just to kind of get you rolling.

Tell us about the first time going to Lamar. Tell us a little bit about how it felt as you got ready to go over there and then arriving there for the first time. It’s such an experience. A lot of our ACO members are dreaming or are going to Lamar. And so tell us about your first time and a little bit about how all that felt.

Jim Busby: To sort of give a little background to how that happened, I always dreamed of Lamont and Lamont to me was the kid’s dream because my uncle was fascinated by sports car racing and in particular the Mille Miglia and Lamont. He had a Cat Allard, which he raced at Pebble Beach down south at Torrey Ponds. I didn’t really have an opportunity to do [00:03:00] that.

I was a hot rod guy. Because I could afford to do that. I worked at a body shop in Pasadena, but I always dreamt of going to Le Mans. And then I started sports car racing, had some success in IMSA right away. I’d raced in Europe before that, which I think gave me a leg up on a lot of guys and began winning races in IMSA right out of the gate.

Well, I, I built a 9 35 conversion of a 9 34 for a felony. Hal Shaw, who he owned the OR house, and Hal said, Hey Jim, would you drive a Daytona with me? And I said, well, sure, but you know, we don’t have a factory 9 35 engine. We’re gonna run your 9 34 engine. But we re bodied the car as we did for Rick when he first went to Seabring.

And it was, it was a mid packer, and with some luck, it could run near the front. So after my second stint, I got outta the car and I was walking across the paddock at Daytona. And up walks Erwin Kramer. And I’d met him through John Fitzpatrick and a couple of guys. And of course their focus was Le Mans, Monza, and the big stuff.

And he walked right up to me and he [00:04:00] said, Jim, would you like to drive our car at Le Mans? Are you kidding me? I said, Tim, do I leave tonight? Do you want me to not stay? And he said, we’ve watched you. We want you to drive our cars at Le Mans. And I said, well, okay, but I’m going to level with you. I raced really hard and I want a chance to win.

You know, Lamar is a very dangerous race and part of the mystique of Lamar, whether we like it or not, is the fact that it’s very high speed and very dangerous. And that myth and that truth Have carried Le Mans as far as it’s gotten today, and it remains high speed and dangerous today. Somebody said, well, they put in the chicanes.

Well, we raced non chicane. Rick Newp and I did that. We get it. It’s still a high speed dangerous place, and that’s half of the mystique of the race, and it needs to stay that way. People need to understand that this is the real deal. This is not your little backyard game, and that’s what people are so fascinated with.

So I said, well, who would I drive with and they shall remain [00:05:00] nameless. And they told me, and I said, look, I’m so flattered that you’ve asked me to come in and I would like very much to do that, but I want a chance to win. And I don’t think that’s going to happen. And he said, well, what would you do? And I said, well, what if we could find a couple of guys in America that I think are really good, that can give us a chance and we’re racing in the group five category, which is harder than the IMSA category, but different size fuel tank, different length pit stops, it’s a tough race to win.

And so I thought about that and I, and I walked over to Fred New. Rick’s dad. And I said, Fred, do you think Rick would like to go to Le Mans? Of course, Rick had never been to anything like that. He was at Daytona. I think I saw a Carrera with maybe Howard Meister or somebody like that. Good team. And, and I’d seen him race.

And best part was, is he was quick enough as a beginner. But he brought them back alive. The cars came back alive. And if you think you can win it in the mall without bringing them back alive, you’re dead wrong, [00:06:00] especially

David Spitzer: in that era, you know, I mean, nowadays may be a little bit more tolerant, but certainly in that area, the danger and the keep the gearbox going, you know, keep the darn thing on the track.

Jim Busby: So Fred looked at me and he said, well, if we could put that together, that would be wonderful. I said, we’ve got to replace the money that these other drivers are bringing with money that we can find, because that’s going to supply it. And frankly, I’m a paid driver and we got to find money to run our guys.

And so he said, what about Chris Cord? And I said, Chris Cord is a really quick guy. I’ve raced him in both Trans Am and in IMSA and his moms, and he’s very quick. Chris Cord was that guy that you didn’t expect him to be. And then you looked in your mirror and there he is. Stuck up your tailpipe. So you got to press on a little bit.

So I thought Chris is a real winner. He’s mature. He’s quick. He’s good. So I called the Kramer brothers and said, what about these guys? If we can round up some money. Well, Chris found Amdahl Computers, which is a film about Le Mans that was done, [00:07:00] narrated by Bruce Meyer of the Peterson Museum. You’ll see that we were sponsored by Amdahl Computers.

We weren’t buy a ride guys. We got the sponsorship. So I call it Kramer Brothers. And I said, we got it. We’ve got 20 grand from Amdahl Computers. Chris Kord’s the driver. They say, wow, he’s great. We love him. And we’ve got Rick Newhart. It went silent on the other end of the line. And then Irwin or Manfred Kramer.

Their English was a little questionable and probably designed to be so because Amdahl Computers. They don’t want to be too committal, but anyway, here was the question. Has Rick Newt ever driven a turbo? My answer was, has Rick Newt ever driven a turbo? Like it was the most incredulous thing I’ve ever heard in my life.

Preposterous question. Yeah. And they never, ever said, well, what do you mean by that? They said, okay. So we get there and one of my first memories when we got to Le Mans, we had some car trouble with some vibrations. We sent Rick out for a couple of laps. After he did the most flat chat and high gear, man, he had [00:08:00] eyes the size of sauce.

When he arrived back in the pit lane, they’re going to try something. They put some, something over the air and let’s to try to stop this vibration. Put me back in the car and I took off again and didn’t fix it. And so on and so forth. Then we’d put Ricky in and then we’d. You know, the moment, the practice is really great because it starts at four in the afternoon and then it morphs into darkness, but darkness is very late.

They’re 10 30, something like that, depending a little bit in the day and you run a lot at night and it’s wonderful. And so Rick took well to that. And after that, it was just no problem. He was in like a little pro and he was a kid at the time for Chris recently passed away, but he was a vet. At the time, a veteran at the time, and I was not a veteran of Lamar.

That’s for sure. But I’d done some long distance racing.

David Spitzer: Was it everything you thought it was

Jim Busby: going to be in terms of, uh, it was more. And I think the nighttime racing on the most on straight and rich Quebec, this up was the most incredible thing I’ve ever done, and it was, More difficult than I ever imagined.

I’d run [00:09:00] Daytona, gosh, I can’t even tell you how many times the 24 hour and been on the podium and finished second, third, fourth, second, so on. Never won that one myself as a driver, but we did win as a team, but it was everything that I imagined and then some much more dangerous, much more risky. And it was everything that I had hoped it would be.

Remember that when people see what Lamar was in the day and they saw Steve McQueen’s movie and the huge accidents, that’s the real deal. Those cars do flip over backwards. They do hit things at very high speeds. And while the terrible 1955 Mercedes accident will always be tagged to Lamar, Lamar will always own that accident.

People still show it. Why? Because it’s part of the scenery at Lamont and it’s huge and it had an enormous impact on the popularity of racing, tragically in both directions. And why do people go to Lamont to see the danger and people lose their lives? No. [00:10:00] they go to see them escape doing that. They want to see that they’re right on the ragged edge of being in that awful fire, but not in it.

Almost. And that’s what they want to see. And as soon as there’s too much, I don’t want to say safety, but too much emphasis on not making it risky, it loses its mystique. I’m sorry. That’s just the way it is. And it will always be the race. It’s not a race. It’s not a great distance race. It’s the race always will be.

And you can win the farm into one world championship. But boy, when you get done with that, you better get a ride at Lamont. That’s you notice they’re all doing that because that’s the one they left out. And it’s still the most exciting, the most dangerous and the biggest thrill to win. It’s incredible.

Incredible. And the helicopter’s going over the top of the pit lane with your name on it. That doesn’t happen at IMSA in mid Ohio, but it’s a hell of a hard race in mid Ohio, but the reality is that it has a mystique in and of itself. [00:11:00] It’s not the same as anything else. The Daytona 24 hour is a wonderful 24 hour race, but it’s not Le Mans.

It never will be. And it’s still just as tough to win in some ways. It will never have the mystique and the thrill that not only the drivers get, but the spectators get. Spectators are on their toes all the time. You know, in the middle of the night, you walk out into the pit lane and you stare across. And when the race started, there was 150, 000 people in that grandstand.

Standing on

David Spitzer: those concrete little steps that are at a weird

Jim Busby: angle. Yep. And then you come out at 1130 or 12 o’clock at night. And then you come out at three in the morning and they’re empty. There’s not a single person in the grandstands. What do they do? Well, whatever French people go off into the forest and do, and then come back and they start trickling in.

And by morning time, there isn’t an empty seat anywhere. I had a really fun experience in my first daylight session after we’d run all night. And Chris had witnessed a horrible accident on the Moulson street, and we thought it had [00:12:00] killed Bob Gerritsen. But. I thought it was Brian Redmond because I’d been following Brian and then I lost track of him, I think I got around him or something.

Anyway, I, he wasn’t, we weren’t together anymore. And then I came around and I saw this wadded up red 935 in the middle of the street and they were cleaning it up after Chris. Had witnessed the accident. It was turbos and engines flying through the air and everything jumped. The Kramer brothers had the foresight to say, don’t pit for new tires.

We were running over debris. Chris called in and said, you want me to come in and get new tires? This is a really bad accident. It’s going to take a while to clean up. They said, no, don’t come in. Why? Because you’ll put new tires on the car and go out and puncture them. And then we’ll put another set on.

Plus you don’t pit because when I asked Phil Hill, when he came in right before the start, after my first session, before the start of the second section, which would have been Chris, I said, Phil, give me an idea how you win this thing. And all he said was after his decades of racing there and five wins or whatever his overall win record was, he looked at me and he said, [00:13:00] stay out of the pits.

So I said, great wisdom entailed. And all I said was stay out of the pits and the pits is Rick will recall. We ended up also winning, not just the group five category. We won what’s called the Francis Afrique trophy. You ask, what is that? Well, I don’t know, to tell you the truth, they give you so many trophies.

They all take that too. And we’ve got them all lined up here. When was the last time you got over to Lamar? Have you been

David Spitzer: over recently?

Jim Busby: No, I went to race and never went back for any other reason. I went three

David Spitzer: times and we went three times. Tell us a little bit about the lodging and the experience. Just the whole ambiance, you know, seeing people at dinner and the whole experience of being in France was that extra special beyond the racetrack.

It was

Jim Busby: equally important because I’d never done it and I went with Chris and his wife. Rick, his brother and Rick’s dad, and we got a little, I’m going to murder this town, but I think it’s good. It was called Allen song. Your pronunciation is excellent. It’s on the signs right around the mall. That’s right.

Yep. So Rick’s [00:14:00] dad rounds up this hotel in Allen song and a cool little restaurant. So that’s good enough for me. And we’re staying there and we commute back and forth daily. So here we are sitting in this tiny little town. It’s not known for racing. It’s known for making beautiful lace. And a very sophisticated population.

And I’m really thinking this is cool. And yet we’re a few miles away from the circuit, which is remarkable in itself. But mostly when I get there, I find out that the technical inspection is in downtown Lamont. So somebody says to me, who’s going to drive the car on the racetrack from the tech inspection?

I said, I’ll do it. I’m your guy. And then somebody says, no, they quit that last year or something. So they don’t do that anymore, but they did in the day. And I imagine myself going down some Boulevard and breathing nine 35 headed for the racetrack down the Mulsanne highway, which then leads you in the Indianapolis corner, all incredible legendary stuff.

That’s going to happen to me as a young man, [00:15:00] none of it happened. They trailered the car over there and we got going. And that was that.

David Spitzer: But it was by the plaster Jacobon with the big, beautiful Gothic church and

Jim Busby: everything right there in the center. Absolutely. Yeah. Every tech inspection I ever went through.

All you can think of is when am I going to get out of here? Do I really need to be here? Please look at my helmet and tell me it’s okay. And let me get out of here. You could have stayed there for two days and enjoyed the ambiance and the photograph. The fans were so excited to be there and they’re locals.

You’d think that if you lived in Ramon that you would ignore the race after a while. It would become blasé. I grew up in Pasadena and I eventually ignored the Rose Parade, which was two blocks from my house. Park cars and make money. No, if you live in Lamar, you go to tech inspection, the entire city turns up for that.

And so you get to meet people that are thoroughly excited to be there and want to meet you and so forth. So once again, the experience of Lamar, it isn’t just the challenge or the danger, it’s Lamar itself. It’s an [00:16:00] unusual city full of wonderful people. And the idea that French people can be difficult to get along with is something that’s generated here.

I’m sure because they weren’t, and they were wonderful to us and treated us like princes and princesses the entire time we were there, my wife and I went a couple of years later, there’s another. A movie that was done by BF Goodrich for the Porsche clubs, which you can also find next to the Le Mans movie.

David Spitzer: Let’s talk about BFG. So you mentioned that you started out on street tires and then you kind of put together a deal that allowed you to take them to Le Mans. Is that right? Can you talk us through a little bit of that journey?

Jim Busby: Well, really what happened. It was sort of the reverse of that. What happened was as a friend of mine from sports car racing back in the day, when I was racing in Europe and I’d won a race at Le Châtre in central France, which had been won by Jack Brabham and some big shots.

The only reason I won is I was a kid from America. I didn’t come in in the rain. I didn’t know about rain tires. I’d never raced in the rain in my life. So I just stayed out, slid through the grass. And they [00:17:00] finally called off the race with a couple of laps to go because it was too dangerous. And I won it because everybody else stopped for rain tires and I stayed out.

So I’d gotten a reputation for being this crazy American guy, which wasn’t intentional, didn’t occur to me that I’d want to stop. And I didn’t, I had gotten to know Duncan Nearpatch, who at the time was running the FIA and had run BMW when I drove for BMW factory, he hired me, I sadly replaced. Ronnie Peterson at BMW after he died, and Jochen Nierkash was my boss.

He came up to me at a race in America, and he said, you know, we’re happy with what you’re doing here in America, but do you think BFGoodrich would be interested in ever going to Le Mans? And I said, well, I don’t know if they would, but I sure would. He said, well, we’re going to start the C2 category, which is going to be very competitive.

Do you think they’d be interested in participating in that? So I went to Gary Pace, who was running in the BFGooders program at the time. And I said, Gary, I know you’ve mentioned that you like the idea of Le Mans and we’d [00:18:00] already been in the 924, which was basically a factory effort of a Brumos car, and we had done it on street tires, which was outrageous, but BFGooders had had some experience at doing that by shaving their tires down almost to slicks.

So they’re pretty sketchy in the beginning and they never get to be a race tire, but they get managed. And we did it in the 924 turbo, which was a factory effort, which has a whole bunch of fun Le Mans stories about Porsche rebuilding the engine in the rain and so on and so forth. And we went. So when Nearpatch suggests that we go again on street tires, VF Goodyear goes for it.

I go to Japan and meet with the The people from Mazda, because they’re going to supply the engines and we know that they’re good 24 hour engines and I take a look at their stuff. And when I, I said to one of the engineers, I said, well, maybe you want to have a human transmission, not a synchromesh transmission.

Maybe you want to have a little different chassis than what you’ve been running there for a couple of years. You haven’t had the success that you like. If you send me to Lola, we [00:19:00] can get a really good chassis built, use your running gear and so on and so forth. We’ll be good to go. So the guy looks at me and the greatest honor in Japan is when you’re getting ready to go to the ma, you get to take a bath with the president of the company.

So naturally I’m thinking, well, maybe that’s not my first idea. I guess I’ll do that. So that night I taught the president of Toyo Kogo, which is Mazda in Hiroshima. I talk them into going to Le Mans with a Lola chassis, a Hewlin gearbox, and their power plants with BF Goodrich tires, which BF Goodrich is convinced are going to be street tires.

I’m not, but that’s a fight for another day. What ends up happening is I fly backwards that night around the world. To London, meet with Eric Bradley, who I’d driven for in the sports car championship in Europe, of Lola fame, could you build us a car that would do something unique and win it in Le Mans? He said, sure.

Is that’s for your passion’s new C2. I said, it is. He said, okay. And they had their Le Mans car there, which was a [00:20:00] 610. I looked at it and I said, well, that’s a big car for a small engine in the C2. And he said, well, why don’t we make it smaller? Isn’t your sponsor a tire company? And I said, of course it is.

He said, good. We need 13 inch tires, just like on the front of a Formula One car. And we’ll squeeze that body down to nothing. And that was that really flat body that looked like it got squashed. That’s exactly right. And it came out really pretty. And I’ve got pictures of it all around here. Rick and I, our first race in Europe was Monza.

Rick and I won it

David Spitzer: in that C2 car

Jim Busby: and the C2 car. Then we went to Lamont and one there. The reason was that car. Wouldn’t accelerate like a rocket, but it had high speed because it had no wind resistance. If you look at the pictures of the actual Lamar car, as opposed to the one we ran here, wing is down behind the car.

It’s a trimming device. It’s not a real wing and there’s no wind resistance. So by doing that, and then ultimately through tire testing, convincing BF Goodyear that they need to make slick tires [00:21:00] with real radial street construction, which was more challenging than you can imagine, because I can remember the first test I did, it shook the fillings out of my teeth because they were trying to use a street construction that has all sorts of lifelong tendencies of a street tire, but with the traction of a racing tire, but they did it.

And we won, I mean, we didn’t screw around with that car. We led races and we won to win at Monza on our way to high

David Spitzer: speed. Also, right.

Jim Busby: There was only one thing that they liked better than looking at our cars and that was looking at our 18 wheeler. They’d never seen one. There was a hundred thousand people watching the race and 40, 000 of them.

Every time we’d pull in and our 18 wheeler would come and stand around the truck and wait for it to be unloaded. That was the whole story of the race was the BF Goodrich 18 wheel truck. And they loved it. And that thing got stuck in some old lady’s house, went around a car and got wedged into a wall and the president of BF Goodrich had to romance her, write a check for a man to come and remove her fence, get [00:22:00] our 18 wheeler out of this little town and put the fence back up and write a check for the whole thing.

David Spitzer: Any of our fans that have been to Le Mans or been to France know exactly what he’s talking about. You get to these. Old medieval towns and you’re lucky it wasn’t two buildings that just couldn’t be taken down. But I did a lot of work for Cadillac back in the day. And I mean, we’d get over there with a Cadillac street car and there were places you just couldn’t go.

I’m imagining with an 18 wheeler. Now, one of our fans asked a very interesting question. The question related to the 1986 event. Apparently there’s a rumor out there in the world that you were racing with BF Goodrich sponsorship on a car that actually did not have BF Goodrich tires. Is there any truth

Jim Busby: to that?

You’re smiling already. First of all, every story takes on its own truth, and that’s not what happened. And it wasn’t 1986, it was 1982. Porsche wanted to win both categories, which they were pretty sure they were going to win the overall with X and Bell in the 956. Yeah, 962 [00:23:00] shorter wheelbase, 962 with a four valve twin turbo engine, whereas in America, we’re in the 62 longer wheelbase with an air cooled motor, single turbo, which ultimately we managed to hop up here with Ed Pink and Alvin Springer.

And I’ll to make more horsepower than the factory four cam motor, because we had 3. 2 liter motors. They have 2. 4. I know Alvin very well. He’s been a part of racing for many,

David Spitzer: many years.

Jim Busby: Alvin and I started to get, what happened was this Porsche was convinced that in order to race, you must qualify. BF Goodrich agreed to allow us to qualify on Dunlop tires without any ID on them, because the truth is, is that there’s a limit.

You have to cut within a certain limit to make the show. You don’t just go because you’re in a class. My drivers, two of the guys that I raced with. Francois Mignot, who was a great guy, great driver. He didn’t get enough in the time in the car and they didn’t let him race. And he was French, which is [00:24:00] just unheard of.

They’d make some new rule or something and change that, but they didn’t. And so they stick to their rules and God bless them. And the poor guy was a great driver. He just never got enough time in the car and they didn’t let him start. So doc Bundy had to do that race with me. And there was just two of us and we did the whole race, which I was used to.

Cause at the Daytona 24, we did two driver races leading up to Nowadays, when there’s six drivers or whatever it is, I never quite understood that why there’s more drivers on the podium than mechanics, it’s how they get it

David Spitzer: paid for Jim. Come on. You know, the answer to that. I

Jim Busby: didn’t want to bring that up, but that’s how it is,

David Spitzer: by the way.

I got to dial back to the fact that you guys came up with 20 grand and that was enough to go to Lamar. That blows my mind. 20 grand. Wouldn’t even pay the fuel bill at Lamar. There’s a little

Jim Busby: sidebar that the Kramer brothers will go on any. Right. They went every year and they were a top lot flight team.

They won overall the next year because they didn’t have the group six class. And I hooked them up with the guys who raced in that, the Whittington brothers, basically the same car, which is now owned by Bruce Meyer, who’s the founding [00:25:00] director of Peterson museum owns that car. And I hooked the Whittington brothers up with the Kramer brothers.

And they won again, both in group five, we were five previous year. And they won overall because there was no group six anymore. So anyway, BFGoodrich agreed to do that. We did qualify. And that car was so fast down the street. I remember in qualifying that little 924 with this hot rod motor in it. I could catch a toll off Derek Bell in the 956 and he wouldn’t get away from me.

As soon as we went over the kink, down through the kink and over the hump and get on the brakes, he’d disappear. Right. We didn’t have the downforce or the braking capability in our car waiting. Anyway, the factory set it up. So I got a tow with the 924 from the 956 in qualifying and we did well. I would catch a tow from him occasionally during the race.

And I, Doc did too. And it was Doc Bundy and I, Doc had never been to Le Mans. I’d never been, I’d been to Le Mans in 78, but I’d never been in a stock 924. Well, guess what? We had a lot of engine trouble leading [00:26:00] up to the start of the race and poor Francois didn’t get into the car and Doc and I are now starting this race alone.

So the night before the race, we find out that the reason the engine isn’t running well is something is wrong and Porsche decides to rebuild the engine. Now this will tell you why, if I ever go anywhere to a serious race, go with Porsche, because you got a real good chance of doing well, they always come back a lot.

I say, what are we going to do guys? And they said, we’ve got it figured out. So two guys show up. You ever seen a Volkswagen? Flatbed truck where the full sides fold down. It’s a dual cab, like a Volkswagen bus, but with folding down rear sides into a flatbed truck. And they pull one of those things into the paddock.

It’s raining. Remember this isn’t the glorious pits that you have at Le Mans. Now, these are concrete bunkers with steel pipes full of gasoline running over the top. So I say, well, what are you going to do with that thing? They pull an engine stand off, stick it in this hole in the back of this truck. And pull the 924 [00:27:00] motor out of the car, which is in trouble and rebuild it in the rain to portion mechanics in red jumpsuits, like you’d see in the factory water from the rain, dripping off their noses onto parts.

And they build the engine that we will run in the 24 hours in the rain outside on the back of a truck. And what had happened is one of the gears on the crankshaft was incorrectly indexed. Oh, they took a flat file for lack of a better term was a flat bastard file, a new groove in it and put the gear on the other way off.

We went to the new motor and we ran 24 hours with that motor flat chat the entire time and missed a lick, except it pushed out a head gasket with about 3 laps to go. And doc was in the car and we called him in. And they would pack ice bags on top of the cylinder head and send them back out. And they did that for the last three laps.

Every lap he pitted, we had a big lead over the Chevy Camaros, and we could give up time and by God, we ended up winning the race with ice steaming off the top of the [00:28:00] cylinder heads on this Porsche. And it still goes down the street as fast as it did in qualifying. And it still wins the race. So that.

That’s why you always want to go with Porsche. I used to kid Kirby and Hodgkiss. They always went to Le Mans because they love Le Mans. And one day I went up to him and I said, let me ask you guys, why you always come here in a Chevy Camaro? They don’t have the reliability. Don’t seem to have the reliability that you’d want.

It’s a lot different than the GM of racing today. These homemade guys with their Camaros and Corvettes. And their answer was really simple. We have dinner reservations on Saturday.

And we’ve got this great place where we’re staying and they got dinner and everything else. So remember that part of the reason to go to the mall is the dinner in the hotels and that’s why they went eventually. I think they did finish in one and we’re great. I’m quite disappointed they had to go to breakfast, but anyway, there’s so many wonderful stories about this thing.

And don’t anybody get confused about Lamar and all the other [00:29:00] races in the world. There aren’t any. This is it. This is the race in the place with the people. And that’s why I’m so happy that I went there three times and I’m so happy that I won as a driver twice and finished third. Second or third the other time, but on the team that time, that was the first time I’d ever gone as the team owner.

David Spitzer: One of the things that’s really interesting with this centennial edition of Lamar this year, we’re all so excited to go and be part of it because IMSA and the FIA through the world endurance championship and the ACO of course, have gotten together and worked really hard to hammer out a set of equivalency that creates a premier category that allows the Yankees to come over and race for the top honors.

Of course. You and I both know there’s a long history of politics at Lamar. There’s all the group Sierra and there’s all the stuff that happens. So many chapters that we can go through. So I’m interested in your perspective today. First of all, are you excited for Lamar 2023? Is that on your radar screen?

And then maybe if you want to dial that back and talk about. Politics, you know, [00:30:00] you were an American person with American co drivers, you’re with Kramer, which that’s good. That gets you a check mark of Euro that gives you entree. But how did that feel back then? And what’s your observations on the politics between big old America and little France that wants to rule the roost?

Jim Busby: There’s a couple of different answers to that. First of all, I’m very excited and I really want to see Hendrick’s car do well, and that’s garage 54 or whatever it is. And Jeff Gordon is a friend and a wonderful guy and Jimmy Johnson’s going to go and the whole deal. And don’t you count that car out.

That’s going to be a fast car. That’s going to open a lot of eyes. That’s a real state of the art current NASCAR. Which is really built by Dallara, I think the chassis. So that’s a serious company in Europe. That’s not in North Carolina, which I don’t mean to downgrade North Carolina, but they do stock car racing in North Carolina.

They race Dallara’s there now and they’re fast and the drivers are really. Really good. There’s no [00:31:00] slouches in NASCAR.

David Spitzer: I know Jean Paulo Dallara very well, been there many times and worked with him on a lot of programs for sure. Right? That’s a pretty stout car. They made a lot of modifications to to get it to run 24 hours, but it’s going to be stout.

They

Jim Busby: needed to also get downforce in the car, which is restricted by NASCAR. Sure. And downforce is going to be the key. And then you trim your down course out to get qualifying speed, but you prefer it in the race, particularly if it begins to rain. So I’m very excited about that. And let’s also remember that like anything on earth, There’s almost no politics that can’t be cured with a checkbook.

And so I got to go to Le Mans with one, the Kramer brothers and to BF Goodrich, which is an enormous company that has great sway and dealers all over Europe. You know, we did it one in one country. We’d have the Italian dealers come. We’d go to France and have the French dealers come. We’d go to England and all the British dealers would come.

When we came up against some [00:32:00] question that May turn out to be somewhat political. It tended to get solved at a different level than mine. So I was never really crushed by politics while I was going to the mall. And frankly speaking, no matter what you think about politics at the mall, they’re racers and ultimately the politics go out the window for the love of the race.

Yep. And they did it every time and they’ve done it every time. And you show me a series that runs in America or anywhere else in the world that doesn’t have political upheaval. We’re looking at Formula One right now. It’s almost a fistfight every race. It always gets cured when you light the motors up.

You know, it’s like you say, have you ever been frightened? Sure, I guess so. What stops it when the engine starts? You don’t think about it anymore. It doesn’t, nothing happens. There’s no

David Spitzer: politics, there’s no nothing. Then the focus comes. Have you had a chance to work with Jim France over the years? Have you gotten to know Jim at all?

Jim Busby: I got to

David Spitzer: know big

Jim Busby: bill France and that’s an experience. And I [00:33:00] didn’t realize the garages at Talladega closed at five o’clock at night. And everybody got their lunch pail and went home. I just thought it was like sports car racing in America. You pull the motor up 6 30 and three in the morning, you put it back in the car and wake up in the morning, groggy and go race.

We decided not to go home. Garage people told us to go home and the next thing I know, I’m sitting in Bill Francis’ office staring at him. That was a very imposing man. It didn’t take very long at all before I saw it exactly his way, . And so I think that like we all deal with politics of different sorts.

And let’s face it, when you’re going to LA Mall, you’re going to a foreign country. It’s their soil. Yeah. They call the shots.

David Spitzer: Give us your thoughts on hypercars, this current generation of premier class at Lamar, a couple of characteristics that I have noted and shared with the fans. I think it’s really unique the way they take all the cars, the wind tunnel now to try to get them all in the same window for downforce, and they’re using half shaft torque sensors to be able to measure the power output to try and get them equal, maybe talk a little bit about [00:34:00] hypercar, where that category is and any of your thoughts on that.

Jim Busby: When Tesla came out with the S model. I bought one. I still drive it today, 10 years and 80, 000 miles on that car. And it’s never missed a lick. The company on the other hand makes great spaceships, but their service is questionable in their automobile industry. And then we’re comparing it to companies have been in business for a hundred years.

So the car is a wonderful car. I still drive it today. I love it. A flip side of that. My favorite car that I own is a 2015 Corvette front engine, big V8. I love the feel of that car. And it’s a great road car for me and my wife. I’ve had it all. And I’ve driven wonderful Porsches and Porsches loaned me cars over the years when I was driving their cars.

And I just think it comes down to a particular model of car from a particular manufacturer. So if you say. The new rules are going to be predicated on dyno runs and torque shaft sensors and all that kind of stuff. So be it, whoever gets that right, it’s going to win. If [00:35:00] you think you’re going to even up the field by giving everybody the same drive shaft and all that, it never happens, Roger Penske always wins.

David Spitzer: Even

Jim Busby: at Indy

David Spitzer: with all the same cars and the same engines, Roger always

Jim Busby: wins, right? Right, so I was asked one time, because the big question for an American racing car driver is, when are you going to go to Indy? Have you ever wanted to go to Indy? Sure, but I won at Riverside twice. Got a podium too. And I lived in Southern California.

That’s like a kid from Indy winning the 500 because I lived in Southern California and I had seen Phil Hill and Lance Raventlow scarab there when I was a teenager sitting in the grandstands with my father. So I was a fiend for that. And when I won there, it was bigger than a kid from Indy for me winning the 500.

I was asked one time, so what do you think about this class or that class? Or did you ever want to go to Indy? And so on so forth. My answer was always the same. I never went to Indy because Roger Penske never called me. So that was the end of it. If you ever sit on a [00:36:00] porch in Ohio in the middle of summer with a bug zapper on the porch next to you, I think of Indy as zzzzzzz.

Just like, cause man, those concrete walls stop you really quick. And they hurt a lot of people. So if you’re going to go there and hang around a bug zap, you better be pretty sure you’re not going in it. And that best way to do that is to be in the best car. And I wouldn’t go to Indy. I had some offers to go to Indy.

I didn’t want to go without Roger Penske and he never called me and I never went to Indy. So the answer to your question is. If you’re going to do an equivalency formula where you decide who’s got this and who’s got that, and you try to equal them up, it doesn’t matter. Wayne Taylor and Roger Penske are always going to win.

I don’t care what the equality formula is. It doesn’t work that way. The best team wins, and that is the best part of motor racing. The best drivers and the best teams always win. Because the best teams read the rule book and figure out the equivalencies and do it right. And the best drivers bring them back [00:37:00] a lot.

David Spitzer: So tell us about a few other of your co drivers that you’ve worked with over the years. I started thinking about Roger Penske and some of the larger than life figures that you’ve been around. Certainly the Kramer brothers are very famous. In fact, we had doc Bundy on this program, Vern Schupan, Pete Halsmer, Jochen Mass.

Any stories you want to share on some of your co drivers?

Jim Busby: You did your homework. I have had the benefit and the joy. Uh, driving with some of the best drivers in the world. My wife would say, well, what do you think about this? And think about that? I said, well, I think he’ll make me look good. Cause that’s all I ever thought about.

I’ve been a teammate of Bob Wallach’s. I’ve been a teammate of Derek Bell’s. I’ve been a teammate of Rick Newbs. I never drove with Pete Halsmer, but he was on our team. So I never had a direct experience teaming up with him, but Jokin Mass is as good as they get. And when Jokin Mass and I drove together, I’m six feet tall with Seven foot legs.

My wife, who’s five one in a theater, I’m shorter than she is. So with mass and I, we were very quick [00:38:00] and we led a lot of races, even at the time, difficult BF Goodrich tires and almost won a few and should have won the Daytona 24 hour three times. I couldn’t see over his steering wheel and he couldn’t reach my pedals.

So there’s more to it than, is he a great driver? Does he fit or do you fit? And so he would wear a pad taped to his back so he could reach. So you didn’t have seat inserts. You could slide in during a pit stop piece of foam and sit on it. So I could see over the steering wheel. Right. He’s all body and no legs.

So that was always difficult with me because of the length of my legs. And that came up with lots of different people. When I drove the historic formula one cars for the last eight or nine years of my life, including a Ferrari, I had to cut the toes off my shoes and tape my toes. In order to sit in the car,

David Spitzer: fit your feet down in the foot.

Well, right down

Jim Busby: jammed up against the cowl and they had to move the steering wheel back with the paddle shift Ferraris in the formula one cars. There’s not a lot of room in there. And Schumacher was a couple of inches [00:39:00] shorter than me. And we usually drove the same cars. So we kind of melded together in those cars, but with any other drivers, look about a lot.

It was a great test driver. Ferrari was a different size than me. And so we struggled in the same cars. Eventually what happened is I just did all my own testing at Ferrano when I was working with Ferrari. But with Porsche, remember that in the very first 956s and 62s, those were adjustable seats, pull up a lever.

And slide it forward and back. Yeah. That didn’t help that I was so short in the body that I couldn’t see over the steering wheel. Right. So we’d use a smaller steering wheel, which took more effort. Remember, this is pre power steering. That was a little bit of a problem, is finishing a long race without arm fatigue.

Rick Newp and I had an interesting experience. They decided to race these big German sports cars, which are really fast, believe me, at Charlotte. On the Roval? On the Roval, pre new Roval, this was old Roval, this was old Roval, where the [00:40:00] transition would just about bash your brains out. And so Noop and I go out at Charlotte in this 962, which is much, much faster around that oval than a NASCAR.

That’s for sure. I come in and I’m bashing my brains out. The top of a 956 or 62 doors is plexiglass. It’s not fiberglass. So I’m bashing the window out of this thing with my head, because when I go up on the banking, the g forces are so heavy, there’s no possibility you can hold your head up. I don’t care how long you worked out at the gym, it’s not going to work.

Noop and I are talking, and we decide to go get surgical tubing in a hardware store in downtown Charlotte, and lo and behold, they’ve got it. And when we start that race, I’m starting the race and I’ve got this surgical tubing tied to the side of my helmet, down under my left arm. We’re going backwards around this oval.

And so my head, I’m leaning over in the car, like waiting for the rest to start praying because I’m about to get a terrible cramp. As soon as the race started, your head would just go up straight and we ran the whole race. [00:41:00] I think we finished second there and new people remember that story because we both suffered from the same problem.

David Spitzer: Once your neck muscles give up, you don’t get them back. That point you’re along for the ride.

Jim Busby: Yeah. I can remember thinking of that. It’s funny. You brought that up because one Indy 500 that I remember, you remember Jerry Grant drove for Dan Gurney? Jerry was a great guy and I knew him right up to the end.

Great guy. Anyway, Jerry was not a guy who lived at the gym. It’s a very gracious way of saying it. Yeah. Right. But he was a hell of a good race driver, but he was a. Enormous guy, and he stuck out of an Indy Eagle like a foot and his head was higher than the roll bar and so on. So at the end of the 500, Jerry Grant is leading the 500.

He’s going to win it. It’s clear he’s in the fastest car and he’s run the smartest race. And Gurney’s put together a good program. I, at the time, was working at Gurney’s, so I knew Jim. I’m watching it on TV. And pretty soon he comes out of turn four, his head might as well have been laying over on the fuel filler.

Poor guy was leaned over. He couldn’t hold his head up anymore in the [00:42:00] 500 and he’s going to win. So at the last minute, he can’t do it any longer. He pulls in and they tug his head over and put the strap around and send him back out and he finishes sick. in the race. And he of course argued that it should have been over on the previous lap and everything, but he lost, but that was where I got the idea.

Well, why don’t we just pull our heads the other way with a rubber band and have a rubber band? But we did find surgical tubing and we invented these things under our arm and attached to the side of the helmet and pulled us over. So as soon as you’re up to speed, your head’s up straight. Perfect.

Perfectly. And now everybody’s got those things. They’ve got Hans devices and all this stuff we never had. And even the Hans device now can be adjusted to give you stability too. And then the padding on the side of the cars, the later Ferraris that I drove 2003, four or five, they had big padding. And if you got uncomfortable, you could lean up against it, but the vibration would hurt your eyesight.

So you didn’t want to do it all. Great stuff.

David Spitzer: Do you have any one last story that you wanted to [00:43:00] try to work in? We got to wrap this up. If you got one more. More that’s tickling around in there. I know you mentioned you had a couple of real gems that you were going to hold out. I think those have probably come through, but anything else that comes to mind?

Jim Busby: I’ll tell

David Spitzer: you

Jim Busby: a little piece that’s fascinating to me. And it’s why Portia wins them all the time. When they decide to Portia is a hot rod company. I’m a hot rod guy. I grew up in Pasadena. I watched the guys come home on the GI bill and take a 32 Ford and pull the fenders off and put a modified flat in it.

I watched him take a Harley Davidson and strip the fenders off and turn it into a Triumph. It looked like it had the buddy seat on it and so on and they’d lower them and do everything. I’m a hot rod guy. I still am today. I love 32 Fords. I got a 32 Ford that’ll smoke most of these cars. I love Porsche because think about it.

If you go to Daytona this year, or Lamont this year, what will you see? You will see a 1963 Porsche nine 11 with fat offenders in the engine turned around and a different [00:44:00] engine which has more horsepower and the suspension lowered. It’s still a 63 9 11 mm-Hmm rear engine car that’s been modified. It’s a hot rod and I’m a hot rod guy and I love doing it.

And look, the very first nine 62s we got had 625 horsepower. And so people didn’t get killed when they’d hit things, they’d get hurt. We got banged up a bit pretty soon. We killed people and we killed them at Lamar. We killed them at Daytona. We killed them. Poor Manfred Winklehock was killed at the most port.

Why? Because the car was supposed to have 625 horsepower. They

David Spitzer: turned it up to 900.

Jim Busby: We had two qualifying motors, one from Ed Pink and one from Alvin Springer at 910 horsepower on the dyno and one that we turned up for qualifying at Daytona that had a thousand horsepower. It was a hot rod motor. It had an aluminum

David Spitzer: chassis, man.

That’s the recipe.

Jim Busby: So what did we do? We here, if you could be here, you’d see one away. Eric has done the beautiful drawings of this car. 108 C2. What does C stand for? [00:45:00] Chapman. Jimmy Chapman built chassis for Indy cars and he was here in Orange County. When I folded the tub up over me at Miami and broke my shoulder and two ribs and had to be back the next week to race, we sent the car to Dave Clem up in Atlanta.

He rebuilt the car, sent it back. It’s still a sheet metal chassis. And we’ve got all this horsepower. Well, I ended up doing is building a honeycomb tub, which we made Chapman tub numbers and Portia was so happy with it, that if you look in the Porsche record of the nine 62s, you will see C’s after certain ones.

And those are the Cassies we built right here in Laguna beach and race them out.

David Spitzer: Well, that is a perfect place to stop. It’s so hard to stop. Cause I know Jim, we could go on and on. I am going to do my very best to come and visit you. I think we’re left savoring those last bites. And just that notion of you as a racer and a hot rodder matches your Southern California history.

It matches all the stories and it really ties it together. So I want to thank you for the extraordinary pleasure of spending this hour [00:46:00] with you on behalf of all the fans that are here, I look forward to more people getting a chance to see this with the recording that David prepared and we get this laid down.

It’s quite a nice time, Jim. Thank you.

Jim Busby: My pleasure for sure.

Crew Chief Eric: This episode has been brought to you by the Automobile Club of the West and the ACO USA. From the awe inspiring speed demons that have graced the track to the courageous drivers who have pushed the limits of endurance, the 24 Hours Le Mans is an automotive spectacle like no other. For over a century, the 24 Hours Le Mans has urged manufacturers to innovate for the benefit of future motorists, and it’s a celebration of the relentless pursuit of speed and excellence in the world of motorsports.

To learn more about, or to become a member of the ACO USA, look no further than www. lemans. org, click on English in the upper right corner, and then click on the ACO members [00:47:00] tab for club offers. Once you’ve become a member, you can follow all the action on the Facebook group, ACO USA members club, and become part of the legend with future evening with the legend meetups.

This episode has been brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports as part of our motoring podcast network. For more episodes like this, tune in each week for more exciting and educational content from organizations like The exotic car marketplace, the motoring historian, brake fix, and many others. If you’d like to support Grand Touring Motorsports and the motoring podcast network, sign up for one of our many sponsorship tiers at www.

patreon. com forward slash GT Motorsports. Please note that the content, opinions, and materials presented and expressed in this episode are those of its creator, and this episode has been published with their consent. If you have any inquiries about this program, please contact the creators of this episode [00:48:00] via email or social media as mentioned in the episode.

Highlights

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

00:00 Introduction to ‘Evening with the Legend’
00:34 Jim Busby’s Early Racing Career
00:44 Jim’s Association with BFGoodrich
01:04 Jim’s Notable Victories and Team Management
01:32 Introduction of Host David Spitzer
02:22 Jim Busby’s First Le Mans Experience
04:18 The Mystique and Danger of Le Mans
05:13 Building a Winning Team for Le Mans
07:47 The Unique Experience of Racing at Le Mans
12:51 The Importance of Staying Out of the Pits
13:35 The Le Mans Experience Beyond the Racetrack
16:27 BFGoodrich and the Journey to Le Mans
17:54 The Challenges of Racing with BFGoodrich Tires
22:49 The 1982 Le Mans Controversy
24:41 The Kramer Brothers’ Racing Legacy
25:11 Qualifying Drama and Engine Troubles
26:06 Rebuilding the Engine in the Rain
27:31 Winning Against All Odds
28:07 The Importance of Porsche
29:42 Le Mans Politics and American Teams
30:17 Excitement for Le Mans 2023
31:27 Challenges of Racing at Le Mans
32:50 Reflections on Racing and Politics
37:00 Co-Drivers and Racing Stories
43:10 Innovations and Hot Rod Culture
45:36 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Bonus Content

Learn More

Evening With A Legend (EWAL)

We hope you enjoyed this presentation and look forward to more Evening With A Legend throughout this season. Sign up for the next EWAL TODAY!

Evening With A Legend is a series of presentations exclusive to Legends of the famous 24 Hours of Le Mans giving us an opportunity to bring a piece of Le Mans to you. By sharing stories and highlights of the big event, you get a chance to become part of the Legend of Le Mans with guests from different eras of over 100 years of racing.

Jim’s recollections of night racing on the Mulsanne Straight are electric. “It was more dangerous than I imagined… and more thrilling than I ever dreamed.” He described the eerie emptiness of grandstands at 3am, the return of fans at dawn, and the visceral tension that defines the race. “People don’t come to see drivers die – they come to see them escape.”

One of the most jaw-dropping stories involved qualifying a Porsche 924 Carrera GTR (above) on BFGoodrich street tires. When the engine faltered, Porsche mechanics rebuilt it—in the rain, on the back of a flatbed truck. “Water dripping off their noses onto the parts,” Busby recalled. That rebuilt engine carried them to a GT class win.

Busby navigated the politics of Le Mans with strategic alliances—BFGoodrich’s global presence and Kremer’s European credibility. But he insists that racing always wins out: “When the engines start, politics disappear.”

At heart, Busby remains a California hot-rodder. He praised the 2023 Garage 56 NASCAR entry as a bold evolution, blending American muscle with European precision. And he sees Porsche’s legacy as a testament to modification and performance. “A 1963 911 with fat fenders and a turned-around engine – that’s a hot rod,” he said. His own Chapman-built C2 chassis, raced under Porsche’s banner, exemplifies this ethos: innovation born from necessity.

Jim Busby’s career spans victories at Daytona, Monza, and Le Mans. He’s raced with legends like Derek Bell, Bob Wolleck, and Jochen Mass. But his stories aren’t just about speed – they’re about survival, strategy, and soul. “Le Mans isn’t just a race,” he said. “It’s the race. The place. The people.”

ACO USA

To learn more about or to become a member of the ACO USA, look no further than www.lemans.org, Click on English in the upper right corner and then click on the ACO members tab for Club Offers. Once you become a Member you can follow all the action on the Facebook group ACOUSAMembersClub; and become part of the Legend with future Evening With A Legend meet ups.

This content has been brought to you in-part by support through...

Screen to Speed: Bel Wells (@stormmalina)

INIT eSports

July 8, 2024

Screen to Speed: Bel Wells (@stormmalina)

In Episode 13 of INIT Talks, host Elz Indriani (@elzindriani) welcomes Bel Wells (@StormMalina), a passionate sim racer and streamer specializing in iRacing. Bell shares her journey into the world of competitive sim racing and how she’s built an engaging online presence while mastering one of the most realistic racing simulators.

This episode delves into Bel’s experiences in the virtual racing community, from honing her skills on iRacing to connecting with fans through her streams. She discusses the challenges and rewards of balancing competitive racing with content creation, offering insights into how she keeps her audience entertained while pursuing her racing goals.

Whether you’re an iRacing enthusiast, a streamer, or someone inspired by stories of passion and perseverance, this episode is packed with motivation and valuable tips. Don’t miss this exciting conversation with StormMalina, as she shares her love for racing and her vision for the future of sim racing.

Watch the livestream

Tune in everywhere you stream, download or listen!

Highlights

00:00 Introduction to Screen to Speed
00:34 Meet the Hosts: Els and Belle
01:31 Technical Difficulties and NASCAR Chicago Recap
02:30 Sim Racing and Streaming Journey
05:07 Pets and Personal Life 07:19 Racing in iRacing and Favorite Series
24:59 Porsche E Cup Experience
32:28 Balancing Streaming and Personal Life
42:54 Passion for Racing and Gaming
43:29 iRating and Track Challenges
46:00 First Wins and Racing Experiences
56:48 Streaming and Community
01:06:12 Learning and Practicing Tracks
01:09:58 Favorite and Least Favorite Tracks
01:12:24 Real-Life Racing Aspirations
01:21:59 Nervousness and Confidence in Racing
01:25:05 Different Streaming Styles
01:26:40 Nostalgia for the Past
01:27:05 Global Connections
01:28:27 League vs. Official Races
01:29:18 Screen to Speed Events
01:42:44 Building and Learning from PCs
01:45:51 The Fun of Sim Racing
01:52:22 Drifting and Dirt Racing
02:01:52 Wrapping Up and Social Media

Transcript

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Welcome to Screen to Speed powered by Ennit Esports. In this podcast, we dive into the journeys of remarkable individuals making waves in sim racing and bridging the virtual with the real. From the thrill of digital circuits to the roar of real life racetracks, we explore the passion, Dedication and innovation that drives the world of motorsports.

We’ll hear from athletes, creators, and pioneers sharing their stories, insights, and the powerful ways sim racing is connecting communities and creating pathways into motorsports. So buckle up. Screen The Speed starts now. Hello everyone! Hello

Elz Indriani: Yvonne! Hello everyone! Welcome to the 13th episode of In It Talks with me, Els, and my dear friend here, Stormalina, [00:01:00] Belle. Hi! Belle! Finally, we made it. We made it to the talks. Guys, I’ve been, I’ve been wanting to invite her into this innie talks because I really love her vibes in the stream. Like, I really love you, Belle.

You’re the best. That

makes me so happy.

Elz Indriani: Hi, by the way! Oh my god, Pepsiman! Yes! Oh my god, Pepsiman, you got stuff to do, so you’ll be lurking.

Bel Wells: I do love the lyric, yes.

Elz Indriani: Oh wait, I’m on the wrong microphone, let me see. Hold on. Okay, is it better now? Is it better now? Oh my god. Belle, I even messed up the audio on the screen.

Bel Wells: I understand. It’s probably because I’m here, I’ve cursed it. No, you’re not. The psychological difficulties have passed to you.

Elz Indriani: You’re, you are, you are a blessing in this community, Belle. Seriously. You want me to

Bel Wells: send my husband over? He’ll fix it.

Elz Indriani: Your husband is the [00:02:00] technical. guy behind everything. Oh, is it better?

Okay, awesome. So I was using, okay, so guys, long story short I just come back from Chicago for the NASCAR Chicago, so this is my first day turning on my PC. So if something mess up, please understand. Okay? I just don’t know. So by the way, Val, how you doing today?

Bel Wells: Very good, very good.

Elz Indriani: Very

Bel Wells: good.

Elz Indriani: Have you had a good day?

So, how’s it going? Like, how’s SimRacing? And, how is streaming?

Bel Wells: Uh, pretty good. It’s pretty mellow. I actually like streaming a lot more than I thought I would. Especially for being, like, quite shy. I enjoyed it a lot more than I ever thought I would. And the community that it’s made. Very nice.

Elz Indriani: So how long you’ve been doing this?

Streaming and SimRacing.

Bel Wells: I’ve been doing it since about [00:03:00] 2020, almost, maybe? I took a break for like six months in the middle there, but right around 2020 is when I started.

Elz Indriani: Oh wait, so you’ve been streaming since 2020?

Bel Wells: Yeah, it’s been a while.

Elz Indriani: A

Bel Wells: COVID streamer, COVID iRacer,

Elz Indriani: COVID pride. High five. We are the COVID generation of simracing.

Hi Sharksboy, Bell is so kind and funny, hacker for Razer. I completely agree with you on that. By the way, Sharksboy, hello. Yes, Bell is one of the best. Like, I’m watching your stream sometimes. Like, when I’m working, I’ll be lurking on your stream. Like, I don’t know, like, everyday you’re doing random stuff.

Like, sometimes you’re doing IMSA, sometimes You did the IMSA Vintage, I think, when I was watching you. And then you do, I don’t know. Yeah, that’s my favorite. I do

Bel Wells: love Oval, yeah. I don’t do as much Oval as I used to, but I still like the [00:04:00] Draftmasters a lot.

Elz Indriani: Why do you like the Draftmasters?

Bel Wells: Oval is so fun, and Dirt Oval is also really fun.

I like those in the sprint cars.

Elz Indriani: Oh yeah, Dirt Oval is so fun, but I never got into it. I don’t know why.

Bel Wells: It’s really fun, it’s like a complete different, I started in ovals, I was intimidated by roads, and I couldn’t, I had a hard time memorizing tracks, there’s so many left turns and right turns, and the oval was just like left, left, left, left, I could do that, I could start there, because there’s people all around you, and I was worried about touching everybody.

Small.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, oval, I feel like in oval you don’t need to memorize the track, but it’s more like you’re focusing on your race. Yeah, and like

Bel Wells: momentum more.

Elz Indriani: Yes, momentum.

Bel Wells: It’s definitely different.

Elz Indriani: It’s, it’s a different road to road racing, but I feel like you can bring what you learned in OVO into, into road racing.

OVO.

Bel Wells: [00:05:00] Yeah. Definitely.

Elz Indriani: Uh huh. Fluffy A5. And it’s like vice

Bel Wells: versa, I think, too.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. So, um. Belle’s cat would like to be interviewed too. Hi! Belle’s

Bel Wells: cat! This is Ivan.

Elz Indriani: Ivan! Oh, that’s Ivan. Hi! Oh wait, you have a dog too, right? So you have a cat and a dog. Oh my god, here’s your dog. Can we see your dog? Oh my god, guys.

We have specially

Bel Wells: summoned him. Timmy!

Elz Indriani: Timmy!

Fluffy Ivan. Yes, Ivan is so fluffy. And I wanna see the doggo too now. Belle, I’m sorry I put you into work in this interview. It’s okay. It’s okay.

Bel Wells: This

Elz Indriani: is

Bel Wells: Timber.

Elz Indriani: Timber, hi! Hello! Oh my god. Oh, got a treat. Hi, Timber. Hi, Ivan. Oh wait, they get along together? Like the cat and the dog?

Bel Wells: Um, now, kind of, yeah. For the most part. [00:06:00] They didn’t before. It took about a year.

Elz Indriani: Oh. It took about a year for Ivan and Timber to get along. So, yeah.

Bel Wells: The cat is still really mean, but Denver is

Elz Indriani: fine.

You’re so

Bel Wells: mean. No.

Elz Indriani: Even your profile picture, I think. Your profile picture on Twitch. Yeah, it’s

Bel Wells: Ivan.

Elz Indriani: My new cat. Sorry about the Dutch team. Oh yeah. Wait, what’s happening in Europe right now? Guys, can you guys give me a little explanation about what is happening right now in Europe? Like, is it like the Euro?

Bel Wells: I don’t know what’s happening.

Elz Indriani: Oh,

Bel Wells: soccer? Or football?

Elz Indriani: I

Bel Wells: do believe, yes. I actually was just playing, um, I don’t think they call it FIFA anymore, but I was playing the soccer game on. Oh

Elz Indriani: yeah? Oh yeah? I came

Bel Wells: past with my husband.

Elz Indriani: So I [00:07:00] think it must

Bel Wells: be.

Elz Indriani: The European Championships football. Right, right, right.

Yeah, it’s so Every time I’m checking on social media, like Twitter or something, like, we won’t have someone talking about it, like, to the point, like, what is happening here? Like, I thought there’s, like, a World Cup happening. So, Belle, by the way, um, so, you said that you started streaming. Since 2020, so that is pretty much during the pandemic, Emma, and what was your first game back then?

Was, were you like, got into iRacing directly, or? I

Bel Wells: think it was F1, we probably started with, I don’t remember if it was F1 2018, or 2019, was there a 2019? Or if we started with 2020, but it was definitely the F1 game.

Oh.

Bel Wells: And we had our driving lines on and everything, and we were just playing with the controller.

Mhm. And then we saw, uh, I think Jimmy Broadbent and, like, Matt Malone on [00:08:00] YouTube. My husband likes to watch YouTube videos of people and, uh, saw them racing with the actual wheels and he was like, Oh boy, I think we should try this.

Elz Indriani: I think we should get a wheel.

Bel Wells: Yeah, I think we should try this and I was like, okay, but you have to put it away every day because it takes up a lot of room

Yeah, and I don’t

Bel Wells: think we put it away ever We bought a new one, a bigger one, moved it into the middle of the room

Elz Indriani: That’s my biggest problem with simracing, cause simracing takes a lot of space, like I don’t need a lot of space I think that’s the downside to me speaking about simracing, but other than that, I never regret my decision about getting into simracing, like, really.

Bel Wells: Same. So much joy has come from it. Mm

Elz Indriani: hmm. Yeah, it is. So much

Bel Wells: fun.

Elz Indriani: It is. And, were you, like, I don’t know, like, [00:09:00] How did you get into iRacing at some point? Because you’re starting from F1 game and you said like I

Bel Wells: think just watching the other streamers on YouTube. My husband found the game and Oh I think we just tried it.

Mm hmm.

Bel Wells: He had an account just for himself and I was like, Oh, this kind of looks fun. And eventually had to get it for myself.

Elz Indriani: Uh huh, you got your own subscription, and

Bel Wells: then you just, uh Uh huh, which was kind of nice, he knew all the things I already, like, the tracks that I liked, and the cars I like to practice in, so We bought all that stuff at once and got him at, like, I can’t remember, the 50 piece club or something of iRacing?

Elz Indriani: Oh! Yeah, we

Bel Wells: committed.

Elz Indriani: Wow, you’re fully committed to iRacing. Yeah. I just found a resale. You just wanna race, huh? Interesting, and it got me to another question. So, were you coming from, like, a motorsport family, like, family who’s into racing?

Bel Wells: Not at all. My family is, like, not into [00:10:00] sports at all, not into racing.

Uh, my dad would play video games with me when I was little, but, really not into sports anybody. I really like video games. I think I’m probably, I just played volleyball in high school and that’s really, I’m not that into sports either. I like to participate in them.

Elz Indriani: That’s the only sport that you do?

Bel Wells: Yes, I did track and field, but yeah.

Volleyball really was the main sport I

Elz Indriani: did.

Bel Wells: Racing.

Elz Indriani: Right, right. And what makes you love racing? Like, what makes you really into sim racing? What makes it fun?

Bel Wells: It’s like really adrenaline y. It’s so fun. You race with other people, but it’s also against yourself, which I really like. I love beating my old times.

I like besting myself. I also like seeing, um, how all the people, like different people around the world, you can race with all of them. iRacing is just so [00:11:00] cool like that. I was thinking about the old games that I would play on the Xbox with my dad and you just play like, Side by side with your friends and stuff and now you can play with people across the world and like 30 different people Real people, not AI.

It’s crazy. It’s still hard for me to believe that they’re all real They’re all real? Yeah, it’s so cool

Elz Indriani: Well, Belle, if we are on the same split one day racing, you will see me racing like an AI. Don’t worry, you will meet your first AI ever

Bel Wells: We’ve all been there

Elz Indriani: Hi, by the way, Aaron! Aaron! Transmission! Oh my god!

Ash! Hi, guys! Hi! Welcome to the 13th episode of In It Talks with me, Elf, and my dear friend, Belle. So, we all know it’s just one of her many personalities. Brian. So, Brian is the other personality, I see. Hi, guys. How are you

Bel Wells: doing?

Elz Indriani: Love you, guys. [00:12:00] Thanks for hanging today. Finally, I’m back. So, yes, last week, we didn’t have, we didn’t have an in it talk last week because it was the 4th of July.

I was literally inviting Belle, like, Belle, let’s do it on Thursday. And Belle was like, like, cool.

Bel Wells: Cool. That’s a really great

Elz Indriani: idea, Els. And I look into the calendar and I was like, Jesus, okay, 4th of July. We had to postpone the interview because everybody’s going out, you know. When

Bel Wells: did you get back from the NASCAR in Illinois?

When was that?

Elz Indriani: Um, yesterday.

Bel Wells: Oh my gosh.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, I literally just got back. So I kinda extend my stay in Chicago, like meeting people and stuff, so yeah. But it was so fun. Have you ever get into the NASCAR race before? Never? Never.

Bel Wells: Uh uh. I thought about it, we looked into it, and we just never pulled the trigger.

I [00:13:00] would definitely Yeah, I think I would go see something smaller maybe to start, but I just don’t know. Something closer would probably be better, and closest to me is Vegas, I think.

Elz Indriani: Is it Vegas or Phoenix, the closest to you?

Bel Wells: Um, pretty equal, really. It’s probably about six or seven, eight hour drives. It’s not that bad.

Elz Indriani: That’s pretty Well, it’s very

Bel Wells: warm.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. But, I mean, if you want to go to Vegas, I can, I can take you to Vegas. There will be another race in Vegas, like, in October, I think. NASCAR. Yeah, I

Bel Wells: think that’s when it was last year.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, so.

Bel Wells: That’s when it’s not super hot also.

Elz Indriani: No, no, no. I would never go to Vegas like during the August, July.

It’s

Bel Wells: so crazy. Yeah, in the summer.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, summertime is hot.

Bel Wells: Too hot to be outside.

Elz Indriani: Do you get a heatwave in Utah? Oh, by the way guys, Belle is from Utah. Uh, right

Bel Wells: now, yes I am. Right now, for sure, it’s definitely hot, like a [00:14:00] hundred degrees, I think tomorrow’s gonna be a hundred and one, and the next day, and then it cools down.

Oh,

Elz Indriani: Jesus, that’s crazy.

Bel Wells: Yeah, it’s hot. It’s like being a body of water or inside.

Elz Indriani: It feels like you’re like simracing in the oven, like crazy hot.

Bel Wells: Yeah, sim racing in the summer feels much sweatier than the winter. I’m ready for the winter to come back.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. I’d

Bel Wells: say that’s a downside of sim racing too. True.

It’s very hot in the summertime.

Elz Indriani: I just, I just noticed that when I moved to California. Because in Chicago we don’t really have that. Like, it’s not really hot in Chicago. So, I never got this kind of struggle in my life. And then I moved to California. Now you’re like

Bel Wells: dripping.

Elz Indriani: I was dripping so bad. Every time I’m streaming, like, dude, this feels like sitting on a real race car and you’re like, I don’t know, just sweating.

Okay, it’s our practice, Belle. It’s our practice to become a race car driver for one day.

Bel Wells: Yeah, I was sweating. I can’t [00:15:00] imagine wearing like a helmet and full gear and stuff. I can’t even wear gloves. It makes me too sweaty just thinking about it.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, like those Race car drivers are crazy in my opinion, like, yeah, those suits and everything, helmets, balaclava.

And you’re sitting in a race car, it’s not like you’re having an AC inside. You don’t even have an audio player. Adjusting

Bel Wells: your vent to blow on you. Yeah.

Elz Indriani: Adjusting. That’s why I’ve said like, one day if I become a race car driver, I just want a CD player on my car. Please let me listen to a song when I’m racing.

Bel Wells: I do love that. Some people don’t like listening to music when they race. I have to.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, me too. I have to.

Bel Wells: It distracts me in a good way. Do you

Elz Indriani: play music sometimes in your stream?

Bel Wells: Um, I don’t play it over my stream now. I know you can do like a There’s a way you can do it so that you don’t get the copyright strikes, but I’ve never troubled to find it out.

Elz Indriani: Ah. [00:16:00] Yeah, I played sometimes and sometimes my thought got muted. Like, in the middle of the stream or something like that, but at this

Bel Wells: point,

Elz Indriani: I don’t care. Like, if you

Bel Wells: want to be Yeah, right, if you don’t reach the limit, you’re fine.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, as long as we’re not reaching the limit, we are fine. Oh wait, 106 two days ago for you?

That’s crazy! I was like, 101 and I already like, you know what? I’m gonna turn on the stream now, end the stream, and I’m gonna Time

to go. Yeah,

Elz Indriani: time to go. I need to get a fresh air. I’m so crazy. All right, so, Val, bye. Elves only listen to gangster rap when she drives. Yeah, so I can become more brilliant in Dwarf Masters, you know?

Bel Wells: It gets you in the right mood. Yeah, the right music for the right race. See?

Elz Indriani: See? As I always Gives you the

Bel Wells: right mood, the right zone.

Elz Indriani: Good music, good mood, good mood, good race, good race, good stream! So, [00:17:00] yes!

Bel Wells: You understand.

Elz Indriani: I understand the assignment here. Don’t worry, Ash. So, by the way, Belle, So, were you like, struggling getting into Irising at the first time?

Or were you like, instantly loving it?

Bel Wells: Uh, I pretty much loved it right off. I didn’t love it Like, as much as I love it now, it was a slow growth, but I definitely was fascinated with it, and I loved, I kind of like crashing, but it’s kind of a fun thing to do. You can’t do that in real life. I like that you can just be reckless, like, recklessly fast and try stuff, but then also, in the races with people, it’s like, you just tone it down.

I tone it way down in the races. I go from, like, wrecking all over the place in practice to, like, Just following people very slowly, but I like that you can try all of it there and iRacing and it really all feels so real and now with the rain, it’s even better. Do

Elz Indriani: you like it, [00:18:00] rain? It’s

Bel Wells: all so different.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, it is. I don’t know. I still struggle. I don’t, I don’t feel confident driving in the rain in all visuals, yeah? Cause, I don’t know, like, it’s

Bel Wells: weird. It is scary. And it’s different in every car. Like, I was just in a Mazda race the other day and I didn’t expect it to be raining. It was not what I remembered the other cars feeling like in the rain.

The Mazda felt completely different.

Elz Indriani: Very

Bel Wells: spinny.

Elz Indriani: I love that it’s

Bel Wells: also different.

Elz Indriani: Belle is the happiest I’ve ever seen when she wrecked or got wrecked. Were you happy? Like, super happy? Do you like actually enjoy it? Because some people kinda, not like afraid, but they get stressed out when they’re losing eye rating, safety rating.

Yeah,

Bel Wells: I don’t get stressed out about the eye rating loss. If I like reckon to another human person and they’re mad, or if it’s bad and I feel bad. [00:19:00] Really murdered them, makes me feel bad, that’s when I don’t feel good. But if I’m just like, wrecked myself or made a mistake, no biggie, I can try again. I learned my lesson.

That’s the best way for me to learn lessons, is crashing my car.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, sometimes you have to take a risk. Like, yeah. I think my problem is like, I don’t really Brave enough? I don’t, I’m not brave enough to take risks. That’s how I

Bel Wells: feel in races. I’m too scared to take risks in the races because I don’t want to upset anyone.

I don’t want to break the car.

Elz Indriani: Exactly. I don’t want to upset everyone or I don’t want someone to report me to sign a report. Yeah.

Bel Wells: Or like ruin somebody’s day. I don’t want to ruin anyone’s day. I want everyone to have fun.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, me too, but sometimes accidents happen, so I ruin someone’s day sometimes. Oh

Bel Wells: yeah, they pulled me before.

Days have been ruined.

Elz Indriani: I only got mad on the internet. Yeah, I mean, of course, Belle, I [00:20:00] was racing in IMSA, okay? We were in the formation lab, okay? I, I was pretty confident with my result. Like, oh yeah, I got this. And I got disconnected! Like Oh no! Of course I’m mad, Ash. Of course. It’s a good one. Of course.

It’s like, oh my god. So, what’s your favorite series in iRacing? Like, I saw you doing a lot of Insa, so I’m assuming you, the Multicars. I’m

Bel Wells: actually, I’m really afraid of Multiclass. But that’s a new love of mine, the fast cars and Multiclass, because it’s very exciting. It makes the races go by super fast. I also love P Cup.

Probably. That’s my favorite car, so maybe my, I don’t know if it’s my favorite series, but I like to drive that car. I really like all the series. I like to do Draftmaster, Ringmeister is, oh, I love it. Yes. I feel like that was made for me. I love, I love it. It’s so fun. It’s really fun this week too. Have you [00:21:00] ever, speaking of Rally.

And crashing. Have you ever tried the Mount Washington track on iRising?

Elz Indriani: Yes, I did. I did a dirt, like, yeah, like the softbox race kind of thing, like with the skidder. You’re just going downhill, like, oh my god, that’s super fun. That’s super

Bel Wells: fun. I’m very obsessed with that right now. For some reason, I like crashing down the mountain, like,

Elz Indriani: Crashing down the mountain, because, I

Bel Wells: get it.

Just going as fast as you can, and sometimes you don’t make the corner, but when you do and you, like, hit the apex, it’s, It’s so fun. It feels so fun.

Elz Indriani: It’s super, super fun. Yeah, there’s a lot of things you can do in Andersen. Like, you’re not just doing the GT3 race, like the sports car, in road course. You can do a lot of things.

Even just going down the mountains. Like, you can do that.

Bel Wells: And the time attacks and stuff. Sometimes I like to just drive as a ghost in the top splits and follow the fast people and see how fast it takes me to, [00:22:00] right? Trying to keep up.

Elz Indriani: Right, I mean, so you did some practice sometimes, like, you’re driving as a ghost in the top split, and how did you see yourself, like, if you compare yourself to the boys, to the guys in the top split?

Bel Wells: Uh, I feel way slower. I feel way slower, and I can, like, kind of mimic what they’re doing for a little bit if I’m right behind them, but I think there’s a lot of stuff I don’t I don’t understand, like, the techniques, and I don’t know, the, like, details of racing, it takes me a longer time to grasp. I feel like my husband understood Apex a lot quicker than me.

I’m still looking for him. Your husband understands Apex

Elz Indriani: more? I mean, sim racing, I feel like sim racing is not easy, as in like, it takes a lot of time for you to actually learn. Yeah, there’s a

Bel Wells: lot of details like trail breaking and stuff that took me a long time to understand and like oversteer and [00:23:00] understeer and all the little like lingo and It’s just bit by bit as you learn it.

It’s very a slow growth.

Elz Indriani: Yeah Do you see yourself as a fast learner like you’re fast at learning some things in synthesis or?

Bel Wells: Do you feel

Elz Indriani: like it takes more time for you to learn new things? Uh,

Bel Wells: I think it depends on the, it depends. Some things I’m faster at learning, and some things it takes me a longer time to grasp.

If that makes sense, like, Like, uh, it takes me a long time to memorize the left and rights of a turn, but, like, the feeling of a car and having it, uh, like, I cannot describe this. Like, the weight transfer, I feel like I understand that in my, in my body more. And I just, the logistics of, like, left and right of a track and when to accelerate, that’s a little bit harder.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, um, for me But, like, some things

Bel Wells: are much easier to grasp.

Elz Indriani: [00:24:00] Memorizing the track can be a challenge for me.

Bel Wells: That’s so hard for me. Yeah.

Elz Indriani: Like, but I just think it makes everything feels natural. Speaking about driving, that’s how I feel. Like, you can actually feel your tires. And that’s what I like in a sim.

Bye. I need to feel my tires, and sometimes in other sims I don’t really feel it, so it doesn’t feel natural to me. Like, I need to try harder in other games, but in iRacing, I need to try sometimes. I can be a tryhard, but iRacing the sim itself really help you to understand things, that’s how I see it.

Bel Wells: Mhm.

Elz Indriani: Oh, by the way, Luka! Hi, Luka. Hi, welcome in. Welcome to Indie Talks. And yes, Tor Malina is the one who raced in the Porsche E Cup Superstars All Stars. Oh my god! Oh my god, we need to talk about it. I got the, I got the topic in my mind. Like, we need to talk about it. Bel, [00:25:00] how was it? The Porsche E Cup. Like, you were racing with a lot of big streamers, a lot of

Bel Wells: pro gamers.

That still makes me nervous just thinking about it. That is crazy. It made me a lot better though. Talking about sponging people, I felt like I sponged some of them. It helps to watch good people race.

Elz Indriani: Which

Bel Wells: makes sense. It’s like learning.

Elz Indriani: So, how was it? How was the race? And, tell me more about it. Like, how did you get into the Porsche?

Like, did like, uh, contact you? Or like, how on earth? Yeah.

Bel Wells: They con I think they had somebody, a couple people drop out before the season started. And then they contacted a couple streamers to fill in the gaps. And I was one of them. Surprisingly. I was like, are you guys sure? Have you seen me race? I’m like, I could be a 600 iRating, I could be a 2000 iRating, it depends on the week.[00:26:00]

It depends on the

Elz Indriani: week. It depends on the week. And, but, you took the, you took the opportunity. Yeah,

Bel Wells: I’m so glad I did. It made me so nervous. I think it’s good to do things that scare you, though. This thing makes me nervous, too. It’s not that bad. It’s not as bad as the

Yeah, I mean The

Bel Wells: Portia All Stars, but it still makes me nervous.

But I think it’s good for you to I like doing things that scares me.

Elz Indriani: You like doing things that scares you. That’s a really good point, like, yeah. You like to decorate, basically, though. Yes,

Bel Wells: I feel like that leads to growth, usually.

Elz Indriani: Cause, seeing you, I see you as a unique girl. I don’t know how to put that into words, like, I can see that you’re a bit shy, like, Shy in a cute way, okay?

Like, I see you, like, every time I’m watching you streaming, like, Oh, she’s so cute. Like, you’re like shy, but on the other hand, you’re also like brave enough to [00:27:00] crash to take a risk. So, I don’t know, for me, you got the personality that what every streamer got to have. Like, you’re having fun in your stream.

It doesn’t matter whatever they’re doing. Yeah, I feel like

Bel Wells: fun matters.

Elz Indriani: It is. It is, like, really, like, you’re amazing just the way you are, Belle. Like, really. You’re so nice.

Bel Wells: That’s why I feel when I come to your stream, you’re just having fun. I swear you’re always in Draftmaster when I read you.

Elz Indriani: I’m kind of avoiding it now, Belle.

I got traumatized by Draftmaster.

Bel Wells: I’ve been there. I took a break.

Elz Indriani: It’s just, well, Draftmaster is great if you want to learn how to drafting. Like, yeah, okay, the race is not long, 20 laps. But

Bel Wells: Yeah, it’s like trial by fire. You’re like, you gotta learn this, and you gotta learn it quick. There’s no yellows. It’s all, you gotta go now.

Elz Indriani: Yeah,

Bel Wells: go.

Elz Indriani: Don’t use your brain, otherwise you’ll get busted. Yeah, never

Bel Wells: live.

Elz Indriani: Never

Bel Wells: live. [00:28:00] What is a yellow?

Elz Indriani: What is a yellow? Yellow doesn’t exist. But, right now, I’m getting more into the A class phase, I think. I’m getting into NIS a lot. Have you

Bel Wells: heard? Oh, fun. I used to love those. With the pit stops, it really can like change the strategy, especially with the, like, I’m not as aggressive like we were talking about, and uh, that helped with my oval a lot.

That was like playing into my strategy of gentle, gentle tire wear and no wrecks.

Elz Indriani: No wrecks, yeah. It really teach me about taking care of my tires. Like you really do it when you’re like. Killing your tires. Yeah. And the

Bel Wells: ovals. Yeah. And you’re like drifting up towards the wall . Oh yeah. So this

Elz Indriani: car never turn.

This car doesn’t like to turn like Yeah. It really teach you about driving a broken car. That’s how I feel. Oval. Like my cars. Oh. I also

Bel Wells: like doing that. I don’t mind driving with a meatball. Sometimes it’s fun to see like how the cars break and the ones that are completely undrivable. [00:29:00] Yeah. You’re not gonna drive a broken car in real life, but it’s weird to.

I wonder, I’m curious how realistic it is, feeling like artful to the right, when you smash into the wall and get wheel damage.

Elz Indriani: Oh wait, um, you’ve got to change an alternator in my charger. Ooooooh. Good luck have fun, by the way. Good luck have fun! Thank you so much for hanging. Thank you. And, well, by the way, ah, just, so, how is it like back again to the Porsche, to the Porsche event?

When was it? Uh, I think that was Was it like, beginning of the year?

Bel Wells: That was like, I think it ended around February, maybe? Or March? Oh! In the winter, maybe? And then there was like, Twitch Rivals. A lot happened all at once for me there. It all kind of blurred together. Mm hmm, mm hmm.

Elz Indriani: And Wait, [00:30:00] um, so you were racing with Love46, Matt Brody.

Yes, yes,

Bel Wells: and Emery.

Elz Indriani: Oh yeah, Emery too, oh my god. She’s, she’s crazy. It’s kind

Bel Wells: of like, both of them is like, they’re so good. They’re so good. They’re so fast.

Elz Indriani: Emery, Emery is so good. Like,

Bel Wells: she’s so good. She’s good at everything. She knows a lot about cars. I don’t really know anything about cars. I just like to drive them.

Elz Indriani: Huh, yeah, me neither. I don’t know a lot of the cars, but I think Emery, Emery is like, I think she’s racing in real life too, like sometimes. Is she?

Bel Wells: Yeah, she is. Oh, that’s so cool. Uh huh. That is, oh, that’s so cool too about iRacing, like Swaleo. Oh. And he, how he made the transition to real life racing and watching him do that.

Mm hmm. It is so fun. I’m like, proud of him. I’m so proud watching him.

Elz Indriani: And he’s doing really great.

Bel Wells: He’s doing so good.

Elz Indriani: Jesus, like, every time you see him, you see his race [00:31:00] result, like, on social media, on everything. You will see him in the podium, or he will be I know, it

Bel Wells: surprises me when it’s not a podium.

It’s, yeah. It’s just the guy racing now.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, I’m, Swellio, he’s really good. I got his He’s really

Bel Wells: good.

Elz Indriani: I got his online course, like, I bought it, like, last

Bel Wells: year. Yes,

Elz Indriani: yes. And it really helps. It’s,

Bel Wells: got a really good It really does. He has like the details that I was talking about that my brain just I don’t even think about that stuff like opening corners and

Yeah, he

Bel Wells: talks about it.

Very helpful. There’s all kinds of YouTube videos and

Elz Indriani: There’s

Bel Wells: all kinds of weird resources To help you learn how to drive

Elz Indriani: Yeah, so, um, I feel like you can see a lot of sim racer going fast But it’s not like everybody knows how to teach people And Zoelio can do it He knows how to teach people how to coach people.

I would love to book his coach, like the [00:32:00] one-on-one coach one day, like just to see if he notice something on my driveway. Uhhuh

Bel Wells: and what to I’m sure he would.

Elz Indriani: Yeah.

Bel Wells: I’m sure he would.

Elz Indriani: Ah, he will see. He will see something that I never seen in my life. Like, yeah. Oh, by the way, transmission motorsport, thank you so much for something to storm Melina.

Yes, guys. If you guys got a lot of free time, on the weekdays, you should turn into Stormalina’s Twitch channel. So, are you streaming everyday, Phil?

Bel Wells: I actually only stream Friday, Saturday, Sunday usually, when my husband’s at work.

Bel Wells: used to not even, we actually started streaming together like way back in COVID started and we would be like side by side doing ovals and uh he stopped and went back to work and I used to be a nanny and I just never really went back to my nanny jobs because the moms were there now and I just started raising more.[00:33:00]

Elz Indriani: I just started raising more. So like it’s Streaming is like your full time job, or are you still like

Bel Wells: No, I’m a pet sitter and dog walker.

Elz Indriani: Dog walker? That’s my main

Bel Wells: job. Yeah, I do kind of odd jobs all over, but that’s my main job.

Elz Indriani: Ah, I see. Animal lover. Oh my god, you really like animals, like, you love them.

Bel Wells: I do.

Elz Indriani: I see.

Bel Wells: Yeah, I would do that for free, I’m I would do that for free? I’m willing to do this.

Elz Indriani: Oh my God. I mean, I love pets. I really love dogs and cats, but with my schedule, like travelling and stuff, I feel like I just don’t wanna live.

Bel Wells: Yeah.

Elz Indriani: My baby behind,

Bel Wells: they tie you down.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. .

Bel Wells: If I go camping for like one night and I leave Ivan, I’m like, we should go home.

We should go home. Yeah. I gotta go home.

Elz Indriani: That’s make it, that’s what makes it hard for me, like to actually commit to having a path. Because, [00:34:00] yeah, I travel a lot to a racetrack, and I don’t think it’s wise to bring your pet to a racetrack. Like,

Bel Wells: I don’t know if they’d enjoy that. Maybe a dog.

Elz Indriani: Can they actually bring a dog to a racetrack?

That’s the question. Probably. Probably. Probably. But yeah, that’s still my biggest concern about getting a pet, getting a new family member, new addition to the family because I travel. I’ll be your pet sitter. Oh my god, I would love to. If I knew you live in Utah, I should have visited you during my trip from Illinois to Cali because I literally passed Utah.

I was thinking about maybe I should stay, like me and my family thinking like that. Maybe I should stay like, one or two nights in, in Utah, because I love Utah. Utah is really

Bel Wells: pretty. Southern Utah has all the national parks too, like Zion and Bryce. It’s so pretty.

Elz Indriani: Utah is pretty. Like, even one day if I’m old, [00:35:00] and I got this retirement money from the government, I’m gonna move to Utah.

Like, I’m gonna move to Utah and actually enjoy it. Like, so pretty.

Bel Wells: It is really pretty and it has snowboarding. I love it. It has all the seasons of sports and all the fun stuff. Oh, no big masks or tracks. I actually think they do have a Utah motorsport campus or something which has really fast go karts, which I should try.

Because I’ve tried the slow go karts at like, uh, family fun centers, but I’ve never done, like, I think these are really fast go karts.

Oh! I

Bel Wells: can’t remember how fast they go, but I think you have to get maybe a license or pass a test. Which sounds like fun.

Elz Indriani: I think you, I, I’m not sure if you need like a certain license for it, like I’m not sure, but I think if you want to do it like casually or for fun, you can like, you can just go, right?

I mean, karting, with karting.

Bel Wells: I’ll look into it, that would be really fun.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, have you tried karting [00:36:00] before?

Bel Wells: I’ve never done super fast karts. I’ve just done like at mini golf centers. I think they probably top speed is like 30 miles an hour. I’m not sure.

Elz Indriani: Right, right. But do you want to get into it one day?

Bel Wells: Um, I’ve never really like had that be my goal, like into real life racing. Kind of more go with the flow. I wouldn’t say no. But

Elz Indriani: I’ve never really,

Bel Wells: I’ve really never even thought about racing until COVID and we were racing in the Sims like this.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, cause, again, as you said before, like, I didn’t even know it was a thing.

Yeah, like, your family is not into motorsports, not like making you into a race car. Same as me. Yeah.

Bel Wells: Yeah, are you the only one into motorsports in your family?

Elz Indriani: Mm hmm. The first one, in both sides, my mom and my dad’s side, like, I’m the only one who got into sim racing, got into, [00:37:00] um, motorsports, and I would say doing a modern job.

You know what I mean? Like streaming, content creation,

Bel Wells: and stuff. Yeah.

Elz Indriani: I’m the first one in the family, so most of the time, I have to explain what content creation is to my big family.

Bel Wells: Sometimes it’s probably a little rough. Yeah. I tried explaining, like, streaming to my grandma, and she was just like, I don’t think I understand it.

And I was like, okay, we’ll try again next time. Yeah,

Elz Indriani: we’ll try again next time. We’ll try again. It’ll

Bel Wells: sink in eventually.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, so that’s my job right now. Streaming, making a content, and working full time in esports, in gaming industry.

Bel Wells: That’s really so cool. Do you love it?

Elz Indriani: I love it.

Bel Wells: Cause it’s

Elz Indriani: really so

Bel Wells: fun.

Elz Indriani: Right now, you’re not just learning how to play games, or how to be good in video games, but You’re learning a lot. It’s more like you’re [00:38:00] doing your job as a professional like you’re going into the meeting every week Yeah, you have like a day job to do like basically it’s like a not like another job But it’s in gaming so you know like

Bel Wells: and you love it, and you’re like passionate about it, which makes it feel less It doesn’t

Elz Indriani: feel like

Bel Wells: working,

Elz Indriani: you know?

Like, it’s more like, you’re having a fun project every week. Like, oh, we’re doing this! Oh, we’re doing that! Oh, we’re doing something cool!

Bel Wells: A fun project, when you’re interested in doing what you’re doing, learning what you’re doing, it’s great.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, that’s I like learning, after all, maybe. Like, I don’t mind struggle, like, in simracing or at my work.

Okay, just It’s kind of torturing my soul, but I love it. You know what I

Bel Wells: mean? I understand. It’s satisfying.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, it’s satisfying. Like, super, super satisfying. Like, [00:39:00] I love it. I love my job. Until now.

Bel Wells: That’s so great. What did you do before?

Elz Indriani: I was a graphic designer. A UI UX designer. I work in UI and graphic designer.

And then, during the COVID era, I switched my job, I switched my career into a gamer.

Bel Wells: Wow.

Elz Indriani: So we are the pandemic baby, very much.

Bel Wells: Yeah, that’s a huge change. It’s

Elz Indriani: a huge change. Especially back then, like, you know, like, a lot of people like losing their job and stuff during the COVID era. And, I was the one who switched jobs.

So I quit my job. Like, I quit myself. Nobody fired me.

Bel Wells: That takes bravery. That takes a lot of bravery.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, but, but then when I started, like, I didn’t know the way. I didn’t know how to get into where I am right now. I just hit the like button with five viewers per day. Uh huh. [00:40:00] At that moment. Yeah, just doing it.

I don’t know. If you ask me, like, how I got into it, like, just press the live button, like, almost every day. I think that’s what I do. Hitting the live button and rising, getting into championships, and stuff, so, yeah, like, I don’t know. It is what it is. But my mom started to understand. My mom started to understand, yeah.

Like, she likes to tell everyone, like, at her church, and something like, Oh yeah, that’s my daughter, she went to NASCAR, and,

Bel Wells: like, That’s so cute.

Elz Indriani: That’s so cute, but again, like, a lot of her church friends, they’re really like, Oh wait, oh, the racing. They’re like, what’s that? Racing, oh, driving cars? Oh, is she like driving cars?

No, she’s not driving cars fast. Driving cars fast? Like, what? Yeah, I was like It’s kinda, it’s kinda unique. Trying to explain what’s My job, [00:41:00] what I do to my big family, like, they’re like, Oh, you have a very cool job. We don’t understand, but that sounds very cool. I was like, oh yeah, that’s cool.

Bel Wells: That’s pretty much the response I get if I tell people I stream video games.

Like, I don’t get it, but that’s neat. Yeah, I don’t get it, but

Elz Indriani: that’s neat. Yep.

Bel Wells: I was like, I feel the same way.

Elz Indriani: I feel the same way. I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t get it,

Bel Wells: but it’s neat.

Elz Indriani: But it’s neat. I don’t get it. So, Belle, are you? Thinking about maybe one day you want to get into it, like, as a full time, like, do you ever think about gaming as your full time job, or as your career?

Cause you’re shiny, really bright.

Bel Wells: Totally would. I would totally stream more. I probably still would Petsit forever because I like to be around the animals and that really doesn’t take too much time. But usually on the weekdays it’s My husband and I will go snowboarding if it’s the winter or [00:42:00] in summer we’ll go camping or paddle boarding or really I just go do other things right now.

But I would definitely, I probably would stream more. I don’t know. I’ve never, I haven’t thought about it too seriously because it kind of just like sporadically happened this whole time. Just going with the flow. My mom thinks about it like that a lot more, and she’s like, Maybe you should, she like wants to make little emotes and stuff.

She’s so cute. She thinks about the, she thinks about my stream more than I do sometimes.

Elz Indriani: More than you do. Yeah, I mean, aww, that’s so cute. So, you’re coming into Twitch, you’re coming into streaming with, let’s say like, zero plan, like, go with the flow and see how it goes?

Bel Wells: Yeah, pretty much, pretty much. I do, I really like racing a lot and I’ve never thought I would, I don’t know.

Now it’s kind of like changed my plans. I would definitely do something in racing. [00:43:00] I really, really do enjoy it.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. I mean, I can tell you really love playing games, you know, like build up games. When you, when you say like, I love playing games. I can feel it, and I believe, like, Mekis and everyone who’s watched your stream can feel the same way.

Like, yeah. She, she loves video games. She likes to play

Bel Wells: them. I like to play. I like to have fun. Yeah, I like to play games.

Elz Indriani: I like to play games. Yeah, so what’s your, what was your highest I rating in Road to Hell?

Bel Wells: Oh, I don’t know, maybe 2. 5. I honestly don’t remember. There’s a chance it’s gone up to 2. 7, but that might be my imagination.

And then it almost always comes like plummeting back down. It’s always a track specific combo, like car track combo that I just We’ll repeat over and over and over that I really really like and then I’ll get a skewed eye rating and the tracks change and I go somewhere I [00:44:00] don’t know and I’m like don’t even know if the track goes left or right and then it all equalizes and I come back down.

It’s kind of fun to look at my eye rating graph. It’s very like a mountain range.

Elz Indriani: I think I said that we had this conversation like in the previous info. I forgot, was it with Sierra, or was it with Jamie, or was it with Cleo, but we were talking about you back then, like, yeah, Stormalina, Belle, I mean, you will see her, like, rising up, and then tomorrow, she will, like, drop down, but don’t worry, she’ll get it back, she will get it back, once,

Bel Wells: yeah, she’ll, it’s not time to worry yet.

I like it. I feel like I don’t want to go into a track or the next week and have my iRating be like 2. 7 and then I’m in the top split. I like when it comes down because I don’t know what I’m doing. I don’t know the track. I need to learn it. Put me back in with like the 1k people before you put me in with the top split because that’s scary.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. How was it? I need to learn [00:45:00] it. Never, or I barely got into the top split. It really depends on the time. Were you like hating it, like, in the top split, or?

Bel Wells: I’d get in the top split with weird races. Like, sometimes if I couldn’t sleep, I’d do a Ringmeister late at night. And it would be like single split or something.

Or P Cups at a weird track. Or, um, the Cleos in the PCC are usually top split. Or the Mustangs used to be top split. You really

Elz Indriani: do. I was scared.

Bel Wells: I’m I, I do like to do everything. Everything.

Elz Indriani: Like, don’t, here’s the correct example of using this, using your Irising subscription in the right way. Do everything.

Don’t just do one.

Bel Wells: Try everything. Wreck everything. Yeah, everything. Win everything. And win everything. Yeah. . So that’s a slope. Progress ,

Elz Indriani: I feel. But you’ve got your first win [00:46:00] in Irisy, right? You’ve got it, yes. Yeah, my

Bel Wells: first win was on Nords life. I think it was maybe either in an NEC or just, uh, the life itself, Nords life itself.

And it was in a peak up, I think it was an NEC. It took me a long time to win a road race.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, me too. I just, I just won mine like one week ago, so I think I like Oh really? Yeah. Were you driving? Yeah,

Bel Wells: that’s like how long it took me to get my road one.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, my road, I don’t even know back then when I just bored, I cannot sleep.

So I just turn on my PC and see how it goes. Oh, oh, what’s this? A new track? Okay, I’m gonna try. And then, um, and then I was like bleeding by two seconds. I don’t even know how did I? Like, I was leading the quali by 2 seconds, started in pole, winning it. I mean, I was like, oh, is this even real? Is that even me?[00:47:00]

So I was that good on the stream? Like, maybe I should stop streaming and focus on my race more. If you’re not ranking, are you even trying? That’s a good question. That’s a good point, Ash. That’s a good point, Ash. I mean, if you’re not crashing it I mean, I don’t I’m not encouraging everyone to crash in the race, but sometimes you have to.

That’s how I

Bel Wells: learn in practices, and that’s how I learn my worst lessons. I’m like in first or something, and you go around a corner too fast, and then you bend it, and you’re like, okay, let’s not do that again. I’ve learned my lesson. Learning from our mistakes, yeah.

Elz Indriani: I’ve heard this else person is like a professional driver.

Yes, I do, Matthew. Hi. Welcome. Pro, pro NASCAR driver. I don’t know if you guys see it, but yeah, I was playing a NASCAR video in the background. But, it’s on pause. It’s on pause. I need [00:48:00] to turn it back, but who cares. Hi, by the way, Matthew. Hi. I think that Stormalina person has the most laughs around Lords.

Yeah, she does a lot of Lords.

Bel Wells: You don’t know. I’ve only been here for a short time. Some people have like, 14 years. I can’t believe iRacing has been around that long.

Elz Indriani: Oh yeah, they are. Like, since 2008, something like that. I was,

Bel Wells: yeah, uh huh. I was still in high school.

Elz Indriani: I don’t even know, like, back in the day when you, when iRacing is just released to the market, like, do you guys even play with a steering wheel?

Yeah,

Bel Wells: were they playing with wheels? I was just wondering that. When I was playing on the Xbox, like, Need for Speed and stuff, I had the Mad Catz steering wheel that was, like, this big and it was tiny. And you’d, like, bolt it to the table. It was so small.

Elz Indriani: Uh huh.

Bel Wells: Yeah. Don’t force feedback, but it was entertaining.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, I mean, that’s how we all I got introduced [00:49:00] to racing games, to city racing, from the arcade game, from Need for Speed, from Forza, from Gran Turismo. I think I

Bel Wells: started from

Gran Turismo.

Bel Wells: Is that what you started in? I’ve never had a Playstation, so I’ve never played it. But it sounds really, people love it.

Like, very dear to their hearts.

Elz Indriani: Gran Turismo is like, one of the

Bel Wells: The gateway game.

Elz Indriani: Like, yeah, that’s That’s how most people got into racing games, either from Forza or Gran Turismo. Like, the console people play Gran Turismo. It’s like the I must say, like, Gran Turismo is like the main game, like the official game.

So every time PlayStation is, like, releasing the console, we will have, like, this Gran Turismo game, like the official. So, yeah, that’s how I got into it. But, now I don’t know how to play Gran Turismo anymore.

Bel Wells: Like, I dunno how to play anymore.

Elz Indriani: Like

Bel Wells: do you just do iRacing for the most part now?

Elz Indriani: Yeah, I do. And a bit of F1, like right now I’m [00:50:00] competing Inri speed Summer Cup.

So in speed. We are now having it in iRacing in, um, I saw that.

Bel Wells: Yeah. And Grand Tomo.

Elz Indriani: Yes, in grand too. So we’re trying our best to cover every platform, so, you know, because. Yeah, we have a, we have a loyal fan base in iRacing, like, we have a bunch of people, like, a bunch of girls racing in iRacing, but in Gran Turismo, so we are, we want to, you know, get into it, like, finding more girls, and hopefully they can grow, get into iRacing, and hopefully put her in, in a real race car one day.

Yeah,

Bel Wells: make the transition.

Elz Indriani: I would love to put you in a race car one day.

Bel Wells: That would be so crazy, I can’t even

Elz Indriani: imagine. Oh my god, I wish I knew you, like, a lot earlier than now. Cause, one or two years ago, I think it was like, two years ago? No, one. So, Screen2Speed, the first Screen2Speed, we [00:51:00] were having it in Las Vegas more speedily.

Oh yeah, it was like,

Bel Wells: crazy big, with Pennzoil, and it was

Elz Indriani: like, I think they made a

Bel Wells: documentary about it.

Elz Indriani: Yes, and we were on the front page of Twitch, also the broadcast, everything. That’s so

Bel Wells: crazy. And

Elz Indriani: the winner got a chance to drive the Porsche in real life. Oh my god! That’s your favorite car, right?

That’s your favorite car, right?

Bel Wells: I think that probably is my favorite car.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, so we really hope that one day we will have another event like that, like during the NASCAR event or even during IMSA. So I would love to have you back. You have to wait it out. Yeah, just let me know.

Bel Wells: I’ll let my pet sitting clients know.

Yes,

Elz Indriani: I mean, I would love to see you, like, actually racing a real race car. If you like the course, maybe one day you’ll drive the course. And I would love to hear it from you, like, is there anything that [00:52:00] you learned in the simulator that I mean, that’s the feeling that I want to, I want to feel one day. Um,

Bel Wells: I don’t know.

I feel like, honestly, the thing that I’ve taken from sim racing is accident avoidance, which is like I mean, just, like, someone’s parked or a mail truck will swerve out in the middle of the road and you’re just like, With, like, natural reactions, you don’t even, like, even notice, and I was like, That felt like Draft Mastery.

And, like, moments like that in real life can be scary because it really just takes one second to, like, I don’t know, someone’s texting and you don’t see it, and then you get in a big car accident, and so sad. But, I feel like, Iracing has helped me with reactions to stuff like that. Even just like, on my feet too, I notice things.

Like, I notice accidents that maybe could happen. Like if I’m walking dogs and I see, uh, cars driving weird, like I saw a tire fall off of a car. I just feel like I notice weird things now. I pay attention to cars more than I’m used [00:53:00] to. I see cars that are like, I didn’t even used to look at cars. I’m like, ooh, that’s a cool car now.

I, I recognize cars now from the service, like little touring cars. Oh, I also love touring cars. Those are fun to drive.

Elz Indriani: Oh, you like it? Huh. I got the car, but I never really got into it. Is it like super fun?

Bel Wells: Yeah, they’re really fun. They’re different, a whole different thing. Yeah. The Clios are fun too in that way.

Elz Indriani: I don’t have the Clio. I don’t know, like, cause if, I was thinking like, if I wanna drive the Clio, I already, I already got the touring cars, like. The Honda and everything so I feel like Yeah, I was like

Bel Wells: I like the Elantra

Elz Indriani: Oh, you like it, huh I got both of them but I never really like got into it

Bel Wells: I actually end up driving those for endurance races a lot with, uh Some of my chat people from Twitch that I’ve become friends with [00:54:00] And I like the, the touring cars are fun for endurance because you’re the slower class, you know It’s less Press for me because everyone’s going around you.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, you’re just waiting for everyone to pass you. I think that’s Hopefully. Hopefully they make it into the corner. Hopefully and not

Bel Wells: rear end you.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. Hopefully the faster class will pass. Yeah, I think for me, after I’m getting into the multi class, uh, racing, I’ll pick the slowest car because I haven’t got any experience driving, like, the prototype.

Bel Wells: Yeah. I

Elz Indriani: just don’t want to kill anyone.

Bel Wells: I know, it’s a bad feeling. I don’t like that feeling. I like to avoid it as well. Yeah,

Elz Indriani: me too. What do you mean I’m causing the chaos, Ash? I never cause a chaos!

Bel Wells: She would never.

Elz Indriani: The real OG will remember the Mario Kart split screen battle mode. Oh my god, I kinda miss Oh

Bel Wells: my god, Mario Kart.

Elz Indriani: I kinda miss having like, that [00:55:00] feeling, you know? Like, playing video games with a Playing a racing game with a split screen.

Bel Wells: I love

Elz Indriani: it. I love the online competition right now, but sometimes I just miss the old days.

Bel Wells: I know, like local co op and yeah. Sitting side by side with your friend holding a controller.

It’s a fun feeling.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, yeah. That’s what I like. Sometimes I feel like racing games, you have to enjoy it. And sometimes you want to enjoy it for yourself. And sometimes you want to enjoy it with your family. But

Bel Wells: yeah,

Elz Indriani: yeah, yeah. Have

Bel Wells: you had your mom try or any of your family try your rig and stuff like try and drive any?

Is it hilarious?

Elz Indriani: Yeah, I, my dad, um, I, my dad tried out my sim setup, so he was like trying to drive. But what I noticed sometimes, like, when people driving, like, when people who doesn’t come into racing games and they try to drive a simulator, they will turn their wheels, like, in real life, you [00:56:00] know, like,

And

Elz Indriani: sometimes it’s like, no, you have to like, Put it like minimum.

Oh, this is minimum? No, no, that’s still a little bit too much. Oh, you know, it’s so fun to watch like people trying out their sim setup. It’s so fun. Like, oh yeah. It

Bel Wells: really is. Like, is this what I used to look like when I tried?

Elz Indriani: That looks like me in the beginning. So, okay. Yeah, it’s okay. We got hopes.

Everybody got hopes in sim racing as long as they’re

Bel Wells: trying. It’s easy to get hooked. It’s a fun thing to get hooked on.

Elz Indriani: He wants to use all the nine hundred, yeah, ten eighty, more like ten eighty, decreased rotation, Ash, more like driving the truck. So, by the way, Bells, um, I got another question for you. So, you get into streaming, you’re streaming since the pandemic era, have you ever got into, like, some kind of awful situation?

For example, like, [00:57:00] getting into, I don’t know, some toxic people, getting touched? Um.

Bel Wells: When I, I think actually one of the first multi class races I did, I, I definitely wrecked somebody. It was a bad move. I said sorry. But they found my stream after and they definitely weren’t nice.

Elz Indriani: Uh,

Bel Wells: my moderators were quick.

They left. No big deal. And that was it. Honestly, that’s like the worst thing that’s ever happened to me on Twitch and it wasn’t that bad.

Elz Indriani: I’m

Bel Wells: honest. I’m so shocked that it has been So much more positive than I ever expected it to be. I’m very pleasantly surprised.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, I mean, I, if you look into some, I don’t know, some articles, some videos on internet, on YouTube, you will see like a lot of streamers getting like, An awful experience on Twitch.

Something like that. Yeah. I’ve

Bel Wells: seen, yeah. I’ve definitely seen it happen to some streamers and like, [00:58:00] it doesn’t matter if you’re a big streamer or a small streamer.

Yeah.

Bel Wells: I’ve seen it happen to a lot of people. Mm-hmm . I don’t think anybody’s immune, yeah. Happened to me. It hasn’t, like I really am surprised that it hasn’t been more issues.

Like I think I can count on one hand the number of mm-hmm . moments of people coming in my chat. Right. Really, people are very nice. I’m quite glad.

Elz Indriani: Awww. Mekis, do you hear that? Mekis, Ash, thank you so much to all of you here, who’s tuning to InidTalks and also to our stream, Belle and mine, like, yeah, thank you for keeping us happy and safe on Twitch.

Like, thank you for creating a, thank you for being nice

Bel Wells: to

Elz Indriani: us. Right.

Bel Wells: It’s nice to have a good chat.

Elz Indriani: It’s nice to have, yeah. It’s nice to have a good chat. My chat

Bel Wells: will, like, cheer me up and just spend four hours telling me jokes. It’s really just a fun time, usually.

Elz Indriani: Haha, yeah. Yeah, there will always [00:59:00] be a negative person online where they can hide behind a keyboard.

Yeah, true. I mean, you cannot control people in the end. Like, you cannot expect everyone to behave nicely or

Bel Wells: Someone with kindness.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. But, I don’t know. Most of the time, I’m just like

Bel Wells: Don’t

Elz Indriani: care. Like, okay, it’s something negative, but you know, there’s a button, there’s a report button. I live it.

Bel Wells: Right, yeah.

Like, I know who I am. I know, I know who I am. Yeah.

Elz Indriani: It’s more like, I know who I am, I know my values, so I’m

Bel Wells: good.

Elz Indriani: You know, like, yeah. But yeah. So, by the way, Belle, um, what’s your goal in life in Sympathy? Like, this year or maybe in five years from now? I don’t know how I would do that.

Bel Wells: I don’t really have like a numbers goal or anything.

I just want to get faster. I want to get better. Hard to like Can’t really put a number on that. I want to get faster. I want to get better. I would love to race everything. The things that I [01:00:00] haven’t raced yet. I know I’m missing some. And I also really, really want to work on like, confidence when I’m racing.

But I know I have to, I have to like, practice a little before I do races, which is weird for me to get the confidence when I’m racing. But I want to be more confident when I’m racing. Because usually people come up behind me and I’m like, Oh my god, they’re so much faster, I gotta let them go. I should just lift right here and just let them go.

Like, no, they’re faster than me. Even, like, they might not be faster. I just get very intimidated. Yeah, I They flash their lights at me, I’m like, You’re right, you should go.

Elz Indriani: No,

Bel Wells: I let you go.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, I mean, building your confidence, building confidence, also my kind of struggle in sim racing, like, it’s easier for you to catch someone than Defending your position from someone behind you.

Bel Wells: So bad at defending.

Elz Indriani: I’m so bad at defending. I

Bel Wells: like chasing people down and then when I get to them, I’m like, I don’t need to pass you, I don’t want anyone to pass [01:01:00] me, let’s just hang out right here.

Elz Indriani: Let’s just hang out right here, yeah. I need to practice more on that. Like, yeah. I think most of the time, every time I want to get better at something, I will go to low 46 too.

Like, I will watch a racing like, Ha! That’s how you do it. That’s how you become a racer. Yeah, or overtakes

Bel Wells: and stuff. I need to learn how to do overtakes from a Whenever I watch people who I’ve had a little bit more practice with driving like Quirk or Malone or Dan Suzuki Sam Soyed, you watch them overtake people or Casey Kirwan I was watching the P.

E. S. T. All Stars back and you watch him like go through the reverse grid and

Yeah, yeah, yeah He’s like, he gets super

Bel Wells: dickered He like predicted my slowness perfectly. I was just, everybody is such a good driver. I want to, I want to sponge all of them.

Elz Indriani: Jesse is like, I don’t know, he’s like different. He looks different.

That’s how I, that’s how I describe him. I bet

Bel Wells: his brain just computes it different. I think everybody computes it differently. [01:02:00] That’s what’s so fun is everyone’s so different and unique. Like we’re all gonna race differently and make different mistakes. It’s, it makes for an interesting race every time.

Elz Indriani: So I was. I was racing with, um, so I did the Six Hours of the Glam back in the day, like I don’t know, it was like a month ago probably? I forgot. It was fun, but I was like racing with someone with, yeah, 5k, I don’t think, basically. And I was asking him, like, how does it feel racing in the top split? Like you racing against someone at your level.

And he said, like, Basically, once you’re in the, in that split, in the top split, everybody can read everybody’s mind. So, it’s more like, driving is not really an issue anymore, like, everybody knows how to get fast at this track, so It’s like

Bel Wells: a lot more mental than physical.

Elz Indriani: Yes, it is. So Yeah. It can be tiring sometimes, but people read each other mind in the top split.

It seems like everybody’s like connected, their brain is like connected to each other. They can, like, [01:03:00] actually predict, like, Oh, you’re slow at this corner. I will take you out. I will take you out. That’s what I

Bel Wells: noticed in the PESC. I kept thinking, like, I should just lift for, because everyone was so much faster than me, I would almost get, like, lapped by the end.

So, one of the races, I almost got lapped. And I was like, I should just lift for the leader. And my chat was like, you don’t need to lift. I can’t remember who it was. I think it was Casey. And we were like, he knows what to do. Like, you don’t need to baby him. You’re gonna wreck him if you do anything weird.

Just behave normally. He knows what he’s doing. He’ll drive around you. He’s a pro. They

Elz Indriani: are pro. They know what to do if they want to, yeah. But, you can actually tell a player in iRacing, like, if they, if they got like, I don’t know, like, 5, 10 years into the service, and you can tell, like, why he got, like, why people got, like, such a high iRacing.

And, I can say, like, iRacing kind of tells you where you are, where, yeah, like, where you are standing in the scene. Like, [01:04:00] Okay, like 5K, I know, like, okay, these people can get his 5K, I don’t think, like, well, 46. She’s like 5K right now, and she drives different than me, the one that is

Bel Wells: below 2K, you know? Uh huh.

Everyone’s 5K is different.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. 2K, probably. Probably. The 2K, probably. I

Bel Wells: don’t know. I go from like, I have no idea because mine just goes all over the place and it will be me from feeling like I feel really confident in races and I’ll like race really good and then my I rating will go up and then even if I’m not feeling, if I still feel good, my I rating will come down.

It doesn’t really matter.

Elz Indriani: It goes

Bel Wells: up and down.

Elz Indriani: It didn’t. It doesn’t really matter. As long as you’re still learning. That’s what I learned from Jamie. Jamie Derrick. I don’t know if you know her. Like, Jamie is my favorite. It’s

Bel Wells: fun to watch learn. Yeah. This is how I felt at the beginning. [01:05:00] I was like, what’s the yellow flag?

What’s the yellow flag? What’s to do here?

Elz Indriani: Jamie is so fun. Like watching her, like you’re just vibing with her in the chat. Like, Oh yeah. Okay. She is learning. And Oh yeah. She’s fun. She’s hosting a lot of, uh, a lot of like practices. I like that. Yeah, I like to join. I like to join sometimes, but every time she starts streaming, I would, I’m still working, I’m still at work, so I’m, I cannot like actually like join every time.

Bel Wells: Uh huh.

Elz Indriani: In my opinion, I feel like you could get any ID, you just gotta work for it. That’s true. Same. Yeah. I mean, uh huh. Your practice kinda determines how your race will go. That’s how I feel. Like, I need to get into one level of confidence. That’s

Bel Wells: definitely how it is for me. Maybe it’s different for other people, but that’s how it is for me.

I have to feel like I have to feel confident. I have to practice a little bit. I can’t just go in [01:06:00] there and, like, pretend to be confident.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, yeah. I won’t be on the

Bel Wells: track.

Elz Indriani: I need to do, like, at least 50 laps of just driving in solo. And then after that, I’ll throw myself into the public practice sector.

So, how do you practice?

Bel Wells: Um, I either, I call them practice races. Like I’ll do a race on Monday or something or Tuesday when they first change and people haven’t really done a bunch of them, or I’ll do a ghost race. Like I was talking about if I don’t have very much time or can’t do a full race. Cause I don’t mind doing a race.

I’m like trying to find, follow people and losing eye reading being at the back.

I don’t

Bel Wells: mind doing that as long as I kind of know the track I can. I actually like learning like that, following other people. That’s probably my favorite way to learn.

I used

Bel Wells: to follow my husband around the track, because we have two separate rigs now, because we have the Logitech, and then he bought the, this, direct drive, nice one.

So we can race at the same time [01:07:00] from time to time. And I like to follow him around the track and learn from him. Or my Twitch chat, I’ll follow them around the track. They’ll teach me the line.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. Practicing with other people really

Bel Wells: It’s more fun for me.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. I find it boring right now, if I just do like a solo, when I really need to do solo as well.

Bel Wells: Yeah. It’s

Elz Indriani: boring. Like, you

Bel Wells: know. I’m trying to. It is boring. I’m trying to do like a time trial face off with some people from my chat, and it’s like I hate learning the tracks by myself, but I feel like it’s teaching me a lot too. They’re definitely way faster than me. I was like, whoa, I lean on you guys a lot.

I can’t do this without following you guys. But it’s helping me learn it in a different way. I feel like it will help long term with other, like, learning different new tracks. Quicker too. And I definitely like to start in a slow car when I’m learning tracks

like, oh yeah,

Bel Wells: Mazda or epr RI try an [01:08:00] MP two.

Sometimes we go, whoa, too, too fast. That’s too

Elz Indriani: fast. Yeah. Faster than, I don’t even know the track. Yeah. Yeah. I, I think that’s the reason why I don’t really drive a lot of. Cause that character is so fast, like, I need more time to react in every corner, like, give me some time. I like to do it. They are

Bel Wells: fun though.

Have you tried the LMP3?

Elz Indriani: Oh, I like it.

Bel Wells: It’s a

Elz Indriani: good gateway one. Yeah, I like it. I like the LMP. Oh, you do like it, okay. Uh huh. I like it. At least, at least that character kinda makes sense to me. I don’t get, I don’t know, like, I’m not a fan of LMP2. I don’t know, I feel like I’d rather drive the Super Formula.

Bel Wells: I’d

Elz Indriani: rather drive the open wheel, like Super Formula, I think. Oh, are you, are you into open wheel?

Bel Wells: I don’t, that’s probably the car I drive the least. I do F3s and I do F4s fairly frequently.

Uh huh.

Bel Wells: [01:09:00] And I used to do the F1. Back and they did a new release of it, and I never bought the new version, so I haven’t done that for a while

Bel Wells: hmm.

Oh and the super formula lights I did a little bit in the rain, but mostly I’ve been doing road cars of recent like since the rain came out But I do go through phases of depends on the track combo Yeah,

Elz Indriani: I’m looking

Bel Wells: more into that

Elz Indriani: I haven’t gotten into like fully committed to one series You know like in iRacing we have our There’s so many options.

Yeah, like, it’s hard for me to commit to one series. Like,

Bel Wells: I want to do

Elz Indriani: this, but next week Cause I look into the race based on the tracks. If I like the tracks, I will do it. More than the money. That’s how I do it. That’s

Bel Wells: how I am.

Elz Indriani: Yeah.

Bel Wells: I’m trying to force myself to do tracks I don’t like. Which, sometimes I’m like, oh, I kinda like this now.

And sometimes I’m like, yep, don’t like it.

Elz Indriani: There’s one track that you will always hate it.

Bel Wells: Do you have a track you don’t like? Oh [01:10:00] yes, I do. I

Elz Indriani: hate the Barcelona. What about you? I don’t love Silverstone.

Bel Wells: I’m trying to like it. I like it more than I used to. But I still don’t love it.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, Silverstone is quite a challenging track for me.

I liked

Bel Wells: Silverstone in the F1 games. I remember loving it in the F1 games, but in iRacing, I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what it is. I just don’t like it.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m not, I’ve never been a big fan of Silverstone, but it’s an okay track for me. Like, I, uh, oh, but I cannot say that because I don’t have it in iRacing, but I have it in another game, so I cannot judge it.

So you know what it’s like. I know pretty much. I used to race it in ACC like two years ago, but the Maggots, Becketts, um, I forgot the other one. Uh huh, it was like

Bel Wells: trick corner. Yeah. I remember liking that one.

Elz Indriani: I I struggle with that in [01:11:00] Silverstone, I think. And also like the chicane. Not like a chicane, like, you know?

Bel Wells: Oh yeah, that’s a hard one too. I

Elz Indriani: forgot the name.

Bel Wells: The walls are so close.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. I’ve never been a fan of it, but Yvonne, um, our community manager, she raised in Silverstone in real life. I don’t know, maybe like two, three years ago, like, yeah. Oh, that’s so cool.

Bel Wells: Yeah,

Elz Indriani: she was raised in Cyprus. I think,

Bel Wells: I thought her partner too, Sophie, also did, um, I think she got to raise brands.

Brands hatch in real

Elz Indriani: life.

Bel Wells: That’s so cool.

Elz Indriani: Wait, wait, is it? Wait, Sophie, were you? Ah, wait, Sophie was in chat. I forgot to say hi. Gran Turismo is the gateway drug. Yes, it is a drug. By the way, Sophie! Were you raising in brands? I know, I know, you fall. I thought

Bel Wells: I remembered you saying that the momentum on that hill that you go down is like, pushes you against the seat like a roller coaster.

Elz Indriani: think that’s what I like about real racing and karting. Like, you feel the G force like

Bel Wells: Oh, I can’t [01:12:00] even I love roller coasters. I would probably I think that’s why rally in real life probably feels so crazy. I can’t even imagine.

Elz Indriani: I bet, I bet. Oh, you were Oh, it was just your race license. Oh, oh, were you Were you getting your license back then and you were like testing it at brands?

Oh, that’s so fun. I would love to get my license one day. Like, if I really wanted to get into real racing, I would start thinking about, you know, like, getting my license and So you

Bel Wells: have to get a race license to participate in, like, race races? Yeah,

Elz Indriani: I believe And you do that

Bel Wells: by track days?

Elz Indriani: For track days, I don’t think you need, like, a specific racing license for that, but once you want to get into racing, like, from the different, from the lowest class, you, I believe you already need to have, like, a racing license, something like that.

But karting, as a start, I don’t think you need [01:13:00] a racing license for karting.

Bel Wells: I want to go racing.

Elz Indriani: Yeah.

Bel Wells: So you should join

Elz Indriani: the screen to skip. I would love to have you in Scrinters Pit next time, because I saw you, you were in it. Yeah, the summer

Bel Wells: series. I’m pretty sure I’m going to be out of town for the later ones in August, one of them for my brother’s wedding.

The other ones, there’s a chance I’m working, but I’m not positive yet. I see.

Elz Indriani: I see.

Bel Wells: But yeah, if I’m available, I’m totally in.

Elz Indriani: Mm hmm. I would love for you. What was your last race in Scrinters Pit? Was it the Woman’s Day?

Bel Wells: Yeah, it was the International Women’s Day. Oh yeah. Which was fun.

Elz Indriani: That’s New Phoenix.

Was that in Phoenix?

Bel Wells: Yeah, that was in

Elz Indriani: Phoenix. That’s Phoenix. I

Bel Wells: was not on the simulator even.

Elz Indriani: Hahaha. I was, oh yeah, when that event, when that event is happening, I was on my way to California. I was on a road trip.

Bel Wells: Oh,

Elz Indriani: [01:14:00] wow. So, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was so fun. Normally for crack days, you can’t get like, Oh, a license for five days.

Okay. I see. Huh, interesting. So

Bel Wells: like drive, drive, drive, like a race car driver. Uhhuh, . Otherwise you have to drive kind of normal. Normal. I have no idea. I

Elz Indriani: have no idea. Like

Bel Wells: So have your own car. I’d be afraid.

Elz Indriani: I would love to do a tech day. One day, like, um, I live very close to Sonoma. Sonoma Raceway. I live like, very close to that track.

Yeah,

Bel Wells: are you by like, Laguna Seca? Or, what else is Sonoma is in California? Yeah,

Elz Indriani: Sonoma, uh, Laguna Seca, we have Baton Velo. But Baton Velo is not on Irizing, so, yeah. I, I don’t know the track. But, the closest one to me [01:15:00] is the Sonoma. So, I would love to. That’d be a fun one. Yeah, that would be fun. From my place to Laguna Seca, it still take like, Three hours I think?

Two hours? Three hours? It’s

Bel Wells: still pretty far. That’s a lot of California. Like half of California.

Elz Indriani: California

Bel Wells: is big. So long.

Elz Indriani: Oh yeah, the Long Beach also. I mean, Long Beach is technically not a permanent track. Not always

Bel Wells: there. It’s not always

Elz Indriani: there. Just like the Chicago street course. I

Bel Wells: do love Long Beach.

I think the GR86s, or the GR86s are there right now.

Elz Indriani: Oh my god. I gained a lot of irony doing the GR86 at Long Beach. Super fun. I love fun,

Bel Wells: I love those. I don’t know why, but they’re very entertaining.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, I love it. I think I just think kind of makes me loving in the strict, the strict course. I don’t know.

’cause I used to hate doing the strip course ’cause Yeah, because the walls

Bel Wells: are so close. Yeah,

Elz Indriani: yeah, yeah. It’s like a narrow track and Yeah. But [01:16:00] I dunno, since I’m getting into the Long Beach, I feel like, oh, it’s pretty fun. Being close to the wall is fun. Like, oh, I

Bel Wells: agree. I haven’t fallen in love with Belle Isle yet, but I really like Long Beach quite a lot.

I’ve never done Detroit. We have Detroit on iRacing now, don’t we? Yes, we do. Or Chicago?

Elz Indriani: We have Chicago, Belle Isle, and Long Beach as a street track. So, I think my last street track that I need to buy, guys, is the Belle Isle. I don’t have that. I don’t think I own that track. So that will be the last street course that I need to buy.

It is a fun one. Oh yeah, and Willow Springs! Ah, is that not

Bel Wells: free?

Elz Indriani: I thought

Bel Wells: that was free. I might be wrong.

Elz Indriani: Oh wait, was it

Bel Wells: free? Something’s there this week. I think Imza Vintage is there this week. Oh yeah?

Elz Indriani: Ugh. I like the track in Gran Turismo, but in Irising, not really my favorite, honestly.

Bel Wells: Yeah, I don’t think [01:17:00] I own it, maybe.

If it’s not free, I don’t think I own it. I don’t know what it looks like.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. It’s like Do you have Sonoma?

Bel Wells: I do have Sonoma, yeah. So Cause I used to do just the, like, NASCAR. Uh huh. And that was one of the, one of the few road ones that they would do. That and COTA. Oh yeah. I actually liked it. It’s so small, but, but I like tracks with elevation.

Like, Bathurst and Nordschleife.

Elz Indriani: Oh yeah. I love it. I love track with elevation things. Cause it really teach um, how you break it. But it’s, you know, like, the trans compression kind of thing, I learned that from Surilio. Yeah, going up the hill or

Bel Wells: down the hill, I was like, no, I’ve never thought about that.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, how you brake, when it’s going up, when it’s about to go down.

Bel Wells: Do you think about those things in real life now? I never used to, but now I do.

Elz Indriani: I do now. I do now.

Bel Wells: Like, driving in real life, I’m like, oh, I’m going up the hill, maybe, you know, change the braking.

Elz Indriani: I’m going

Bel Wells: down. It kinda works. [01:18:00] Why am I thinking about this?

This is so weird now.

Elz Indriani: Yep. And it makes me kind of feel smarter on the road right now, like, you have a faster response about everything than other drivers on the street. That’s how I feel. I can, I can like yapping, like, ah, this guy is so slow at this point. Like, ah, I don’t know.

Oh wait, Willow Spring is for sale. Oh my god, go buy it. Yeah, okay, I will work hard so I can buy the track and I will host, I will host, um, a screen to speed event in Willow Spring if I own the track.

Bel Wells: For practice.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, for practice.

Bel Wells: A warm up. For the real life.

Elz Indriani: In North, you can go around without a license, but it costs.

Oh, wait, even if you want to race the Nordschleife, you need a special license for that. So even if you already have like a racing license, if you want to race in the Nordschleife, You [01:19:00] have to

Bel Wells: get Nordschleife specific?

Elz Indriani: Yeah, like additional license. That would be my,

Bel Wells: that’s probably my dream location. If I could pick a track to go to, that’s where I’d go.

Elz Indriani: Nordschleife?

Bel Wells: Yeah, definitely.

Elz Indriani: So, do you actually know the track? Like, do you actually like remember the whole track or not?

Bel Wells: Uh Probably, yeah. I think I could safely say yes. I remember it.

Elz Indriani: I don’t, I don’t remember the time. I still get lost in Nordschleife.

Bel Wells: It took me a long time. That was probably, it was more like a self challenge.

I was like, can I learn this? I was like, I don’t know. And then I, turns out I can and I love it. It’s so fun. Very satisfying.

Elz Indriani: How did you learn the Nordschleife?

Bel Wells: Did you actually,

Elz Indriani: like, Maybe we’re

Bel Wells: on a traffic

Elz Indriani: coordinator? Probably doing

Bel Wells: races and being like, I’m gonna make a lap and then I’d crash like right before the final thing and just learning the hard way.[01:20:00]

I was in a very low I rating land for a long time, kind of going through some growing pains, learning how to drive. And definitely following people has helped so much, like following, um, Most of my chat, most people on iRacing, I feel like, are better than me. And so just following them around would teach me a lot of things.

And that’s really, like we were saying, so much more fun to learn. And they, my chat has given me lots of tips. They, like, can see what I’m doing wrong much better than I can. I’m not watching myself. And they’ll, like, adjust my breaking or tell me when to shift. And sometimes I’ll fix it. It definitely helps me a lot.

Become a lot faster, a lot quicker.

Elz Indriani: And is there any like struggle, not like, not like a struggle, but challenge, more like a challenge. Like what are the biggest challenge that you’ve got in

Bel Wells: Simracing? Uh, [01:21:00] probably technology. Probably when I try and turn on my stream and it’s like not working or it won’t load in, something’s wrong with the triple monitors.

It’s really just technological difficulties and probably that I’m. Well, that doesn’t matter with simracing, that’s with streaming, that I’m shy. Simracing is really, I’m just kinda, I don’t know, I don’t know what the struggle’s been. That I’m a little bit nervous, maybe, but that kind of helps. I feel like it’s good to be nervous.

You can use the nerves if you can. You can harness them. Sometimes I feel like they’re just gonna make me throw up.

Elz Indriani: That’s really true. That’s really true. Like, nervousness is good. I think I learned that also

Bel Wells: from Like a good stress. There’s a good stress and there’s a bad stress. And sometimes I can like, harness my stress and sometimes my stress is just like It makes me want to throw up.

I can’t control it at all. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Elz Indriani: I was really on that. But now I feel [01:22:00] like, I’ve been racing for two years now. This is my second year. And I still feel that nervous every time I’m trying to, I’m getting into a race. But it kinda, it’s more like something that I can control now.

Bel Wells: Yeah. Yeah, it’s like a free, like, sport excitement now.

It’s less like, I’m gonna vomit and die, and

Elz Indriani: Like, when I first started doing, say what is it?

Bel Wells: Yeah, I could barely breathe when I first started racing. I don’t know, I was, I was so afraid of wrecking other people or having other people be mad at me. I really don’t like upsetting other people.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, me too. I don’t want to ruin someone else’s day, but yeah.

Bel Wells: Yeah, exactly. I would much rather wreck myself because I can get in another race and be like, eh, no big deal.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, yeah. You’re so mean, but now I’m starting to get somewhat, not like ignoring, but things can happen to everyone. [01:23:00] So if I made a mistake, I’m sorry. I’ll be like that.

Bel Wells: Yeah, I’ll say sorry.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, if we made a mistake, we say sorry in chat.

We say sorry. My number

Bel Wells: one used quick text. Sorry.

Elz Indriani: Sorry. Sorry. I have that on my wheel. I have

Bel Wells: that. I should probably put it on my wheel.

Elz Indriani: Oh yeah, it really helps. Cause I don’t like to get into the voice chat. I never, I never. No,

Bel Wells: I don’t either. I never have and I don’t want to. I

Elz Indriani: don’t wanna, like, you know what, sometimes every time I’m getting into the race, I treat myself like, guys, I’m just a ghost.

Yeah,

Bel Wells: nobody sees me here. I’m just an AI racing. Just another AI in the race.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, I’m just like, I never talk in the voice chat. Like, Sierra, she’s so bubbly in the voice chat. Like, she can be in the officials and, Hi! I was like, oh look, you’re so brave. I was like, [01:24:00] oh no! Or when somebody

Bel Wells: crash.

Elz Indriani: She will be like, yo, why are you crashing into me?

I was like, wow, she’s so brave. I want to have her braveness in my life. Like,

Bel Wells: she’s so funny. I love how different everybody’s personalities are. I love it. I love all the different collection of, like, iRacing streamers. It’s such a eclectic bunch, but we all have the same love in common. You can tell we all love iRacing.

Elz Indriani: Mm hmm. Yeah, that’s That’s what I like, like, I’ve been interviewing, like, a lot of streamers here on this Init Talks and I feel like, yeah, every girls are different. So, the way you talk and everything is like, Huh, that’s how, oh, that’s how my friend behave. Oh, that’s really cute. Oh, that’s so fun. You know, like, it’s so fun to meeting, like, a bunch of different girls who got into sim racing.

Like, we have the same hobbies, same passion, but our characteristics. [01:25:00] are different. That’s how I see, like, we’re so different. Like, for example, like, me and Love46, our energy is like a totally different person. Yeah, completely different. I’m more like a clown, and Liu, Liu is more like, okay, I’m getting into the race, I’ll be serious, like,

Bel Wells: yeah.

So serious. Cheers. Love to watch you both, and it’s like a totally different experience, both of the streams. I love it.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. So, I feel like if I wanna hang out, like chilling, I’ll be going to this streamer, but if I wanna learn something, I will go to Love46 and Emre, like that, you know?

Bel Wells: Yeah, it’s like what you’re in the mood to I Twitch is so cool.

I was thinking about what a different like when I was a kid, I’d get home from school and like turn on one of the 12 channels I had.

Bel Wells: hmm. And now it’s like you could come home from school and turn on the internet and there’s so much stuff. It’s so crazy. Yeah. I I don’t even know what I would be doing as [01:26:00] a teenager now.

I think it would be so different.

Elz Indriani: I mean, I love it that now the internet is Keeps, how do you say, like, the internet world, social media, everything is like growing so fast and you have a lot of options to do right now, like, if you’re bored, I can just hang out on Twitch, like, learning, or watching,

Bel Wells: in like numerous different channels or streams, there’s always something going on, it’s like there’s a party somewhere,

Elz Indriani: there’s always a party somewhere, and there’s always something happening, like, if you turn into Madmelon’s stream right now, and you’re still You’re tuning it like later, you will see like something like different.

So it’s like an endless entertainment, but I kinda back again, I kinda miss the old times when you’re like having this local one event, playing with your family, I kinda

Bel Wells: miss that. Like that schedule, you’d look up the TV schedule in the newspaper.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, the [01:27:00] old times, I must say. Kinda miss the old times, like, yeah.

Bel Wells: Yeah, it’s changed a lot. It’s fun, it’s really unique how much we can connect now across all, like, so far. Like, I have a friend in France, I have friends in Germany, friends in England, friends everywhere. Yeah. Friends from, like, sim racing that I’ve met in Utah now. Oh! It’s crazy.

Yeah.

Bel Wells: And it’s like, I never, my friends, when I was growing up, none of them even liked video games.

I didn’t have any girlfriends that would play video games with me.

And it was

Bel Wells: like me and my brother and I could get my dad to play with me. Mm-hmm . So it’s really cool that you can just make these kinds of easy connections and like screen to speed has the whole, like a whole collection of awesome female sim racers, andrs look up too.

And it’s so I really love the Twitch is cool.

Elz Indriani: Did you, did you enjoy your time raising script to spend?

Bel Wells: Yeah, definitely [01:28:00] because it’s like, it’s chill. It’s mellow, but I also, it’s like, it is, uh, what’s the word, it’s like real, much more real than an official race and Yeah, yeah. Uh, iRacing, like I get nervous for that too, but Oh yeah?

From the screen to screen, there’s like broadcast and stuff, my heart is like, It’s a lot, just, uh, league races make me feel like it’s a lot more serious

Elz Indriani: Mm hmm,

Bel Wells: mm hmm. Than official races.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, I feel like, I do more of league races than the officials, no? Oh, I do a lot

Bel Wells: more officials.

Elz Indriani: I don’t know, I feel like, right now, I learn a lot in a league race because I got into this league race in Oval and most of the guys are like 5k, 3k, so I feel like I learn things in a hard way.

Bel Wells: So, don’t worry guys, you’ll be fine with me. It’s hard not to learn. Yeah, beat me real hard.

Elz Indriani: So I can learn something, I can bring that to officials. I think that’s my practice right [01:29:00] now, do a lot of race in, in the league race and then Getting to the officials so I can like, beat everyone in the officials.

Yeah, then you

Bel Wells: go in with confidence in the officials. Yeah,

Elz Indriani: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s the thing. So, I’m thinking like, maybe? It really depends, but if I got the time, I will get into the screen to screen iRacing, because we are racing in F4 this season. The open world, finally. I was

Bel Wells: I saw you doing, um, time attacks too, I think?

Yeah,

Elz Indriani: we did. We did the time attack. So you can go to iRacing, look at the time attack, and we have the script to script. So, yeah, basically we do the time attack before the race. and that the result in the time of night kind of determine like where you stand on the grid so that’s like oh

Bel Wells: fun that’s cool i like that

Elz Indriani: yeah so if you’re free sometimes on this on saturday feel free to join though really i will give you the link after this if you want to [01:30:00] join and i would love to have you racing with us

Bel Wells: yeah send it my way and if i’m free i’ll definitely participate

Elz Indriani: or if you want to get into this uh the upcoming summer party that’s also welcome you’re also welcome Oh, the time attack is separate from the race, right?

So the time attack is separate from the race. But you can do the time attack. I’m pretty sure you

can do.

Elz Indriani: Like, you can score. Just to see, like, just to see, you know. Like, the upcoming one is far.

Bel Wells: Oh, wait.

Elz Indriani: We’re on maintenance right now. Bam! I racing. Bang, bang. We’re on maintenance. We cannot play. Oh, no. Yeah, we cannot read this right now.

Whatever will we do? What we gonna do?

Bel Wells: I’m not going outside.

Elz Indriani: So, on the top 5 ladies in Time Attack, um, will get like a bonus coin. Bell, you should do it, Bell. You can do it, Bell. Guys, do you guys think that Bell can be the fastest on [01:31:00] the grid? So you get, like, an extra point, basically, from the time attack.

And I like it, which is very cool. Like, you know, like, we have our brands, um, We have our brand, the Screen2Speed in iRacing UI, and I don’t know, I just look into it, and I’m like, wow, this is so cool. You know, like, yo, Screen2Speed, so cool in the time attack, yo, let’s go.

Bel Wells: It is cool. I think I’ve seen it when I, um, scrolling down to my mountain time attack.

Elz Indriani: Oh, to your mountain time attack. Right, right. Yeah, it’s on top, so it’s not hard.

Bel Wells: Uh huh, and I saw the little logo. Woo hoo!

Elz Indriani: The logo, the summer, the summer logo. And, yeah, we will have this upcoming, um, screen to speed, I call it screen to speed summer party, because it’s summer, it’s hot, so we’ll be doing, like, a showcase, like I’m, I’m planning to invite all my streamer friends, and I, I invited you.

I will give you more details about it later after this interview, and I would love to have [01:32:00] you race with us, Belle. Please. Please, please, please race with us. Because you’re so fun to be around, and I don’t think I’ve raced with you.

Bel Wells: I don’t remember. Did you do, I feel like you did maybe one of the, was it the Spring Cup I did before International Women’s Day?

I can’t remember what I did before that for Screen to Speed, but I feel like you were maybe in one of the races there.

Elz Indriani: I

Bel Wells: just never saw you.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I, I can’t remember. Because I don’t think I did the Spring Cup. Because the Spring Cup was not on iRacing. Maybe

Bel Wells: it was the fall cup. It was a long time ago.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m planning to get into the iRacing. The iRacing one. Yeah, it really depends because normally, like, the NASCAR thing and stuff, the racetrack, and yeah. I’m so happy actually, like, finally the pandemic is over, [01:33:00] we can go to a racetrack, we can travel, that’s the fun

Bel Wells: part. That is fun.

You’re probably tired from all the travel and fun.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, I’m still not feeling well, but I don’t know, like, every time I hit the stream, start streaming button, it’s just like, I cannot, not like I cannot forget about something, but I just become like, ah! And then when I Shut it off. I’ll be like, Oh God, I’m so tired.

Bel Wells: You’re like, Okay, alright, I need a nap.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, I need to rest. Okay, my bad. Especially after like 5 hours stream, like racing and stuff, like You’re like, I can’t sit here anymore. Yeah, yeah. Do you like that also? Like, after streaming, like, Oh God, I’m so tired. Yeah,

Bel Wells: and I don’t usually notice. And then I stand up and I’m like, Ooh, my knees, my hips,

Elz Indriani: my back.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. You won’t notice that until you get up. From your SimRig, like, okay, my bad.

Bel Wells: But then I also get up and I’m like, oh, I want to sit down and [01:34:00] race more. Just like, one more.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, yeah. Just one more race. Just one more race. When you’re in the hype on that, you don’t want to stop, you know? And then once you’re like, okay, the race gone bad, okay, this is, um, a nature call.

The nature calling me to stop. Like, yeah, no.

Bel Wells: You can’t till the adrenaline runs out.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. And Matthew, Matthew, he said, like, you get more nervous in, um, you get more nervous in the league racing. For iRacing. I think I do.

Bel Wells: I felt like I did, because you see them every week. You’re like, you really don’t want to wrong them then.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. Maybe from

Bel Wells: your buddies, kind of.

Elz Indriani: You don’t want to cause any problem with someone you race every week.

Bel Wells: I don’t like drama. I like drama free, chill, nobody be angry, everyone have fun, that’s all I want. Yeah, everybody

Elz Indriani: have fun. Everybody wins in my race. Yes.

Bel Wells: I want everyone to win and everybody to have fun.

Everybody’s a winner! Oh my god,

Elz Indriani: so [01:35:00] funny! Screaming Cheese! Oh my god, you missed it, no? Hi! Yes, and we are with Stormalina. I know, right? She’s so amazing. We are talking a lot about things, and we were talking about, um, how she got into simracing and stuff, but don’t worry, Screaming Cheese, if you missed it, you can follow us on social media at EnidEsports, so you can see a bit of the interview.

Cheese!

Bel Wells: Beauty. It’s all recorded.

Elz Indriani: It’s all recorded. So don’t worry if you miss it, you will see the clips on our YouTube and also on our social media. Don’t worry. You can watch the vlog too. But don’t worry. Don’t worry. I got you covered. By the way, Belle, I remember I had to ask you this question. But I forgot!

Now I remember. So I got to ask this before I forgot again. So what’s the story behind your name? Why Storm Malina?

Bel Wells: Oh! It’s my childhood nickname. Oh! From, like, being a toddler. [01:36:00] My I used to throw a lot of tantrums. I love to yell no and throw stuff. I was a little bit of a problem child. And my parents would say, here comes Stormalina.

Because my middle name is Malina. So like, Hurricane Malina, you know, Stormalina. Come through. Come through making messes, throwing stuff around, crying, wailing. And it stuck kind of my whole life, so when I was being like, annoying as a teenager, my parents would be like, don’t be Stormalina. Don’t

Bel Wells: Stormalina.

And I

Bel Wells: don’t know, when I was signing up for my Twitch account, I was just like, this kind of fits. And it’s not my real name, really, it’s just my middle name, so. Right, right, right. It’s Maureen Cognito, which I like. You’re having

Elz Indriani: a Like, Love4T6 also, right? Like, Love4T6. Her name is like, Liu, but Love4T6. I wish I could be more creative on finding a pseudo name for my channel.

Now I’m kind of stuck with Elsinreani. [01:37:00] That’s my real name.

Bel Wells: I think so. It’s, it works. It’s perfect. And you can call you El or Elsie. It really just, it works.

Elz Indriani: I like to make it short because a lot of people kind of, not like hard to say my name, but people kind of like Just say it differently. So I’m just gonna l that’s it.

L. L. Sure.

Bel Wells: Keep it simple.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, keep it simple. Just L keep it simple. L. Can’t mess it up. Yeah, you cannot mess it up. If you’re still messing up, then I dunno what to do with you anymore. Like, okay, we’re working on it together. , LZ. Oh my God. Yeah. Lz. Like L and z. Yeah. Sometimes I like it like that way, like lz, like lz, rowina, rowina.

I like mal. But Stormalina is like, I don’t know your name, like your brand name, Stormalina kind of stuck in my head right now, so every time I’m talking to someone like, for example like, I’m about to interview Belle, but I wouldn’t say your name Belle, I’ll be like Stormalina. Yeah,

Bel Wells: [01:38:00] Stormalina, yeah some people don’t know what to call me, I’m really fine with anything.

Elz Indriani: I mean, if We don’t have to put our real name in iRacing, you can just put your name StormMalina in the race, you know what I mean? I think you

Bel Wells: can. I don’t have my actual, like, government name. I have my, my husband’s name. Like,

Elz Indriani: Felwolf isn’t

Bel Wells: my government name.

Elz Indriani: Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. My husband’s

Bel Wells: name is my last name.

So I don’t think they, I think it used to be much more strict with the, I can’t remember how they used to do it. Like, I had to be a name on a credit card, but I know they let you make some adjustments.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, yeah, especially if you’re like a streamer, you can like change it a

Bel Wells: little bit.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, maybe I should contact Iris and be like, just change my name, I don’t know.

Cause it’s just like, I don’t feel comfortable, like, to use like a full legal name. You know Like, I, you know, like, I just like to keep it like, if it’s gaming, just keep it on gaming. Like, I don’t really like to associate.

Bel Wells: Yeah, I like to blend in, [01:39:00] in my little world. Yeah,

Elz Indriani: yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bel Wells: Yeah,

Elz Indriani: I don’t know.

Maybe I will contact Aisling after this. Can I change my name? To my streamer’s name? That’s it. We’ll see. I hope they’ll let me. Nah, they won’t. I hope. I hope. But they would. Yeah. And by the way, Belle, down to the last question. It’s been really nice, by the way, chatting with you and sending you, like, a big hug.

I love you. I finally made it. I’m super happy. Because yeah, your name is like everywhere. We, everybody like, not like everybody talking about you, but we always have a topic about you. Like you’re the one who’s having fun on the stream. And yeah, you, you really enjoy simracing. And that’s what we love about you.

And I wish, I wish I could be like you more. Like actually enjoy it. If I crash, I crash. You know, like, if I crash, I crash.

Bel Wells: There’s definitely moments where I’m like, [01:40:00] ugh. There’s definitely moments where I’m a little upset. But usually, for the most part, it’s just very fun. That’s what’s so great about iRacing.

Like, there’s another race in half an hour. All week. It’s all, it’s there all week. It’s great. Try again later.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, I mean, I should be more chill like you, I mean. Cause, again, I started to become a tryhard. Like, argh, I want this. I want that. I want this. Yeah,

Bel Wells: I’ve been through that. I was like, I want this podium.

I’m gonna have to kill you. I don’t know how to overtake, so I have to kill you. I have to, I’m sorry I don’t

Elz Indriani: know how to overtake you safely, but I will do it the hard way for now. I will learn the soft way. Yeah, the hard way.

Bel Wells: We’re practicing, I’m sorry, you have to be part of the struggle.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, you have to be a part of the lesson.

Bel Wells: A part of the lesson, yeah.

Elz Indriani: You’ll become a part of the lesson, though.

Bel Wells: A casualty.

Elz Indriani: So yeah, since you’re like really fun to be around, you love streaming, and [01:41:00] yeah, you have that regular stream schedule, basically, like on the weekend.

Bel Wells: Yeah, I’m kind of all over the place. It’s for like when I’m free, really.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, so is there any streamers or sim racers or Old that you look up to

Bel Wells: your inspiration. Well, I love, love 46 and Emory. Those are like, I would love to be as fast as, they’re just so good. They’re very talented.

Mm-hmm .

Bel Wells: They’re probably the first ladies I noticed. And then the iron dames in real life, they’re always winning stuff.

Like they’re impressive.

They’re, it’s so

Bel Wells: cool to have like an all ladies team and they’re just doing great out there. Mm-hmm . I like when my cat keeps me up to date of them. And then, I also just like the streamers that are having fun, like Matt Malone and Quirt. I feel like I learn a lot from Dan Suzuki.

Every time I break something on the triples or the display, my husband has to watch a Dan Suzuki video to fix it, so. He’s been very [01:42:00] helpful.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, Dan Suzuki, some sort of, like this year, or about the triple spin

Bel Wells: tip, something like that. Very helpful. Yeah. Even I have learned how to like adjust triple settings and like, whoa!

Oh yeah,

Bel Wells: yeah, It’s fun to learn all this stuff. Iracing has taught me a lot about computers, accidentally, because you kind of have to, I don’t know, sometimes troubleshoot some stuff. Right. It’s good though. I feel like I should know more about computers by now.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, I don’t think, well, simracing in general is more technical, that’s all I’d say.

Bel Wells: It’s so technical, like you at least have to know how to plug in a USB.

Elz Indriani: As simple as that.

Bel Wells: My mom struggles with that.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. Before I get into simracing, I don’t think I know how to build a PC or how does the PC work. Like, inside the case, like, I don’t know how it works. It’s more like a magic for me, but Yeah, after I’m getting into sim racing and iRacing, I build [01:43:00] my own PC.

Like, I feel like I’m proud of myself. That’s so

Bel Wells: cool! Well done! I wanna build one. I’m gonna take this one apart and try and put it back together. Try and put it

Elz Indriani: back together, like a Lego. Yeah.

Bel Wells: If I don’t stream on Friday, we know what happens.

Elz Indriani: I’m planning to build another PC, like, for streaming. Probably, like, next Friday.

Oh, that’s so cool! So, everything is, like, cheap, on discount. Maybe I’ll get Uhhuh, you know? But Yeah. ’cause building a, building a pc and I don’t know, like

Bel Wells: I would love to do that. I just wanna know. I can do that.

Elz Indriani: It’s fun. It’s really fun. It’s really fun. It’s like, if you know how to build a Lego, you’ll get the logic.

Yeah. It’s like Legos. Yeah. Mm-hmm . You’ll get the logic off building it, I mean. Yeah, well, testing it, turning it on after you put everything is the scariest part of building a PC. And

Bel Wells: then waiting for it to like register on the desktop when it comes to the screen.

Elz Indriani: I need to see the Windows logo. [01:44:00] It’s

Bel Wells: probably such a good feeling though when it turns on.

Yeah,

Elz Indriani: yeah, it is. Like, when I, when I succeed building my PC, building my sim setup and everything, I feel like that is like the biggest achievement for me in sim racing. More than winning the race.

Bel Wells: That’s cool. That’s hard to do. I have no idea how to do that. Did you just learn through YouTube videos or how did you learn?

Oh,

Elz Indriani: trust me. I learned from YouTube University.

Bel Wells: That’s how I learned how to be a plumber. Yeah,

Elz Indriani: that’s how I learned. And also I read some articles on Reddit. Like, yeah,

just reading articles on

Elz Indriani: Reddit. I don’t really like dive deep into it, but just look

Elz Indriani: the surface and just to see a little review about what you want.

Bel Wells: Yeah, and then you’re like, here we go, let’s try it, and you did it.

Elz Indriani: Like, yeah.

Bel Wells: That’s awesome.

Elz Indriani: I think to build a PC, you should know what specs do you want in your PC. If you know what you want in your [01:45:00] PC, then finding the piece of it, like going to Micro Center, or like Best Buy or something like that, it’s not that hard, you know.

As long as you know what you want. What you want to maximize in your PC. I think that’s how I do it. For me, when I build this PC, I want to, I don’t care about the rest, because I was focusing on my GPU, my graphic cards. So, for my graphic cards, then I will start like, finding the guide about which motherboard, what RAM, CPU, and everything.

Bel Wells: Nice. Yeah. Build it around there.

Elz Indriani: Uh huh, yeah. That’s how I do it. That’s how I do. Building my PC and learning from YouTube Universe.

Bel Wells: And we go from there.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, we go from there. If we made a mistake, we learn something from there.

Bel Wells: Yeah, we’ll learn from the mistake. I’ll take it. It’s just like iRacing.

Elz Indriani: Just like in iRacing.

Yeah, I mean, after all, like, iRacing is really, like, teaching us about a lot of things. Not just iRacing.

Bel Wells: It’s so good. It [01:46:00] teaches you, like, to fail and keep trying. You’re like, okay, you didn’t win. Let’s try again. It’s not the end of the world. It’s still fun.

Elz Indriani: And it really teach you like, oh yeah, and it’s time for you to actually learn this thing.

Because if you’re not learning, you’re not like, you’re not progressing, you’re not improving, so. Yeah. Yeah, that’s why I’m like, okay, it’s time for me to actually go fast at least, right? Especially like Yeah, definitely.

Bel Wells: If you ever find yourself in like, autopilot days, and you’re just like, what am I doing?

Yeah.

Elz Indriani: I don’t know, am I driving? Am I driving or am I not driving? Who’s

Bel Wells: driving?

Elz Indriani: Yeah. Iron Dames for the win. Yeah, they’re, they’re exceptionally good. Like, yeah. I think they won the Imola. Wait, were they on podium? I think they did. Were they winning the Imola? I forgot, but you will always find her, find this Iron Dames in podium, winning the race.

Oh yeah.

Bel Wells: It’s so impressive. It’s, like, inspirational. I want to be [01:47:00] fast. I want to beat the boys, too.

Elz Indriani: I want to beat everyone. I want to beat everyone, yeah. I want to be fast. I want to be fast and beat everyone.

Bel Wells: I really like to beat myself. I think that’s why the rally has been so fun lately, because it’s just yourself on the mountain and you’re just, like, trying to beat your old times.

It’s very fun.

Elz Indriani: I think you mentioned also earlier, you like the, you like the Richard Burns movie.

Bel Wells: Yeah, that was really fun. I just barely, my husband just barely installed that for me, and it’s, it’s like, oh my gosh, there’s so many different rally cars, so fun, different rally tracks, I would love to get more rally tracks on iRacing.

I was wondering, as I was driving up the canyons by my house, uh, it would be so fun to get, I wonder if you could make canyons, like, how do, how do they make the tracks on iRacing, how do they make the tracks for, Like Pike’s Peak. I want to make the track by my house so I can race them. I wonder how people do that.[01:48:00]

Elz Indriani: Yeah. It got me wonder also. But iRacing did such a fantastic job. Scanning the car and the track. I know for a lot of people iRacing can be pricey because you need to pay the subscription you need to buy the content but I feel like you get what you pay. Like, I feel like okay you need to spend like a certain amount of money and Yeah, you have to, like, pay for something, but you don’t actually get what you pay, so yeah.

Yeah,

Bel Wells: they have options too, like, I love that they do the participation thing if you do. It’s eight races out of the season. You get credits like seven bucks or eight bucks for a class. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do that every season. So it’s like free car. I love it. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. I like that they have that. Very cool.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, the participation program. I love it. Like, yeah, I wish I could be more committed to one series instead of like keep on jumping to every.

Bel Wells: Oh, leapfrogging [01:49:00] around.

Elz Indriani: But my problem is like, I cannot race every race. Like, yeah, that’s That’s my biggest issue with

Bel Wells: commenting. Flavor of the week for me. Not every, I can’t do everything.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, yeah, that’s what I wish. We’ll see, we’ll see. Maybe I will get into more simracing when I’m not traveling after the NASCAR season done.

Bel Wells: When is NASCAR season over? November?

Elz Indriani: The final will be at Phoenix, so I might go to the final. I would love to have you! On the track, let me know if you are planning to go, if you wanna go, seriously, let me know.

Bel Wells: Yeah, if I end up doing my first race, I’ll let you know. I’m gonna do one eventually. I’m like intimidated by the crowds. I really don’t like large crowds and loud noises.

Elz Indriani: I will take you to somewhere nice on the track, don’t worry. I’ll take you somewhere nice at the track where you can sit, there’s not many people around you, [01:50:00] because I don’t like being around a lot of people, like, you know, in the middle of a concert.

Bel Wells: Uh huh, yeah, exactly.

Elz Indriani: Why are you standing so very close to me? There’s the unbreathed air. Yeah. Don’t take my oxygen. Not like that but, Don’t breathe in my air. Don’t breathe my air. That’s my air. Give it back. It’s more like, I love being around a lot of people, but if it’s too crowded with music, people talking, people chatting, like a lot of things happening in one time, in one area, it really stress me out.

I think like

Bel Wells: overstimulated, like the baby. Yeah. .

Elz Indriani: I dunno what

Bel Wells: to

Elz Indriani: look at. . Yeah. And Oh, oh yeah. Sophie said you could make a track on Aceto Ora. We don’t mop. Oh. Do you get into Aceto Ora or not? Not really. Uh,

Bel Wells: I’m pretty sure we have a CC. I don’t know if we have just a set of corset, but I know we have a CC.

Elz Indriani: Ah, [01:51:00] AZA is crazy. Like the community. That’s

Bel Wells: one. Build it on.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. The community is like.

Bel Wells: It’s not usually. I feel like it’s only five bucks on Steam sale usually.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, yeah. Assetto Corsa is like a perfect sim to start. If you want to get into the PC, sim racing on PC, you should go to Assetto Corsa like the best of the best.

I should try more of them.

Bel Wells: I like to see the differences between them all.

Elz Indriani: You should try. You should try Assetto Corsa like one time. ACC, I like it, but ACC is quite limited because most of the time you’re only driving the GT2, GT3, GT4, um, in the track that is like racing in SNO, motorsport event, like, yeah, ACC, I like it, but it’s quite limited, that’s how I describe it.

But in Assetto Corsa, the sky is the limit, well, really. The sky is the limit, like, you can

Bel Wells: find I don’t know, look into that, I love [01:52:00] freedom. I love

Elz Indriani: freedom. You can find lots of freedom in Assetto Corsa, like,

Bel Wells: really.

Elz Indriani: Oh,

Bel Wells: lovely.

Elz Indriani: You can do drifting, if you’re into drifting. Oh, fun. Have you tried drifting? Uh, like, not on purpose.

Not on purpose, but by accident, yeah, sometimes. Going around

Bel Wells: some corners, and you’re like, ooh, that felt fun.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, if you’re interested to get into drifting, I think, um, yeah, I think in screen to script we will have like a drifting coaching program with, uh, ESDA, so.

Bel Wells: Oh yes, I think I saw something about that in the chat.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, so if you want to get into it, like, I don’t know, just try and find out if you like it. Let us know. Yeah. Like we will have coaching. Yeah, we’ll have coaching and stuff, so. Feel free to join if you’re interested, like, let us know if you want to join. If you want to join, yes. Yeah, and for all of you guys also in the chat, [01:53:00] Ash, Cheese, everyone, if you guys want to get into some drifting, we will have a coaching, we will have a coaching program and yeah, let us know.

Maybe I will get into it. I think I never got into it. You haven’t

Bel Wells: gotten into the drift yet?

Elz Indriani: No, not yet. Early in drifting?

Bel Wells: No,

Elz Indriani: I haven’t yet. Spend so much time, so much time into it.

Bel Wells: Yeah, it’s like a whole different, they could have a license for that on iRacing. Yeah.

Elz Indriani: Oh, by the way, have you tried, um, dirt roads?

Bel Wells: Uh, Dirt Road I’ve done a few of, like with the rally jumps and stuff. I went through a phase of that with the jumpy trucks, those are really fun. And then I kind of, I lost interest with those, I stuck with the dirt ovals more. And the sprint cars, the 305s, those are so fun. Oh god, the

Elz Indriani: 305s are so fun. They sound like little

Bel Wells: mosquitoes.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bel Wells: Matthew,

Elz Indriani: Matthew is the dirt oval driver, like he drives in real life. Um, Window TV. He was in the [01:54:00] chat. And yeah, he drives the micro, wait, uh, Matthew, I forgot. Were you driving the, uh, the micro sprint? Like the car in rookie class, you know, the new car in rookie class? There’s like, one of them is

Bel Wells: wingless and one of them

Elz Indriani: has a wing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Bel Wells: The wingless one is really hard for me to control.

Elz Indriani: Ah, the wingless is. I don’t know how to describe

Bel Wells: it. A wild ride.

Elz Indriani: But the wing is super fun. Like, that guy likes to scream.

Bel Wells: It’s

Elz Indriani: so fun. And you’re just going in circles. But everybody can, I don’t know, I saw a lot of airborne in the movies.

Bel Wells: Yeah, they roll. They’re fun.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, that’s super fun. Yeah, I used to do a lot of Dirt Oval, like when I got burned out from Oval, from Ruth, I would throw myself into Dirt Oval. Yeah,

Bel Wells: it’s a nice change, it’s fun. They’re really fast too, they are over in like 15 minutes.

Elz Indriani: Oh

Bel Wells: yeah. Some of them [01:55:00] can go longer.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, it’s like 15 20 minutes of freeze, I think, most of the time.

So it’s like, I never got serious, like really serious, into third level. I’m doing it for fun. So, I’m, I’m literally just throwing myself with zero practice and just doing it.

Bel Wells: Yeah, that’s how I feel with all of it. Maybe I want to try and take it all just a smidge more serious. I still want to have, like, all the fun, but I do want to be a little more serious.

Yeah.

Bel Wells: I feel like I understand a little bit more now that it, I can, before it’s, it’s like, I don’t even know what a green flag was, I didn’t know what a yellow flag was, I knew what a checkered flag was.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, all you know is the checkered flag.

Bel Wells: Blue flag, I was like, what’s that, what’s a meatball, I don’t know any of this.

I just understand so much more. I feel like I want to, like, try harder. So I can get better.

That makes sense. Yeah,

Elz Indriani: well, it really depends. Maybe like one day if you got into the, like a league race or something that [01:56:00] is like high competition, high level, then you wanna start to get serious, but in my opinion, as long as you’re doing like officials on daily basis and you are doing it for fun, don’t lose it.

Like, don’t do it. Yeah.

Bel Wells: Yeah. I, sometimes I’ll be, like, racing and I’m like, this isn’t fun, and then I have to take a break for, like, the rest of the day, and then I go back to the next day and it’s fun again. Yeah.

Elz Indriani: Sometimes you have to, like, take a break.

Bel Wells: Like Just need a breather.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. Take a step back, touch some grass in real life, and,

Bel Wells: you know, like,

Elz Indriani: yeah.

Bel Wells: Go pet my dog.

Elz Indriani: Meatball flight means you’re hungry inside the car. Yeah, now I’m hungry. I’m

Bel Wells: hungry, I need a snack.

Elz Indriani: I need a snack, I need a meatball. Oh my god, my first time learning the meatball flight, I learned it in a hard way. So, I was like, doing the GT3 endurance, I think it was at Sebring, I crashed. I got the mid move flag, but I feel like I still can drive this car, so it’s [01:57:00] fine.

I did three laps, I got disqualified. Now I know. No! Oh, no! My car was fine! So funny. I can drive the car!

Bel Wells: This is soft, people! Not that bad! Not that

Elz Indriani: bad! I can drive on it! My wheel wasn’t even I don’t know, my wheel was straight! I got the meatball, I know. But, I was like, what is that? I got that kind of

Bel Wells: meatball.

Nothing’s wrong with it.

Elz Indriani: Just irising. Like, I can do this irising. Take out that meatball flag for me, please. Don’t doubt me. Don’t doubt me. Do not underestimate me at driving a car. There’s nothing different with a car. I learned it in a hard way, so

Bel Wells: That’s so rough. That’s funny though. A good rough memory, but a funny one.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, but at least I learned it. Now, every time I’m getting a meatball, I’m back to pit. Like, yeah, bro, I will fix it. Like, yeah, bro, I will fix it. Okay. Meatball Marinara shop, yeah. Meatball Marinara. Oh my god, [01:58:00] by the way, oh, Jesus. See, I’ve spoken, it’s two hours, I keep on saying it every week to everyone, it will be a quick interview, one hour, we’ll be chatting, and it’s down to two hours now, and my record was with Jamie, I think?

It was like, there was like one talk that is like almost hit three hours mark. What? Time flies. Time flies, I know right. And by the way, before we end the stream, I don’t know if you can see this well and everyone, but this is what I got from Chicago. What is it? Can you

Bel Wells: describe it to me? I

Elz Indriani: got sunburned, Belle.

I got sunburned. Oh, you got sunburned? So bad. This is what I got coming back from Chicago. Ash. A souvenir. A souvenir from Chicago. Like, I was this white and now I am this tan. Like, from two days. It’s two days trip to a racetrack, I

Bel Wells: believe. So I think I’m slightly [01:59:00] sunburned from paddle boarding. Can match.

Ahaha.

Elz Indriani: So next time, if you go to a racetrack, don’t forget to bring your sunscreen. Always sunscreen.

Bel Wells: Always sunscreen.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. Yeah, it’s a 10. Yeah, I know, Ash. Yeah, This is like a milk and a coffee. That’s how my mom say it. Like, you, you look like a milk coffee. I was like, what milk? What? What, what, what? What is milk?

Coffee. You know the white one is milk. This one is coffee. I was like, haha. So funny. It hurts. It hurts. It’s burning right now. I put burn. I put a lot of olive. I touch grass. I touch grass, I touch the McDonald’s bridge, I touch the Nascar Chicago walls, I touch everything last weekend. I’m touching everything.

Oh, it’s so fun. How fun. I touch the tires. I always want to, I, I can obsess with tires, so every time I see tires on the pit lane, I will touch it. I don’t know, I will touch it for no reason. [02:00:00]

Bel Wells: I feel like that makes it more real, more tactile too, when you’re seeing all this stuff on the, the sim in the game, and then you can like touch it in real life.

It’s a pleasure.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, every time I’m going to a racetrack, I got that feeling in me, like, I wanna drive that car. Probably for

Bel Wells: real, like a dream. Mhmm.

Elz Indriani: Like, I wanna drive

Bel Wells: this car one day.

Elz Indriani: That’s what I keep on saying, like, when I was in Chicago, like, Bro, these bro are driving so fast, like the sound of this cop car are so brutal, like brr, brr, brr, you know the sound of

Bel Wells: a stop car.

Like you can feel it in your, in your chest. Yeah,

Elz Indriani: and I want to be a part of that, you know, it gives me that feeling, so hopefully one day I’ll be able to. I’ll be able to, yeah, drive in real life hopefully one day. Yeah, we’ll see about that. Alright, anyway, Belle, thank you so much. Yes, my pleasure. Thank you so much for hanging.

Thank you so much [02:01:00] for, yeah, spending your time with us here in Innitalks. Thank you so much. It’s been really nice to have a chat with

Bel Wells: you. Yes, it was. Not that bad at all.

Elz Indriani: Not

Bel Wells: bad at all,

Elz Indriani: okay. I hope you, I hope like, the question list and everything that I gave to you earlier kind of helps you, like, guiding.

Bel Wells: Totally. It chilled me out. I was actually more mellow about it than I thought I would be. Oh yeah? But I think that helps that it’s you, too, because you are mellow. You’re chill.

Elz Indriani: Yeah, I’m, like, I’m doing my best to, you know, like, make my guests feeling, like, comfortable in the interview. You

Bel Wells: definitely do. I feel like I’m a hard person to make comfortable, and I feel comfy.

You did great. She’s

Elz Indriani: comfy, guys. She’s comfy. Belle’s comfy. I’m comfy. I’m

Bel Wells: comfy.

Elz Indriani: Thank you so much, Belle. Oh my god. Thank you. Thank you so much. And by the way, before we end the stream, before we end the interview, so if anybody wants to follow you on social media [02:02:00] or, yeah, any social media if you have, feel free to, yeah.

I just have

Bel Wells: Twitch. I think I have TikTok, but I don’t put anything on there. It’s really just Twitch and YouTube.

Elz Indriani: Oh, just Twitch and YouTube. I see. So, she’s like, you’re like a real streamer. The channel that you go to. I’m

Bel Wells: not really on that. Like, I don’t do Facebook for my personal account or Instagram.

I’m not really on those. My chat made me make a Discord. I’m a forced social media for Twitch. But I’ve grown to love it.

Elz Indriani: Yeah. But it’s okay. I mean, Twitch is more than enough for now. It is. If you’re focusing on streaming, Twitch is like the best. Like, yeah.

Bel Wells: Yeah, I feel like it’s exactly the realm I need.

Mhmm. Perfect.

Elz Indriani: Later you can move to Instagram. Like you can start posting if you are thinking about Yeah.

Bel Wells: Small steps. We’ll start here. . Yeah.

Elz Indriani: Because it’s not like streaming is not for everyone and

mm-hmm .

Elz Indriani: It’s hard to manage [02:03:00] streaming and content creation at some point. So I’m, I would love to have you on social media, like I would love to see your presence on Twitch.

I dunno, I mean on Instagram, but when, only when you’re ready.

Bel Wells: I’ll let you know when I’m there.

Elz Indriani: Sure. Please let us know once you’re making an Instagram or Twitter, whatever. Let us know and we will give you a follow. We will give you like, Oh my God, Belle is here! You know? So yeah, Belle. Thank you very much.

Once again, it’s very nice to have you and. To everyone here in the chat, thank you so much for hanging, and we have to end the stream for now. We have to end the interview, but don’t worry. If you guys want to see something more from today’s talk with Storm Arlina, don’t worry. We will put it on our socials, so make sure to follow us on Instagram at initesports and at screen2spit.

If you want to know more about the competition, you can go to screen2spit. If you want to see what’s going on on [02:04:00] INIT. So, yeah, you can follow us on Innit Esports. And also, don’t forget to follow Stormalina Belle on Twitch, because she’ll be streaming on the weekend. So, yeah, Belle, I will see you when I see you!

Yes, I’ll see you around! Bye! Bye, everyone! Thank you so much for hanging, and we will see you next week with a new guest. So, yeah, don’t forget to follow us on Twitch also. Tidaki, bye, guys! We love you! Keep up the good workout! Ah, thank you so much, Belle! Love you! Bye. Bye.

Crew Chief Brad: In it, eSports focuses on sim racing events and digital tournaments. They bring eSports content to fans and sponsorship opportunities to brands while maximizing audience reach across multiple sports, industries, and platforms. In it, eSports is a woman led company where diversity, equity, inclusion, and [02:05:00] accessibility is in their DNA.

And their platform aims to combat bullying and cheating to help make the e sports world as safe and fair as possible to learn more. Be sure to log on to www. innitesports. gg or follow them on social media at Innit Esports. Join their Discord, check out their YouTube channel, or follow their live content

Crew Chief Eric: via Twitch.

This episode has been brought to you by Grand Touring Motorsports as part of our motoring podcast network. For more episodes like this, tune in each week for more exciting and educational content from organizations like The Exotic Car Marketplace, The Motoring Historian, Brake Fix, and many others. If you’d like to support Grand Touring Motorsports and the Motoring Podcast Network, sign up for one of our many sponsorship tiers at www.

patreon. com forward slash GT Motorsports. Please note that the content, opinions, and materials presented and expressed in this episode are those of its creator. And this episode has been published with their consent. If you have any inquiries about this program, please contact the creators of this episode [02:06:00] via email or social media, as mentioned in the episode.

Copyright INIT eSports. This podcast is now produced as part of the Motoring Podcast Network and can be found everywhere you stream, download or listen!

More Screen to Speed…

Dive into the journeys of remarkable individuals making waves in sim racing and bridging the virtual with the real. From the thrill of digital circuits to the roar of real-life racetracks, they explore the passion, dedication, and innovation that drives the world of motorsports. They hear from athletes, creators, and pioneers sharing their stories, insights, and the powerful ways sim racing is connecting communities and creating pathways into motorsports.

INIT eSports focuses on sim racing events and digital tournaments. They bring eSports content to fans and sponsorship opportunities to brands, while maximizing audience reach across multiple sports, industries, and platforms. INIT eSports is a woman-led company where Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Accessibility is in their DNA, and their platform aims to combat bullying and cheating to help make the eSports world as safe and fair as possible. To learn more, be sure to logon to www.initesports.gg today or follow them on social media @initesports, join their discord, check out their YouTube Channel, or follow their live content via Twitch.

At INIT eSports, founder and CEO Stefy Bau doesn’t just settle for the ordinary. She creates extraordinary experiences by producing thrilling online competitions and real-life events that transcend the boundaries of the eSports universe. And she’s here with us on Break/Fix to share her story, and help you understand why you need to get more involved in the world of eSports.

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David v Goliath, Porsche 914 & 917 at Le Mans in 1970

History of Motorsports

Gran T

June 15, 2024

David v Goliath, Porsche 914 & 917 at Le Mans in 1970

As we celebrate the 101st anniversary of the 24hrs of LeMans we #tbt and geek out with Rick Barnett from the Concours at Pasadera about how the Porsche 914-6 GT took on the infamous Porsche 917 during the 1970 LeMans 24 hours.

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Transcript

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] We always have a blast chatting with our guests about all sorts of different topics, but sometimes we go off the rails and dig deeper into their automotive and motorsports pasts. As a bonus, let’s go behind the scenes with this pit stop mini sode for some extra content that didn’t quite fit in the main episode.

Sit back, enjoy, and remember to like, Patreon.

Rick Barnett: So I’ve got a, I’ve got a 914 two liter. I’ve got a Bentley Arnage. I’ve got, you know, I’ve got a variety of cars. MGB GT. Those were all cars that were important to me as I was 16 years old and thinking someday I’m going to end up with a cool car. From that point forward, I started collecting the cars that I really like to drive.

And so, uh, those are the cars that I have in my collection.

Crew Chief Eric: You can’t see over my shoulder.

Rick Barnett: There you go. There’s a cool nine 14

Crew Chief Eric: wide body. That’s been in the family since 86. Is that an

Rick Barnett: authentic GT?

Crew Chief Eric: No, that was a 1. 8 SC out of [00:01:00] Florida with air condition and much of the stuff. It’s in the nine 14 registry, but it’s a full on wide body car is a former pro solo nationally recognized winning car belong to my dad.

He passed away. It was in storage. I have it, it had a six in it at several sixes in it at one point, and now I’m converting it back to a four cylinder. I’m going to put it that way. The car is still in the family. It’s at the point of it can’t be turned back original. So I’m tastefully restomodding it is what I’m, what I’m saying.

So that’s one of many in our collection. It’s been around forever, but yeah, it’s sitting in my garage right now waiting for me. So we’re, we’re kindred spirits in 914. How about that?

Rick Barnett: Yeah, no, I I’m like a big, big fan of the 914. I think what’s what a lot of people don’t know. And as long as we’re talking about the 914, there really is a David and Goliath story that goes back to Lamar in 1970.

So here we are, if we can close our eyes for a moment and remember the first time we saw the Steve McQueen [00:02:00] movie and what an impact that movie had on us. In 1970, the 917 comes in and absolutely is a behemoth. On the racetrack dethroning Ferrari’s 512, which, you know, if you remember the history of it, Enzo was absolutely committed to make sure that Porsche did not win the 1970 race and he pulled out all the stops on the 512 s and brought in a great racing team.

Sam Posey was racing 512. It was just unbelievable. The 512 was like this major monster and Porsche comes in with a 917 with very little, what should I say that, you know, they didn’t have an awful lot of time to build this car. They come in with a 917. And so, as we know, based on the movie Le Mans by Steve McQueen, the 917 and the 512 battle out to the very brutal end.

But what most people don’t know is that. In that same race, the 24 hours, the most grueling automobile race [00:03:00] ever in the history of automobiles, I believe, in 1970, the Porsche 914 6 finished sixth overall, ahead of the 908s, ahead of the Ferrari 312s, ahead of the 911 S’s, the 914 6 GT finished sixth overall, so it was amazing That the car finished the race at all 24 hours, that’s a group.

I mean, there were a number of cars. If you go down the list, a number of cars and a number of manufacturers that couldn’t finish the race, but the nine 14 six finished sixth overall, absolutely unbelievable. So a real David and Goliath story. So yeah, I’m a, I’m a huge nine 14 fan.

Crew Chief Eric: And I believe they repeated that with a triple podium at the Nurburgring 24 in that same year.

Maybe then it was the next year, 71.

Rick Barnett: Oh, I don’t know that. Yeah. Yeah. The poster’s

Crew Chief Eric: on my wall. Uh, 22nd of August, 1970. It looks like they took the top three spots in class with 914 sixes. So there

Rick Barnett: you [00:04:00] go. Yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: I have to read it in German. It’s halfway across the room.

Rick Barnett: Yeah. Amazing.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, 914 is an underappreciated, ugly duckling, call it whatever you want, but it’s actually a great car and it’s always been the big battle between the 911 right?

They had to, I hate to say, neuter that car, handicap it, to keep it from beating the 911, because as a platform, it’s a… Better handling vehicle, but you know, you got the flagship, you got the 911 and the same is true today, right? They introduced the Boxster as the, let’s say the heritage 550, the evolution, and then the Cayman, it’s not too far off.

They’re basically 914s, right? I mean, come on,

Rick Barnett: you put the right guts in the Cayman and it is going to give the 911 a real run.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s right. But they’re always, they always want to keep it just slightly shy of the 911, right? That’s why there’ll never be a Cayman Turbo, not from the factory. You know what I

Rick Barnett: mean?

No, that’s for sure.

Crew Chief Eric: So we talked earlier about your posters and you [00:05:00] mentioned the war, the rivalry between manufacturers and drivers and the spirit of competition and all that that’s exemplified in those posters. I want to ask you this pit stop question, which we’ve asked many guests, but I’m going to frame it appropriate to our discussion.

There is one rivalry outside of the many driver rivalries that we know, you know, Hunt versus Lauda, Senna versus Prost, things like that. There’s another one that’s in the modern times, and it’s probably one of the most epic rivalries still between Porsche and Ferrari. Let’s say you’re deciding on the next year’s theme for the concourse, and it comes between choosing between exhibiting in center court.

The Porsche 959 or the Ferrari F40, which do you choose?

Rick Barnett: Well, yeah, it’s going to be, that’ll be a challenge because next year’s center court is Corvette and it will be, you know, erasing Corvettes that have an incredible pedigree in history. And of course the history of Corvettes, again, dating back to C1’s [00:06:00] all the way through the 2022 Z06. It’s hard for me to put myself into that.

Thought process for next year. However, when we think about the rivalry between Porsche and Ferrari, I will tell you that the history of automobile racing between those two marks is such that they are for me, a bloodbath. Rivalry, there’s no love lost between the two. There is anger and focus between those two marks.

As soon as you see those cars get on the track, whether it’s the driver or whether it’s the manufacturer, whether it’s the supplier, the vendor of the parts that are in the car, the teams that support it, pit crew, there is an anger that exists between those two manufacturers. And when you think about that intensity.

showing up within the same proximity of each other. I don’t know. I [00:07:00] don’t know. I don’t know how, I don’t know how you point to one or the other. It is just such an amazing competition, a war between two, you know, it’s, it’s core. I mean, if you were an Oregon football player, it’d be like the difference between the ducks and the beavers, you know, it’s just like, they’re just going to come after it.

Crew Chief Eric: So if you had to pick up the keys. off the table and drive one home. Which would you choose?

Rick Barnett: Well, you know, I, gosh, I, if I could only have one car and it was mine personally, I think probably tipping my hat to this year’s mark, it would probably be the Ferrari.

Crew Chief Eric: You are in good company with that answer. Let me tell you.

Porsche is not winning this battle in the long run.

Rick Barnett: Well, and I don’t have a Ferrari. I mean, I’ve got a 914 down in my garage, which I absolutely love. And I just sold my 2012 Spider back to the dealer. They wanted it so bad, but I’ve got to tell you that, that I think [00:08:00] tipping my hat to this year’s market would have to be Ferrari.

Crew Chief Eric: Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and, you know, the, the arguments we get are fantastic. A lot of people will agree. The nine 59 was technologically more advanced. It was the super car of, of, of super cars at that time. But there’s something about the F 40 that everybody just gravitates towards. It’s amazing.

We hope you enjoyed another awesome episode of break fix podcasts brought to you by grand Torrey motorsports. If you’d like to be a guest on the show or get involved, be sure to follow us on all social media platforms at GrandTouringMotorsports. And if you’d like to learn more about the content of this episode, be sure to check out the follow on article at GTMotorsports.

org. We remain a commercial free and no annual fees organization through our sponsors, but also through the generous support of our fans, families, and friends through [00:09:00] Patreon. For as little as 2. 50 a month, you can get access to more behind the scenes action, additional Pit Stop minisodes, and other VIP goodies, as well as keeping our team of creators Fed on their strict diet of fig mutants, gumby bears, and monster.

So consider signing up for Patreon today at www. patreon. com forward slash GT motorsports, and remember without you, none of this would be possible.

Highlights

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

00:00 Introduction and Behind the Scenes
00:25 Guest’s Car Collection
00:49 The 914 Wide Body Story
01:45 David and Goliath: 914 vs. 917
04:56 Porsche vs. Ferrari Rivalry
05:39 Choosing Between 959 and F40
08:28 Conclusion and Call to Action

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Showcase: The $50,000 Millennial Gray Challenge

And now back to our regularly scheduled reviews and ranting…

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Is Toyota bringing back the Celica?

Did you know that the new Maxda CX-90 has an inline-6?

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Rich People Thangs!

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UnCOOL-wall Nominee!

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DeeAnn Hopings’ Auto.Biography

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Legacy, Passion, and Perspective

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GTMSpreading Motorsports Enthusiasm - since 2014

GTMSpreading Motorsports Enthusiasm - since 2014

GTMSpreading Motorsports Enthusiasm - since 2014