Life often presents interesting opportunities. Sometimes you take them, and sometimes these opportunities turn out much better than you might have initially expected. Take, for example, the Compass360 Racing (or C360R) team. What is now a multiple-championship-winning operation began quite humbly.
Back in 2004, I made the move from regional racing in Ontario, Canada, to a pro series, the Grand-Am Cup. I had done well in my rookie regional season in 2003, winning a GT Sprints championship and taking Rookie of the Year honors in Canadian Touring Car in my trusty 944 Rothmans Cup Porsche. I’d also raced a couple of times in the GAC as well, doing arrive-and-drives with other teams, with decidedly mixed results.
I felt that with the right team of people, I could field a better effort than those I’d rented from, and with that in mind sold my trusty Porsche for a BMW Z3 Coupe that had run for a number of seasons in Grand-Am. My crew chief, Ian McQuillan, was a friend from the Porsche Club who owns a shop north of Toronto, and we ran a lean, even Spartan, program. We took the car to the track on an open trailer, pulled behind a capable but rusty GMC panel van, which held all of our spares, a couple of easy-ups and a bicycle. Our goal for the year was simple: finish every race.
Grand-Am Cup, which started life as the Motorola Cup in the mid-’90s and later became the KONI Challenge and more recently the Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge, features 2.5-hour races. Each car is driven by two drivers, usually swapping mid-race during a pit stop for fuel and a tire change. The format allowed me to drive one stint and rent out the other seat to another driver, with us splitting the cost of the weekend, making it reasonably affordable for both of us.
This is one of the unspoken truths in racing: the money has to come from somewhere. When I started in the pro series, I put together a program that would allow me to spend the same money I was spending racing regionally and move up to the next level. Having a co-driver made that possible. At the time, other single-driver pro series like the SCCA’s World Challenge were well out of reach. By the end of the first year, we’d accomplished our goal and took the checkered flag at every race. I’d driven with a different co-driver nearly every event, the result of some pretty strong promotion of our effort on my part, with four top-10s (our best result was sixth at Mid-Ohio).
By the end of the first year, we’d accomplished our goal and took the checkered flag at every race.
Being in the paddock and having visibility is a big part of the success at this level, especially given that in our first year we were knocking on the top 10 every race. This meant that I was able to put together a two-car Z3 program for 2005. We still had a variety of drivers at each and every event, with me as the only season-long shoe. A couple of up-and-coming drivers signed with us, and we notched five top-10s during the year. Billy Johnson put one of our BMWs on outside pole at Mid-Ohio, and we gave the Z3 platform a fabulous send off at Virginia International Raceway during the season finale, when my co-driver Daniel Herrington and I won the race in a rain-soaked deluge. It was a thrill to win our first pro race in the Z3’s final outing, and we finished seventh in the year-end standings.
Our second season wasn’t without its trials and tribulations, though. Dealing with four drivers instead of two proved to be vastly more than twice the effort, especially as the expectations of our performance changed from simply finishing a race to winning it. Doubly challenging was that by season’s end Ian decided the racing schedule wasn’t something he felt he could commit to into the future, and the BMWs were no longer legal to compete in Grand-Am. Selling the cars was easy, but plotting the future of the team was less so.