RACER celebrates Don Panoz’s 80th birthday with a look back at his most prized achievements and a range of other topics in a Q&A with the driving force behind decades of ground-breaking, championship-winning sports car and open-wheel products.

RACER: Looking back, what achievements stand out as your proudest moments in auto racing?

DON PANOZ: To be completely honest, some of the things I’m proud of now I did not realize I should have been proud of when they started. For example, when I got AUTOSPORT’s John Bolster Award for putting the engine up front [Panoz LMP1], I didn’t really understand the significance that no one had done it for many years. Now when I look back at it, it was a hell of an accomplishment and I was led to it by Adrian Reynard. I didn’t know enough about racing to say, well, that’s not what everybody is doing. When I look back on that, I think that was quite a legacy.

I think the thing that I’m most proud of, was recognizing after the first year and a half – so as a neophyte to racing – that although racing was about the teams and the drivers and the officials, no one was looking at the fans. That was what got me started with the American Le Mans Series. I think nobody will ever dispute the fact that the American Le Mans Series was a great vehicle for the fans to appreciate racing. I never heard a whisper of dissent even for those years that we raced in the series, I never used any influence with the officials or anybody else. I think that was the difference with the ALMS: the fans got close to the cars and the racing was open. They knew that there was not any politics in the rules. I’m very proud of that.

The Panoz Q9 hybrid – Sparky – was also a rather forward-thinking car that foretold where the auto racing industry would seek performance gains more than 10 years later.

Not only motorsports but the OEMs. Sparky only raced once. It raced at Petit Le Mans and won its class in its first race in the GT1 category. I remember after Sparky won, I went around to see Ford and General Motors and all the other people, and they all yawned and said, “Hybrids, forget it, it’s not going to be anything.” That was 1998. Nobody had an interest. Sparky’s down here in our museum (at far left, photo courtesy of Panoz). I could not believe that we were then 10 years ahead of our time; 10 years later, people started looking at hybrids.

Sparky was a very proud moment. It was unique, it was new. I remember they made the batteries in Germany by hand. They were hand wrapped and in a box in the passenger seat and had a special cooling vent put on the hood to keep the hot air out. When the car came out of a corner and the driver stepped on the accelerator to a certain point, the battery and the power would kick in, you had an instant extra 100hp. Sparky spent 20 minutes in the pits with a broken suspension at Petit and still won the race. That wasn’t too bad.

In our first four years I think we won eight sports car championships, different sports car championships with the LMP and the GT. Even in our first year, 1997, when we got to Mosport we were one race away from the Manufacturers’ Championship. But Porsche sent their new prototype over for Dorsey Schroeder and Allan McNish to drive. They beat us after that, so we didn’t win the championship but we were only one race away from winning that title in our first year, which I thought was phenomenal. Later, to go to Nurburgring and beat BMW and Audi, that was phenomenal. Then we came out the next year with the second-generation of Panoz and raced in Texas, we raced it up to Le Mans but the performance kept getting worse. We put it back on the shelf and we brought out the old LMP1 and we went and beat Audi. That was a great one.

So there were a lot of fond memories and a lot of challenges. I think, really, I wasn’t a huge racing fan; I was a fan of the challenge of things to do. I think the proudest thing is that the series really created a good fan base and people really started to love sports car racing. I think that is my best accomplishment.

Moving ahead, do the recent endeavors of your current racing program provide a sense of satisfaction and inspiration?

We’re committed to the DeltaWing. We had a gearbox problem, unfortunately, at Daytona where we had a comedy of mistakes with EMCO. They have redoubled their efforts and will have the new gearbox for us for testing before Sebring. It was really a trauma because we had taken the car apart, done everything to accommodate the new gearbox, all the plumbing, all the changes. Then when they didn’t have it for us, we had to put it all back together and put in the old gearbox for the Roar, and then take it apart again and rebuild it so that it would hold the new gearbox for the race. The team was working 20 hours a day for a week getting everything done.

But the car is fast, and as we’ve gone on from the last year, we’ve made a lot of improvements, particularly with the aerodynamics. I think at Road America and Petit, we could have finished a lot higher because we didn’t need any fuel the last hour and 10 minutes, but the other guys got to stop for fuel because of the yellows, which took away our advantage. We had the “NASCAR yellows” the last hour of the race.

What’s next for the DeltaWing? Has it been taken as far as it can go?

We’re going to have another version of this car ready towards the end of the season to race maybe the last two or three races; it’s an advanced version that we’re working on, but we don’t want to give too much away on that right now. In fact, we just brought in a new chief designer and head of engineering who worked for us for many years a long time ago, Brian Willis.

And we’ve consolidated our company. We had Panoz at one end of our complex down where [son] Danny is and then we had IMSA, we had ALMS and then we had Elan here. We’ve been going through a whole reorganization since what they call the merger with NASCAR. We’ve been re-consolidating our companies and investing in some more engineering. We’re going to take the DeltaWing as far as we can take it with not just racing but with the appropriate commercial involvement for the car for commercial use.

It would appear you have plenty of ambitions to take you well past your 80th birthday.

I like to do things that everybody says you can’t do. I like growing grapes in Georgia and making wine. Entering the racing business when I was 62 years old. Going to the fifth race of my life with my own car. It was a chance to prove that even a newbie could do something with imagination. And I like that kind of a challenge.

You know what was an eye-opener for me this year? Last year at Petit Le Mans, I had the chairman of a Chinese company that’s building a new testing track in China come over to see Road Atlanta. We started walking down the grid during the fan walk, and it took me 20 minutes to get from the start to the end. People were stopping me and really were gracious and telling me what a good time they had and they wished me well, and they really appreciated all I had done. Not one person said, “You’ve abandoned us.” I wasn’t abandoning anything, it’s just my life; it was time to go and do my own thing.

I think I did make a real effort for a number of years to get the best out of racing I could get. I was really amazed by the number of fans who thanked me and congratulated me. I was just really awestruck by all of that.

Click on the thumbnails below for images of some of Don Panoz’s contributions to motorsports:

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