Toronto — Ashley Freiberg is resting comfortably in her custom-moulded racing seat; an apple sits beyond the steering wheel beside a short stack of date-filled treats.
She is unfazed as mechanics tinker with the esoteric components of her 250-horsepower engine. The car is parked in a paddock alongside others from the Star Mazda Championship series, where the 20-year-old from Illinois drives for team JDC MotorSports.
Freiberg is trying her best to explain “the zone.”
“When you are in a race, you’re in your own world and absorbed by what the car is doing,” said Freiberg, in between two practice sessions at the Toronto Honda Indy. “When I’m sitting in the car about to go out, I shut my visor, close my eyes and just visualize laps.”
A natural athlete and ultra competitive, she shifted gears from basketball to go-karting when her brothers introduced her to the sport. Immediately, Freiberg had an insatiable appetite for going fast. Karting success led to her enrollment in the Skip Barber Racing School at age 15, her first foray into open-wheel cars.
“I love driving,” said Freiberg, who is in her first season of Star Mazda and a two-year partnership with sponsor TrueCar. “The feeling of getting a corner right, and driving at the limit, is a feeling you can’t describe.
“The adrenaline rush is just … really cool.”
But merely getting to this point, the second of four circuits that comprise the Mazda Road to Indy driver development series, has been painfully challenging. The roadblocks aspirant racers face are manifold, though, they all pale in comparison to the mother of all hurdles: money.
The cost of carrying a driver in Star Mazda is roughly US$350,000 per year, according to series president Gary Rodrigues. Freiberg’s 605-kilogram car costs US$100,000 alone. And the expenses increase significantly for racers competing in the Firestone Indy Lights series, the next rung on the ladder.
Supporting a driver and their team in the premier IZOD IndyCar series costs US$5- to US$8-million annually. Professional racing is ostensibly about speed, but is tacitly about funding.
“Racing is a very cost-intensive activity,” said Jim Bowie, an industry iconoclast of sorts, who has more than 20 years of experience in motor sports marketing. “Racing is a very cost-based environment, and that is not the racers’ fault.”
Bowie, formerly a marketing director for both Skip Barber and Champ Car, believes the cautionary tales of drivers, those who failed to acquire the necessary funding to compete at the sport’s highest level, can provide a lesson for young hopefuls everywhere: There is no such thing as putting too much emphasis on marketing.
“If you had somebody playing little league baseball, minor league hockey or football, and they wanted to become a professional, the odds are probably very, very similar,” Bowie said. “Except for, you have to have incrementally greater financial support as you move up the ladder.”
Freiberg spent 2011 in a spiral of shameless self-promotion, attending races, talking to anyone who would listen. A year after winning a pair of Skip Barber series championships, she spent nearly a full season off the track, doing everything in her power to try and find the necessary sponsorship money to compete.
She could not afford a publicist, and realized very quickly that huckstering was just as challenging, if not more, than steering around a race track. Freiberg finally landed a spot as part of TrueCar’s six-driver, all-female racing team. TrueCar’s Women Empowered initiative, which also features IndyCar driver Katherine Legge, is a perfect example of how drivers and sponsors can find a mutually beneficial fit.
But these relationships are hardly permanent, and you do not have to look far to find an accomplished driver still searching for a full-time ride.
“There is a driver named Raphael Matos, who James Hinchcliffe raced against and was teammates with, who won a racing championship at every level that he raced at,” Bowie said. “And Rafa is unemployed.”
Bowie allowed that Matos’ situation is likely more complicated than anyone on the periphery can understand — Rodrigues thinks that the 2009 IndyCar rookie of the year is close to securing a ride — but finds it disheartening that someone of Matos’ calibre is not competing.
Meanwhile, Hinchcliffe has become arguably the biggest influence for young drivers in the sport, and more so for what he has accomplished off the track than on it.
Hinchcliffe’s website, Hinchtown.com, is an anomaly for IndyCar racers, and a central component to the efforts that helped the sophomore driver from Oakville, Ont., land GoDaddy as a sponsor. His affable personality and charming sense of humour stand out on the circuit, and he has used that eccentricity to his advantage.
“He had an opportunity to differentiate himself from almost every other racer,” said Bowie, who assisted Hinchcliffe in harnessing his persona. “It was matter of convincing him and his parents that we were going to create a branding strategy for him — which was the mayor of Hinchtown — that positioned him differently than everyone else, and brought attention to him in a way that hadn’t been brought to other people.”
But Hinchcliffe is the exception, not the rule. Rodrigues knows this, and also just how cost-prohibitive racing can be. He is working hard at putting drivers in a position to succeed.
His two sons had their paths to IndyCar impeded by financing shortfalls, and he developed the Star Mazda Championship series to fill a competitive void between Indy Lights and the lower circuits. In 2010, the Road to Indy program was established, providing a straightforward developmental course for those aiming to advance beyond karting or racing schools.
The program includes a scholarship component that guarantees the winner of each circuit a fully funded ride for one season at the next level up. Although the participants appreciate the assistance — “I think it’s just phenomenal help for drivers,” Indy Lights racer David Ostella said — there can only be one circuit champion a year.
More often than not, drivers will need to channel their inner publicist and make themselves known.
The Indy Summit is an integral part of the Road to Indy program because it is where drivers receive public relations and media training, not to mention seminars in marketing and social media moderated by Hinchcliffe.
“There is a common misconception when you are very young as a driver that if you just go and keep winning races that the sponsors are going to run up with their chequebooks,” Rodrigues said. “And it doesn’t work like that.
“You can learn what potential sponsors are looking for. In order for a sponsor to write you a cheque and not lose his own job, he has to be able to justify sponsoring that driver by selling something.”
Everyone needs to develop his or her own brand, and unfortunately there is no blueprint to follow.
And for drivers like Freiberg, knowing that she has to find a way to attract sponsorship hardly makes the process any easier.
“Everybody has something special about them, something unique about them,” Freiberg said. “I’m still in the process of even figuring out who I am. Honestly, that will probably be a never-ending thing. I think it is really just a matter of finding that sponsor that wants that unique part of you.”
For the time being, she has found that healthy partnership with her current sponsor. It is a reward for the hours of phone calls, emails and face time put in; she has earned this respite to focus on her driving.
Freiberg hopes to spend another season finding traction in the Star Mazda series, before ideally moving up to Indy Lights. She wants to feel a sense of accomplishment in every circuit she passes through; she wants to win.
Where racing will ultimately take her she does not know; she is trying to control only what she can.
Back in the paddock, the race now only a day off, Freiberg is calm. She is thinking back on her first meaningful victory in Skip Barber, to the countless classes she missed in high school because her race car beckoned and the innumerable sacrifices she has made along the way.
Now is the appropriate time, tomorrow she will be too focused. She will enter her driver’s seat from the right as she has done hundreds of times before, lower her visor and dissect the corners in her mind.
She will be in “the zone.”
Dragon Racing announced Sunday it has secured a second Chevrolet Indy V6 engine for the GoPro Indy Grand Prix of Sonoma, with Katherine Legge back on a road or street course for the first time since Brazil in April. It’s the first two-car effort for Dragon since Indianapolis, when the team switched from Lotus to Chevrolet powerplants.
Dragon Racing will revert to a two-car line-up for the Sonoma IndyCar race later this month after securing a second Chevrolet engine for Katherine Legge.
