Jimmy Vasser has been making headlines in American motor racing for more than 30 years and today he remains in the winner’s circle with his Lexus GT3 team in the IMSA sports car series.
As a teenager he won America’s Formula Ford championship, graduating to Indy Lights in 1988 and CART/Champ Car in 1992 before getting his big break with Chip Ganassi in 1995 and winning the championship in ’96. Along the way he flirted with Formula 3000 in Europe, was thwarted in his dream of Formula 1, and returned to the States to build a career in CART and IndyCar that lasted until 2008.
As a team co-owner with Kevin Kalkhoven he won the Indy 500 when Tony Kanaan claimed victory in 2013 by less than a second for KV Racing. Today his Vasser Sullivan IMSA team is flying high – GTD Pro champions with British drivers Jack Hawksworth and Ben Barnicoat – and there are plans afoot to go IndyCar racing too.
Motor Sport: You did your first Indy 500 with a year-old Hayhoe-Cole Racing Lola-Chevy in 1992. A huge experience as a rookie?
Oh, yeah, the 500 is such a big deal, especially for a young American. When you’re young and bushy-tailed everything seems so big, almost wondrous. I’d come up through the ranks, winning the Formula Ford series, and even then I thought, you know,
