There’s an old joke that you hear in the pit lane a lot and it goes something like this: “How do you make a small fortune in racing? Well, it’s easy–you start with a large one.” Like a lot of things in life, we laugh because it's funny and we laugh because it's true. This is a country where there is a lot of easy money to be made in the so-called “FIRE” business, consisting of finance, insurance, and real estate. There isn’t any easy money to be made in racing. This is particularly true when it comes to the business of racing instruction. Yet people keep trying, because when you ask eight-year-olds what they wants to be when they grow up, “race car driver” is at the top of the list and “stockbroker” doesn’t even make the cut.



The latest victim of that disconnect between romance and finance: The Skip Barber Racing School, which has filed for bankruptcy. This isn’t the first time the firm has faced major financial trouble. In 1999, the school’s founder, Skip himself, sold 80 percent of the equity to a venture capital firm. In 2002, the company went out of business and the assets were transferred to a new business entity. Things deteriorated from there and at one point there was an active lawsuit between Mr. Barber and the school that still bore his name.

Editor's Note: This article was originally published on May 24, 2017, when the future of Skip Barber Racing School was uncertain. Since then, the school has reopened under new management. We sampled the new Skip Barber's beginner, intermediate, and advanced racing schools in July 2018; you can read about our experience here.

According to various reports, over the course of the past few years the school has run up some serious debts to many of the racetracks at which it operates. Rumors have spread of vendors and employees that have gone long periods of time without being paid. A spate of canceled events last year led to some extremely unpleasant customer feedback and a bit of a public-relations crisis. Although the school’s bankruptcy filing is intended to permit reorganization and continued operations, one could easily be forgiven for thinking that this is, indeed, the white-flag lap for one of racing’s most iconic and venerated schools.

Jack Baruth

That would be a shame, because the methods and techniques used by Skip Barber still work. Last year, my wife took three courses from SBRS: The one-day school at Laguna Seca, the SCCA license school at NCM Motorsports Park, and the follow-up Advanced Racing school at the same location. I hadn’t had any interactions with the school since I took two podiums at Laguna Seca in its West Coast MX-5 series back in 2009, but from what I could see, virtually nothing had changed in the seven years between my race and my wife’s race school.

In an era of professional instruction where complex in-car telemetry, paddle-shift transmissions, and Internet-centric coaching techniques are now the rule, Skip Barber’s old-school curriculum is a defiant exception. The open-wheel cars are older than most of the people who wind up sitting in them, and they are powered by the same SOHC two-liter used in the 1994 Plymouth Neon. The NC-generation Mazda MX-5s that were brand-new at my Laguna Seca race are now harlequin hobgoblins of mismatched primer-painted panels and sun-faded interiors worn through to the shiny metal beneath. The mechanics are always busy and it’s rare for all of the cars to make it through an entire day’s worth of instruction.

At many of the modern racing schools, like Lucas Oil’s traveling open-wheel operation or EXR’s Vegas-based spec-racer facility, you can watch your own in-car footage and see your data traces overlaid with that of your favorite pro racer or coach. Skip Barber does things differently. After all these years, SBRS still put coaches in the corner stations to watch what you do and then call you to the pitlane for corrective behavior. There’s no video, no data. If a club racer were to fall asleep beneath a tree at Lime Rock back in 1977 and wake up in the middle of a school session today, he would think he’d only dozed through the afternoon. The whole world has changed around a program that, for reasons of poverty or stubbornness, refuses to recognize the fact. It’s no wonder the school is having trouble attracting students—there’s no glamour to the process, and we live in an era where Instagram-ready glam is now a requirement.

John Lamm

Yet for drivers like my wife, the SBRS program is perfect just the way it is. She didn’t want to look at a data trace for gaps; she wanted detailed personal feedback from coaches who have seen a hundred thousand laps pass before their experiences eyes. She appreciated the fact that she got immediate feedback in the pitlane and that her opportunities for improvement were presented as digestible chunks rather than as hyper-detailed observations on throttle application. She even liked the mandatory corner-station trips, standing out on the middle of a field watching her fellow students spin off, flub around, and sometimes get it just right.

After she completed six days with Skip Barber, I took her to a very advanced school where they showed her complete video analysis of throttle and brake and g-level and track diagrams and whatnot. She understood what they were trying to tell her, and she progressed accordingly, but that evening at dinner she said, “I miss having Ray and the other guys just watching what I was doing and telling me what to fix right then.” When she told me about the bankruptcy news, she was frantic with concern for the instructors and staff. They’d become real people to her, not just data to be sifted.

There is room for a revitalized Skip Barber that incorporates some of the modern gingerbread into the tried-and-true curriculum. It wouldn’t hurt to get some new cars, too, lest it become too obviously a vintage racing school. All of that would cost a lot of money on top of the money that is already owed to everyone. It seems unlikely. All we can do is hope. Perhaps one of the FIRE-fueled millionaires out there will take a personal interest in the school, its history, and the opportunities that still lie ahead. Perhaps there is still someone out there who can hear their inner eight-year-old. Someone who, for whatever reason, is still willing to make a small fortune in racing.

Born in Brooklyn but banished to Ohio, Jack Baruth has won races on four different kinds of bicycles and in seven different kinds of cars. Everything he writes should probably come with a trigger warning. His column, Avoidable Contact, runs twice a week.

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