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INTERNATIONAL MOTOR SPORTS ASSOCIATION MEDIA CONFERENCE

January 26, 2019

THE MODERATOR: Closest to me is Mitch Bishop and on the far side, Mark Raffauf. Gentlemen, thanks for being here today. Let's start with you, Mitch. Celebrating our 50th anniversary, your parents obviously a big part of IMSA. What's it mean to you to be here this week?
MITCH BISHOP: Well, it's obviously phenomenal, and I don't know that they would have ever imagined when we started IMSA back in '69 the kind of success that you guys have had building it into what we see today. I mean, every year I come back for the 24‑hour, and I say to myself, it can't possibly get my better, and you've outdone yourselves again this year. It's pretty phenomenal. It's humbling. I think my father would be pretty humbled by it.
But the support, first of all, from the fans who support IMSA all these years has been tremendous, and it really all relies on that, but it starts with the great product that you guys put on the track.
THE MODERATOR: Mark, you've been around IMSA before IMSA started‑‑
MARK RAFFAUF: Not quite, but close.
MITCH BISHOP: Well, he was born before IMSA started.
MARK RAFFAUF: That is ‑‑ technically that's true.
THE MODERATOR: How about the same question to you, Mark?
MARK RAFFAUF: For me it's pretty special. I started working for Mitch's dad at IMSA in 1974, so this is the 44th 24‑hour hour race that I've been to, all of which were sanctioned by IMSA, USRRC for a couple years, and then GRAND‑AM and then IMSA again. So for me it's really special to, one, have been able to work with some of the best people in the sport for such a long time; two, to actually still be here, that's pretty special; and three, Mitch and I have known each other since high school, and we kind of grew up in the early years with IMSA when it was still kind of rough‑and‑tumble, but the experience has been wonderful for me.
Where we are today, where it was in the past, it's come a long way. It had its peaks and valleys over the years, but to have worked with John Bishop and Peg Bishop and be part of that for me is a lifetime you can't trade for anything.
THE MODERATOR: For both of you, what's one surprise over the years that's happening today that you never thought you'd see in IMSA or a sports car race?
MARK RAFFAUF: I think‑‑ it's hard to say it's a surprise because it's inevitable, but the things that occur in racing over long periods of time, it's just a constant development of people, processes and technology, and I think the surprise is the fact that in spite of all those changes, every year when you come to great races, you watch people do great things. You watch drivers do heroic things, and that part of the competition has never been lost.
To me it's surprising because you would think the multiple layers of all these new processes and technologies would kind of even that out, but there's some drivers in this room that have done very heroic things here before and other places, as well.
But to watch the teams and the drivers excel and do what they do and raise the bar higher and higher after four decades to me is surprising. You would think it would have slowed down at some point, but it never has.
MITCH BISHOP: Yeah, and I would say building on that, when IMSA first got started and it was very much a family atmosphere, it was a family business. My brothers and I all worked at IMSA for years and went to the races. We all had our jobs in the office and then our jobs at the track.
But it was definitely a traveling family. When we interviewed folks for our book, it was a common theme in all of the quotes was it felt like a family. In fact, my parents were surrogate parents to a lot of the drivers.
What's interesting to me about the current IMSA is it feels like a lot of that has carried forward. We haven't lost that. And that to me is very gratifying.
THE MODERATOR: You gentlemen are now accomplished authors. Want to talk about your book real quick, please?
MITCH BISHOP: Sure. I don't know if we're accomplished yet, but we're published authors. But yeah, Mark had the idea to make sure to document the original history of IMSA back in 2007 or so, and he worked with a guy named D.C. Williams that a lot of you may know, and they spent hours with my dad and my mom interviewing them and asking them questions. Fortunately they did that, and they recorded hours of tape.
Not much happened with the book for various reasons, but about three years ago, I called Mark up one more time and said, hey, what's going on with the book, and he said, I don't know, not much. And I said, what do you say we take over that project. So I quit my job in the high‑tech world and spent the last two and a half years with Mark on this project writing the book about my father's life but also the early days of IMSA, the first 20 years of IMSA.
It was a labor of love for sure, a lot of hard work, but the book was just launched this weekend, obviously.
MARK RAFFAUF: I'll add to that by saying the process of doing it for me of course was fantastic because it rekindled a lot of older memories and gave us the opportunity to talk to a lot of people who were there with me and often with Mitch, as well, and the unbelievable cooperation we got from everybody we spoke to‑‑ we probably interviewed 200 drivers and team owners and significant people, and we created far more of a story, far more information than any normal human being could actually carry in a book, so we had to make it smaller a little bit.
But the process was really wonderful because, I'll use a quote which is in the book, but it embodied the whole project I think for Mitch and I, was John and Peg created an environment in motorsports that a lot of people could make a living doing what they love. And I think back to today, it's still the case. A lot of people look down on sports car racing now and say it's not professional. It's very professional. It's more professional than it's ever been, but even over the years, it always had a level that is exemplified by the quality of the people who participated.
MITCH BISHOP: A few years ago in 2014, IMSA unveiled a new perpetual champion's trophy called the Bishop‑France trophy, and Jim kindly asked me to come out and help him unveil it in New York, which we did, and NASCAR and IMSA had put together a nice tribute video five minutes, I guess, ahead of that, and afterwards I was mingling with the crowd, and quite a few people said, hey, I had no idea that's how IMSA got started, and that's what really planted the seed in my head that we had to take over this project and make it happen for the 50th.
So this book really is sort of the inside story, if you will, about how it all happened, and there's some misconceptions or some holes in people's knowledge, and I felt it was important for the current generation of IMSA drivers, team owners, manufacturers to understand how it all got started.

Q. Over 50 years in IMSA racing, what is personally for you the biggest technical innovation you've seen in IMSA?
MARK RAFFAUF: Well, there's obviously errors that are dictated by the regulations, as you know. I think the most innovative period was certainly the GTP era in the '80s because the box within which we played was quite large, and it allowedit. It's not the same today.
That doesn't mean the innovation is any different when you look at the track records set this weekend by a car that weighs about the same. It has quite a bit less horsepower, much smaller tires and a lot less aerodynamics. Granted, it took 26 years to break the GTP record here, but there's an example of innovation; cars are going just as fast with a lot less of that. But the '80s for me was the most innovative because change occurred, it occurred naturally, it occurred creatively, and the environment allowed that, and I think that enabled it to become what it was by the late '80s, early '90s with those cars.
But the same thing happened in the '70s with GT cars. The open cars of the '90s was another change. GRAND‑AM was kind of innovative in a different way, of close competition between somewhat more spec‑type cars, but the racing was probably the closest it's ever been anywhere in sports car racing. Certainly the LeMans formulas that we currently base our stuff on now are more restrictive, but they still create interesting‑looking and extremely good competition, and for me that's kind of what it's all about.
MITCH BISHOP: And I would say for me, the era where turbos came into the series, and you had 935s competing head‑to‑head with GTX machinery that was American‑based or Japanese‑based, and the cars were wild looking, they were raw, they were hard to drive, and yet we had guys driving those cars really fast. So I think the era between, say, '78 and '82 was for me my favorite.

Q. Mark, just speculation, long‑term future, do you think something can be done with IMSA sports car racing which has never done before to go oval racing with sports cars? Is this a realistic possibility?
MARK RAFFAUF: Probably not. You know, the machinery we've always based this on over the years has never been suited for that, particularly power plants, gear boxes. That's a specialty form of racing in my opinion. I don't have a huge amount of experience at it.
But whether it's open wheel or stock cars, oval racing is an American game. We don't really play an American game, we play a European/international game, so I'm not sure it would play well, so I would say no.

Q. We read, we hear, we write a lot about golden eras in sports car racing, and I'm keen to hear about what both of you have to say about the current era of IMSA and where that ranks with some of those previous eras you've already referenced?
MARK RAFFAUF: I'll start with that. I think we're pretty close, or we're in the middle of another one, there's no question. The DPi concept for us has opened up a whole different kind of racing again which is distinctly more American than maybe European, but it's doing what it's supposed to do. It's attracting attention. It's giving us growth. Spectators like it, the manufacturers like it, the competitors like it. It's a little bit more difficult to manage, per se, than in the past, but I think we are in the midst of definitely‑‑ certainly in the last 20 years, the most significant North American golden era of sports car racing right now.
MITCH BISHOP: I couldn't agree more. Nobody knows it's the golden era until you have to wait another 20 years, and my prediction is in 20 years we're going to look back on this era that we're just in the beginning of as a golden era for sure.
THE MODERATOR: Gentlemen, we appreciate your time, and we'll get Mr.France back up here throughout the day at some point in time. Thank you.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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