INDIANAPOLIS — Tony George is the last man standing, and his realm extends far beyond the four turns of Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Heir to the auto racing empire his grandfather Tony Hulman created from a decaying, weed-infested track after World War II, George took a huge gamble when he founded the Indy Racing League in the mid-1990s.
Vilified by many at the time, George abandoned the established Championship Auto Racing Teams, producing an often bitter feud that fractured open-wheel racing for more than a decade. But he persisted, expanding not only the IRL but also putting his stamp on the speedway and auto racing in ways his grandfather never would have imagined. On top of that, he runs his own race team, Vision Racing, as well as two family owned companies based in Terre Haute.
And when CART, which morphed into the Champ Car World Series, went bankrupt amid a steady drain of teams and drivers to the IRL in recent years, George engineered a buyout of the rival series this past winter and achieved the long-awaited unification of the two open-wheel series.
The 48-year-old is a busy man.
“I try to compartmentalize things and I try being involved at a high level in all aspects of our business,” George said. “But I have good people in operational roles, both in the league and the Speedway. … You’re as good as the people you surround yourself with, and I’ve been fortunate to be able to surround myself with some pretty good people.”
He became track president in 1990 after the death of Joe Cloutier. Hulman’s right-hand man for 30 years, Cloutier was seemingly stuck in a management style that didn’t adapt to a changing sport that already was losing fans, revenue and its TV audience to NASCAR. Open-wheel racing, George said, needed a boss more than a board of directors.
He was that man.
The CART board was restructured in 1992 to be composed of five car owners, with George and then-CART chairman William Stokkan as nonvoting members. Stokkan resigned at the end of the 1993 season, and the board was restructured again with 16 team owners as members. George then resigned from the board in January 1994, complaining he never really had the respect of its members.
That’s when he decided to go it alone.
Renovations of the Speedway’s garages, walls and pit areas, a new scoring tower and media center, an 18-hole championship golf course, new suites and fan-friendly attractions were only cosmetic changes. He also broke a one-race-a-year tradition by bringing NASCAR to the track for the Brickyard 400 in 1994, and didn’t stop there.
In 2000, George brought Formula One to the Speedway for the U.S. Grand Prix, an eight-year marriage that ended last year after George and F1 boss Bernie Ecclestone couldn’t agree on a new contract. In its place, George has added the MotoGP series for this fall, the first motorcycle race at the track since 1909, two years before the inaugural Indy 500.
Meanwhile, a management restructuring several years ago changed George’s titles to CEO of the Speedway and the IRL — with Joie Chitwood now track president and Brian Barnhart league president. George formed his own race team in 2005 with his wife, Laura.
Vision Racing’s third co-owner now is actor Patrick Dempsey, and the drivers include George’s stepson, Ed Carpenter, and A.J. Foyt IV, the grandson of car owner and four-time Indy winner A.J. Foyt. For the second straight year, the team has also hired veteran driver Davey Hamilton, who survived a devastating crash in 2001, as a third driver for Indy only.
George is a hands-on car owner, but he says it’s just part of the job.
“It’s not more fun. I don’t know that I really look at it that way,” George said of running a race team. “Being a team owner now is part of what I do. Running the family business, which includes the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, is part of what I do. It’s all related, so it all is affected and benefited by my active and daily involvement.
“I juggle a lot more than just those two things,” he said. “I also spend a fair amount of time on the business of two public company boards that I serve on. That becomes more time-consuming all the time with the oversight and regulation that’s involved with public company management, committee structures and whatnot.”
Vision Racing’s team headquarters is about halfway between George’s office at the Speedway and his home, which makes it more convenient to stay involved, even during the offseason.
“And certainly I’ve been involved at a high level and a fairly hands-on level,” he said. “I’m usually stopping in the shop on my way to or from the Speedway. And I’ve spent quite a bit of time in the last three years we’ve owned this team working on other things like unification, which is more league-related.”
He’s used to wearing many hats.
Anton Hulman George was born Dec. 30, 1959, grew up in Terre Haute, and has spent nearly all his life around racing. His grandfather bought the Speedway for $750,000 in 1945, and his father, Elmer George, drove in the 500 three times between 1957 and 1963.
George’s father was shot to death in 1976, and his grandfather, who had emphysema for several years, died the next year. Still a teenager, Tony George began working with Cloutier in the summers.
“I really wasn’t sure if and when the day would ever come I was actually running it,” he recalled, “but I always felt I would be a part of it somehow.”
Possibly even as a driver.
George attended racing school in 1984 and made his debut in the USAC Pro-Ford championship that year. He was third in the Sports Car Club of America Formula Ford series in 1985 and drove the Super Vee and Formula Pacific series in 1986-87. In 1989, George competed in the American Racing Series for a team owned by Foyt. He stopped driving after he became Speedway president, but started again in 1993 in the Firehawk series.
“The racing was more of a release,” he said. “I was helping my kids with their quarter-midget racing and getting some satisfaction out of that. I turned that over to others who were better qualified to do a good job for them, and so I saw opportunities to do a little more racing myself.”
George had fleeting visions of driving in the Indianapolis 500, but realized there was little chance of doing it.
“I wasn’t emotionally or mentally prepared to do it at the time. I did do a few laps around here once, and it wasn’t comfortable. It wasn’t exactly fun,” he said.
He’s found his comfort zone in other things.
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