RETRO: 30th Anniversary of Dyson Racing's Lime Rock win

Few teams if any have arrived in the world of big-time sports car racing with a bigger splash than Dyson Racing did over the 1985 Memorial Day weekend at Lime Rock Park's Coca Cola 500, when the team won in its first-ever entry in the International Motor Sports Association's Camel GTP class.

With Drake Olson behind the wheel of the first production Porsche 962, Dyson Racing took the measure of the top IMSA Camel GT teams of the day, including the Porsche 962s of Holbert Racing and Jim Busby's BFG racing, plus Group 44's pair of Jaguar XJR-5s.

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Thirty years later, almost to the day, the four people who were associated with Dyson Racing in 1985 and are today still members of the team gathered in the team's transporter on Belle Isle during the Grand Prix of Detroit and recalled that weekend three decades ago. The group included team founder and current CEO Rob Dyson; technician John "Boz" Pultz; Steve Potter, a veteran motorsports marketing and communications executive; and two-time IMSA American Le Mans Series driver champion Chris Dyson, who was then a seven-year-old chock full already of ambition.

"My dad was racing at an amateur level before I was born," Chris Dyson recalled. "And I remember sitting on the hillside with Dad at Lime Rock during one of the track's big professional races in the early 1980s, and he said to me 'I'm thinking about doing this level of racing soon.'"

Rob, who as a club racer had already won an SCCA National Championship in 1981, was doing more than thinking about moving up. He had a tube-frame Pontiac Firebird built for IMSA's GTO class and with a very small team he began to campaign the car in 1983. But despite a third-place class finish (sixth overall) at Elkhart Lake in 1983, Dyson soon recognized the limitations of the Pontiac.

"I called Bob Akin," Rob said. "I was thinking about buying a March, but Bob said, 'Nobody collects Marches. It will be very expensive to operate and it's not a turn-key package. Call Al Holbert.'"

Holbert, a multiple IMSA champion and the head of Porsche Motorsports in the U.S., took Dyson's call. "Oh, you want to get into real racing?" Dyson recalls Holbert saying. "Let me see what I can do." The first production 962 – chassis #101 – had been purchased by Bruce Leven for his Bayside Disposal team, but Leven had ordered a second car, and Holbert facilitated a deal whereby Dyson would purchase Leven's original 962 a few races into the 1985 IMSA Camel GT season.

Dyson hired as a teammate Drake Olson, a very quick young driver of unquestioned determination and bravery, but limited experience outside obsolescent Formula Fords in SCCA club racing.

After taking delivery of the ex-Leven 962 and going over it in the team's shop in an old industrial building in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., the next stop was Roebling Road, a club racing circuit near Savannah, so Olson and Dyson could test the car.

"I couldn't believe how fast the car was," Dyson recalled. "And how well the cockpit was laid out. The visibility was so good – like being on the nose of a guided missile." The team tested a couple more times at Lime Rock. "Smitty (crew chief Pat Smith) wanted to race at Road Atlanta, but I decided to wait until the Memorial Day weekend at our home track, Lime Rock."

The team rolled into the Lime Rock Park paddock with its tractor-trailer transporter freshly painted in a brilliant shade of white with yellow, orange and black trim, which echoed the dramatic livery of the Porsche GTP car inside it.

"We had about five guys to run the car," Dyson said. "We worked under an awning off the side of the trailer."

Dyson also recalled that helping support the team that weekend was a travel agent from nearby Kent, CT, Marion Champlain, who today runs an at-track catering service that feeds about half the teams in the IMSA paddock. "Marion was making sandwiches for us on the tailgate of the truck."

Dyson and Olson both set good times in practice and Olson qualified the 962 on the outside of the front row, next to Holbert's Lowenbrau-sponsored 962. Holbert led the race until turbo problems slowed his car. From there on out it was a duel between the legendary Englishman Brian Redman in one of Bob Tullius's factory-supported Jaguar XJR-5s and Olson in the Dyson Porsche.

As the fuel window opened, Dyson and Smith decided that a driver change during the refueling stop would cost too much time, so Olson should stay in the car. "I knew if we changed drivers we were going to finish second," Rob recounted. "If Drake stayed in the car, we might win it."

Pat Smith then cooked up an inspired strategy to mislead the Jaguar team. Rob Dyson: "Smitty said, 'Get your helmet and gloves on and look like you are going to make a driver change. Stand right by the door and open it like we are going to change drivers. But as they finish refueling the car, close the door and step away behind the fueler.'" The decision to not change drivers saved valuable seconds and would prove to be vital to the outcome.

The race had begun in sunny, hot temperatures, but as the laps unwound the temperature dropped precipitously and at one point it began to drizzle. Redman's vision was partially obscured by a windshield smeared with an emulsion of oil and water, and with a somewhat daring pass Olson claimed the lead.

But the seemingly surreal drama wasn't over. In the closing laps, Olson slid wide in the track's solitary left-hand turn and everyone gasped as he re-entered the track and another car clipped the 962, breaking its left-front fender. It was more than a near miss, according to Boz Pultz. "If that car had hit Drake just a little farther back it would have been the end of our race." But Olson was able to soldier on in the lead, despite the worsening rain conditions, with merely cosmetic damage.

Pultz pointed out that IMSA was in the mid-1980s at a technical inflection point. For the first time, cars were producing really massive downforce to accompany their eye-watering horsepower levels, and no one had established firmly how to work with this combination; even the veteran teams had no sizeable, particular advantage over the newcomer Dyson team. "This was a pioneering moment in IMSA GTP. We were on new ground but I knew we had a hell of a driver in Drake Olson. At Lime Rock, we were going to have as good a shot as anyone."

In addition to several stints over the years as a consultant to Dyson Racing, Potter's career took him from writing on motorsports for the New York Times to managing the sports-marketing department at Mercedes-Benz USA during the company's time in CART, the position of managing director of a CART team, managing communications at iRacing.com and even at one point a stint as general manager at Lime Rock Park. He described that day 30 years ago at Lime Rock during his first weekend with the team, as "magical."

"I'd already been involved in racing for almost 20 years and I didn't have the same level of confidence that Rob and Boz had, I have to admit," Potter said. "But Rob was giving me the chance to try my hand at PR and I was grateful for that. I didn't expect the team was going to embarrass itself, but I wasn't making plans for a trip to the winner's circle either. When Drake came out of the Downhill and it was clear he was going to win the race, I just couldn't believe it. Like everyone else in our pit, I was yelling and screaming as he took the checkered flag. Really, it was amazing. Thirty years later it still stands out for me as one of my really significant days in racing."

"When Drake came across the line it established some Dyson Racing history," Rob Dyson said. "We had some luck, but the race showed we knew what we were doing. Not just to our competitors but to us on the team. We can do this!"

Indeed, Olson won twice more that season, teamed with Bobby Rahal at Road America and Price Cobb at Columbus. And for the next 30 years, the race victories and season championships have kept coming.

Chris Dyson recalls the race at Lime Rock as though it were three months ago rather than three decades.

"A lot friends and members of our family had gone to Lime Rock to see us in our first race in the big leagues," he recalled. "Then, following the race I remember we had a BBQ at our house for the friends and family who had come to watch the race," "And everyone was so happy, my mom (Emilie) and dad, my Uncle Bruce, my godparents Pat and Phyllis (Smith's wife), Boz, Link (Smith's son, now team manager for SpeedSource's Mazda IMSA effort) and the team, all laughing on our porch with our neighbors in Pleasant Valley – the same house where until a year earlier they'd been preparing our racecars in our barn garage. It was just wonderful. They'd just shown up and toppled the giants of GTP in their first big race. In retrospect I've come to realize just how special that weekend truly was."

Earlier in the Detroit weekend, Chris had driven the Bentley Team Dyson Racing Continental GT3 to a podium finish in the Pirelli World Challenge. "It's amazing to me that now I'm the age that Dad and Steve were that day at Lime Rock," Dyson said. "The race that day has continued to inspire me throughout my career. Dyson Racing is an extension of our family, and this is what we do. We work hard to make sure it's just as successful and memorable, each and every time we go racing."