PWC's Baldwin wants happy customers

GTS Series Manager Jack Baldwin sees his job as making sure that racers have a good time and get what they want out of racing in Pirelli World Challenge.

Last month, Pirelli World Challenge announced the hiring of two new class managers – Rob Morgan for GT and Jack Baldwin for GTS. Both are former competitors, both as drivers and team owners in their respective classes. Both men see their responsibility to be a conduit between series management and competitors, whom they regard as customers. Baldwin and Morgan came on board not long after the hiring of former Touring Car entrant Jim Jordan to lead that class into the future.

RACER recently spoke to Baldwin about his role and ideas for forward progress in his respective class and the series. (Stay tuned to RACER.com for Jordan's thoughts on those questions.)

A racer for more than four decades, Baldwin has competed in everything from Formula Ford to NASCAR stock cars. He is probably best known for winning a pair of IMSA GTU titles in the 1980s and the 1992 Trans-Am championship. Pirelli World Challenge fans and competitors will know him as team owner and driver for GT Sport, which fielded a pair of Porsche Caymans in the GTS class for four years, including two second-place finishes in the drivers' points.

"For me, for being in racing, in motorsports, my entire life, as a driver and then as team owner/general manager for GTSport, [this move is] a logical next step," he said. "I'm looking forward to it, still going to the races and still being involved in a little different way. I've got some things to learn on the business side of it, but hopefully I'll improve and make a positive effect on the thing."

Throughout his career he's had to handle negotiations, put together sponsor deals and, yes, sometimes do battle with series organizers or officials when things didn't go the way he thought they should. He sees his role as someone who can make all that stuff go more smoothly.

"With the way racing is now with the homologated classes – GT3, GT4 – it's really a customer-oriented business," he said. "I think that's where I'll serve as far as team relations, customer relations. I can be a mentor to some of the younger drivers. I can certainly be a liaison to help the communication go a little smoother. One of the things that aggravated me as a team owner is when I had to go fight the fight, or plead my case, or whatever it happened to be. That's not the fun part of the business. Now the teams will have someone they can talk to. If there's something they don't like, something they're unhappy about, they can talk to me and I'll see if I can't work things out."

Baldwin comes on board as GTS makes the transition to being an all-GT4 class, just as GT has moved to all GT3. While last year had a mix of GT4-homologated cars and legacy GTS cars, it looks like all the entries – with the exception of one car still working on GT4 approval – will be GT4-homologated cars, including Blackdog Racing's Chevrolet Camaros and KohR Motorsports Ford Mustangs, now that both manufacturers have GT4-approved cars. Baldwin says he sees the advantages of using an existing homologation process – mostly in Balance of Performance, which remains under the auspices of Director of Competition Marcus Haselgrove to apply the international BoP formulas.

"When the series is responsible for Balance of Performance, it's difficult to make everyone happy," Baldwin said. "With GT4, it goes the next step as far as manufacturers building a car that meets a particular spec. Certainly GT3 has proven to be pretty successful; it's only natural that GTS should follow suit. What they don't want is all the different versions of cars, and that makes sense. I understand – I've built racecars. I built my Caymans. They were great cars, but there were two different versions." With manufacturers building cars, instead of two or more variations of a GTS Mustang built by different teams at different times, now all the Mustangs are built the same. It takes a lot of guesswork and fiddling out of the equation for both the series and competitors.

That takes Baldwin to a quality he sees as key to the series' success: accessibility. It applies not only to a homologated class in general, where a competitor can go buy a car and know that it's going to be pretty close to the others, but also the sweet spot that he says GTS/GT4 sits in at the moment.

"You want manufacturers involved," he said, "but you want them involved in the right way, and the right way is to produce a product, get it homologated and then support it with parts and pieces behind it. A guy running Touring Car, he's a young guy, runs well in TC, and wants to go to the next step. He can buy a GT4 car and focus on the driving and not focus on all those other things."

Baldwin recalls a conversation with Porsche Motorsports North America head Jens Walther when he brought his Caymans out. Walther wanted to know why he didn't just get a GT3 car instead of developing the Cayman, which Porsche at the time was not really interested in seeing in competition. Baldwin's reply was that it was a target he just couldn't hit. GTS was accessible. Furthermore, it's a great training ground for the driver who's looking for the next step in sports car racing. 2014 GTS champ Michael Cooper is a pretty good example of that, having performed well in his rookie season for Cadillac in the GT class last year.

"The cars are sexy, the cars are cool, and they're priced at the right place," Baldwin said, and given that the GT4 cars provide great opportunity, it's his job to help make sure that that promise is upheld.

"We need to create a solid format in a good quality series, so that when they come they have a good time," he said. "The competitors need to get what they're looking for – a good weekend, a good race. It's a customer-based business."