How massive Daytona effort paid off for Black Swan

That sound you hear is the dozen-plus members of the Black Swan Racing team, who earned at least a week of uninterrupted sleep after forgoing rest for most of the Rolex 24 At Daytona, starting to rustle and wake.

A chassis-destroying crash by Trenton Estep during the opening practice session sent team owner Tim Pappas and his hearty Porsche 911 GT3 R crew into four straight days of a zombie-like existence where building up a new chassis and then going racing for 24 straight hours tested their fortitude.

The end result was worth the effort, as the No. 54 Porsche shared between Pappas, Estep, Jeroen Bleekemolen, and Sven Muller climbed from the back of the deep GT Daytona field to finish fifth in class. Each year, the Rolex 24 tends to nominate one team for an agonizing experience, and this time, Black Swan was tagged as the recipient.

As usual, the story behind the misery and eventual reward was remarkable, starting with the team owner whose driving career was called into question after suffering a nasty crash at the Bathurst 12 Hours in February of 2019.

“My own personal journey on it was long and interesting just because it included a long year of recovery and a lot of physical therapy, and a lot of training, and a lot of heavy mental and physical discipline to get myself in shape to do the race,” Pappas told RACER.

Primed for his long-awaited IMSA return, Pappas watched as the 20-year-old Estep made the error of driving across a painted section of the damp Daytona circuit, which sent the 911 GT3 R into a calamitous crash, and wondered if he tempted fate in the process.

“You just couldn't help but feel really dejected after Trenton's off,” he said. “That was sort of funny because [pit reporter] Jamie [Howe] came in to interview me in the pits, and she's like, ‘Do you have a second?’ I was like, ‘I don't really want to talk to you. I feel like this is going to jinx us.’ I was like, ‘All right, just be optimistic.’ I was like, ‘Oh, I'm just excited to be here,’ or whatever. She walks out of our pit box and three seconds later, Trenton crashes.”

The Black Swan crew consider their options after the heavy wreck in practice that wrecked their 911 GT3 R. Image by Martin Little

Black Swan’s original Rolex 24 plans ended after the twisted chassis came to a rest and Estep climbed from the Porsche without injury. Pappas ran through a series of options, which included packing up and licking their wounds.

“At that moment we started a new journey, which was at first initially, we were considering buying a new car,” he said. “Then I just really caught myself, and decided that that was not the smartest thing to do, getting a brand-new car, even though we could have. Porsche had one in Atlanta. I just thought, ‘No, that's a really financially irresponsible thing to do. I really want to be in the show, but I don't want it that badly.’ Which is also, for a lot of people outside of the sport, talking about financial discretion in a sport that doesn't make any sense at all, maybe sounds a little bit ridiculous.

“But, leaving that aside for a moment, we just felt like, OK, we're done. Not going to buy a new car, and there's no way to fix the one we've got. So, we're done. I spent about an hour thanking the guys, texted my assistant back in my office in Boston to get me a flight to get me home. Really, just before I was about leave the track, Porsche came in and said, ‘Well, there's one other option that's come up.’ I went, ‘Oh God, I should have left. What are you doing to me?’ They proposed the idea that [fellow Porsche GTD team Wright [Motorsports] had a car that was bought right after VIR last year.”

“The offer was, we buy our own brand-new chassis, which we would have to do anyway, and we give it to them [after the race]. In the meantime, we take their roller, strip it down to a bare chassis, rebuild it with our own parts and drive line, and cover the cost of Wright doing their own [build] in the future, which I would have spent on my own guys.”

Fantasies of rest and watching the Rolex 24 from home quickly gave way to an epic thrash where Black Swan camped out in their garage while turning Wright’s backup Porsche shell into the new No. 54 911 GT3 R.

“I just thought, ‘Well geez, that's a really unbelievably fair and amazing offer. Are you sure you guys really want to do this?’” Pappas asked. “They also were incredibly nervous about what was going to happen to them. We didn't really, actually get to go ahead to do that until they were safely through qualifying. We didn't start the process of stripping the two cars that had to be stripped, in order to build one new one until after qualifying. Normally, Porsche would tell you that [building up] a bare shell is a 120-hour job. We had eight guys at the track, and they did it in 10 hours. But that included stripping the two cars and building one new one.”

As Wright and the rest of IMSA’s GTD teams continued to practice and qualify for the big race, and the Black Swan team readied itself for the almighty task of building a new car, Pappas also had to take Estep’s post-crash mindset into consideration, and whether the young talent was better off sitting on the sidelines after the costly incident.

Tim Pappas. Image by Richard Dole/LAT

“When you think back in the history of Black Swan Racing, I started my own team in 2008, and we did a few programs that people think about us for, like the back-to-back championships that we won in the American Le Mans Series, in the GT Challenge class, which was driving me and Jeroen Bleekemolen,” he said.

“At the time, nobody knew who Jeroen Bleekemolen was. I remember after I hired him, I'd said like to give somebody an opportunity, and I think blazing a trail with new talent is one of the identifying features of some of the best and most successful teams. That crosses every single sport, not just auto racing. I think altruistically, giving a young American kid like Trenton a shot feels like the right thing to do, if you're me. If you're fortunate enough to be able to go racing and do what I do, why not give a young guy who's done well, and just hasn't had that one big shot, an opportunity to go forward? That's how we got there.”

Pappas chose to use Estep’s error as a teaching moment.

“When we were standing there on Thursday with the car in shambles, and Trenton was just beside himself, I just said to him, ‘Hey, every one of us wakes up every day, with the plan of going out into the world and being completely perfect and infallible, and not making any mistakes, and executing to the nth degree every goal that we have. But it doesn't go that way and it never will. This is not the first setback that you're going to have in your career. We need you. We need your mind. We need your body. We need you to get focused. Nobody at Black Swan racing has a bullseye on your head. Everybody knows that we're all human and we all make mistakes. In fact, as a team, we made a big mistake at Bathurst, the car got put together unfortunately, and had a mechanical failure that really costs me pretty mightily,’” he continued.

"I've never blamed or looked back or thought that I should have done something differently than I did. It's just the way things go. It never occurred to me that that was the right thing to do, although certainly for a couple of brief moments, the thought crossed my mind just out of sheer panic of, ‘Boy, if we get it going, is he going to be mentally prepared?’ The three of us -- Sven, Jeroen and I -- chatted on it, and they were both in agreement that Trenton was going to get his act together, that he'd done a great job at the Roar. He had done driver pit stop practices with us, and he was really ingrained in the team. It was the right thing to do to stick with him. I'm glad we did because I think he did a fantastic job in the race. I mean, I'm so proud of the effort every single person on the team put forth -- their maximum, maximum effort.”

Fifth place felt almost as good as a victory for the Black Swan crew after their epic weekend. Image by Barry Cantrell/LAT

By Sunday afternoon, after 24 hours of racing that was more like 48 hours of anguish with Thursday’s dramas factored in, placing fifth in class and second among the Porsches -- behind, fittingly, Wright Motorsports -- Pappas knew that maximum effort was justified.

“Fifth place feels like a win for us,” he said. “I mean, yeah, it would have been amazing to cap off all of the drama with a win, and we had some really nice coverage. I was getting text messages from family and friends who were like, ‘Dale Jr. is talking about you guys and Paul Tracy is talking about you guys.’ It was a good story for everyone, and so I wish that we had done a little bit better but only just for pure pride.

“Otherwise, we all got together and had dinner Sunday night, and everyone was incredibly satisfied with where we finished. I think that it was a victorious weekend for us in many ways, being in the race in the first place, on the grid, taking the start, I thought, ‘Yeah, we're already on borrowed time.’”