Lane departure warning. Once people decide which lane you belong in, stepping out of it can leave you standing alone while the rest of the world keeps moving. That doesn't mean you took the wrong road. The Schkee Can-Am car at Willow Springs, February 1978. Photo by Jeff Zwart.
Paul Pfanner on the pattern behind his whole career, and the day in 1978 that set it off: an art director with five Formula Ford races to his name talks his way into a 550-horsepower Can-Am car, and drives straight into everything that came after.
It was a Monday in February of 1978, the sky finally clear after a week of rain had scrubbed the earlier dates. I folded myself into a cockpit I had no business being in. Twenty-something, the art director of a magazine, a twenty-eight-inch waist, and next to nothing behind me that had readied me for what I was about to do. That was the whole point.
The car was the Schkee, a single-seat Can-Am machine built on a converted Lola Formula T-332 5000 chassis, a Chevy V8 screaming a foot behind my head. It belonged to Tom Spalding, who had made his money in business and was early into a racing career, a season of Trans-Am behind him and a step up in front of him. What he wanted was publicity, and not really for his driving. He was chasing a much bigger idea, and a magazine art director folding himself into his car was one way to point some attention at it. I had a little Formula Ford time. Tom knew it, and it didn't bother him. So what the hell. Go for it.
His two mechanics warned me I'd be dead if I threw their car off the track. I told them I'd do my best not to.
Tom gave me the whole lesson in a sentence. Fuel pump on, hit the starter, blip the throttle, throw the ignition, and the V8 went off behind me like a charge going up. The first lap I was slow and unsure. By the third I had it in fifth near seven thousand rpm, the nose diving hard under braking, the whole thing planted and pulling like nothing I'd ever felt, and I understood in my body why people give their lives to this. I hadn't earned a second of it. I'd just said yes.
The rule
There's a rule nobody writes down and everybody enforces. Stay in the lane they put you in. Keep doing the thing they know you for and don't wander off. I climbed into that car because I'd decided a long time before that the rule wasn't mine to obey.
It ran. I didn't stuff it. It became the cover of SportsCar that April, and it opened the door to six more track tests I had no formal right to be doing.
Not everyone was glad about it. A magazine art director with no racing résumé folding himself into a serious Can-Am car bothered some people, and I understood why. It never stopped me, and it shouldn't stop you.
People are comfortable with the shape they assigned you. Refuse to fit it, and watch how quickly they look away. Let them. What matters to me is to keep learning and stay who I am, and to own the choices that made my life mine. The mistakes and the failures and the losses have taught me more than the wins ever did, and you only get to those lessons by risking something you haven't tried before.
But the drive was not the thing that mattered about that day. What mattered was who was standing on the other side of the camera.
Who you meet out there
His name was Jeff Zwart. The publisher had paired me with a young photographer who had a radical idea, mounting cameras on the car itself to shoot the drive from inside it, at speed. Almost nobody was doing that. The images came back like nothing the magazine had run. That same day, the crew ran one of the earliest experiments I ever saw with an onboard TV camera, meant to send a live picture out from inside a moving race car, which in 1978 was close to science fiction.
Getting ready for the shoot, Jeff and I drove up to San Luis Obispo to measure the car for his rigs, and somewhere in that prep we started talking about a magazine. An American racing title good enough to sit next to the best from Europe and Japan. Two people already working outside their lanes, dreaming up a bigger one to share.
April 1978 SportsCar, my first track test, words by me, photos by Jeff Zwart. Above, the two of us at Laguna Seca in 1981, Jeff with his camera, me in my race suit after a Formula Ford win in the Jim Russell series. Two guys with ideas and no idea what they were starting. They started anyway, and kept going.
That conversation took fourteen years to come true. RACER launched in April 1992. And Jeff, the kid with the camera rigs, became one of the most important visual storytellers the car world has, a photographer turned sought-after director, co-founder of Luftgekühlt, eight division wins up Pikes Peak, and right now the subject of a Petersen Museum exhibit tracing four decades of his work. That is who you meet when you leave your lane. You find the others who left theirs, because stepping out is the only way they can recognize one another.
The pattern
I have run that same move my whole life. When we launched RACER in 1992, plenty of people told me a magazine like it could not survive. When we put RACER.com online in 1997, smart people were still calling the whole internet a fraud. We did both anyway, because the math never changes. You step out when you believe you have more to gain than to lose. The day you believe the reverse, you have already lost, whether you move or not.
That is the quiet cost of the rule. It does not feel like losing. It feels like safety. It feels like being sensible. And all the while the doors that only open from the outside stay shut, and the people who would have found you never do.
The signal
Here is what the years since that Can-Am car have taught me. Leaving your lane is not only how you find out what you are made of. It is a signal. It tells the people who are also willing to risk something that you are one of them, and they come looking. Nearly everything I am proud of walked up to me because I was somewhere I had no business being.
The kid who talked his way into that Schkee is still in here, and I work for him. The one thing he keeps telling me is the plainest thing I know. You have to show up for your life.
Postscript: the day the point of view changed
That test turned out to be a small hinge in racing history, and I only understood it later. A company called RaceVision was running one of the first live tests of an onboard transmission, a camera the size of a lunchbox bolted into the cockpit while Tom Spalding drove, beaming the view to a tent at the track where you could sit and watch the circuit from inside the car. It was ahead of its time, though not alone in it. An Australian outfit was chasing the same idea in Formula 1 around then. But that day at Willow Springs was the first real proof of the system, and the footage still holds up. You can feel the speed, and you can see the exact point of view that would go on to change how the whole world watches this sport.
The irony is that Jeff was inventing his own points of view at the same time, on the same car. One camera slung out ahead of the nose, one on a tall mast above the rear wing, one tucked in behind the driver's shoulders. Nobody was doing that in 1978. He was still a student at Art Center in Pasadena, years before the legend. This was close to his first real professional work, and the ignition point for everything that followed. Two people outside their lanes, in one red car, watching the future arrive and helping build it.
One last thing: The latest lane I left
Three weeks ago I wandered off again, this time into the music business. I never played a gig, and I’ve already retired from it, which I’d call a gift to the record industry. My whole songwriting career ran under a month, but I enjoyed it and learned fast, thanks to the new tools that lower the barrier to entry. The proof of my latest learning adventure is here; full album playlist. And true to everything above, I have no idea who I’ll meet because of it. That was always the best part.
Sixteen songs about life, love, loss, and learning, drawn from human experience and made possible by technology that has erased the distance between imagining something and making it. What is in you remains only in you until you make it real by bringing it into the world. This is what happens when you show up for your life with intention, and a commitment to grow past who, or what you are now. .
Pfanner Advantage works with clients to turn change into advantage at the intersection of mobility, motorsport, media, technology, and marketing. Learn more or start a conversation: contact us today.
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