Chip Ganassi needed some tangerine juice, so he jumped into his Mercedes 420 and headed for the neighborhood store. It was just after Christmas on a dank and dreary night in his hometown of Pittsburgh, and as he pulled to a stop in front of the store, it was mere minutes from closing.
This is why he left his car unlocked and running as he dashed inside and waited for his purchases to be rung up.
“You know how you can look out of the corner of your eye and register everything in just a millisecond?” he remembers. “That’s what I did, and I’m thinking, `It’s so ugly out, I can’t even see my car out there.’ “
“Uh. I just parked my car out here,” he then thought after opening the store’s front door and realizing his car had been stolen.
On Sunday, on grounds that were once a dog track owned by Al Capone, the new Chicago Motor Speedway at Sportsman’s Park is host to the Target Grand Prix, which will give this area its first glimpse of championship open-wheel racing.
Many groups over countless years had aspired to do that, but all failed until Ganassi sold his vision to Sportsman’s head Charlie Bidwill and catalyzed the conversion of a horse track into a dual-purpose facility. Ganassi is now the president of the Speedway.
That facility and Sunday’s event are clearly Ganassi’s babies, of this there can be no doubt, and the personality that spawned these difficult births is best understood here, in these moments after he realized his car had been lifted.
For he rushed back into the store and to its pay phone and dialed the number of his car phone.
“Hey. You have to bring my car back!” he barked when the thief answered.
“Are you crazy?” the thief shot back. “I’ve been stealing cars since I was 15 years old. This is the easiest one I ever got.”
“Aww, man,” thought Ganassi, who was concurrently busy creating a fictitious tale.
“You got any kids at home?” he then asked the thief. “I had to come in here and get medicine for my sick kid.”
“I kept talking, talking, talking, talking,” he remembers.
“I had nothing to lose. He had my wallet and my car.”
“I don’t know,” the thief finally said. “I need money.”
“You need money?” Ganassi shot back.
“Open the console. See my wallet? There’s $500 in there. It’s yours. You want more, I’ll take you to the cash machine.”
“Call me back in 10 minutes,” the thief said, but Ganassi called back in five.
“I said 10 minutes,” the thief said, hanging up on Ganassi.
“We’re right across the street from Blockbuster Video,” the thief said. “Come down and get your car.”
“Did you leave my wallet?” Ganassi asked.
“Yeah. I left your wallet there,” the thief answered.
With that Ganassi dashed down the block, found his car and started rummaging for his wallet.
As he searched, a new Ford Expedition pulled up beside him, and from inside it a voice said, “Hey, man. Find your wallet?”
“It was the guy who took my car,” Ganassi remembers.
“It was the cheapest 500 bucks I ever spent,” remembers Ganassi, who did indeed find his wallet. “I was so happy, I had a bottle of wine in the back seat, I grabbed it and said, `Here. Thanks. Merry Christmas.’ I gave the guy a bottle of wine! The whole thing took 30 minutes. My heart was pounding. My mouth was dry. It was weird. But you always got to be talking. You always got to be promoting. You always got to be working.”
“Chip makes you believe the deal he’s offering you is fair–even if it’s not what you want,” says Alex Zanardi, who won two championships for the Target/Chip Ganassi Racing team before jumping to Formula One.
That is the wheeler-dealer essence of the man who got the Speedway built and a characteristic he first manifested as a young kid who talked his dad into buying him a go-kart. An older friend had one and Ganassi wanted to be like him. From that moment he has rarely rested in his efforts to make yet another deal.
The one that first made him an owner occurred in 1988, the year after he retired as a driver and purchased a portion of Patrick Racing. The next year that team won the Indianapolis 500 and the CART championship with Emerson Fittipaldi, and the year after that–in a parting that was less than amicable–Ganassi took over the team completely and began what was then a revolutionary partnership with Target.
Until now, a sponsor such as Target would basically fly solo. But Ganassi pushed it to involve the products sold on its shelves, and that created a synergy that left his cars decorated with decals of countless products.
“I didn’t know it would work,” he explains. “I thought they could do for the sport in the ’90s what tobacco did for it in the ’70s and ’80s because they were a national brand with consumer products. They were a retailer with many, many tentacles they could utilize.”
Target did utilize them, and this turned into another deal that worked to Ganassi’s benefit. Then he focused on his struggling team. After Fittipaldi’s success in 1989, it muddled through four straight seasons without a victory, and over the next three seasons, Ganassi switched to a Reynard chassis and a Honda engine and Firestone tires.
Each of those companies was a relative newcomer and an unproven CART entity. With each, Ganassi–again showing no fear–was rolling the dice. But in 1996, driven by that trio, he won the championship with Jimmy Vasser, and in the two seasons that followed, he did the same with Zanardi. Now Juan Montoya, in Zanardi’s seat, is second in the points race and Ganassi’s team is the one all others pursue.
Along the way, as he sought that success he now enjoys, he himself grew into a subject of debate, and he picked up detractors who variously found him too loud, too emotional, too opinionated and too high-strung.
“He’s a strong figure,” Vasser says. “When things aren’t right, he lets you know. Sometimes he’s not the most pleasant guy, but he’s not running for mayor. Sometimes you don’t get the warm fuzzy from him all the time, but that’s OK.”
Ganassi’s just doing his job.
“Am I supposed to apologize for trying to grow my business? Am I supposed to apologize for that?” says Chip Ganassi, and here he is very much the guy who got the track done, even more the guy who recovered his $50,000 car for $500.
“I’m sorry. I’m not running for office. I have a job to do. I have people to answer to. So if you’re not on my team, get off my team. Show me someone who goes from seven to 85 employees and I’ll show you a guy who kicked some butt.
“That’s why they call it racing. You’re competing. You’re pushing hard. You want to go faster. You want to get bigger. You want to go longer. Bigger, better, faster, longer. That’s what competition’s all about.”
