RFM Front Page News

BOWMANVILLE, Ontario, Canada — Seth Neiman of Flying Lizard Motorsport is a man of mature years or so the calendar tries to tell him. “According to Patrick Long [Petersen/White Lightning Porsche driver],” Seth explained, “in racing years I am only 13. That’s because most drivers start racing when they’re eight!” What was it that brought him into racing at the age of 50, you may wonder, when most drivers these days are retired?

“Serendipity,” he said thoughtfully. “Johannes [van Overbeek]’s dad said to me one day ‘you ought to go out to Skip Barber Racing School, it’s great fun.’ I think he was just looking for someone to run laps with him at that time. But I went out there and I enjoyed it, and I said to myself, I can do this. I’ve always liked working hard at things that are worth trying to do – I like hard stuff.” Seth won his first race in 2001 in one of the Skip Barber series, but his first professional win was at the Six Hours of the Glen with Johannes in 2003. After that he decided that it was time, together with Johannes and other fellow race enthusiasts, to put together a racing team the way they knew a racing team ought to be put together, and set out to make it an important part of the American Le Mans Series. “Starting out when you’re older,” he said, “makes you more patient with the amount of time it takes to get up to speed, both to gel the team and to bring your own racing up to the level you want it to be. When you’re young you think it will take one year to go to Formula One from Formula Atlantics. But when you’re older you know that things take time, and they take the time they take, so even when you’re secretly convinced that it’s never going to work, you’re willing to keep on making that effort and count every forward movement as success. In fact, it’s better sometimes not to have too much success too early, because it makes you complacent. The Lizards were very successful in our first year and then we had a year when things didn’t go quite the way we thought they would, but the team is really beginning to come together now and it’s all good.”

The most difficult thing to learn when driving in a four-class series like the American Le Mans, Seth commented, was managing traffic. “Because there are so many cars and so many different kinds of cars,” he said, “you learn what you can and can’t do more quickly than in a one-make or spec series, for example. When you go off line during an ALMS race, you quickly find out that’s a problem, because off the line there’s a lot of rubber and you can get into trouble. And even though each class is running its own race, each driver has to be mindful of the traffic as much as he can.”

Seth praised the respect the drivers in the higher classes have for the drivers in the lower classes, too. “Oh, you will have some drivers complaining about what others are doing,” he said practically, “you are always going to have that. But the general rule is to take those complaints and divide them by five! As a general matter, the accidents that do happen are just that – accidents – and people don’t go on and on. The American Le Mans welcomes teams very warmly and they have certainly been receptive to us at all levels since we came in.”

In addition to running the No. 44 Flying Lizard Porsche, Seth runs a BMW in the SPEED World Challenge Touring Cars. “I’m away from home anyway,” he said, “and I feel like, the more driving I can do the better. At first I was running in the World Challenge just to get more seat time, but I very much enjoy the challenge of Touring Car racing. It’s great competition and the fans love it. The only difficulty I have is to re-adapt to the speed and G-force of the Porsche after I have come out of the BMW. That’s a completely different environment and takes longer than I thought it would, but I’m learning to make the transition more quickly.”

As for other forms of racing, Seth has not really considered them seriously. “I’d like to do a run,” he said, “in a professional Rally car, but sports car racing is really the only kind of racing I want to do professionally. I’ve really never considered any other kind.”

There is a prospect of rain for the weekend, although Seth said hopefully that the weather reports now say the Sunday race will be dry and he very much wants that to be true. “Racing here in the rain,” he said frankly, “would be a nightmare. The rain will just cascade down the track and you can end up anywhere! Let us hope that this time the weather reports are right and we have a dry race day for Sunday, since the reports say we may have two inches of rain tomorrow and if we do, I doubt if anybody will go out.”

Because of his tight schedule with two racing series, Seth had to hurry away for a bite of lunch before jumping into Touring Car practice. What will tomorrow bring? No one knows. But the 44 Flying Lizard Porsche took the pole in class here in 2004, and if it doesn’t rain, we may see them up in the front again.

Both the 45 and 44 Flying Lizard cars look forward to a great race weekend, rain or shine. But there’s one thing you can guarantee about Flying Lizard Motorsport. Win or lose, they won’t tell you where they got the name.