Thirty years of teaching at Lime Rock Park

"I’ll never forget the moment I decided to become a race car driver. You know those twisty roads along the reservoirs in upstate New York? I was driving one of them in my Corvair, and I thought, if there’s anyone in the world who should become a race driver, it’s me. I love the flow of carving arcs around curves.

"The racetrack is the canvas, the car is the paintbrush."

Thus spake Bruce MacInnes, now 62 and the longest-serving instructor at the Skip Barber racing schools, based in Lime Rock. He has taught or coached Paul Newman and Tom Cruise, as well as the sons of such racing greats as Mario Andretti, Phil Hill and Dan Gurney. He has worked hard to avoid getting into management, he says. "I just want to work with the guys I work with. I’m lucky to be able to work with a group of passionate professionals."

He has no formal training as an engineer, but he rebuilt (and pilots) a sleek RV-4 aerobatics aircraft. He constructed a Sterling GT kit car with a Mazda rotary engine. He devised a crane that picks up his elderly mother and deposits her on his boat for rides. He’s now working on a fuel-efficient three-wheeled Tri-Magnum car. At the Skip Barber facility in Lakeville, he enthusiastically took me on a technical tour of a Formula racer that was being worked on in the shop—and managed to make much of what he was saying clear to me.

One former student whom he taught the proper "line" at Lime Rock told me that MacInnes was full of practical tips, telling him, for example, that when you come out of a particular turn there you should point the car at the "OO" on the "RESTROOM" sign on the infield hill.

Before turning to teaching, Mac-Innes had a promising career as a race driver: he won two professional Formula Ford championships, three "Longest Day at Nelson Ledges" races, and the notorious 1985 Can-Am competition on a wet and windy day at Lime Rock. One of his early sponsors, a farmer nicknamed "Chicken Chuck," gave him a toy-store chicken named Seymour that he still carries with him when he races.

Like many able and aspiring drivers, however, he eventually ran into a roadblock: money. "I really wanted to get to Formula One," he said, but it was not to be. One young man whom MacInnes has coached told me that nowadays a single season can easily cost $300,000 to $400,000, and sponsors are often hard to come by.

As Bill Lovell, a writer for Auto-Week, put it in a 1985 cover article on MacInnes, "If you don’t have the money, you’re dogmeat." He quoted MacInnes: "I was naïve. I thought I could do it. I really did." If he still has any regrets, however, you’d never know it. He’s a cheerful, lively guy who enjoys his job as senior instructor and is obviously good at it.

"I absolutely love teaching and building projects," he said in an e-mail. "There is Life After Racing...."

MacInnes still talks about a flip he experienced in an open racer at Bridgehampton on Long Island, a once-famous track now extinct. "The roll bar hit going backwards," he once wrote about the crash. "[It] folded flat against the chassis, and the car ended up spinning inverted with all four wheels touching the ground. Believe it or not, my head collapsed the steering wheel, the gearshift went right past my eye, and I was unhurt."

With the gallows wit of his trade, he goes on to cite "The Two Basic Rules of Flipping":

1. Don’t close your eyes; you’ll miss the best part.

2. If it gets quiet during the crash, don’t release your seatbelts—you may still be airborne.

 My brother, Leonard, had an odd experience recently with his 2005 Chevrolet Suburban, which he had parked in Sagamore, Mass., on Cape Cod, while taking the bus to spend the day in Boston. He returned some 12 hours later. When he tried to start the vehicle, it made alarming noises. In his absence someone had tried to cut out the catalytic converter, seriously damaging the exhaust system in the process.

He learned later from the police that thieves steal converters because they can be resold for $400 to $500; their value is largely in the platinum and palladium that react chemically to remove pollutants from the exhaust. (Googling "stolen catalytic converters" quickly makes clear that this is a national problem.) To make matters worse, my brother’s insurer would not accept digital photographs of the damage. It took a week for a claims adjuster to come down from Boston to verify the damage.

© 2008 by Keith R. Johnson. A retired editor of Fortune, Johnson lives in Sharon. Wheels appears monthly.