Episode 220 features Cal Wells, founder of PPI, legendary driver/owner in the racing world

Cal Wells III on Episode 220. Such a privilege to interview Cal Wells. We talk about all the racing, racing, racing that Cal has been a part of. Cal was inducted in the Off Road Motorsports Hall of Fame in 2020. Cal is why we say; legends live at ORMHOF.org.  Be sure to tune in on your favorite podcast app.

5:13 – I could get from Westminster to downtown LA in 35 minutes, and now it takes 3 hours 

10:43 – I rode up there, it was like going to heaven; here’s this line on both sides lined with red, white, and blue off-road vehicles             

20:23 – my first trip to Baja… 

29:07 – That was the first time we raced, we were running down the highway and the engine blew up

43:24 – And if I had a do-over, I would have done things very differently

48:00 – I’m going to go hire Ivan Stewart or Malcolm Smith

1:03:22 – We got the deal for 180 grand, and that first year, I spent 360

1:23:44 – Everything was our own, our own shocks, our own everything.

Special thanks to ORMHOF.org for support and sponsorship of this podcast.

Be sure to listen on your favorite podcast app.

Transcript

[00:00:01.040] - 

Welcome to Conversations with Big Rich. This is an interview-style podcast. Those interviewed are all involved in the off-road industry. Being involved, like all of my guests are, is a lifestyle, not just a job. I talk to past, present, and future legends, as well as business owners, employees, media, and land use warriors, men and women who have found their way into this exciting and addictive lifestyle we call off-road. We discuss their personal history, struggles, successes, and reboots. We dive into what drives them to stay active and off-road. We all hope to shed some light on how to find a path into this world that we live and love and call off-road.

[00:00:46.130] - 

This episode of Conversations with Big Rich is brought to you by the Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame. The mission of the Hall of Fame is to educate and inspire present and future generations of the off-road community by celebrating the achievements of those who came before. We invite you to help fulfill the mission of the Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame. Join, partner, or donate today. Legends live at ORMHOF.org.

[00:01:15.770] - Big Rich Klein

On this episode of Conversations with Big Rich, I'll be speaking with a gentleman that has done more than most people have in off-road and beyond.

[00:01:24.250] - Big Rich Klein

Let's talk about 20 years plus of off-road racing, starting Precision Preparation Incorporated, PPI, racing with a stable of drivers, including Ivan Stewart, before he became known as Ironman, then on to NASCAR, then on to IndyCar, dabbling in F1, back to NASCAR, and is now the CEO of Legacy Motor Club, a NASCAR team out of Charlotte, North Carolina. Cal Wells, how are you doing?

[00:01:53.510] - Cal Wells

I'm good. Sorry, I missed you there.

[00:01:55.700] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, no, no, no, that's all right.

[00:01:57.530] - Cal Wells

I've got LeMans on here. Somehow my speakers were screwed up. Anyway, I didn't hear the call come in.

[00:02:06.150] - Big Rich Klein

No worries. No worries. Thank you for making the time to do this interview. I've been looking forward to this one, and I'm sure there's plenty of off-road enthusiasts that are looking forward to this as well.

[00:02:19.370] - Cal Wells

Are there any of your listeners that are old enough?

[00:02:23.650] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, yes. I've got listeners everywhere. My son went to Cabo, He's got a condo down there. And they were checking in. And the concierge that was at the next desk when my son says, Hey, yeah, I'm Rich Klein. I'm checking in. The guy goes, Are you Big Rich? And my son says, No, I'm his son. Little Rich, and he goes, Oh, we love your dad, Big Rich. Everybody down here listens to his podcast.

[00:02:52.510] - Cal Wells

That's awesome.

[00:02:54.030] - Big Rich Klein

And he was like, Damn, everywhere I go, dad, people know you.

[00:02:58.650] - Cal Wells

Yeah, exactly. That's how they're all lined up. We're going to see a hell of a start here. Do you watch sports car racing at all?

[00:03:05.760] - Big Rich Klein

I don't very much on TV because I don't watch TV. I normally catch highlights on the internet, but it's not the same. I love Le Mans.

[00:03:18.640] - Cal Wells

Yeah, they're literally just coming to the green. Now, I have a friend who runs the stuff for Chip. Okay. Steven Midas is his name, and he runs Cadillac, but General Motors stuff, and they qualified second, third, 8.3-mile track, and they missed pole by a 10th of a second. Wow. If you think about that, it's crazy.

[00:03:43.350] - Big Rich Klein

That's like two foot on the line.

[00:03:47.940] - Cal Wells

Yeah, exactly. It's just on an 8.3-mile track. I mean, think about that. It's just hard to even fathom to me, but it could be that close. But Anyway, that's pretty cool. Yeah, it is. Pretty cool. So I love all kinds of racing.

[00:04:06.830] - Big Rich Klein

Anyway, sorry. I digress. No, no, no, no, no, I'm really looking forward to this interview, and it's one a long time coming. You've been in the off-road and motor sports business for quite a while, since actually about the time I graduated high school. So you were pretty young because we're not that many years apart. In fact, only three. So let's find out where were you born and raised.

[00:04:39.610] - Cal Wells

I was actually born in Pomona, California. Okay. 1955. Within the same month that Disneyland opened. And lived in Pomona for a very few years, and then migrated to Corona Del Mar for three or four years, but actually grew up in Tustin, California.

[00:05:00.360] - Big Rich Klein

Okay. And I know that almost all of LA was still pretty rural at that point, unless you got right downtown. Was that the case for you?

[00:05:13.060] - Cal Wells

You know what was, Orange County really had Orange Groves. It was quite the thing. When I was working for my dad in my early teens, I would run bolts of fabric to downtown LA, to the Garment district. My dad I was a drapery and cornice box manufacturer, and I actually built. I wasn't a carpenter, but I would make plywood cornice boxes and then upholster them. I was a gopher as well. I got my driver's license early, 15 and a half. I would drive downtown from Westminster, which is ultimately where I first built PPI as well. I was building cars in my garage, but I would run these things for my dad. And just to comment back on it being rural, I could get from Westminster to downtown LA in 35 minutes, and now it would take 3 hours.

[00:06:11.750] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, and that's on a good day.

[00:06:14.230] - Cal Wells

It was very rural. Exactly. Exactly.

[00:06:17.440] - Big Rich Klein

So what was it like growing up in Tustin, when you got into Tustin? What age did you move to Tustin?

[00:06:29.430] - Cal Wells

I think I was four.

[00:06:30.670] - Big Rich Klein

Okay. So if I ask you about Corona, Del Mar, you're not going to really.

[00:06:34.890] - Cal Wells

No, we were only there a year. And then we moved to... My parents were able to buy a house that was, probably 3,000 square feet, 28 for $32,000 or something like that. And so we moved there. And it was actually, thinking back on it now, it was actually very fortuitous to how I really got hooked into off road. And not to jump ahead, but being in Tustin, which is fundamentally, we had a Santa Ana mailing address, but it was Tustin, almost like a Prefect of. I'm the eldest of seven, so we needed all the room we could get, mom being Catholic at all. So This is well before Bill Gates invented the information highway. If you were going to communicate, if you were going to read, there were no podcasts, there were no cell phones, there were no There was no internet, so it was all slick magazines. I had friends, this is before I had a driver's license, that were really into off-road through Fourwheel and Off-Road or Off-Road magazine or just and stuff like that. And we just loved it. And of course, being in Southern California, Baja was very close. I had never been to Baja, but it was very, very close.

[00:08:09.540] - Cal Wells

So geographically. So in an interesting turn of events, I had a neighbor, his name was Ken Chant. I've lost touch with him. He's probably passed away by now. He'd be well into his 90s. And he was taking care of a pickup truck for an an off-road racing pickup truck for a guy named Bill Dieterly. So if you really want to go back in time now, Bill Dieterly owned a construction company that put in sidewalks and curves for Walker Evans when Walker was building houses before he was racing as a living. Okay. Yeah, I know. Crazy. Here was this red, white, and blue, and I'm sure you recall it, Straub, painted all their vehicles the same. They had this big team deal, and there was a flat mat, yet metal flake-ish blue. Then the red was off-red. It wasn't red like what you'd see on the American flag, but that was the idea with red, white, and blue, and then black hoods, so you didn't have the flat plaques. He didn't have the reflection off the hoods. They built Bronco's to race back in the '60s and pickup trucks, F100s for Ford. And here's this truck, and it's like, Oh, my God, what is that Stroppe built truck doing here?

[00:09:36.720] - Cal Wells

And he literally was just around the corner from where I lived, and I was incredibly shy and very sheepish. And this guy, Ken, he walked out one day and said, Oh, come on in and look. Very, very nice guy, and very. It really changed the course of my life, one of many events that changed the course of my life, where I was able to come in and climb all over this thing, and I didn't really know what I was looking other than it was... I saw renditions of this in Petersons, Four Wheel and Off Road or other magazines. Bill Dieterly, to say he was frugal would be an understatement. So he didn't want to pay this drop hourly rate, so he had Ken prep the thing at his house. Ken was... I can't even remember what he did for a day job, but did he do a lot of stuff in his garage at night? He was a welder of sorts and a wirer of sorts, a wirer of sorts, and a Jack of all, master of none trade guy. I was just, I love this thing. Again, I didn't have a driver's license yet.

[00:10:43.780] - Cal Wells

I was getting it. I I got a permit to ride a motorcycle because you could get one in California before your 16th birthday. So he invited me to go up to Signal Hill. And it hadn't even been called Bill Stroppe and Son yet. Willy wasn't old enough. And so I went up there with him. He had a Bronco. He put a 351 Winsor Ford engine in it, which is, I don't know if you're familiar with Winsor versus Cleveland, but the difference is about 70 pounds and block and head weight, meaning the one being cast in Winsor, Canada. And so he built this freaking hot rod with a four-speed in it and all this stuff in a Bronco, and it was awesome. I rode up there with him and drove up that signal. It was just like going to heaven. I mean, you walk into that compound that Strapp had built in between all the pumping oil derricks. Here's this line on both sides of a garage with lines on both sides of these red, white, and blue off-road racing vehicles. Mickey Thompson still ran a truck out of there. Walker was there, but he was as much a customer as anything he got Ford support.

[00:12:07.790] - Cal Wells

And Bill Rush, and again, Dieterly was a customer car, but on and on and on and on and on. And it was just incredible. The mechanics that were working there at the time from Bruce Eichelberger to Danny Shields and to Jamie Martina Tustin, these guys have all passed on now, but they were all Straub's cornerstone guys. I was just in awe of what I was seeing. I would go up there and help roll tires around and load pit trucks and things like that. And so growing up in Tustin was interesting because had I not met Ken, I don't know if I've ever would have been able to migrate at that level and understand what was possible because that was a hell an introduction to off-road. I was a sand master engineer. Yeah, it was something. Anyway, it was just there were others that were there. Obviously, Scott McKinsey had sand master there in Southern California. That's the the way, it was in Southern California. A lot of suppliers, a lot of builders, a lot of different things. But that was something. Just took my breath away.

[00:13:21.030] - Big Rich Klein

Having that opportunity to begin with, it'd be like some kid walking into one of the NASCAR shops right now. At that age and being able to get a start, just sweeping or being a mouse in the corner, the education that comes with that is phenomenal.

[00:13:43.610] - Cal Wells

It was. And then I went to my first race with Ken. He went to pit a car and helped support a Bronco that Ford was supporting with a driver named Roger Ward. Roger had won the Indy 500 in the '60s. He was a Ford guy. And that was the same day. I was 15 and a half. It was the same time that I met Mickey Thompson and many others. And it was, again, just a really a breathtaking opportunity. This is when the mint was run out of the gun club. This is before Las Vegas Motor Speedway was even a vision. And these little 30-mile loops, just dusty as hell, and it was a ridiculous race. But yeah, it It was something that was my first race. I remember riding back with Ken and saying, I really want to do this. And I came home to my dad and said, pop, we really need to look at this. It can't be cheap, but it's something we really need to strive for, worse to that effect. My dad had done some time distance rally racing. He'd never done any performance racing. His dream was to go to Le Mans.

[00:14:53.510] - Cal Wells

Was never actually able to put it together. But he and a friend of his named Pete Bundy had raced Jaguars in these time distance rallies. And so not performance rallies, but time distance. So there were times you would go fast, but not a lot. And so he had a racing bug, and we would get up at O'Dark 100 to watch Formula One when you could get it in the States. And, yeah, it was very cool. So that's when I was just like, this is my calling. There you go. I was after it.

[00:15:28.710] - Big Rich Klein

What did your dad do for a business?

[00:15:32.280] - Cal Wells

He had a... At that time, just I'm sorry, he owned a company called Diversified Draperies. What they manufactured were wall coverings, so they manufactured Drapes. They didn't sell them. He had accounts that would sell, and then Diversified would manufacture and install. I worked for him building these lamerican, lamerican as they were called, but fundamentally, cornets boxes or coverings for the top of headers over Drapes. That's what I did when I was, again, before I could drive. Then I would go help install.

[00:16:09.080] - Big Rich Klein

Because you'd said that you were delivering upholstery to him, or fabric, and I was like, okay.

[00:16:16.230] - Cal Wells

Yeah, bolts of fabric downtown. The garment district was pretty big down there then, and I was cheap. Five bucks an hour or less. I was an inexpensive solution to a runner. It was good. It was great, actually. I was able to build stuff at home in our garage at the same time. That's when we decided, Hey, we should build dung buggies. Because that was still 1,200... Class 10 cars, 1,200 cc cars were achievable financially.

[00:16:56.180] - Big Rich Klein

Anyway, I'm sorry. What was school like for you? Were you one of those that looked out the window and just wanted to get away, or were you a good student?

[00:17:08.470] - Cal Wells

I was not a good student. I went to Mildred Marle Elementary School. Funny joke between Mark McMillan and myself. Ultimately, it was knocked down on a little housing project built. Mark and his brother were the ones that swung the wrecking ball and built this other thing. Where I used to go to elementary school. Then I went to Hughes Intermediate, and that's where I started to get a flavor for cars, Southern California hot rod stuff. Go to Orange County and watch drag, racing, things like that. Then I went to Footh High School, and That's where I met Jeff McPherson, who's been a lifelong friend. We've been in each other's weddings and on and on and on. That provided an opportunity for me to, as I I was trying to build cars for my dad and my brother and a Bronco for myself. My dad and my brother would drive the same car that I had a Bronco. But going to high school there, I'd met Jeff. I had been on his dad's Little League team when I was nine. And so we'd known each other for a while, Joe McPherson. And so there was just all these connection points to off-road.

[00:18:28.320] - Cal Wells

My first trip to Baja, California was with team McPherson, and I didn't go with... Well, no, I think maybe I went with Ken. My first trip was with Ken. And then after that, it was with the McPhersons.

[00:18:41.070] - Big Rich Klein

What is it that I'd normally ask this later on, but going to Baja, everybody I talk to that goes to Baja that first time just goes, wow, and falls in love with the place, all for different reasons. Did you have that experience?

[00:18:59.870] - Cal Wells

Absolutely. My first trip, I did have my driver's license. I was 16. I had a Pontiac station wagon, and I had driven to San Felipe. Ken had a camper and towed it behind his Bronco with that Cleveland 351 on it. And he had young daughters, and one of them rode with me, and I had a very dear friend, still dear friend, Brent Duggleby was with me. The road from the Portecita's Road, of course, very famous, you'd be familiar with.Oh, that's right.We went down to... Yeah, so we drove past San Felipe and went down to Portisidas. Calf and Seano's is a little restaurant there, which is right on the race course, and that's where we set up. When I say we set up, it was a straw pit, and I was, again, like you said, a floor sweeper. I was a support guy. I actually told this story the other night when I was in Sanoma, funny enough. So I'm there, all of '16. Back then, it was just a different place. The drug thing wasn't like it is now. It was really adventurous and not as frightening as it is now as it relates to the banditos.

[00:20:23.350] - Cal Wells

You just didn't have that. You could feel very comfortable. At least I did, very comfortable, very safe. Really, that you were out really on a true adventure. We went down there, and we were about 10 miles up from the foot of the Three Sisters, which is now a highway, but at the time it was called the Three Sisters because there were three very rocky, extraordinarily rocky, almost like going up the summit, things that you had to navigate if you were coming back up. The 500 then was about 600 miles, and it went down the outer Coast, the Pacific side before cutting across and then trundling back up the Gulf side of Baja. Where was the turnaround point? San Ignacio. So anyway, the first car on the road, he didn't win the thing, but the first car on the road was a PJ in the Big Oley, Dick Russell had built it, same guy that built the Blazers later. And it was a tubular space frame, Ford Bronco, still had twin I beam in it, the big wing of the gold, of course, very famous. One of the things about off-road that I love, and I've been able to experience it much later in life with Ivan, when you're first on the road, you not only set the pace, but you set the from a sound perspective.

[00:22:02.550] - Cal Wells

Again, I was mentioning this the other night when I was in Sonoma at an event. The thing that's different about all the types of racing I've done is that because you're so isolated, when your first car on the road, or you're supporting the first car on the road, and you hear them crackling through the canyons, grasping for traction constantly, and in that little thing, it was short. He built it like a sprint car, like a world of outlaw sprint car, that big old wing on it, that he could hydraulically move the thing with the power steering pump provided to the servo, and he could change that thing around. He and Strapp had come over the sisters, and you could hear... You could see the lights flashing, those three that popped out of the wing. You could hear him just. He's just grabbing for everything you could get, just sliding every corner, burn to burn to burn. If you remember that there's those concrete vatos that would let the the water roll down to the golf from the mountains, and you could hear him leaping those and then grabbing and grabbing. But because it's the only car, it's different than a NASCAR race or an Indy car race where there's 30 of them out there.

[00:23:11.160] - Cal Wells

And they sound great, too. Everyone has its own tone. But when you're listening to one guy who's delivering the driver performance you would expect from a Parnelly Jones or an Ivan Stewart, or there's many that you could mention that are really supreme athletes. And that's all you hear, and it's crackling off the side of a canyon. The sound does, right? So it echoes and you just hear it thundering towards you. Even to this day, the hair is coming up on my arms right now, even reliving it. And that was 52 years ago. It took Baja very differently for me because beyond going down and you have your camping experiences and everybody's making their margaritas or their tacos, and they're enjoying the fish from Sanfil, or excuse me, the from San Felipe, very famous, of course. Just absolutely, absolutely breathtaking scenery, and the skies are perfect, and the weather is perfect. But then to see that thing come up and we pitted him. He came whistling in and I was handing gas cans or something. I can't remember what the hell I was doing. But anyway, it just really... This is a very long answer to your short question, but it just really captured my imagination and propelled it to a level that I couldn't have even imagined.

[00:24:35.260] - Cal Wells

It was just incredible experience.

[00:24:38.030] - Big Rich Klein

Yeah, everybody has something that that grabs them. I know that the first time I went down to Baja was I owned Vora at the time. I'd picked it up from Ed Robinson when he wanted to retire. I went down with the BFG guys and helped Pit there. And we were on the road, turn off road to Fish Camp, and outside of Cadevina. And I had no idea what to expect. I just heard about it. And first in the motorcycles, and then there was a whole bunch of locals coming through with lights. But everybody said, oh, you'll know when the trophy trucks come because it looks like a city approaching because of all the lights. And it was just so... It was magical, like you said, the sounds, the sights, and everybody in the pit getting prepared those first cars, those first trucks and cars. And it was just, I just went like, wow, I don't know how I got through so much of my life. And here I am in the early 2000s, and I'm like, I've missed out on so much. Exactly. I'm sad that I don't get down there every year.

[00:26:06.320] - Cal Wells

Yeah, I'd love to, too. But honestly, in some of it, it's like, God, I don't want to. My memories are so... I mean, I may not remember what I had for breakfast, but I certainly can remember these things. And so I was 16, so I was born at 55, 65. So '71 is when this... '71 is when this experience happened for me. And the bikes, Malcolm's running a Husky and he won the thing. And this is before he started driving with the Belray bullet with the tennis. And he was just so different because a lot of it was the experience is waiting and waiting and waiting. Different now because the trophy trucks, they're damn near indestructible and they all run in a big pack. And it's very, very different than when I was blessed to be able to do it. And not bad, just different. Great, actually. Those things are incredible pieces of technology. One of the few remaining unlimited categories you can actually compete in with four wheels. I clearly understand what you're saying. I can totally relate. It's just an experience that you... It's like, Oh, my God, I can't even imagine I'm able to do this.

[00:27:25.080] - Cal Wells

Again, for me, I was blessed to do it at a very early age.

[00:27:27.700] - Big Rich Klein

Right. And get totally immersed and hooked. Totally. Your experiences are incredible. Then, when did you... How did you first get your first vehicle to race? How did that come about?

[00:27:43.620] - Cal Wells

My dad and I had talked about it. We tried to put together a budget to say, hey, what's the right way to go about this? And of course, I wanted a Ford Bronco, which was not the cheapest way to do it. But I had found there was some a hurricane, big storm, something that had gone through South Dakota. And a Ford store that was on a a hill washed to the bottom of the hill. And with it, all the vehicles that were either on their lot or in their showroom. And there was a Ford Bronco brand new six-cylinder in it that had rolled down this hill, and I bought it for... Again, It was brand new. It had zero miles on it. I bought it for 1,600 bucks. I had been working at an engine rebuilding place. That was my first job before I went to work for my dad. I worked at a place called Bolsa Engine Rebuilders in the Westminster, California. I worked for my dad for the... Then I migrated from there to working for my dad after working for them for a summer. I could dictate my time. And I bought this thing full of mud, cleaned it all out, changed the mounting around.

[00:29:07.840] - Cal Wells

It was just bolt on stuff because Ford was upgrading to a V8, and we put a It wasn't a 289, it was a 302 that I built. My garage was horrible engine builder. But I built this thing myself. And then Ken helped me do a lot of work on the vehicle. He We welded the first cage into it with a steak welder. And we went to the Baha 500. My dad and I did. And we had a little motor home, and my mom was also working in real estate at the time. We went down as a family. As far as pitting, we paid a fee to Strob and painted the thing all orange and didn't have any money, so we I didn't have fancy anything on it. But they had a three-speed transmission, which came stock with the six-cylinder, and we went and raced. That was the very first time I went, and we got raced, started in Encinada. Where the hell did we get to? I can't remember right now, but it was early on in the race, and we were running down the highway about 100 miles an hour, and the engine blew up.

[00:30:30.640] - Cal Wells

Because I didn't know what I was doing. And I screwed up something in the valve train, and it popped a push rod out of it. And then the lift were rolling around in there, and we were done. But again, it was a great experience for my dad and I to do it together. And then I went racing. Second time, at the Mid 400 with my dad. Not the Mid 400. Was it the Mid? No, that was with Ralph. It was Parker. I rolled the thing over early. That was when you used to run two laps on each side. You started on the Arizona side and then train her across to California and then back. And very early, I tumbled the thing just because I couldn't see. A turn came up and I tumbled it over. And we got going again. But afterwards, it had cracks throughout all of the cage, and that's when I had the thing rebuilt at Straps, and they put a proper cage in it and their fancy dash and all that stuff. I somehow scraped enough money to get there to do it. Then at the meantime, I was building a fun co from Gil George, who was a very, very dear friend, had become a very dear friend.

[00:31:55.980] - Cal Wells

I was building a fun co We bought one on SS1, the little short guy, the 88-incher, for Class 10 for my brother and my dad. So my dad stopped riding with me. And then a very long-time friend from high school, Ralph Cosmeties and I built those cars, again, in my garage, and we built Bahaba pre-runners as well. Ralph and I went and raced them in. Then it took us like... Pj wanted. I was slow as hell. Took us nine hours. You snowed like crazy. And we were running south of town, out of Jean, and there were two 200 mile loops, and it was so cold and so snowy. And we just ran out of steam. After the first lap of nine hours, we couldn't have finished it in time, so we just stopped. And then I had to start getting really serious about it. So I didn't race as a driver many more times. I I had a very good friend of mine, Bruce Borchard is his name. We have lost contact with each other decades ago, but he and this other good friend of mine who actually was my original partner in PPI, Ralph Cosmeties.

[00:33:18.330] - Cal Wells

We were all friends. And in Orange County, he had a place. Bruce had a place up in a draw up where Orange Hill restaurant is, and you'd go whistling around up there. It was a bunch of dirt roads up there, and we used to go sliding all over the place. And I was riding with him right after graduating from high school, and he lost control of the thing and tumbled down a hill, and I cracked my head. And I was out for a while and just then became a builder, and that's all I did. I never drove again. So That was that. I honestly realized I won one race. It was the Whirly Bird 350. It was an event put on by Walt Lott to support a guy that had crashed a helicopter and needed some money to get it fixed, who was a support guy for Walt. I won that because almost everybody else broke. It was nice to have one trophy, but that was it. My dad and I did. We raced. Again, we raced a lot, but it was hard I had to work. I was still going to school, still going to high school and working for my dad.

[00:34:41.270] - Cal Wells

It was just there was only so many hours in a day. After I tumbled in this, fundamentally, it was a road, off-road accident. We were coming off the highway on Chapman and tumbled down this hill. Like I said, a little small depressed skull fracture that was fine. I mean, it took me out of commission for a while, but I get too many headaches. One of the things that I also realized is I just wasn't... As a driver, I was marginal. I could do it, was nearly as good as my brother and Dave, who was now racing single-seaters, and it just didn't make any sense for me to continue that. It was fun, but I just wasn't very good at it. And that's when I started to realize that it would make more sense for me to build cars for those with the talent or developed skill that could extract the maximum out of whatever I was able to construct.

[00:35:38.810] - Big Rich Klein

Sometimes we all have that epiphany, you might say, whether it's something that led us there, as like your accident. Or in my case, I was in Utah, and we were all starting to build rock crawlers, everybody in our club, because that was when It was late '90s, and the rock crawling competitions were just getting started. But we were taken and really doing something besides just cruising around with stock Jeeps. And I realized right away that I just didn't want and couldn't afford to build a car the way I wanted to do it. And so I looked around and thought, and I'd be better off as what we call a spotter or possibly As an event promoter, after I saw the first event that I went to, and I looked at what was happening and said, I think I could do this, organize it a little better. And so that took me down the path for the last 25 years of being an event promoter, because I just realized early on that maybe I might have had the talent to crawl or to race, but it was financially, I just couldn't burden the family with that expense.

[00:37:02.510] - Big Rich Klein

And at least as a promoter, I might have a chance to make some money if I could drum up some sponsorship. So that was my epiphany.

[00:37:14.540] - Cal Wells

I hear you. That's what I got it.

[00:37:19.570] - Big Rich Klein

So then you're building cars, and is that when... How long did you go until you started PPI?

[00:37:28.520] - Cal Wells

Well, that's when I went to I worked for Joe building a car for Jeff, and I would still build my dad's stuff. We went from an SS1 to an SS2, and So I built an SS2 for Jeff, which was really his first off-road car that was just his to go race. And the SS2 was 110 inches long. And Goodrich was building bigger and bigger tires. They'd done that deal with Scoop and Bobby to develop what was... Gary Blaylock actually designed the tire, but it was a It was really a street tire they tried to race with. It wasn't anything like, say, the Baja Runner. One of the things when we were racing Broncos is you had this incredible bias by tire because that's what Parnelly wanted, If you look at the Baja Runner and how thin the rubber is on it, really, so it doesn't build up in front of the thing when you're going 130 miles an hour down the highway, how it dissipate heat. And the traction was reasonable, but because it was a bias by tire, it was very predictable and just a damn good tire. And because PJ had 50 of those, he and Velt Melitich had 50 of those Firestone stores everywhere.

[00:38:59.300] - Cal Wells

When they were When they had Velt, Pernel Jones racing an Indy car. I'm talking a long time ago now. He was able to get Firestone to build that thing, and it was a really good tire well ahead of its time. And PJ developed it. Well, Goodrich in its various and its order forms, and of course, as I'm sure you know, there was Goodrich by itself, and then there was Unireal Goodrich. But then when it became Michel, huge advancements, massive, and that's what we see on the trophy trucks today. But back in the day, we were running production tires, and they were doing this development program on the Blazers with Scoop and Bobby. Pj had gotten out of it. Anyway, that's the tire we were running on, Jeff's car. On my dad's car, we were running the Oklahoma, the little bias pie round-looking things because they were... I can't remember what the hell they were called, but they were perfect for a little 10 car. It was perfect. So obviously, 60 horsepower, whatever. See if it was a Leigh Leighton engine, which is what we had, it was 60. But that was a stretch. So I would build that at home and then build Jeff's car.

[00:40:28.460] - Cal Wells

Had Joe's new dealership, the one he put in Irvine Chevy store. And then I got an auto racing the Bronco. So when I got out of high school, I had that accident. It was on my back for a little while. And when I got going again, I was offered this job by Jerry McDonald, who actually I just had breakfast with he and Judy not a week ago. He was my boss, and Jeff was the driver. The very The first race we went to, I can't remember how my dad and my brother finished, but we finished second to Ivan Stewart. Ivan was driving a two-seater. It was a high jumper, quite a minute, with Bill Hirinko. Ivan was still string in advance. This is before the Ironman titles, before he really started getting after it. And He won it and we finished second, our very first race, and we were thrilled. To be honest, had we done a couple of things a little differently, if I wasn't working on stupid amount of cars at the same time and sleep in 2 hours a night, I believe we would have won it. It was a little race out of San Felipe.

[00:41:51.670] - Cal Wells

It began and finished in San Felipe. I don't know if it was called the San Felipe 250, it might have been. But it rained like hell. We were actually pretty lucky. When I say lucky, anybody that got through the chapala or anything, we were fortunate. Anyway, the net-net-net is we had a really good first event, and that now was my full-time job working for Joe. Jerry was building trucks to race for Chevrolet. His personal vehicle had been a Blazer, old body-style Blazer that he built himself when he lived in San Clemente, and Joe owned a store down in San Clemente, and Jerry was his GM. Joe really got into it, and then they got some support from Shandy and built their C10 stepside thing, which was Pretty cool. I worked there at the dealership, working on the single-seater, and they still ran a love truck on occasion, and then the Chevy pickup truck. And I may be getting some of these dates wrong, but that was when I worked and was very, very focused. I think where I struggled longer term is that I worked for Joe for three or four years, loved him to death.

[00:43:24.830] - Cal Wells

And if I had a do-over, I would have done things very differently. Joe was fiercely entrepreneurial, fiercely. And he knew how to start businesses. And I think he and I could have just owned the world in motorsport. But I didn't have quite the age or maturity yet. And ultimately, I wanted to do something that you would call professional racing. And what I mean by that is that Joe ran a very professional outfit, and Jerry ran a very professional outfit, but they were fundamentally... And they had some support from Xavie, and they had some support from BF Goodrich. And Perna was on the truck when Jeff drove it for a while. By then, I'd already started PPI, but The thing is that I was so committed, and all I would do is focus on what it would take to win. And I learned so much from Joe. But one of the big things I learned from Joe is that level of entrepreneurship. I realized that if I was ever going to really be successful beyond what Joe was doing, which was very, very Very, very successful team in person was phenomenally successful. But at the end of the day, there were certain pieces of it that I either didn't have control over or didn't have the influence that I would have liked.

[00:44:58.330] - Cal Wells

I wanted to do And ultimately, other stuff as well. So as I was working for Joe, there was a guy named Drino Miller, who, of course, you'd be very familiar with.

[00:45:11.300] - Big Rich Klein

Absolutely.

[00:45:12.410] - Cal Wells

Yeah, who was building the engines for Jeff's single-seater. And Drino offered me a job. And it was a phenomenal opportunity. And when I looked at Jeff Jeff, Joe's son Jeff, was going through a bit of a transition himself. He was interested in doing stuff beyond off-road, which he ultimately did at 3000 in Europe and an Indie car and all sorts of stuff. It was hard to keep him focused on what we were doing at the time. We would lead races and be in a position to win races, and then we just didn't. I I was passionate about putting myself in a situation where I could learn more, and I felt that I was top out. No, I really wasn't. It was just me being young and impetuous. So I continued to take care of Jeff's single-seater by working at Joe's place at night, but I left full-time employ at Joe's to go work for Drino. Drino was racing a midget with a sleepy trip as his driver. He had an off-road client in the Hamilton's, Willis Hamilton. They built all sorts of houses and materials for houses, and they were a customer. But Drano, his place was run.

[00:46:41.110] - Cal Wells

He didn't have his own deal. He had a lot of customers, but it was an It was an opportunity for me to learn different things. Drino was truly an expert in internal combustion. He was a good welder, good car builder, very, very, very, very, A very smart guy. And understanding with him was fantastic. So I was able to take care of Jeff's car and then go to the off-road race supporting it because with Drino, he had a customer named Randolph Townsend, who was running a 935 in Imsa, and then a Can-Am car. He was a wealthy guy out of Nevada. His mom was a state senator there. And I was I was able to work on a very idyllic grouping of different types and styles of race cars, and then learn from one of the most brilliant guys I've ever worked with on what to do, and in some cases, what not to do. Drina was very strongly opinionated on a number of things, and I learned quite a bit about how to manage relationships. Anyway, the net of it was that after working for Joe for three, four years, I went I worked for Drino.

[00:48:00.620] - Cal Wells

I worked for Drino for about six months. Again, I learned a ton, but ultimately, I just felt I needed to go do my own thing and that I'd learned all I could learn from Drino. When I say I learned all, I could have learned from him forever. But again, what he was doing was the same thing that Joe was doing and that they had sponsorship, but really, at the end of the day, it's not like you're saying, Okay, I'm going to go hire... Well, in off-road, it would be, I'm going to go hire Ivan Stewart or Malcolm Smith, or you name them, but guys that were race car drivers, and that's all they were. They It took it out of an avocation into a vocation. That's how I looked at it. And Trino had every bit of capability. He ended up doing a lot of consulting for Interscope, went on Gaias was driving with Teddy Fields. He did a lot of Indie cars, very, very successful. But he never actually owned his own stuff once he stopped driving himself. And that was a thing I aspired to do. And it wasn't that the others weren't very professional, but I wanted to control my own destiny.

[00:49:20.160] - Cal Wells

So if I picked the wrong driver, it was on me. If I screwed something up, it was on me. Whatever I needed to do, whatever mistakes I made, they were on me. And so ultimately, I left Reno and I went to OpenPPI to, again, take care of customers. Joe was my first client because we were minkly. He was hurt when I left to go to work for Reno, but he figured it out pretty early. And then I started taking care of some that were entrepreneurial racers like Scoop and Bobby, successful businessmen wanted to race. Very, very, very, very good drivers. Bobby, in particular, was really sporty, but not as fast as his son, but really smart. God, he was good. Anyway, And it branched into... Joe was my first with Jeff, single-seater. And then I built a couple of... Or my team built a couple of Chevy pickup trucks. We did a lot of the FAB work for team at first. And then, of course, I knew everybody. Walker's place was going, and he had a bunch of customers as well. And then his, quote, ownership, not in his company, but in his actual team that he did that he drove.

[00:50:49.980] - Cal Wells

It was with Ford, and then he drove for PJ for a while on the Chevy, which is amazing. And then ultimately did his own thing with Dodge. And so when he left the Chevy camp, he did a deal with drop short term, keep points up and score. And then, as I recall, this is a long time ago, but he ended up with a little deal with Dodge. So he had that. And then he had customers as well. And one of his customers was Coco and Short Corral, four dealers that were very successful. So they were looking for someone different to take care of their stuff. There was a guy named Kim Klepper that was working at Walker's, taking care of it. And he left and tried to do it out of his garage at home, and that didn't work out so well. So at the end of the day, they had decided it was time to do something different, and I got a call. And next thing you knew, I had their F150 in our shop, and so we started to grow well beyond my competency. And that's when... Yeah, it It's true. It just was.

[00:52:00.970] - Cal Wells

I could weld and I could... But as a businessman, I didn't do the simple math of saying, How many hours is it going to take to prepare all this? So I could sell stuff because Jeff was pretty sporty in the single-seater, so had a reasonable reputation, nothing over the top, not a I was nowhere near as Scott McKinsey, but I was at least the guy that showed up. I was able to gather these clients, but I struggled to have enough people and to figure I got the math between what I charged customers versus what it actually cost to deliver the vehicles, and I'm a real perfectionist. That's why PPI was called Precision Preparation Incorporated. I was really committed to doing the absolute best I could do, no matter what the cost, I just did it. And then the customers would either pay me or they didn't. But I wouldn't want to know to seemingly deliver a product that was not the best I could possibly do. So I was a horrible businessman, decent racer, but not a good businessman. But that really worked out well. At the same time, we ended up getting Scoop and Bobby.

[00:53:17.510] - Cal Wells

They had been doing the stuff themselves, but they couldn't finish anything. And so they'd looked at... They had won some races, but struggled. So their stuff came in to the shop as well, both Blazers. We had both of them. Coco's car, my dad's single-seater. And Coco and Charlotte's truck with Ivan driving it. And then we had Joe's Chevy's, and Joe had a series of different drivers at the time. It was Jerry, McDonald. So we had all this going on. I just didn't have enough people to do everything I needed to do. But We still want some races. Probably our top as PPI goes, this is before Toyota. We went to the 500, and we went Class 8 with Ivan, and we went overall with Bob Gordon. I can't remember where my dad and my brother finished, but it was good. Jeff finished third, I think, in the single-seater. We had a really good weekend. But we could barely walk when we were done because you'd work 70 hours straight near the end. It was It was stupid from a business perspective, but we did have a good event down there. But it still wasn't exactly what I wanted.

[00:54:38.140] - Cal Wells

My brother and my dad put a good effort in. We did all the work. They drove it, they did well. They won the Baja 1,000, ultimately. Finish second of the mint once, and very early on. Had some good runs, but it was still a hobby, and I don't mean a hobby in that they weren't very serious about it. My brother in particular was a athlete. He could have gone on to do all sorts of stuff. We've been in the right situation. And Joe ran his stuff with Jeff. Scoop and Bobby did their thing, and they had BF Goodrich support, and a little bit from Chevrolet, but not much. And a couple of other sponsors, mostly was BF that funded it, or they funded it themselves. But when you look at it, Charlotte and Coco had their truck, but I didn't own any of it, and I didn't pick the athletes. It was, Here's the platform. Here's our cars, or, Build us a car. Here's our driver. Go do it. During this time, I developed a really strong personal relationship with Mickey Thompson. We'd gotten to know each other real well, and I'd gone up to see his place a million times.

[00:55:54.530] - Cal Wells

He was still doing some drag racing, but started his shop company, and he was so enamored with off-road and made a real industry out of it. And he had his dream of MTEG. It was called the Off-Road Championship Grand Prix at the time. But anyway, he had done Riverside. And at Riverside, I was pretty successful there. When I say I, PPI was. We swept the podium in class 8 three years in a row, which the Thunder Trucks were the big deal. That was the Sunday show. And We'd done well with Glenn Harris. He was a customer client for a while, and had done well there in short course. Jeff finished third once in single seat, where there was 90 of them, which was very good. We had a lot of good success there. And mostly it was because we just identified that we needed something different to be successful there than being successful at the Mint or Baja or whatever. So we went to We did a ton of testing at Saddleback Motorcycle Park. It still was a motorcycle park. And Swayaway, that was in part, not completely, but in part owned by a guy named Brian Skipper.

[00:57:14.400] - Cal Wells

He came and did some work with us to flatten out the platform in Ivan's truck, which was Charlotte's at the time. And it was just sway bars, but we did a lot of sway bar work, and we tested and tested and tested on this little oval. And it was amazing because Ivan was always viewed as a stab and steer guy. And much more of an Emerson Fittipaldi than a Rick Mears. Just jam it, jam it, jam it. The tires would be melted off a thing and all sorts of stuff. But this was an amazing, Rich. It was an amazing experience. We're out at Saddleback, and we've got this little oval that we're just testing on. We're not running all over the track. I'd rent the whole thing just so it would be safe, and you could do it cheap during the week. He was running around this thing, and it was on and off the throttle, and the thing would roll. Typical Class 8 deal. With an I-beam, it was even worse than a Xabby right with the A-frames. Brian had done all these calculations well above my competency level, saying, Look, here's what roll stiffness we need.

[00:58:24.250] - Cal Wells

If you want to do this, you're going to go down Thompson's Ridge and you're going to do this. If Riverside... Did you ever go to Riverside?

[00:58:29.280] - Big Rich Klein

No, I never had to. A chance to.

[00:58:31.400] - Cal Wells

So freaking awesome. Oh, my God, what a festival. First year they ran there. It was 11-mile track. But then after that, it was about three and a half. And they were just dangerous as hell, but breathtaking, breathtaking racing and breathtaking. So we needed to build something where you could be on throttle a lot more than the other guys by getting the platform settled down so you could come to the throttle early. And in the desert is not as important. And it's important to come to the throttle early, but you got to have traction to do it. And because other than the start, there wasn't like a mogul area. It was just big jumps, but everything was flat. So the corners would have rollers that would get carved up in there, but they were still... The holes were big enough to overwrite any a sway bar. When you wanted the platform flat, particularly down Thompson's Ridge, you wanted to get to the throttle early. So we put all this work and we hooked these sway bars up. We had them all in there and we He ran around and ran around. He says, I think it's pretty good.

[00:59:33.560] - Cal Wells

And this was the transformation for me with Ivan, because he was not driving for me yet. We didn't have the daughter deal. He was driving a car I was preparing, but he was driving for the carousel. So We hook these things up, and all of a sudden, it was like a different guy. And he's driving this thing around with Charlotte in the car because she rode all the time. And it was just smooth as glass, and his throttle application was just beautiful. The way he'd feed lock. He was always like, Well, if it's sliding, I'll just put more. I'll just countersteer more, and I'll just jam on the throttle more. But inherently, his skill that he didn't even know he had, really, was now he was driving what you consider a race car that had a multiplicity of handling characteristics, something very different. And he was perfect. I mean, just perfect. And we ran around there and ran, and I said, my God, I can't believe the difference. I said, neither can I. This is something. So we went out and ran a longer course out and was like, hey, I think we could be pretty sporty.

[01:00:43.480] - Cal Wells

So we did the same thing with Jeff Chevy, and then Tom Morris, who had... We'd build a car for him for Pacific Clark Aken, did the same thing for him. And we went to Riverside and we just owned it. I mean, absolutely owned it. It was one of those deals where... Walker was good, but he just hadn't made that step yet. Talent-wise, Walker was incredible. But I'm just saying that Randy Anderson hadn't quite made that leap yet. And with the Dodge, they had unlimited horsepower, but we just had a better package. And that really led us to be the team to be at Riverside. And it was the The only short course race we ran all year. Everything else was in the desert. And again, we were having some success there, not owning it, but still decent. And that's when Mickey had come to me and many others. He went to Roger Mears. He went to Walker. He went to Team McPherson for Joe. He went to a number of guys that had manufacturer relationships. He said, I'm thinking about taking the Wilds of Baja and following what the Super Bowl of Motorcross was doing and taking off-road racing to the cities.

[01:02:10.620] - Cal Wells

And of course, it was nothing like off-road racing. But I think I can get this sold in. And then what Mickey did that was brilliant is he didn't go in and sell teams. What he did is he went into the manufacturers and said, Here's a vision of what we can do in the cities to get good television. Here's my TV package with ESPN. Here's the stadiums I can go to. And Mickey could talk well beyond what he actually had committed. But he was a brilliant salesman. And and just a brilliant guy. And they got eight manufacturers to jump into this thing. And then they all started putting out RFPs. The first deal we bid on was the Mazda deal. I did not get it. Walker Evans did. And that was actually I was very lucky there as well. Just luck. But Mickey did a great job because, again, we were personal friends. We talk all the time, and he wanted strong teams. He wanted Walker Evans to be a strong team in stadium racing. He wanted Roger Mears to be a strong team in stadium racing. He wanted each group, Mitsubishi ran, all sorts of people.

[01:03:22.930] - Cal Wells

He wanted them to be strong. And he was able to convince Toyota to do it as well. And there was a motor sports manager there named Lee Sawyer, who had... They'd run one season of IMSA with a guy that they had to fire because he was just a bad guy, a bad businessman, bad Just a bad guy. And so he was trying to get his IMSA program sorted out. They were running in GTU Grand Touring under 2L, and it migrated to Dan and his All-American Racers. They were looking for a team, and they talked to everybody. But Lee came down to our shop. I was in Westminster, and he came down and looked at our place, and it was immaculate. And we got the deal. It was 180 grand. They provided transportation, they provided the engines. And the first year, I spent 360. I brought money from everybody I knew, including my parents. And Ivan was already driving, and I said, I want you to come do this for me, and I'll pay you to do it. So you can actually make a real living instead of the pennies that would come from a sanction organization.

[01:04:38.860] - Cal Wells

And so we did a deal. And then I tried to get Sherman Bolsch to come drive because I was always impressed with Sherman. He was so great in that cornbinder, the international harvester. And he ended up getting a job with Nissan as a teammate to Roger. And this is before Roger ran his son, and he just felt that was going to be a better opportunity for him, so he turned me down. And then I just couldn't get... I asked Jeff if he would do it, but his dad was going to do a shabby thing, so they turned me down. Who else did I offer the job to? Just thinking out loud here. Can't remember. But I wanted a warrior. And there was a lot really good desert racers, but not anybody that I thought could really... That was available that could get it done in short course. Again, there were a lot of good... Roger Mears, he couldn't do any better, but he had his own team, he had his own thing. So that's when I branched out to Steve Millen as a guy that had been successful in Raleigh, was trying to get into the States to move from New Zealand.

[01:05:57.760] - Cal Wells

And I can't quite remember introduced me to him. But we went out and did some testing. It said, Hey, this guy's mega talented, and let's do a deal. And so we did. And then we had a really great season. We didn't win every race. We actually lost the first one to Roger, but we won a lot. And with that, Toyota decided that, hey, we should take our tough and reliable image with what was changing the name from Hilux to Tacoma and go race in the desert. And so our contract dribbled, and we built two desert trucks. Tommy's Pacific Clark Aken thing was fiddling around. The guy who owned it was not on risk or what he could fund. I may have this a little confused, but he didn't look like they were going to continue with that truck. So he came to work as my partner, really, at PPI, and we built these Toyota trucks, and then he was the driver for one, and Ivan was the driver for the other. And then in stadium, Robbie Gordon drove one, and Ivan drove the other. And with Robbie, we owned everything. If Robbie didn't win, Ivan did.

[01:07:24.320] - Cal Wells

But we had the biggest budget, and we worked really hard, and we had really smart people and we'd hired some really good, brilliant engineers. And we did damn well. And the off-road thing was... The stadium thing, Nicky really had it going on at the time. You get 60,000 people at the call, see them, or you get... It was unbelievable. I mean, it was crazy, crazy good. And the racing was good. It was exciting, and really exciting. So So we just kept after it. In the desert, we struggled. We started in class seven. And the first race, we were fast but fragile, and we broke. And that first year was really miserable. We won a class seven race or two, but we had speed, but we just didn't have everything we needed. And part of it was I was still trying to support customer cars. But Ivan had come to work for me full-time. Charlotte had left. Ivan had actually left Charlotte for a while, put Glenn Harris in the car, and he drove for Joe McPherson for one year. But then he ultimately came to work for me full-time as a full-time athlete. But always driving stuff I was working on.

[01:08:51.310] - Cal Wells

In other words, whether it was Joe Shabby or it was Charlotte's Ford or whatever it happened to be. We And I know I'm leaving parts of this out here, Rich. I'm sorry.

[01:09:03.040] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, no, you're doing great.

[01:09:05.040] - Cal Wells

The stories are awesome. So we really started honing in on being the Toyota factory guys. And I still did a little bit of stuff for my dad and my brother. But Jeff was driving a Chevy that was a Class 8 truck, which we still worked on. Again, And then Charlotte ultimately stopped racing. They didn't have the money to do it. And Glenn went off to do his own thing. He got a great career in military and doing a number of different things and stopped racing single-seaters. Yeah, I actually tried to hire him, too, and he ended up driving for Walker and the Mosses, as I recall. Anyway, so that first year was really hard with those four in our cylinders. It was tough. Again, we could win some races, but it was tough. And ultimately, we were running into an inflection point where I would spend everything I had, sleep on the shop floor. I was still living at my mom and dad's, and We didn't have enough bandwidth budget-wise, so we decided to park the two-seater. The two-seater was driven by Tommy, it was driven by Butch R. Sierra. Butch won races in that thing.

[01:10:29.050] - Cal Wells

My dad rode with him, and he was fantastic. But ultimately, we decided it made more sense to focus on Ivan. We built a new truck. What would really turned us on to the fact that we could win overall, and I was able to convince Toyota, when I say me, it was more a matter of they were migrating to GTP with Gurnie for overall victory. They'd gone through grand-turing under 2 liter, they went to GTO grand-turing over 2 liter, and then a grand-turing prototype, which these incredible spaceships that John Ward had designed that Dan was racing. We hired this engineer that I'd actually met when I was at Dinos named Ted Mengels that had designed... Carol Smith did our first little trucks, and then we did a lot of it ourselves. Had some brilliant guys. Brian Cudillo is another just brilliant engineer. Jack Ald, a number of them that had come to work for us. Brian Santee, a number of really smart guys, far smarter than me, which I set a low bar, but they were really good. So So we had started building a new single-seater, and we had migrated our trucks. We pooched out the suspension and taken advantage of running in the unlimited class, and this is before our Trophy R class, we were running in class one, class two.

[01:11:51.080] - Cal Wells

Our first race, we were okay. We went to the Vegas to Reno, and Ivan was in class one, and Butch and my dad were in class two. Tommy had gotten out of driving, and he didn't necessarily want to, but he just made too many mistakes. We tore up too much stuff. Frankly, he was distracted because he was also running the shop and was doing all sorts of stuff. So his full-time driving had come to a close. And we did well. I mean, we finished that thing, but we led most of it with Ivan. The Vegas to Reno race back then was really something. I mean, you're out in the middle of it. And the BLM stuff was not too oppressive. We could pre-run, and you could run any chase road you wanted. And we had such a lead over Larry Rossler in the single-seater. It was fantastic. But we had put a lot of effort into the trucks, and we repainted everything, and we didn't ground the ignition properly. And Ivan's truck, we ran a little teeny four-cylinder, two-liter thing. 152e out of Toyota. And we were always pushing that thing beyond its limits. I mean, it would break so often.

[01:13:08.870] - Cal Wells

The net-net-net is that we were leading this thing soundly, and Butch and my dad were also doing really well. So we had to stop and work on it for about 20 minutes until we finally found out what was missing because we thought we'd broken a valve spring, and it turned out to just be a grounding thing. And And Larry had gotten by us, and we caught him, but we couldn't get around him. And so he won it, and we finished second overall. It was our first step into the unlimited category with a quasi truck. And The net-net-net is that, like I said, it was on. Anyway, so we built... Ted Mangels designed it, and we built around a Toyota V6 because the Toyota Tundra, the T100, was coming out with a V6. It's first year, it had a V4, and then it came out with a V6. So we built this thing. It took us a year to build it. And when we first started running it, we had a lot of drive train issues with it. And you wouldn't think with a... With a little V6 thing, there's no power at all. It was awful.

[01:14:27.250] - Cal Wells

That we We wouldn't tear it up. And the suspension was decent, that the tires from Goodrich were spectacular. They really were. And we used a lot of the tire Squish as a suspension thing. And we had put a Doug Nash transmission in it, and we had trouble with it, and we had trouble with all sorts of stuff. We had trouble with CVs. We tried to use constant velocity joints out of a torn auto, and we've done all sorts of stuff to try and... And so then we got serious and built a lot of this stuff ourselves. And at that time, we just kept struggling with it. It was a real freaking nightmare for me. So at the end of the day, you know what I think happened is I think I lost my Internet because these guys are putting this cable in here. Damn it. That's why we're struggling with phone call. I'm sorry. Okay, no worries. So anyway, I could not connect. So, unbelievable. So the net of it was that we just kept braking. We could go a decent speed, but we just kept braking and braking and braking. And one of the problems we had with this new truck was the steering system in it.

[01:16:08.990] - Cal Wells

To get a good angle of attack, we put together this funny servo system where we weren't using a Saginaw Gearbox, we were using something else, but with these pistons that would move the thing back and forth, and the whole front of the car would shake because it was steel, and of course, it was ductal, and it would just shake like crazy, and it would get worse and worse and worse, and we couldn't We couldn't manage this feedback in this system. We kept fiddling around with all sorts of different line sizes and stuff like that. We went out to the mint to run it, We were still owning the stadium. I mean, that was still going real well. But we just couldn't get this thing to go. We ran it for, God, six, eight months with all this problem in it. I had put every penny I had, and I was ready to go broke. I remember actually sitting with my father and saying, Dad, if we can't get this thing to finish, I don't know how I'm going to make it. I mean, Toyota has been very generous, but I'm not quite sure how we're going to do it.

[01:17:26.080] - Cal Wells

We went out to Jean, Nevada, where you had a testing loop out there that the meant organizers had put together, and everybody would go there and run around, and it was a, I don't know, three-mile loop or four-mile loop, four-mile loop. And we kept running and running. We had an engineer working for us that was working with Ted Minkles at the time named Al Bode. He works at Canasi now. And Al had come up with these little pills that would check foules that we put into the thing. And so when there was feedback on the wheel, instead of tearing it out of Ivan's hand or the whole front of the truck shaking, it would stop it. And then we put a damper on it, and we kept changing them and changing them. And the last time we ran, we put 100 miles on the thing. The last time we ran, Ivan gave it. He said, I think that's got it. And I just figured, you know what? He's just tired of driving this thing. I'm not sure. I'm not sure that we do have it. Anyway, we went back to the parking lot at whatever hotel we were staying at.

[01:18:29.690] - Cal Wells

I remember right now. I think it was one of Michael God's places, probably the South Point. No, the South Point was the other one before, man. I'll think of it in a little bit. We worked on it for hours because we took, tore the thing completely down, rebuilt it, everything. And by now, we'd made our own CVs and a Gearbox and all this other stuff. So the balance of the truck was robust. I remember I was just incredibly disheartened because we got the rest of the thing worked out, except it just wasn't drivable. So the next day, the race was getting ready to start, and they paraded out of town and went out to what is now, we used to call it the Speed Drome. It's now the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. And we tried to get up in the air. I would chase My uncle, John, had a 172 RG, a little Cessna retractable gear thing. And he had a guy named Jeff Fields, who still does own Transitional Engineering. We're a very good friend. He was a pilot. And then Linda, who was a pilot, we would go chase together. So Linda was right seat, my uncle was left because it was his plane, and we couldn't get up.

[01:19:52.430] - Cal Wells

He had parked it in North Las Vegas, not at McCarran, but North Las Vegas. So we drove out there and the wind was gale for us, which obviously, if you're racing desert and it's going crossways, it's an advantage, no matter what the dust is, particularly at the minute. And we had gotten, in this particular case, the two-seaters had been doing very well, so we started behind all the two-seaters, and I think we'd drawn, this was well before qualifying, I think we'd drawn 20th car, something like that. And there were 42-seaters. My dad was riding with Butch in his... Or Bobby Gordon and Butch in Frank R. Sherrill Jr. In Bob's incredibly dominant two-seat channel. And they started up front, they were leading. And we were like 60th car on the road, but we couldn't get up in the air, couldn't do it. So Finally, the wind got down enough where we could go up and actually be the relay because that was also the relay for our radio's communication. And I'd run it from up top. Our logistics had become really superior to our competitors because we had good funding from Toyota and we could do a lot.

[01:21:04.150] - Cal Wells

We finally got up in the air, and I was finally able to talk. I don't know if you remember that race or not, or that course, but it was four 100-mile loops, and you'd leave the speed drone and you'd drive up one side and turn around and drive back the other side of the freeway. Rough as hell, just right off those mountains coming out of Las Vegas. And so it was just constant cross-creen, just awful. Rocks and everything else. So it was tough.

[01:21:34.580] - Big Rich Klein

I hate cross-creen.

[01:21:36.560] - Cal Wells

Oh, my God. And there were these big vatos, these big ditches, big. And then they'd gobble up a whole car, and you'd have to drive through them and drive up the other side. So I get up in the air and I call and say, Hey, we've just gotten up. And we were totally blacked out where we were, where that North Las Vegas thing is. We could hear a little bits and pieces of we get up. I said, Where's Ivan? I said, Well, he's just about ready to make the turnaround come down the other side about 50 miles in. I said, Where are we on the road? Because we always talked about we were on the road, not we were in class. I said, No, we're sixth. And I said, 6 in class. He said, No, we're six on the road. I said, We can't be six on the road. There's 66 cars that were starting in front of us. Cal, we're six on the road. What Ivan had done is he'd worked out in his mind these holes he could leap across. So these big vatos that were 20 feet, 30 feet that you couldn't get across because your approach was so slow, you couldn't leap them.

[01:22:40.450] - Cal Wells

But now that the steering was working, everything else was working. And so he would leap past two and three cars at a time. And sure as shit, we were six car on the road, and he just ate them alive. And by the time we got near the end of the second lap, he caught Bob and my dad. And I remember when he bumped them, they couldn't believe it was And they got out of the way, and we dominated it. We ended up winning the thing by like 45 minutes. Wow. I couldn't believe it. I mean, it was like, okay, am I going to go out of business? Or are we going to win today? And we just owned it. I mean, it was crazy. And then we went down to Baja 500 and won that. And we didn't win the thousand, but we finished every mile of every race, won them, whatever It was called True Grit Award and all that good crap. We had a just great. And that truck really served us well for the next year, year and a half. But we still didn't have enough power, and trophy trucks were becoming a real thing.

[01:23:44.440] - Cal Wells

So We had built more stadium trucks, killer, super awesome stadium trucks. But that whole series went out of business when Mickey was killed, Mickey and Trudy. So we really focused on building this new truck, 015, which is the last truck we ever built for Toyota. And that thing was incredible. We were able to build a full of fuel with Iman in it. It was just at 4,000 pounds. And that Alexis V8 engine in it that would make 450 horsepower, maybe 500, but the power to wait was really good. And we'd taken everything we'd learned and everything else with how we built the gear boxes and how we built the wheels and how we built the space. Everything Ted designed it, and he just did a brilliant job with Tommy. Everything was our own, our own shocks, our own everything. We built everything. And we had a very rigorous maintenance program. So other than the chassis, 90 % of the thing was new. Every time we would go race, and we were strong. And it was spectacular. Unfortunately, the last race, I was racing IndyCar for Toyota at the time, and things had really come off the tracks there.

[01:25:08.830] - Cal Wells

We'd lost the driver Jeff Crosnoff. It was a very emotional time, and the Toyota was really struggling, and they ultimately decided that they could enjoy better results with other teams in IndyCar. And my off-road program, our off-road program, couldn't support itself financially on the revenue that was available to run it. So we made the conscious decision to stop. Toyota and myself together, Les Under and myself had said, We can't do it anymore. We went down to run the race, the Baja 2000, with Larry Rossler and Ivan, and same Same thing. We let it by 45 minutes halfway down the peninsula, so we were a thousand miles in. And we dropped a valve, then it ate the engine, and that was that. So that's my sorted Toyota off-road history.

[01:26:02.440] - Big Rich Klein

And then you said you were doing Indy car at that time as well with Toyota. And then, so it was off-road, Indy, and then you got into NASCAR?

[01:26:15.490] - Cal Wells

No, they were overlapping. Overlapping? Yeah, the Indy car thing started in '95. Jeff Krosnop was our first driver with Hero Mozzashida, and I had raced the year before with Hero in '94. And we... I mean, off-road was still and will always be my deepest love. But we ran... We started with a causeworth the first year to learn and had a great, great month of May at the Speedway. We had We ran Firestone tires, which were like cheating. You could double-stent them. They were perfect and perfect tire, much better than the Good Year at the time. And Lorraine, our chassis was superior. Pinsky couldn't make the race with their cars, and we just had a spectacular month. We qualified 10th, finished 10th. It was unbelievable. And that's with Hero driving. No disrespect to Hero, but if we were a little bit more of a mature team and had Bobby been driving it, we would have won the damn thing. I mean, we We were really sporty. Led it, ran the fastest lap of the month. Great. And that evolved into the Toyota development program with engines, and it just took a very, very long time for Toyota to develop an engine that was capable of finishing much less winning.

[01:27:48.520] - Cal Wells

And when those things happen year after year after year, and you bring sponsors and they get unhappy, and you lose a driver, things can get really contentious. And all the racing I'd done for Toyota in the past was with what was then called Toyota Motor Sales USA. And that still exists, but everything's now Toyota Motor North America in Texas. At the time, it was all up in torrance. And The racing guys out of Hagashi, Fuji, didn't really care about off-road, and they didn't actually do much with sports cars with Dan either. But IndyCar was a big thing to them because they had aspirations to race in Formula One, and so they were very involved. But the relationships were really different, and the expectations were really different. It's not that they were wrong, frankly, they were right. But I was passionate about being successful, and we were blowing up every week, and I struggled. Just emotionally dealing with it. Of course, again, my habits of spending everything I had were still there. We got A lot. But we just didn't have the prime mover to the point. It wasn't developed to the point where it could get it done.

[01:29:07.170] - Cal Wells

It wasn't until I hired a guy from BMW, Heinz Passion, as his name, and he developed the Phase 6. So we'd gone through five different engine iterations. Then that Phase 6, that thing was a real racing engine. But by then, they hired Chip and a number of other guys. It wasn't just me and Dan. And so we were on our way out. They brought in a whole new group with, like I said, Chip and Carl Haas. So all I had remaining was the motorsports garage and the other deal. Well, during that time, I had a friend named Bill Corbus that used to work for John Nelson, God rest his soul, who he was a good rich guy, and then he worked for John, and then he left and went to work McDonald's as a motorsports manager, and he reached out to me to see if I could help him put together a marketing package because McDonald's was very unhappy with Bill Elliott, and they wanted to look at maybe doing something different or getting out altogether. So that was like a parallel path to the Indie car thing and a parallel path to the off-road thing.

[01:30:18.420] - Cal Wells

At our height, we had nine drivers under contract, 308 employees, and separately, the Oklahoma Tire thing, PSRG, Precision Service Raising Group. We had a lot going on well beyond on a competency level.

[01:30:32.080] - Big Rich Klein

But you're still doing it, so I don't think that's necessarily true. Maybe you're just beating yourself up.

[01:30:39.570] - Cal Wells

Well, I'm just doing it differently. Okay. And the net, net, net is that PPI closed. When did we close? Well, we closed when the off-road thing went away in 2000. The Indy car thing had gone away. We closed our Southern California building in Santa Margarita, and I moved to North Carolina and ran PPI in NASCAR out of there with McDonald's and Tide. And then ultimately, we won a couple of races for them, which was great, really great. But ultimately, both sponsors left the sport, and Procter & Gamble has never come back other than a little spot here and there. Mcdonald's does a little bit of work with Bubba Wallace and and Tyler Reddick at 2311, three or four or five events a year. But as far as full-time, they left. So when they did, I closed. It was an orderly closure. We sold everything, paid all our debts off. And I was back here in North Carolina looking for the next thing. And that's when I got an opportunity through a gentleman named Rob Kaufman, very successful, another fierce entrepreneurial businessman that was a partner in Fortress Financial, which was a hedge fund investment group.

[01:32:11.100] - Cal Wells

And he was looking at getting involved in racing and through a celebrated attorney named Alan Miller, who was a very dear friend of mine. He introduced us as Rob was looking at investing in the NASCAR team, and I went to work for Rob, working on how I could help him look at acquiring one, and I did a due diligence thing on it. And ultimately, I made a buy recommendation. He didn't buy the whole thing, he just invested. But on all the upside, there could be a NASCAR and with Michael Walsh Racing, Michael built a great organization. They just didn't have... They jumped into the sport in a real interesting time when NASCAR had two entirely different packages that they were racing the Gen 5 car and the Gen 4 car. Nascar was just doing a lot at the same time. The costs had gone exponentially up. And they were missing a lot of races and struggling a lot, so they were in distress and needed a capital infusion to keep going. Then Rob installed me as the CEO there, and I worked there for three years and loved it. Rob was arguably one of those, if not the smartest guy I've ever worked for.

[01:33:33.060] - Cal Wells

And that kept me in line with Toyota. I had worked for Toyota continually, even after we closed down out of off-road and all that. A guy named Dave Ellingworth, which was really the father of Toyota's Racing in the United States. He had reached out looking for me to write a white paper on getting involved in NASCAR before they ever did. And so when they did, and I was blessed to join Michael Walsh Racing, it was just like old home week. And we had a good run there. We did pretty well. I had left before all of the controversy that they went through, maybe 18 months before they went into They had a lot of rules and fractions, a lot of problems, and ultimately it killed them. They had another good year or two, but then it killed them. They went out of business. I just started a little consulting thing, which is my L&GA, Life's Next It was a great adventure. I had a series of clients, but it started with TRD and Toyota. I worked for them and did a lot of different things, both in production trucks, the Tacoma and the Tundra, in NASCAR racing, a ton of stuff in NASCAR racing, recruitment and team recruitment.

[01:34:53.560] - Cal Wells

I was blessed to recruit Furniture Row, which went on to win a Championship for them, a series of drivers and different athletes, all sorts of different stuff. Not that I was special. I just could focus on things that they were pretty busy and could have done themselves, but just needed the bandwidth. I'd been around for a while and we knew each other, so I could help. And that was it. One thing led to another, led to another. And that ultimately installed me in this job. When they looked at joining up with Jimmy and Mori Gallagher, as far as a third team. I was the right guy to install, so that's why I'm here. I was blessed to have this job. And this is a turnaround, but I've got a lot of experience in that, so it's pretty cool.

[01:35:42.740] - Big Rich Klein

And so now you're the CEO of Legacy Motor Club?

[01:35:50.180] - Cal Wells

Yes.

[01:35:51.300] - Big Rich Klein

Okay.

[01:35:52.380] - Cal Wells

Yeah, that's what I do. I still do some work with TRD, and I still do some work with TMA on the truck side, the group of guys out of Ann Arbor. I do some consulting for them. But my 99.9% of my time is dedicated to this opportunity.

[01:36:12.840] - Big Rich Klein

So basically in 2000 was the end of your off-road, and then you went pavement?

[01:36:21.220] - Cal Wells

Yeah, I did some consulting for Andy McKmellon, so I got to taste it again then. But it was his second to his last year, and unfortunately, we weren't able to get... We were trying to bring him a trophy truck program, and thought we had made some traction in a couple of different areas, but I wasn't able to get it done, so we didn't, which was a bummer. But other than that, I haven't been attached to it nearly like I was.

[01:36:52.450] - Big Rich Klein

In 2020, you were inducted into the Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame?

[01:37:00.430] - Cal Wells

That was awesome. I love that. Incredible honor for me. Just incredible honor.

[01:37:11.010] - Big Rich Klein

After basically being out of the dirt for 20 years, and then you get you get inducted, that had to be special.

[01:37:21.820] - Cal Wells

It was. I put a lot of effort into my speech, which, of course, is legendary for one reason and one reason only, because it went on for... They gave us six minutes and it went on for 28. But I wasn't going to let the opportunity slide me by. I just absolutely loved it.

[01:37:37.290] - Big Rich Klein

And that's when Robbie came up to try to help get you off the stage.

[01:37:40.550] - Cal Wells

Tug me off, yeah. But that was a moment I was not going to give up on. I just wasn't. That was a really important thing for me.

[01:37:53.740] - Big Rich Klein

That's awesome.

[01:37:55.050] - Cal Wells

Yeah, it was. Amazingly enough, in a momentary lack of judgment, I was inducted into the West Coast Hall of Fame, Stock Car Motorsport West Coast Hall of Fame the other night in Sonoma. And funny enough, with Jimmy Johnson, of all things, and with Jimmy Basser, all Toyota alum in one way, shape, or form. So pretty freaking cool.

[01:38:23.080] - Big Rich Klein

That's awesome.

[01:38:24.520] - Cal Wells

Yeah, it is and was. Very cool.

[01:38:29.340] - Big Rich Klein

I I love Sanoma. That's a home track for me, having grown up there in the Bay Area. And I always used to go up. I had the opportunity. I was working for Sears Automotive, And it's AutoCenter Manager. And we got an opportunity to go out when they were doing some truck testing, the NASCAR truck testing. And it was out at Sanoma. And since I was at the store closest to the track as a manager, they sent me out there with all the employees that had done good enough to be invited out to the program. And we got to hang out in the pits during testing with Parnelly Jones Jr. He was taken over the truck for a couple of races while I think his brother was recovering from an accident or something. And that was quite the day being out there. I I mean, being on the track during even testing, compared to being up in the stands or up in the hospitality tents during the racing was pretty cool. I wish I had more chance to do those things than I did, but it was always a bug, and it was always great to be able to do that stuff.

[01:39:51.160] - Big Rich Klein

So you're now Charlotte, and NASCAR, and racing all over the place, and still running programs. What's in the future?

[01:40:05.930] - Cal Wells

Well, I think I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. I think I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing. I've got a five-year engagement here, and I'm just in year one of it. So my focus will be this. And I love Jimmy to death. Mori's been fantastic, and I just feel blessed to have the opportunity. So I'm just going to keep digging here. And I love being connected to the Off-Road Hall of Fame, and I'll certainly go every year and contribute where I can. And if asked, I'll continue to contribute on the Tundra and Tacoma projects and things like that. But my focus will be, pardon me, my focus will be Legacy Motor Club.

[01:40:52.100] - Big Rich Klein

Nice.

[01:40:53.470] - Cal Wells

Awesome. Yeah, it is. Very much so.

[01:40:56.310] - Big Rich Klein

Well, Cal, I want to say thank you so much for spending this Saturday morning. I know there's plenty of other things you could be doing, like watching Le Monde's. I appreciate you taking the time and getting this interview done. It's been my pleasure.

[01:41:13.670] - Cal Wells

Oh, my pleasure. I really appreciate it. I know we rambled on forever, so thanks for your patience with me.

[01:41:18.420] - Big Rich Klein

Oh, no, it's awesome. Hey, you didn't do like Bob Bauer. I love Bob Bauer to death, but I had to turn his into two, almost two-hour episodes. We talked for so long, but love the guy. And I can't wait to get to see you again at the gala this year. We'll be back at that that CIMA date, which is nice. That's fantastic. It's good to get that to get that date back.

[01:41:49.160] - Cal Wells

Perfect.

[01:41:50.250] - Big Rich Klein

Well, I appreciate it. Looking forward to it. Yeah, me too. And I hope you have a great rest of the day. And again, thank you.

[01:41:58.590] - Cal Wells

Thank you very much. You take care, Rich. Sorry, it's taken us a while to get this put together, but I really appreciate it.

[01:42:03.090] - Big Rich Klein

No worries. No worries. Thank you.

[01:42:05.530] - Cal Wells

Thanks, partner.

[01:42:07.230] - Big Rich Klein

Well, that's another episode of Conversations with Big Rich. I'd like to thank you all for listening. If you could do us a favor and leave us a review on any podcast service that you happen to be listening on, or send us an email or a text message or a Facebook message, and let me know any ideas that you have, or if there's anybody that you have that you think would be a great guest, please forward the contact information to me so that we can try to get them on. And always remember, live life to the fullest. Enjoying life is a must. Follow your dreams and live life with all the gusto you can. Thank you.