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More to Haas than meets the eye. |
Carl Haas has been in the racing business for more than fifty years. Haas started by trading and selling gear ratios and gearbox parts out of the trunk of his car. The enterprise was the basis of Carl Haas Auto and helped support his hobby racing MGs, Porsches, Jaguars and ultimately a Ferrari in SCCA races across the upper Midwest.
“A friend of mine took me to a race at Elkhart Lake,” Haas relates. “Prior to that, I had been involved in model airplane competition. I wasn't that interested in cars, but I was really taken by the race so I got into it and loved it. For quite a while it had nothing to do with business. It was my racing... what I loved to do.”
As well as becoming the American agent and distributor for Hewland gearboxes, Haas sold Elva sports cars and then Lola racing cars of all types from Formula Fords to Indy cars.
“I went to Hewland to find a gearbox for the Lola sports cars and I took some of those back to the States and started selling them,” he remarks. “That's really how it started. I got into the business by accident. I was racing and selling gearbox parts, and it got to the point where you had to do one or the other. So I slowly got out of the racing which you couldn't make a living at.”
Haas also sold European sports cars. “I knew Luigi Chinetti pretty well,” Haas said. “He was the Ferrari importer for North America and I was a Ferrari dealer for many years.”
In the mid-sixties Haas started running his own, quasi-factory Lola team in the SCCA's USRRC, CanAm and Formula 5000 series (the latter in partnership with Chaparral founder Jim Hall). Among Haas's drivers were Masten Gregory, Chuck Parsons, Peter Revson, Jackie Stewart, Brian Redman, Patrick Tambay, Alan Jones and Jacky Ickx. All of this preceded the creation in 1983 of Newman/Haas Racing with Mario Andretti driving. Newman/Haas has gone on to become one of the sport's most successful teams with seven CART or Champ Car championship titles and more than one hundred individual race wins.
Haas has invested in a variety of property developments over the years and is also an avid art collector. Another thing that has also been very important to Carl is the SCCA. He served on the SCCA board for twelve years and was a director for five years.
Last winter, Mike Lanigan became the third partner in the renamed Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing. Lanigan and his three brothers own Mi-Jack, North America's leading manufacturer and supplier of gantry cranes, and it was announced recently that Newman/Haas/Lanigan Racing is expanding into NASCAR by entering into a partnership with Robert Yates Racing.
“Going into NASCAR is not a situation where the success will come automatically,” Haas commented. “It'll take a while. We're going to have to work at it. If we keep our engineers together, we'll be alright. There's a good nucleus there and we're getting some good people new to the team.
