Drive

By Preston Lerner / Photograph courtesy of Sutton Images



Barry Simpson runs his company, Grand Prix Tours, out of a small corner of a large, sleek office in Newport Beach. At one level, it’s nothing more than a travel agency that specializes in automobile racing. But in another sense, the company is nothing less than a fantasy factory. And Simpson, its founder, is living a dream of his own.

Born in England in 1937, Simpson moved to the United States in 1977 to help coordinate public bus transportation in Orange County. It was a high-pressure job that he grew to loathe. When he daydreamed, his thoughts kept returning to his lifelong passion for racing. As a 14-year-old, he’d been at Silverstone—the World War II airfield that had been turned into England’s premier racetrack—when Ferrari scored its first Formula One win. Since then, his appetite for the sport has never flagged.

In the back pages of Autosport, the weekly considered the bible of the British racing industry, Simpson noticed an ad for a company that put together travel tours to races on the Continent. At the time, there was no American equivalent to this motorsports-only travel agency. So, in 1983, Simpson sold his home to raise the capital to create Grand Prix Tours, and set up shop in Irvine, inside his then-girlfriend’s garage.

“There was no air-conditioning, so I left the garage door open all day,” he recalls. “I had an Apple II computer at the time. Whenever I got a phone call, I’d use the computer to print out a letter I’d composed for just this purpose—so the printer would drown out the sound of the traffic outside the garage.”

Grand Prix Tours prospered because Simpson is the sweetest guy imaginable. It also prospered because, over the years, he made countless highly placed friends in the tight-knit hospitality and motorsports industries. But it prospered, most of all, because Grand Prix Tours offered a remarkably satisfying product—not cheap, mind you, but great bang for the buck.

With few exceptions—most notably Monaco, where Simpson rents out a boat docked in the harbor—most racetracks are in the middle of nowhere. They’re difficult to reach, and traffic tends to be hellacious. Decent, convenient hotels are hard to find and even harder to book. At the racetracks, the best seats quickly are scarfed up, and access to the pits and paddock is strictly limited. As far as face time with drivers at major events, good luck getting close enough to yell “good luck,” much less grab an autograph.

Grand Prix Tours offers packages to about two dozen races on five continents. The deals vary widely, and there are plenty of options from which to choose. Overseas races will set you back at least several thousand dollars, and that doesn’t include airfare. But if you’ve got the money and you want to go whole hog, Simpson will provide lodgings, transportation to and from the track, race tickets, racetrack hospitality, pit and/or paddock tours, and special events that allow you to get up close and personal with drivers and other racing celebrities.

“These days,” Simpson says, “anybody can go online and buy tickets and reserve a room. So the only way we can stay in business is to put together a package that they can’t buy themselves. We know the people who run the best hotels. We’ve got relationships with a lot of the drivers. Our customers get a chance to talk to them and ask them questions. Nobody gets into the harbor at Monaco, but we’ve been doing that for 18 years.”

I’ve covered dozens of races as a working journalist, and as a member of the press I’m able to score media credentials most fans would kill for. But other than better access, I’ve got to deal with the same indignities suffered by the great unwashed, including junky, out-of-the-way hotels, traffic jams, and exorbitantly priced and greasy racetrack food. I attended a NASCAR race with Simpson and company a few years ago, and I still remember what a joy it was to be squired to and from a swanky hotel in an air-conditioned tour bus and having the racers come to me instead of me chasing them. Basically, all I had to do was … have fun. What a concept. No wonder 70 percent of Simpson’s clients are repeat customers.

Still, earlier this year, with the economy tanking, Simpson thought about closing Grand Prix Tours. Income, even among high rollers, suddenly wasn’t so disposable. The NASCAR phenomenon had peaked, which cut into his customer base. More troublingly, the Canadian Grand Prix—which used to account for a quarter of his business—was dropped from the Formula One schedule. But Simpson soldiered on, business gradually improved, and even now, as he awaits a kidney transplant, he’s planning for 2010 and beyond.

Personally, I can’t imagine Grand Prix Tours disappearing any time soon. What is it, after all, that we want out of entertainment? To start with, we want to be transported to a different place. Racing does that without any help from Simpson. Second, we want to be pampered, whether it’s stadium seating in our local multiplex or a room-service breakfast at a seaside resort. But mostly, we want to feel special, that we’re not just one of a million other schlubs getting the same deal. That’s why we slip an usher a crisp twenty so we can slide into a box seat at Angel Stadium, or pony up $69 for the seven-course omakase menu
at Hamamori.

Grand Prix Tours delivers this Holy Trinity of entertainment. True, the price tag is hefty, but Simpson offers something you can’t get anywhere else. Between Web sites such as Amazon.com, eBay, and Craigslist, we’ve been conditioned to believe that everything we could possibly want is available online. But access isn’t a commodity that can be traded on the Internet. So even in the Information Age, the issue isn’t always how much you have, it’s who you know. And Simpson knows all the right people.

Preston Lerner is an Orange Coast contributing editor.