Tacoma native Leo Hindery chasing a dream at Le Mans
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Today, along the rolling hills of western France, Tacoma native Leo Hindery will attempt to become the first U.S. corporate chieftain to win the grueling 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race.
It's the largest annual gathering of sports-car fans in the world, and Hindery and his two fellow drivers are crowd favorites to win the GT class — a stampede of 11 high-velocity Porsches, two TVR Tuscans, two Ferraris and one Morgan — going bumper-to-bumper with 32 other race cars for 24 hours, over 3,000 miles.
Bathed in sweat and the aroma of Elf Racing Fuel, sporting fire-retardant jockey shorts and a helmet that can muffle an impact load of 40 G's, Hindery tightens the Velcro straps on a fresh pair of gloves.
He says Le Mans is a place where his more than 200 broadcast industry deals with an aggregate value in excess of $100 billion as chief executive officer or senior executive of megawatt firms such as Tele-Communications Inc. (TCI), AT&T Broadband Corp. and Global Crossing Ltd. are meaningless indicators of authority and influence.
"Le Mans is bigger than any deal, and it doesn't care about shareholder value," he says.
For Hindery, a Le Mans hot lap in the silver and blue Porsche with New York Yankees logos above its exhaust pipes is 4 minutes, 10 seconds. His speeds range from 60 mph to 200 mph, while avoiding collisions with Le Mans prototype class cars that can whip past at 258 mph.
Mostly, the 56-year-old Hindery will average 140 mph, 3 percent to 5 percent slower than his teammates, Marc Lieb and Mike Rockenfeller, who are less than half his age.
"Chief executives live in an artificially rarified air of numbers and accomplishments, but you can't bluff with impunity in a race car," Hindery shouts above the overture of a 450-horsepower engine in a car with a muzzle velocity in excess of 190 mph and a warning label on the door that reads: "This car is not road legal."
The drive from Hindery's Manhattan home to Circuit de la Sarthe in Le Mans was no ordinary rush-hour commute. Hindery has successfully passed 400 other three-man professional racing teams who each year compete for some 50 Le Mans starting slots in four separate classes of race cars: the LMP1 and LMP2 prototypes as well as the GTS and GT categories. The entry fee is $42,000, and the GT class winner goes home with a trophy and a check for 10,000 euros (about $12,000).
"You beg to drive here," Hindery says of his investment.
It started in Tacoma
In a small food market on the corner of 26th and Proctor in Tacoma, it's 1962 and Leo Hindery, the son of a shoe salesman, is 15 years old, bagging groceries to make ends meet and watching his pals ogle the Playboy magazines stacked on the newsstand. In his office on the 36th floor of the Chrysler Building, he recalls the moment with precision:
"I'd just finished stocking the shelves. I picked up a copy of Road & Track and opened the page to a picture of a green Lotus. I couldn't catch my breath. I fell in love."
Suddenly, there's a big roar from the store manager to get back to work, and reality slaps the teenager in the face.
"I knew sports-car racing was a rich-man's hobby," Hindery says of the day he started to chase his dream of racing at Le Mans. "It was a sport handed to wealthy East Coast Ivy League kids, not a poor boy from the Northwest. I decided to become a businessman, a privateer, and chase my ride like a gypsy."
Hindery's pursuit lasted almost 32 years. It ended at a March 1994 board meeting of Intermedia Partners Inc., at the time the fastest-growing cable company in the U.S.
"The previous fall, I'd bought an Acura NSX and took it out on the Sears Point Raceway in Napa Valley," he said. "I nearly got myself killed, so I went to North Carolina and signed up for the Richard Petty Driving Experience Challenge at the Charlotte Motor Speedway."
In the middle of the meeting, Hindery says the dream that he deferred in Tacoma came out of nowhere and kicked into top gear.
"Now I was really hooked," he says of the epiphany. Hindery headed for the track the next morning.
For the next six months, he would spend every free moment learning how to drive, and survive, a racing car.
A painful passion
Hindery has driven in 75 professional races, including many on the NASCAR circuit, and his body feels the pain. A 1996 crash into a concrete wall at a North Carolina track compressed two of his vertebrae and bent his spine like a sapling. Arriving at the hospital with a broken neck and his jaw fractured in eight places, Hindery was in shock, his liver had shut down, and the doctors feared he would die.
Four years later, while driving his red Ferrari 360 Modena at the Road America track in Wisconsin, Hindery smacked into another wall, causing doctors to replace his right knee and leaving a perpetual throb in his leg.
"Wall Street doesn't tolerate its CEOs racing cars," says Matthew Blank, chairman and chief executive officer of Viacom's Showtime Networks Inc. "It's too dangerous."
By late 1998, John Malone, chairman of the TCI board, finally realized the company's multimillion-dollar president was moonlighting as a professional race-car driver. Hindery was allowed to continue his breakneck pursuit of an invitation to Le Mans in return for instituting a "key-man" life insurance policy and a promise to be careful.
Finally, Le Mans
Hindery punched out of NASCAR in 1998 for the Ferrari Challenge Series, a sequence of eight races that leads to a 24-hour endurance race at Daytona. There, if he was very fast and very lucky, he might earn an invitation from the Automobile Club de L'Ouest to attempt to qualify for Le Mans.
The French told Hindery to show up for the test runs in April 2002. Hindery finished seventh in the GT class of 18 cars. Jubilant Le Mans officials asked him to come back in 2003 and try again. He finished second.
Reaching Le Mans as a privateer isn't cheap. Track time alone can cost $6,000 an hour. And then there's sticker shock. A Porsche such as Hindery's costs $200,000, but only if Porsche agrees to sell one of about 25 of the 911 GT3 RSR models it builds each year for the professional racing circuit
Hindery's ride at Le Mans will go through 140 tires, all underwritten by Michelin. The Yankees, Porsche, YES Network and Four Seasons restaurant foot the remainder of a 2004 sponsorship tab in excess of $1 million.
Hindery says the 24 Hours of Le Mans is an allegory.
"Le Mans is the only experience where in such a short amount of time a man can compress together all the emotions that make up his entire life," Hindery says. "There's nothing the business world can offer to rival this."