Weida Racing to Front of Class : Indy Lights Team Owner From San Clemente Coming Up a Winner--Whoever Drives

Other than their passion for auto racing, Mark Weida and Joe Gibbs might not seem to have much in common.

But Gibbs got a lot of credit for winning three Super Bowls for the Washington Redskins with three different quarterbacks.

Weida has won three American Racing Series Indy Lights championships with three different drivers.

For the last eight years, the San Clemente resident has been directing racing teams with remarkable success. The first was with Arciero Racing as that team’s crew chief and race engineer. Then, opting to become a team owner, Weida formed Leading Edge Motorsports in 1988 and the titles continued.

“Unlike in IndyCar where you win the championship and everyone comes back, with our series, the driver leaves and we’re forced to start all over again,” Weida said. “Each of our three champions all moved on to IndyCar the following year. It’s somewhat the nature of the beast that we’re involved with. You win and your driver leaves.”

Fabrizio Barbazza won for Weida in 1986 and was on the Indy circuit the following year. Same with Mike Groff in 1989 and Robbie Buhl in 1992. But Weida has handled the inherent challenges just fine.

“People go their whole lives without winning a race, let alone a championship,” Weida said. “It’s the ultimate goal of what we’re trying to achieve. That we’ve done it three times with three drivers, I think that’s more satisfying than winning three with the same driver.”

His rules to win on the fast track are simple: “The No. 1 thing, you have to pay attention to detail. Setting up a race car is nothing magical. You don’t get yourself all wound up in a magical setup, you just pay attention to the basics, give the driver the best race car you can--something that will run all day.”

With Buhl behind the wheel in 1992, Weida’s team set a CART record by completing every race lap in a season, the only time that has ever been done, and set another record with 11 consecutive top-three finishes; he finished fourth in the other race.

Weida’s team has won 14% of all races and finished in the top three 52% of the time over the last eight years. And when the Indy Lights Championship Series celebrated its 100th race anniversary in Cleveland last month, Weida was recognized for being the only person to compete in all 100.

That, in itself, is a fairly remarkable statistic, given the difficult nature of owning a race car team where the budgets easily soar into six figures.

Patience is his virtue.

“There are so many uncontrollables in racing: a crash, someone else crashing, mechanical problems. You can’t let yourself get frustrated, you’ve got to keep your mind on what your job is and keep plugging away and not give up,” Weida said. “A couple of times it would have been pretty easy to shut the whole operation down and go to work for someone else, but I’m glad I didn’t.”

The most difficult time came in 1990. He was running three cars and, on the surface, it looked like a big-time operation. But a business partner was taking in the money and Weida was doling it out. Then the partner disappeared.

Weida was $160,000 in the hole and relied on his word that he was good for his debts. No one to whom he owed money forced him into bankruptcy--that’s how good Weida’s credit and word was.

Today, Weida and his Leading Edge racing team is one of the most successful in the sport; his debts from 1990 have been nearly paid in full. Still, he had to sell his home, cash-in a second trust deed on a property and borrow from his father.

“You rarely find Mark in a bad mood,” said Weida’s wife, Kathy. “He’s pretty even-tempered. One of his mottoes is ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff.’ . . . But it has bitten him a few times because he has been taken advantage of a lot.”

Kathy was the more predominant racing name among the Weidas during the early years of their 9 1/2-year marriage. She was Dan Gurney’s chief assistant at All-American Racers in Santa Ana, and has been for the last 20 years--she started when she was 17. Her title is now vice president.

Mark met Kathy in 1982 while working as a mechanic for Gurney. They married in 1984.

Weida raced motocross when he was 12, but his auto racing career--even though it’s more managerial in nature--began to take shape in 1979 when he was a 19-year-old gofer working the Super Vee Series. He eventually worked himself into the chief mechanic position.

Though he wanted to drive, Weida realized that without sponsorship money, there was little chance. Given more responsibility on the race cars as the months turned into years, he eventually became passionate about race engineering, which led him to his Lake Forest shop.

“It’s like owning a baseball team and getting a chance to coach it,” Weida said. “I’m responsible for logistics, day-to-day payments, but when I’m at the track, I work one-on-one with (driver Alex Padilla). He tells me what he feels with the race car, and I call the shots and tell the mechanics what I want on the race car to make him go faster.

“I still get my hands dirty. My attitude has always been ‘Whatever it takes.’ ”

Whatever it takes to pursue the passion that has kept him enthralled since his mother and father took him to sprint car races as a child, since watching Indy 500 qualifying at age 8, since working at Bob Bondurant’s School of High Performance Driving at Ontario Motor Speedway at 13.

“I don’t know of any other business where, when you have time off, you do it again,” Weida said. “When I have time off, I go to the races.

“I don’t think too many bankers, when they have time off, go spend their time in other banks.”