By Scott Longman
For most 13-year-olds in the early 1980s, you secured your capital one snowy sidewalk or overgrown lawn at a time. Not so a kid from California named Zak. He decided to go big or go home, and landed himself on a “Teen Week” session of the gameshow Wheel of Fortune. He nailed it, by somehow tearing his attention away from the then-beyond-breathtaking Vanna White and recognizing the answer “Wild Bill Hickok” before his fellow contestants did.
Zak walked away with $3,050 and a passel of other swag. He managed to sell some of said swag for another couple grand. Had my 13-year-old self scored that kind of coin, I would have promptly bought a nice bike, a Crosman air rifle, and as many Playboys as my buddy could steal from his father’s collection. Zak showed vastly better thinking by investing it in his dream motorsports career.
According to reports, Zak bought himself a racing go-kart and some good training for same. It took two years from the Wheel win to enter a race, but he got there. For those unfamiliar, racing karts aren’t at all like the lawnmower-powered county fair contraptions your mother wouldn’t let you drive. A proper kart chassis is remarkably sophisticated, teaching the use of traction patches through oversteer, understeer, braking, drawing lines through a corner, et al. That produces a baseline of real racing skill.
Indeed, one of the winningest race drivers ever, F1’s epic Michael Schumacher, followed a similar path: by fate, his father happened to run the local kart track, and that man lovingly built his six-year-old son a kart from discarded parts, which the boy then used to win a championship, and start his career.
Zak started with the International Karting Federation, the oldest karting sanctioning body in the U.S., and in 1986 he launched. Over the course of the next four years, he landed an impressive 22 firsts and won three championships. Well, of course, as with any other career, there’s a progression, and with the chops he’d won karting, Zak jumped into other series, such as British Formula Three and Formula Ford, among a great many others too long to list here. Zak’s goal became to somehow land a shot at the biggest, brassiest ring of them all: F1.
While it might not appear so on casual inspection, racing is a desperately expensive enterprise. In a former life, I once represented a NASCAR Winston Cup racer, and the numbers absolutely crisped my synapses. It turns out that, at least until you are a big name, the dispositive racing skill has zero to do with on-track prowess and everything to do with attracting sponsors and merchandising. The uninitiated think that, like the field of dreams, that if you are good enough, they will come, but that is only true at or near the top. Working to get to the top requires salesmanship, and a lot of it.
Zak had it.
He had not only been blessed with driving skills, but also and far more importantly with people skills, which he appears to have managed beautifully. He could and did draw sponsors. According to a number of reports, despite how good he was on the track, some in his circles told him that his time was better spent in marketing. In 1995, he started a business, called Just Marketing International. Brilliant move. Over the decades, JMI has secured deals with about every major race series you can think of: F1, Indy, NASCAR, World Rally Championship, and a whole lot more.
All that, in turn, meant he could found another outfit, United Motorsports, which ended up owning a who’s who of racing teams. And he landed as the CEO of the legendary McLaren Racing. Some reports place his net worth in excess of $100 million, and credit him with a famous race car collection that includes the names of racing’s greats, like Ayrton Senna, Dale Earnhardt, Nigel Mansell, and Mika Hakkinen.
And it all started because he had the self-control to ignore Vanna.
