There’s a motion-sensitive security gate at the bottom of Chris and Jan Riley’s driveway in Wilton. It opens slowly, revealing, not the usual lacrosse gear and soccer balls strewn on most Fairfield County lawns, but a yard filled with trucks, trailers and automobiles. This is a family that lives and breathes cars.
Chris Riley owns the Volvo dealership right off the Post Road in Stamford, a family business his father started, importing fine European cars; and though Riley Senior did not encourage his son to race cars — Jim Riley considered automobiles works of art — he spawned two generations of race car drivers. These are not guys who rumble through town and idle at stoplights in shiny showroom cars; these guys mean business. They drive fast — on the track. Chris races a rear-drive MINI Cooper in Sports Car Club of America national competitions, chalking up wins and accolades; twenty-one-year-old Jameson, among a list of many other accomplishments, drove for the Volvo Factory team alongside champion race car driver Derek Bell, and has hit the track with Patrick Dempsey, better known as McDreamy from Grey’s Anatomy; and nineteen-year-old A.J. is the recent Skip Barber Formula Dodge Eastern Regional champion. The clan has come to be known as the Racing Rileys.
“I knew Chris wanted to race when I met him,” says his wife, Jan, while seated at her kitchen table drinking tea. She is a fresh-faced redhead with long wavy hair and a splash of tawny freckles across her nose. The boys are still asleep upstairs. Chris is at the dealership. “It has always been a dream for him, and I could understand it. I was a tomboy growing up: baseball, volleyball, track. I even had the urge to race cars myself.”
Chris’s office over the showroom at the dealership is filled with racing memorabilia and photos. This is where he worked alongside his father until a few years ago when Jim lost his battle with cancer at age seventy-seven. “Racing was always a passion. But when I took over running the dealership, I had to work long days. I had to put aside anything that got in the way of the success of the business. The dealership is what I have to give my sons, ” says Chris.
The Starting Line
At Chris’s urging, his sons started driving early. They were not even teenagers. “I wanted them to know how to drive and have confidence behind the wheel. Kids aren’t given enough instruction. I think every kid should take the Skip Barber Defensive Driving course at Lime Rock.” He pauses. “Do you know that more teenagers die in car accidents than die as soldiers?”
Jameson was ten when he asked for a go-kart for Christmas and he buzzed around the driveway till spring. Then he announced he wanted to race. “I got him a four-stroke Briggs & Stratton racing go-kart,” says Chris, kind of shrugging. Clearly, Chris also wanted a four-stroke Briggs & Stratton racing go-kart. “Jameson started racing in the beach league. I was the pit crew.”
The league was then, and still is, organized by the Norwalk Go-Karting Association. Since 1972, kids have been blasting around the parking lot at Calf Pasture Beach in Norwalk in little bright-colored one-cylinder vehicles that look like toys but can go up to fifty mph on the straightaways. Little brother A.J. watched with mild interest for a couple of years. “I told myself I wasn’t interested,” A.J. says today. “But I decided to try one race, and I was addicted.”
Chris found himself with both of his sons charging around in go-karts. The weekends were filled with the smell of hot engines and rubber and kicked-up dirt. Soon Chris would be looking for another outlet for his own urge to race.
Jan knew her husband well enough to know that one more thing on his busy schedule would help, not make things worse. She gave him a three-day competition course at the Skip Barber Racing School at Lime Rock for his birthday. The predictable happened: He was hooked. A year later, he was on the racing circuit. He bought a trailer and hauled his MINI Cooper from track to track. Often, the one day he had off all week, he and his family would be racer and pit crew. Jameson and A.J. were not far behind their father, each following in his footsteps to Skip Barber in 2002 and 2004 respectively.
Chris defends his decision to race MINIs, the boxy little car originally designed to accommodate four adults and their luggage and looks more like the automotive equivalent of a sensible pair of shoes than a race car. “They’re more challenging,” he explains. “I mean, anybody can drop a huge engine into a racing frame and make it go like hell, but to take the original 1275 of a MINI Cooper and make it race-ready — that means I had to bring that engine up from 35 horsepower to 160 horsepower. That takes work.” Chris grins. “It’s like a hand grenade ready to go off.”
Driving the Business
Mom drinks her tea and listens for signs of the boys waking up. Jamie comes downstairs first. Biscuit, the dog, one of three Jack Russells at the Riley house, charges over to say hello, and there’s a contented Sunday morning feeling. Both boys have another week before they go back to school. “We’ve always been very strict about their grades,” says Jan, “because racing isn’t all about going around the track. We all know they have to have a fallback position. Even as racers, they need to know the business behind it all to be successful.”
“We want our own company,” says A.J. He is now hovering in the doorway, halfway between the kitchen and the garage. “Like Boris Said of No Fear Racing.” No connection to No Fear, Inc., the clothing line; he’s talking about the road race champion whose late father was an Olympic bobsledder. The boys have developed a concept and business plan for their own line of clothing. They’re waiting on the start-up capital, but with their drive and passion, it’s not a big leap to imagine that the line will be a household name.
Jameson pads into the room barefoot and makes himself a cup of tea. He is taller than his brother. While A.J. looks a little Tom Sawyer-ish with his rumpled hair and shy smile, Jameson calls to mind a state trooper who has just pulled you over, but you have a hard time paying attention to him because he’s so young and just so darn cute. Jameson studies Business Management and Technology at UConn Stamford. “There’s more flexibility there,” he explains, “because it’s a city campus and there are evening courses and a lot of adult students.” A.J. is a business major at the Storrs campus. He doesn’t mind the two-hour drive like his brother does. “I hate I-84,” says Jameson.
“With their grades, they could have gone to an Ivy League school.” Jan is proud, but tries unsuccessfully to hide it. “Chris and I told them all through high school that if they wanted to race, they had to keep their grades up, but they knew we wanted to funnel as much money into their racing as we could. They chose UConn. It’s not an Ivy school, but it’s a good school. They’ll get a good education. We had to make priorities.”
Racing the amateur circuit is an expensive venture. It costs $3,500 for three days of racing in the Skip Barber series, which does not include $1,000 for a practice day. They provide the car, however, and helmet and gear; but participants in races sponsored by the Sports Car Club of America, of which Chris is one, must have a van for equipment and overnight stays — big and strong enough to trailer a race car to the track. This vehicle alone can cost anywhere from $50,000 to $250,000. And, of course, there’s maintenance, tires, gas, spare parts and safety equipment. There’s apparel: racing jumpsuits, helmets, boots, gloves, even special underclothes and socks.
And where does a race car driver practice? Certainly not on city streets or highways. “One practice day on the track is built into a race weekend,” A.J. explains. “You pay for it, though. You can rent track time, too, but it’s expensive.” Drivers with lots of money have a serious advantage. A.J. says he goes around the track mentally, either before or after a race session, corner by corner, and thinks about what he has to work on. “Or if I even need to,” he says. “But the best practice a racer can get is seat time: experience in a car on the track.” So it goes back to go-karts — shifter-karts this time, karts for professionals. The brothers maintain their skills and fitness and feed their habit at a local go-kart track, racing karts with a six-speed sequential gearbox, capable of speeds over 125 mph.
Fit and Fast
Driving skill and track savvy are only part of what makes a good racer. It’s more physical than people think. The steering wheel pulls and resists; there are short bursts of intense activity requiring split-second reaction time and muscle; and the engine pumps hot fumes into a small space where the driver is wearing a fire suit, a full face-helmet and thick gloves. To stay race-ready, drivers go to the gym and go through a workout that is specifically geared toward keeping the body strong enough to endure high speeds and control a car that may weigh 3,000 pounds on a track that demands quick turns, acceleration and hair-trigger braking. Strong enough to control centrifugal force gone mad.
Giles Wiley is the Rileys’ trainer. He has designed a workout specifically focused on the muscles that a racer uses. “It’s important that they get stronger without gaining any weight,” says Wiley. “Body-building-type training is the worst possible thing that a race car driver can do as it trains the muscles to pump up and they’ll fatigue faster during a race.”
“We are constantly coming up with new methods and ideas to simulate what we go through on the racetrack,” says A.J. “There are boxing exercises, abdominal strengthening, balance work and cardio. Wiley has us balance on a Swiss Ball while catching smaller balls thrown at either hand.” Wiley compares training the Rileys to training highly skilled martial artists. “They need the same intense focus, despite fatigue and multiple distractions. They need to stay razor sharp.” A.J. and Jameson know how important their physical fitness is for what they want to do. They neither drink nor smoke, and they are totally drug-free. Lack of mental focus can result in serious injury or death. Wiley says, in a gross understatement, “Mistakes at speeds in excess of 120 mph are not advised.”
The Road Ahead
Last year the Riley family took their obsession to a new level. They established the Riley Racing Team, a vehicle for promoting and supporting their passion.
“The first thing we did was build a Volvo racecar,” explains Chris. “An S40. We raced it in the World Challenge, a Sports Car Club of America pro-sanctioned event where manufacturers showcase their cars. The cars on the track may look like the cars you see in the showroom, but they are specially built for the racetrack. They inspire people to buy cars. We used to say we’d race on Sunday, sell on Monday.”
At the track, everybody knows the Rileys. They know Jan, standing by herself with no earphones. “Do you think they want to hear their mother’s voice screaming in their ear when they’re trying to win a race? Like I’d be saying, ‘Oh, be careful, honey. Don’t go too fast around that turn!’ I just stand there and watch and root for them, and believe me, I say the fastest Hail Mary in the East.” When she sees a black or a caution flag, flags that indicate trouble on the track, she looks over to Chris for a sign that everything is OK. He’s her touchstone. He gives her a thumbs-up and she starts to breathe again.
“The one time Jameson flipped, Chris wasn’t there.” Jan remembers every minute of that day, exactly where she was standing when it happened, the bad feeling she had the night before. “It happened in slow motion, and when the car came to a stop, Jameson got out, and our eyes met and everything was OK, but I thought my heart was never going to start beating again.”
And he wasn’t there when A.J. crashed and the impact flung his transmission off the track and deep into the woods. “They were going to charge me for it,” he says. “I went out there and beat around in the weeds until I found it!”
Everyone at the track knows Chris, too. He never misses a race any more. His silver-white hair catches the sun; you can pick him out in a crowd. If he’s not glued to the action on the track, he’s talking about it with friends and fans. “What’s great about Riley Racing is that it’s a family thing, and it’s local,” says Chris. “We market for the big-ticket sponsorships, of course, but I like it when local merchants buy in. They can get a lot of visibility with their names and logos on the car, but sometimes they don’t even want anything on the car. They just become a sponsor because they want to be part of the family, part of the fun.”
Last October, the Skip Barber Regional Championship finals were held on a spectacular sunny day at Lime Rock. Jameson raced an earlier race; he and his girlfriend, Allison, were watching when A.J. screamed across the finish line and won the title. Afterwards the family soaked up the compliments, socialized and caught up with old friends.
“It’s like home here,” Jan says. They bought some hot dogs and sodas. They talked over the races, they talked about the next race, they talked about driving home. Behind them, a sprinkling of honeybees, like a handful of tossed confetti, buzzed around the waste cans, looking for drops of sugary liquids. One bee, apparently drunk on warm Coca-Cola, stuttered to a stop on the picnic table. Chris absent-mindedly urged it over toward A.J., who trapped it under a paper cup, released it and watched its confusion with amusement. “It’s a great way to be together,” says Chris. “Besides, it’s a testosterone thing. We can’t help ourselves.”
“No, it’s a family thing,” says Jameson, an arm loosely across Allison’s shoulders and looking around the table at his brother and his parents.
Behind him, cars whir like friction toys around the nasty S-curve where A.J. threw his transmission into the woods. The new Skip Barber Regional Champion for 2006 is still following the drunken bee around with a paper cup.