The Dream Factories, The Flying Frenchman, And When Dreams Come True
by Michael Gougis They exist in every professional racing series, and in a lot of the semi-professional and amateur series as well. They are the teams that go racing not to win, but just to make it onto the grid. Scratching for money, propped up often by a sympathetic series organizer, they are the teams for which “winning” means that everyone gets paid. Think of them as the Dream Factories. Often, their drivers or riders bring cash - lots of it - to the teams to make their racing dreams into realities. It's the other end of the grid from the factory squads, where huge multinational corporations pour marketing and engineering dollars into the men and machines that attract huge audiences and camera air time. For those squads, there are essentially no budgetary restraints, or only the ones their corporate masters choose to impose, based on complicated and occasionally emotional return on investment calculations. Fat with cash and credit, those teams pay massive salaries to
