Did Wannabe Racer Casey Putsch Get My Article About "Ace" Taken Off The Internet?

The answer is probably "Not quite as successfully as he wanted to"

as john mayer said, something’s missing

About four months before I got fired over Zoom at Hagerty, I wrote a column about a wannabe racer whom I nicknamed “Ace”.

You can find the article here, and you can also find it here, and I have a full copy of it in my archives, so I can assure you that it will be readable and searchable until the end of time. But you won’t find it on the Hagerty website. AT least not anymore. An ACF reader messaged me two days and told me that the article, which he has sent over and over again to all sorts of racing homies in the Midwest, had been taken down.

In a perfect world, I could just call my old website people and ask them why the DELORTION happened — but just talking to me would put their jobs at risk, at a time when their employer just got done letting well over a hundred people go and there might still be room for a few more names on the list. So I can only speculate that it was taken down at someone’s request.

Care to guess who that might be?

I didn’t name any names in the “Ace” article, but I did detail some scenarios that included:

• putting a crummy old 944 into a ditch pretending to be a race driver;

• getting banned for life from an SCCA autocross region for puking oil and also pretending to be a race driver;

• asking to go on One Lap of America with me, and pretending to be a race driver;

• claiming to be “groomed for F1” by major backers despite having finished dead last by both time and lap time in the only race he’d ever run at that point, the Pittsburgh Vintage Grand Prix, which is a remarkably relaxed affair mostly run by old people looking to take pictures;

• claiming to have a brand-new F1 program in the works, and pretending to be a race driver;

• having a photo on his website claiming to be testing a LeMans Prototype and pretending to be a race driver;

• registering for multiple NASA races then not showing up;

• Posing for photography over and over again in a wide variety of vintage racing outfits while… you guessed it.

As fate would have it, I did hear an anonymous tip from a non-Hagerty source that a fellow named Casey Putsch was very annoyed with the article, because he felt that all of the above scenarios described him. Can you believe it? Turns out that — yes, Casey also did all of the above, and there’s at least one third-party witness to every incident!

But that’s FAR from all there is to Casey Putsch. For years now, he has been trying to step away from his daddy’s money and establish his own identity via two avenues: his YouTube channel, which has had a few big hits but generally gets maybe four or five thousand views per video, and his “Genius Garage” nonprofit.

I have heard multiple stories from people on the periphery of the Genius Garage operation that, were I to repeat them, would probably get me sued, because they are absolutely horrifying. Let’s assume for now that all of these people maliciously lied to me, and that Genius Garage actually helps young people become racing mechanics through the sheer goodness of Casey’s heart. It could be true, and it would be nice.

(I would love to hear a single success story to balance out the sour grapes, but nobody seems to know any. If you do, send it along.)

Casey crossed my radar most recently when he had Bring-A-Trailer auction his “Lykan Hypersport” supercar. You may remember the real Lykan from one of the less interesting Fast and Furious movies. A genuine production Hypersport would be worth a couple million bucks — but this ain’t that. Instead there are a lot of stories swirling around this car and this auction. From the sources I’ve head, it was a “buck”, or empty shell, placed at shopping malls to promote a live Fast and Furious tour. Casey put the bones of a salvage title 987-generation Boxster under the car, shortening and lengthening where necessary, then took it for some extremely cautious laps around Mid-Ohio.

(Which doesn’t say anything about the car; Casey is known for cautious laps, and his overall performance in his debut vintage race a decade ago, the one he felt qualified him for Formula One, was summarized by famous driver coach Peter Krause as “Ouch! Cautious times.”)

Casey made a very big deal about the BaT auction but it didn’t do very well. You can see the car, and the auction, here. The winning bidder had never bid or commented on BaT before but somehow just decided to wander in and bid $175,000 for the car. Here is the winning bidder’s record of bids and comments.

(For comparison, here is my record on BaT, which is what the record of a casual, but real, bidder looks like.)

Casey’s comments throughout the auction reveal his hubris (“If the winning bid is over $300,000, I’ll fly the bidder to Dubai for adventures”) then his disappointment, then his anger: “if we kept doing these auctions with builds, Genius Garage and I would both be bankrupt. This went badly.”

I mean, how badly did it really go? It’s a salvage title 2007 Boxster with a kit-car-esque body on top of it and a handmade “W MOTORS” badge on the steering wheel. I sold a much better Boxster S 550 Edition a while back for $19k and prayed the rosary in thanks afterwards. Sure, there was some labor involved, but if I understand the whole “Genius Garage” thing correctly, the labor was done by kids, for free.

If, on the other hand, your bidder was a shill or a fake, then it would be very fair to say that it went badly. Who knows

The fact is, however, that I’m not all that qualified to judge the legitimacy of a nonprofit organization that builds cars to sell at auction, the funds then going back to that “charity”. That’s not the sort of thing with which I would get involved.

Let’s talk about Casey’s next adventure: becoming an IndyCar champion at the age of 41. He even convinced Sports Illustrated to write a story about it in which Putsch, who has never won a race of any sort to my knowledge and doesn’t appear to have entered more than one or two, is directly compared to Helio Castroneves. His website is called “Putsch Racing”, and it talks about his spirit of competition, his racing gifts, his love of racing.

It contains no race results.

To be fair, not every race result is searchable on the Internet. But the vast majority of them are. Many of them can be found via Speedhive, an amateur and entry-pro database. Want to see my last race? It’s right here. Want to see more of my results? They are on Speedhive as well. But wait, there’s more, because most sanctions maintain results apart from speedhive as well. Want to see me in a race where our car broke but I still beat David Donohue and Randy Pobst? It’s here! Want to see a World Challenge race where I finished, albeit with a broken swaybar? It’s here! Would you like to see my AER endurance racing record, after the first year where they didn’t put everything in the computer? It’s here!

(To give you an example of how frustrating I occasionally find the “woke” car crowd, someone sent me a screenshot of some dipshit named Ben Dawson saying how much better he was at endurance racing than I am. Here’s his record; we each have 20 stints but I have seven podiums and three wins to his four podiums and zero wins. Yet Car Twitter will nod its head and be like, “OMG HE IS GREAT”. Because he’s not a bad person, and I am, and you have to count the wins differently for bad people. Ask Kyle Larson.)

The marque and for-profit clubs like NASA, BMWCAA, and PCA, maintain their own results, but they are searchable, as you’ll see with one of my results in the Accord here. It’s hard to race under the radar nowadays. So after a remarkable amount of searching I was able to find a couple of vintage races for Casey, including one where Casey ran a 1990 GT1 Corvette, about 3.9 seconds a lap behind the winning driver. The article mentions that he has kids crewing his race car as “Genius Garage volunteers”. He’s also apparently claimed to have “1000hp” in the car; his times are about what my SCCA competitors with 600hp get, so either he’s fibbing about the engine or he’s under-driving the car.

So it looks like Casey has finally become a racer after many years of pretending to be one. It’s vintage racing, which with certain exceptions doesn’t get any respect outside vintage-racing circles, but it is a race. Good for him! But what about that Indycar career, in conjunction with the Meyer family of “500” fame ? After many — and I mean many — articles published all around the Internet about his impending intense and historically significant attack of Indycar, it looks like Casey did just one practice session then quit forever. Here’s the result sheet from that test:

ouch! cautious times

When you see the (R) it means Rookie, so Casey’s not lagging Will Power or Scott Dixon by four seconds here; he’s lagging people who are also getting a first look at the car. So I don’t think you need to be a genius to see why Casey isn’t going to win, or even enter, the Indy 500. Heck, you might not even need a garage.

For the record, I bear the guy no ill will. I think the free-teen-labor thing is a little icky, and I don’t know why someone would take twenty years’ worth of vintage-racing photos while accomplishing no more than maybe three vintage races, but who am I to judge? I can’t even complain about his “RACING DRIVER EXPLAINS X AND Y” videos on YouTube. If he wants to call himself a “racing driver”, that’s not as bad as pretending to be a Navy Seal or something like that.

If anything, I have a sort of grudging pity for him. Being a thoroughly committed wannabe, poser, or grifter is often almost as difficult, nearly as time-intensive, and just as stressful as being the real thing. Casey is almost certainly aware that anybody who knows his whole story has less respect for him than they would for a rookie in GridLife Sundae Cup Time Attack — and a lot of people know the whole story, if my inbox is any indication. At any point in the past two decades he could have spent a fraction of his vintage-stuff expenditures on, say, a Spec Racer Ford season. But there’s nothing glamorous about such a season. You win, or you lose, and nobody really cares except the people around you on the grid.

I don’t know if Casey was behind the removal of the article. If he was, then congratulations! He’s managed to get his name here, in a forum that, to my alternating amusement and sorrow, does slightly better numbers than the original Hagerty article did. If he didn’t, then he can blame whatever simp went to bat on his behalf. The problem with playing part-time Internet censor is that it almost never works the way you thought it was going to. Shine on, you crazy diamonds out there! It’s never too late to dump the weird “charity”, buy a Spec Miata, and become a real “racing driver”. There are two kinds of would-be racers out there: the ones who figure they can never lose a race if they don’t enter — and the ones who realize they’ll never win one until they do.