Jimmy Vasser has been making headlines in American motor racing for more than 30 years and today he remains in the winner’s circle with his Lexus GT3 team in the IMSA sports car series.

As a teenager he won America’s Formula Ford championship, graduating to Indy Lights in 1988 and CART/Champ Cars in 1992 before getting his big break with Chip Ganassi in 1995 and winning the championship in ’96. Along the way he flirted with Formula 3000 in Europe, was thwarted in his dream of Formula 1, and returned to the States to build a career in CART and IndyCar that lasted until 2008.

As a team co-owner with Kevin Kalkhoven he won the Indy 500 when Tony Kanaan claimed victory in 2013 by less than a second for KV Racing. Today his Vasser Sullivan IMSA team is flying high – GTD Pro champions with British drivers Jack Hawksworth and Ben Barnicoat – and there are plans afoot to go IndyCar racing too.

Motor Sport: You did your first Indy 500 with a year-old Hayhoe-Cole Racing Lola-Chevy in 1992. A huge experience as a rookie?

Jimmy Vasser: Oh, yeah, the 500 is such a big deal, especially for a young American. When you’re young and bushy-tailed everything seems so big, almost wondrous. I’d come up through the ranks, winning the Formula Ford series, and even then I thought, you know, Roger Penske must know who I am by now. That’s how excited you are. Then there was Formula Atlantic, an F3000 test at Brands Hatch which went really well ahead of a possible season with Crypton in 92. Angelo Ferro from Genoa Racing had been helping me right through those early days and I wanted the chance to do Formula 1. I soon realised that was going to be pretty tough sledding. There weren’t many American drivers in Europe back then, and there wasn’t any kind of open arms policy for Americans in F1 at that time.

Back home I had the offer of doing the Indy 500, so I went that way. It was a great experience… until I crashed in Turn 1 and broke my leg after 93 laps. It was a cold day, the coldest in history, and on a re-start with cold tyres I lost it, hit the wall, and finished my first Indy 500 in the hospital with a compound fracture. Not a great start.

MS: You joined Chip Ganassi’s team in 1995 and the following year you won the championship. What did Ganassi give you that was such a big boost for your career?

JV: Racing is all about the people and Chip had spent years building a winning team. He’s always been 100% committed to giving his people all the tools they need to win races. Over the years he’d acquired some very good engineers so there was brain power, people with good ideas. Of course you can have all the good ideas in the world, but if you don’t have the money to execute them then you’re screwed, so Ganassi really took off when he got Target as his primary sponsor. In ’95 we had the Reynard 95I with the Ford XB engine and then in ’96 we got the Honda engine. Alex Zanardi joined me as team-mate and we were looking good.

MS: How tough was that 1996 season for you? After a great start it was no easy run to the title, was it?

JV: No, not at all. I got off to a great start, winning four races, but then I had a big shunt in practice at Detroit, backwards into the concrete wall real hard. I didn’t know it immediately but the concussion was really bad and in the race, on the last lap, the vertigo hit me, and I barely made it back to the pits. I had a couple of weeks to recover, we did a test at Mid-Ohio, but my whole world was turning upside down with the vertigo. It was tough to do a single lap. Back then it was ‘suck it up, get in the car, we need the points’ but it took time to get back in the game. Meanwhile my team-mate Alex Zanardi was just kicking my ass, catching me up. My points lead was eroding fast. That was tough, people didn’t realise what I was going through, the vertigo, the concussion. It stalled me for a while.

“I finished my first Indy 500 in hospital with a leg fracture“

My relationship with Alessandro [Alex] was good, it was blossoming, we were good friends from the start, the atmosphere in the team was really great, like a racing team should be. Maybe I was too nice, but in America beating your team-mate was never as important as it’s always been in Formula 1, and I was always racing for the team as much as racing for myself. It was exciting, we were on top, Alessandro was winning, I’d been winning, and in the end I was able to close it out and win the championship.

In the years after that I won some, he won some. He struggled on the short ovals so I wish there’d been more of those… but he was an animal, he kicked my ass in some of the road races. The team won three championships in a row. It was a magical time, and then Alessandro went back to Europe to give Formula 1 a shot. When he left I thought, thank God, he’s got his one-way ticket to F1, he’ll be battling with Schumacher – that’s Michael, not Ralf – and it was well-deserved. His transition to F1 didn’t really work out but I believe Alessandro was for sure one of the very best on the planet and now I wasn’t going to have to beat him any more.

MS: Winning the title in ’96 must have been a life-changing moment for you just three years into your Champ Cars career?

JV: Yeah, it was life-changing, but you’re constantly having to prove yourself, to make your mark on the sport, build a career. You think everyone knows how good you are, that you’ve already proven yourself, but on every step of the ladder you have to keep on getting better. Sure, we had some extra dollars, security for the family, but you just want more of it, more winning.

It’s kinda like a disease, the need to win, and if you don’t it’s frustrating. The arena is just so competitive. You may have won races and championships on the way up but hey, you have to keep on proving to people that you are as good as you think you are. Sometimes my team-mates, like Zanardi or Juan Pablo Montoya, they’d beat me when I thought I was on top of my game, and that was frustrating when you don’t know why. I’d keep scoring points, which was good for the team – Chip liked that. And like I say, you gotta keep proving yourself however good you think you are.

MS: So, Zanardi left Ganassi in 1998, and along comes Montoya as your new team-mate. How was that for you going into the new season?

“I said to Montoya, ‘Hey man, you’ll end up in the wall’“

JV: I knew a bit about him, his exploits in Europe. Along comes this cheeky, snotty-nosed kid, and this was my new nightmare. I mean, this kid was so bloody fast, and now I’ve got another really quick team-mate and going up against these guys is never easy. I tell you, it was easier for me to beat him on a road course than it was on the short ovals where I was on top of my game, so he was pushing me to be better. I said to him, ‘Hey man, you’re doing things out there you shouldn’t be doing – you’ll end up in the wall.’ He’d say, ‘Nah, nah, it’s OK, Vasser,’ but he’d be driving the thing sideways on an oval. You just don’t do that.

One time, in St Louis in ’99, we went testing, I did the driving, got the car into good shape. At the end of the day he jumped in the car and – about the fifth time by – he was already right on top of my times. St Louis is a very short lap, so he’s had less than five minutes in the car, and I thought, ‘Oh, shit,’ and scampered off to the airport. Come the race he put it on pole and I was, like, seventh or something, so now I’m looking at the data sheets and he’s sitting there flicking little balls of paper at me. So yeah, Juan was yet another tough team-mate and he did a fantastic job for Ganassi.

MS: You raced right through the era of the fall-out between IRL and Champ Car. How frustrating were those politics for a driver?

JV: I don’t dwell on it, and I didn’t at the time. I was just happy to be at the top of the sport, doing what I always wanted to do. In some ways it gave us other opportunities to win the big 500-milers and 300-milers that were the alternative to the Indy 500. These were $1m races, and we won a few, the feeling is euphoric, to win those big races when you’ve come up through the school of hard knocks. Remember, the driver doesn’t get all the prize money. It’s split with the team, maybe 60-40 driver and team owner – everyone participates. So yeah, I focused on the racing, not on the split in the sport, and that was six good years with Ganassi, getting a championship, a runner-up, and a third from 1996 through to 1998. Good times.

MS: After the days of the big teams you drove for both Bobby Rahal and Stefan Johansson, two racers with huge experience of the sport in America.

JV: Bobby was a role model for me when I was young. He’s a class act, part of IndyCar history. I nearly went to him in ’99 but then when Zanardi left Ganassi I thought, ‘Why am I leaving such a good situation?’ The chance came again in 2002 after an average year with Pat Patrick and it was a tough year. The Cosworth engine was down on power by this time.

“Bobby Rahal was a role model for me when I was young“

We had pole at Long Beach, fell foul of a regulation on fuel stops, and came back out second behind Michael [Andretti] who had a better strategy. I just couldn’t get around Michael, it was frustrating. He was so crafty that day. He had got himself in the lead and he smelt blood in the water. At the end of the year we won on the oval at Fontana and for 2003 I joined Stefan’s team. He was already a good friend. He helped me out a lot in ’96 when I won the championship. He introduced me to his super-powerful coffees. I was like the rat going for the drug in the lab test, knocking on his door first thing in the morning for my shot of coffee.

There was still this battle going on between IRL and Champ Car, the big split, Honda and Toyota had gone, and the Reynard was a bit of a dinosaur. Also, we couldn’t get the new Lola, and I was getting closer to 40 years old.

We had some podiums and I was mentoring a new young team-mate called Ryan Hunter-Reay who won his first race at Surfers Paradise at the end of that year. He’s gone on to win a lot of races, the Indy 500 and the championship. We had a good time, Stefan has a great outlook on life, makes good wristwatches, paints good pictures. He’s not just all about motor racing.

MS: You never won the Indy 500, having lost so many chances during the split between IRL and Champ Car. Is that a regret?

JV: I never won as a driver but would you say that Chip Ganassi has won Indy? That Roger Penske has won Indy? Of course you would. Well, so have I, as a team owner, when Tony Kanaan won in 2013 for the KV team owned by me and Kevin Kalkhoven. It’s one of the absolute best memories of my whole career, driving into Victory Lane sitting on the sidepod of that car with Tony. I just wasn’t the meat between the pedals and the firewall that day but it was a terrific high to win at the Speedway.

MS: You have a Toyota dealership and now you’re a team owner in the IMSA series with James Sullivan, running the GT3 Lexus. Are you enjoying yet another new challenge?

JV: I am. It’s our fifth season, and this time we won the championship with our Pro car, and we also have a Pro-Am car. We work very closely with Toyota Racing Development and their senior managing engineer Steve Hallam. It’s a very serious full-time project, and we parked our IndyCar aspirations to focus on bringing victory in the championship to Lexus.

When we took over this project it was not in great shape, not properly competitive, and now we’re winning and there’s nothing better than this, celebrating with the team after years of hard work. It’s actually one of the high points of my career along with racing with Zanardi at Ganassi and winning the Indy 500 with Kanaan. We still hope to get back to Indy this year. We have a car for it, but right now it’s heads down to keep bringing it home for Lexus.