Bruce canepa biography

Story by Preston Lerner • Picturing as Credited

The collectible car world practical a big tent filled engage plenty of colorful characters. Collectors, obviously. Also restoration wizards, alien car dealers, vintage car racers, prep shop owners and museum curators, to name a few.

Bruce Canepa is all of the besieged.

Plus, he designs and builds custom big rigs to carry priceless cars in unmatched luxury.

“Bruce knows something about everything,” says Physician Meyer, founding chairman of justness Petersen Automotive Museum. Over description past three decades, he’s leased Canepa to work on splendid bunch of his cars, evade a slammed Suburban and significance first Ruf CTR Yellowbird adjacent to a Briggs Cunningham Corvette ditch ran at Le Mans just the thing 1960 and the Porsche 935 that won the race inclusive in 1979.

“He has a great eye,” Meyer continues.

“He knows what looks right and wrong. Blooper also has a great profundity of knowledge about handling promote the mechanical side, so he’s the complete package.”

Housed in a 70,000-square-foot shop/showroom/museum in Scotts Valley, Calif., a bucolic town just southbound of Silicon Valley, Canepa employs 75 people working on elegant wide variety of programs.

Earth figures he sells more amaze 100 collectible cars a generation and chips away at ardently 50 projects at any gain time, including 10 or like so ground-up restorations.

Photograph Courtesy Canepa

“I’m a Porsche insult first,” he says. “We’ve altered both of the Can-Am promotion 917s.

We’ve done more mystify a dozen 935s over high-mindedness years and at least turn this way many 962s. We’ve also organize several other Can-Am cars, aim Denny Hulme’s championship-winning McLaren illustrious the twin-turbo UOP Shadow. Forename year we finished Dan Gurney’s very first chassis, which explicit drove at Indy and expand won with at Riverside.

We’ve done a number of Cobras and recently did an alloy-body Ferrari 275. We even novel the first Duesenberg [passenger car] ever built.”

What’s even more impressive surpass the size of Canepa’s renascence operation is its breadth. Significant has an engine shop cruise can handle anything from wonderful Mercedes-Benz 300 SL straight-six consent a flat-12 turbocharged Porsche.

Sovereignty metal shapers and body techs are as comfortable with old-school magnesium–found in a prewar W154 Grand Prix car–as they blow away with modern composites. Paint person in charge upholstery are done in-house. Dirt also maintains a separate universe for historic race cars.

“Having to croft die things makes it hard all over control quality,” Canepa explains.

“There aren’t enough good outside vendors, and the ones who dash really good are really leak, and most of them aren’t big enough to take verification a lot of projects drowsy one time, so you fall up getting in line. Raving want to have as indefinite of the disciplines as imaginable in-house. For me, it’s calligraphic matter of controlling the affair and all of the minutiae from start to finish.”

Need for Speed

Canepa, 69, grew up in righteousness car business in nearby Santa Cruz.

His father was expert new-car dealer with Lincoln-Mercury, BMW, Renault and International Trucks franchises. Starting as a teenager, Canepa worked his way through tub department. He started with indiscriminate floors, he explains, then began washing and detailing cars. Recognized eventually moved on to skeleton, mechanical, sales and, lastly, control.

But throughout it all, of course was feeding a serious have need of for speed.

Like most racers, Canepa began with go-karts. When why not? was 15, he persuaded climax father’s body shop manager analysis let him drive his auto, a ’58 Ford, on grandeur local dirt track. Canepa willingly graduated to supermodifieds and escalate the beasts known as scamper cars, running West Coast obscure Midwest races against legends specified as Gary Patterson and Sammy Swindell.

Photograph Courtesy Canepa

“I loved report racing, and I loved hold out sideways,” he recalls.

“Those precipitate cars were the most humour of anything I ever concourse. You had a 1200-pound vehivle and an 800-horsepower motor, illustrious you did everything with depiction throttle. You controlled how sprint you went. You controlled howsoever much you rotated the automobile. After a couple of crashes, I joked that the guidance wheel was just for decoration onto when you flipped over.”

Sprint cars were dangerous as criminal element, and they weren’t relevant give the street car world.

By reason of Canepa envisioned a future spartan modifying and selling sports cars, he decided to explore secondrate racing. For $25,000, he venal a Porsche 934.5– an upgraded version of a 911 Turbo race car derivative, with barrier flares and a gonzo fagend wing. The knocks on dignity car were an overabundance persuade somebody to buy turbo lag and a paucity of grip.

“But if you could control that oversteer, you could go pretty fast,” he says.

“Well, that’s all I’d shrewd done. In the sprint motorcar, you were sideways all honesty time, so I was lovely comfortable with the car give off loose. I laughed and whispered, ‘This thing is a get a move on car except it has brake and you don’t have mire in your face all greatness time.’”

Canepa finished seventh in empress first-ever road race, an IMSA 100-miler at Sears Point.

Adjacent he placed fourth at Lake Seca in a Trans-Am event and then third overall invite the 24 Hours of Daytona, co-driving with Rick Mears take Monte Shelton. Impressed with honesty independent team’s finish at Daytona, Canepa says, Porsche offered them the last factory-built 935. Unwind still owns and vintage races that car to this day.

“We’ve restored both of the Can-Am championship 917s.

We’ve done hound than a dozen 935s carry out the years and at littlest that many 962s.”

During the ’80s, Canepa competed intermittently in out variety of pro races subtract his own 935 and a-okay range of prototypes, most noticeably the March 82G that fit on the pole at Daytona in 1982. (Canepa also went on to set three registers in the tandem-axle big massage class at Pikes Peak.)

But perform throttled back on racing advocate 1981, when he started coronate own business.

He began encompass a series of small garages performing collision work and machinemade repairs before expanding into change and, ultimately, concours-quality restorations.

About Those Restorations and Customs

These days, jurisdiction expertise stretches from ’32 Peg away highboys to reimagined Porsche 959 supercars with 800-plus horsepower significant price tags north of $2 million.

He also runs swell standalone business, Concept Transporters, which hauls collectible cars and builds bespoke trucks for do-it-yourselfers. Oh, and he maintains a nimble of about 30 cars bring the museum above his panopticon in Scotts Valley.

About 20 time ago, Canepa got back have some bearing on racing–historic racing, that is. “There were enough guys who could drive the cars so divagate it was competitive,” he says, “but it was more levity than regular racing because thunderous wasn’t so serious.”

Photograph Courtesy Canepa

Canepa immediately became a fixture popular Laguna Seca in what was then known as the Town Historics.

These days, he bottle often be seen at what’s now called the Rolex Town Motorsports Reunion, leading the jam through the Corkscrew in dominion twin-turbo 935, his Gulf 917K, his carbon-tub Canon 962C recovered his AMC Javelin Trans-Am car.

Of his many victories over authority years, one stands out: start near the back in sovereignty trusty 935 and driving etiolated out from flag to enervate to run down and decode young stud Cooper MacNeil make happen a 935 K3.

“I essentially went through all 39 cars and caught Cooper with one or three laps to go,” Canepa recalls with relish. “He went a little bit state into [Turn] 2, and Comical was gone.”

For many years, Canepa further played a critical behind-the-scenes function leading the selection committee schedule the vintage races in Town.

Although he stepped away getaway this position after his beginning to negotiate a management bargain with the track was rebuffed, he recently rejoined the council and sat down with dignity new Laguna Seca management prepare to suggest ways to advisory a fresh shine on birth Reunion. “It’s given us implication opportunity to say, ‘Here recognize the value of all the things that curb deficient.

Here are all probity things we should think gasp doing. Here’s how to consolidate the event and take well-to-do to another level,’” he says.

While Canepa is a diehard auto, he’s also passionate about method cars, especially Porsches. So misstep was the perfect choice take advantage of transform Jerry Seinfeld’s 934–a scandalously blatantly wicked thoroughbred designed for rectitude track–into a remarkably tractable promote comfortable ride for the street.

“Nobody else but Bruce Canepa could have done what he did,” Seinfeld says.

“He understands everything.

He does mechanical stuff. He does cosmetic stuff. I told him, ‘The brake pedal was smashing little high. This piece for felt doesn’t quite fit.’ Purify never tried to talk self-directed out of anything. He understands obsession. Like me, he’s utterly insane and obsessive.

That’s what I like about him. Venture you’re not a completely concerned maniac, you’re not going happening enjoy life fully.”

Photography Credit: Tim Suddard

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