WORDS Mark Fogarty IMAGES Peter Norton, Dale Rodgers
Australia’s doyen of motorsport journalists Mark Fogarty joins V8X Supercar Magazine with his trademark in-depth interviews. First up is DJR Team Penske’s Dr Ryan Story, who saved Dick Johnson Racing. here are very smart people in the pitlane… and then there’s Doctor Ryan Story. He is literally a genius, with an imposing intellect and number-crunching abilities beyond the brightest engineers. Story has an extremely high IQ, a doctorate in mathematics and a lucrative data-mining business. He is the entrepreneur who loves motorsport and idolises Dick Johnson, whose troubled team he helped save. Combining science with passion, he runs DJR Team Penske in a much softer manner than his mostly street-smart, racing-schooled peers. His background is unorthodox and unrelated to racing apart from his almost lifelong devotion to Johnson – adolescent over-achiever, academic whiz and brainiac businessman. And to top it all off, he is unfeasibly young at just 31. Yes, a barely thirty-something is in charge of the longest-established team and one of the most iconic. But it’s not so surprising that this entrepreneur – who by his own admission is a “complete, total, card-carrying nerd” – is running Roger Penske’s Aussie outpost. Story’s expertise is statistical analysis. He takes demographic data and interprets the numbers to reveal what
Foges goes one-on-one with DJR Team Penske’s Ryan Story.
motivates people. For more than a decade, his numerical nous has helped shape the election campaigns of major political parties in Australia and the USA. He established a lucrative enterprise that enabled him to help Dick Johnson Racing during the most serious of its crises in 2011/12, first as sponsor, then investor and finally saviour. Story stepped back from his business to become a trusted advisor to Johnson and steered the team back to solvency in 2013, before brokering Penske’s futuresecuring takeover the following year. There is no greater endorsement of his quiet leadership and commercial acuity than the fact that despite his youth, he was Penske’s pick to oversee the day-to-day operations of DJR Team Penske as managing director. Story’s story is as improbable as it is intriguing – from DJR savant to boy genius political prognosticator with the means and methods to orchestrate the salvation of his racing idol’s legacy. When did you meet Dick Johnson as a fan and when did you get involved with the team? I first met him in 1997 at Mallala. I’d been going to Mallala since ’95. I grew up on a farm about 250 km from Adelaide – a place called Yorketown. I went to Mallala in ’95 and subsequent years with my Dad. I met Dick in ’97; it was a pretty big deal. My old man was more speechless than what I was because I was prattling on. I could recite Dick’s record and John Bowe’s record from memory; and to me it was a pretty spectacular thing. Then I got involved with the team through its fan club, ‘Teammates’, of which I’ve been a member since day dot. It started in 2007. I first got involved with the team in a more formal capacity in 2011. Dick Johnson Racing (DJR) was going through one of its many financial crises at the time and you stepped up to help? I got involved originally in a very small capacity as a 35
V8X93 p34-39 Ryan Story Interview.indd 35
23/05/2016 12:16 pm