PETER GREGG

About Peter Gregg

Peter Gregg was the IMSA driver everyone strove to beat. He started in the early ’70s with Porsches and had done very well. Peter Gregg was one of the most successful and loyal Porsche racing drivers of all time. His long-standing relationship with the Porsche factory is the stuff of legends.

With the platform of GT racing and IMSA, Gregg and his #59 Porsches powered his racing passion and served as marketing for his “we race what we sell” dealership at home in Jacksonville, FL. Jim Busby said it best, “Peter Gregg and Roger Penske were the first to see the business potential in the sport of racing.”

Gregg often referenced both his race team and dealership when he stated, “Win on Sunday. Sell on Monday.”

Peter Gregg was born on the fourth of May in 1940. He was a graduate of Deerfield Academy, a private preparatory school, in 1957 and moved on to Harvard University, where he earned a degree in English. Gregg had a brief career in filmmaking, coupling that as a squash player; he eventually settled into an automobile racer’s career. Following his graduation from Harvard in 1961, he moved to Europe to attend Centro-Sud Driving School. Peter’s next stint was in the U.S. Navy, where he became an Air Intelligence Officer at the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida. After being discharged from the Air Force in 1965, Gregg married Jennifer Johnson and had his two sons, Jason and Simon Gregg.

Gregg was one of America’s greatest and most successful road racers, with 152 wins out of 340 races he started. Gregg was a two-time Trans Am Series Champion, a six-time IMSA GTO Series Champion and a four-time winner of the 24 Hours of Daytona.

The level of preparation shown by Gregg’s race team best showed Gregg’s standard for perfection. Barton Workman, in an article, stated, ” … the glimmering team cars would sit on jack stands in the paddock, virtually untouched. At the same time, competing teams scrambled to get their cars ready for the track with tools flying and much commotion; the [#59] crew sat quietly by the car in lawn chairs eating ice cream or bumming cigarettes waiting for the next session to start.”

Peter Gregg kept intensive journals highlighting his career and races. Jack Atkinson, Gregg’s crew chief, also took detailed engineering notes about the cars. These notes allowed the team to prepare and perfect the art of racing.

Despite his tragic passing in 1980, the legend of Peter Gregg lives on. His passion for racing and the ideals that racing embraces still live on in the racing community. Hard work, dedication, focus, constant self-improvement, endurance and passion are qualities that all motorsport enthusiasts display.

Take a moment to ponder what the American sports car racing scene would look like these days if we were to have the influence of Peter Gregg after 1980. Workman also wrote, “The GTP era may well have taken on a completely different direction and it would have begun earlier on a more solid footing. And, we very likely wouldn’t have had the absurd fifteen-year split that we’ve recently endured as Peter would never have stood for turning the clock back on sports car racing by twenty years.

What I remember most is the quote that Porsche of North America ran as a full-page advertisement in every major motoring magazine and newspaper across the country to memorialize Peter:

‘The excellence of his example changed us forever.'”

Sources: http://www.finecars.cc/en/editorial/article/news/the-peter-gregg-i-knew/index.html
https://www.porscheroadandrace.com/conversations-with-peter-gregg/