K-PAX Racing, out of this world racing

It’s a tough ask to make a name for yourself as a relatively new team at the best of times, but to do so amid the plethora of legendary teams within American motorsport is quite another task altogether.

 

Competing for exposure against the likes of Ganassi, Penske, Andretti, Foyt and swathes of homegrown US manufacturer efforts seems like an impossible task.

 

But rather than competing against those names in the world of open wheel racing, Californian outfit K-PAX Racing has forged its own path in GTs since its inception in the latter part of 2006.

 

And since then, it’s done more than its fair share of winning.

 

Formed by Jim Haughey and currently co-run with former racer Darren Law, K-PAX has been a close partner of Lamborghini Squadra Corse since 2021 when it entered the Fanatec GT World Challenge America series across The Pond.

 

The success was not only immediate, but utterly dominant. The team recorded 19 victories out of 26 races (a 73% success rate in the series), completed back-to-back drivers’ titles with Andrea Caldarelli and a pair of teams’ and manufacturers’ championships to boot.

 

The stats alone go some way to demonstrating just how well-oiled the machine has become.

 

“We definitely dominated in those two years, we walked away with two championships with two factory drivers in 2021 and 2022,” said explains Law.

 

“I think we kind of achieved everything we could have in America and that’s why Jim wanted to come back to Europe with the team.

 

“For us, we wanted to partner with a manufacturer where the relationship was mutual, and we always worked with manufacturers in the past.

 

“With Lamborghini, we were looking for someone and so were they and we met up with Chris Ward [Lamborghini Squadra Corse’s US motorsport manager] so it worked out nicely that we could partner at the start of 2021, and we have achieved great things together already.”

 

On top of their double title triumphs back home, K-PAX Racing also caused a stir on its one-off appearance at the Spa 24 Hours last season, topping the Superpole before unfortunately being demoted on the grid due to a penalty.

 

But the pace shown last summer has been on display for all to see in the team’s first full-season foray back in Europe, challenging for an overall podium finish at Monza and fighting for a top five in both Paul Ricard and the Spa 24 Hours.

 

Dropping other brand names isn’t something we generally approve of but to give you a better idea of just how varied the K-PAX Racing story is, you need only look at the type of cars used in GT competition.

 

After starting with a tried and tested Porsche, Haughey decided to take on the unique challenge of running Volvo S60s in the US-based SCCA championships. From then, stints with McLaren and Bentley followed before transitioning to Lamborghini machinery.

 

“People said we were a bit little bit crazy to bring a front-wheel drive sedan into GT racing and maybe we were,” said Haughey. “But this was pre-GT3, and you could do things with those sorts of cars that other teams weren’t doing, but we couldn’t take it into the GT3 era because the support you need for GT3 cars is totally different to what you needed for the Volvo.

 

“So, we switched to McLaren, and I also wanted to move things closer to my home in the south bay of San Francisco.

 

“And Darren got involved because he had just taken over Flying Lizard Motorsports and we wanted someone to run the team operationally, so the partnership and the plan to bring Darren into the team kind of suited us both.” Once his racing career came to an end, Law picked up the management hat with aplomb.

 

“I retired from driving, and I had the opportunity to take over the [Flying Lizard] team and buy it out and we decided to take it in a different route and become more of a customer racing team,” Law adds.

 

“Our whole history had been in GT racing, and we started off together very well and always had factory drivers and that was an important factor for us. Jim is in this business to win, and we want to be running up front and the best way to achieve that is to align yourself with a manufacturer.

 

“We’ve run Pro-Am drivers before but there’s always that additional risk when you run in the pack; if you’re up at the front, you’re there to win.”

 

And that’s precisely what K-PAX Racing has been doing a lot of in recent years, despite an up-and-down GT World Challenge Europe campaign to date where bad luck has prevented the factory driver crew of Marco Mapelli, Sandy Mitchell and Franck Perera from standing on the rostrum.

 

But it’s through this sort of adversity that K-PAX Racing has really flourished, and it has benefitted from an enthusiastic, and diverse on-event staff which hails from here and everywhere.

 

“I’m learning more about Europe and the people and the languages than I ever knew in the past,” Haughey says.

 

“We’re kind of the odd ball as there aren’t too many American teams racing in Europe, but we have a group of staff from the UK, the US, Italian, French, all coming from various countries and that’s a great thing because you can learn different things from different cultures and ways of working.

 

“Most of our staff are contract labour, who are with us on-site for the whole season, but we generally have only around six people working full-time at base,” Law adds.

 

“But that’s the great thing about the team, a lot of our staff have stayed loyal to us and have been with us for a number of years now, which is also very useful from a continuity perspective when we go racing.”

 

Urged on by the team’s press officer Tom Baker, we enquired about the origins of the K-PAX Racing name to finish off.“It stems from a series of books, which was subsequently made into a film, and it’s about this guy who claims he’s from the planet K-PAX, but nobody believes him,” explains Haughey.

 

“We needed a name for our team, and we wanted to come up with something a little different, something unusual, so we landed on K-PAX because nobody believed we could be a race team.”

 

The name certainly stuck, and success duly followed in abundance. In fact, you could even say that K-PAX Racing’s performances have been truly out of this world…