Mike Hull could rest on his record of success and live forever as legend of Indy car racing.
Hull is in his 26th year with Chip Ganassi Racing as managing director of the organization’s INDYCAR and sports car operations, and has played a key role in many of its greatest moments – four Indianapolis 500 victories, 11 season championships and 103 race wins, 40 coming as driver Scott Dixon’s race strategist. Hull helped the team win eight times in the Rolex 24 at Daytona, including this year to give the Ganassi organization its 200th motorsports victory. And in 2016, Hull managed the Ganassi Ford GT effort that finished first and third in class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans.
If anyone has earned the opportunity to sit back and reflect on those triumphs, it’s the 68-year-old Hull. He’s a Southern California native who clears his mind from the pressure of big-time racing with a few hours on the golf course and a challenging workout in the gym. But he’s far from ready to leave his day (and night and weekend) job.
“I try to look after myself and work out a lot. I’m not exactly ready for ‘American Ninja Warrior,’ but that’s OK,” Hull said. “Golf takes my mind away from what I do every day. But after a couple of days of that, probably about the 12th or 13th hole on the second day, I’m already thinking about work. My back nine score on that day kind of falls away.”
Nothing lures Hull back to his job like the powerful will to win. But it’s not about him; it’s about accomplishing something as part of a team. When that happens, the euphoria stirs a fire within Hull to experience it again and never become complacent with success.
“Racing is a strange thing,” he said. “Everybody in this business works really, really hard. Winning is validation for how hard you work. The effort is the same but winning is really important. Probably more important than that, you should never take it for granted. You should always celebrate it because the race you just won might be your last, so you’d better remember that when you go to work on Monday. That's what drives me.”
Age is nothing but a number to Hull, especially in this sport. He’s 68 going on 38.
“You’re not really your real age or your body age,” he said. “You’re your racing age. Racing keeps you young and the people we have around here have a lot of energy, so as long as I have the energy they have, it’ll be great to continue to work for Chip.”
Ganassi hired Hull in June 1992, and has long praised Hull for his role in the organization’s success, especially in pulling together all sides of the team – from management to drivers, engineers and mechanics – to work toward a common goal. Hull, instead, credits Ganassi for establishing a culture of fairness, where no person gets more than anyone else.
“And that’s for any position on the team,” Hull said. “It certainly starts with the drivers because they are our quarterbacks, but they have to have equal treatment and they have to have equal equipment, and I believe they know that. We work really hard to do that. That’s the way we run all our teams; it isn’t just the INDYCAR team.”
The key to success, Hull says, is to put people in positions of their greatest strengths because when individuals perform at their peak, so does the team.
“It’s very difficult to make weakness stronger,” Hull said. “I think you have to work on the strength that each person has, and if the strength of all those people then blends together, you have a chance not to micromanage their effort. With people, you have to give them the flexibility and freedom to freely exchange information and work really hard on their individual crafts and ask them to take pride in it, support each other and rejoice with each other when they win.
“There are lots of ways to manage people, lots of ways to manage a business. The way I’m comfortable is for people to have a free exchange of information and rely on each other.”
Dixon raves about Hull’s ability to build a team and extract the best from those who work around him.
“That’s very, very important for this job – making sure that they’re giving their all,” Dixon said. “He has a keen eye and a ton of understanding with the job. He’s worked with many different people and many different series. He has an overall view of what’s needed and what’s expected. The racing strategy side is one thing, but (Hull has built) a team that has done so much. They just won their 200th race, they have 11 Indy car championships, the Indy 500s and winning at Le Mans. All of those programs are run in Indianapolis, and it’s pretty special.”
The versatility in Hull’s achievements stands out to three-time Indy 500 winner and four-time Verizon IndyCar Series champion Dario Franchitti, now retired but still serving as a driving coach for the team.
“To be successful in anything is tough. To be successful in multiple disciplines is difficult. To be continuously successful is very difficult,” Franchitti said. “One thing that Mike and Chip say all the time is that it's about the team, it's about the people. It is such a team sport, and that’s one of the things I feel very fortunate about in working with a great team like Chip Ganassi Racing. It’s good people and that’s what it takes to win.”
Hull knows his career may have been vastly different without people shaping him in the early days. Before he jumped to Indy cars in 1981 as chief mechanic for Arciero Racing, the foundation of Hull’s career goes back to 1971 when he began racing Formula Fords in Southern California. He cherishes that phase of his life because, in many ways, the pursuit was similar to what he does now.
“It’s about extracting the best out of yourself at the right moment in time,” Hull said. “I think we looked at what racing was all about, not necessarily in a naive manner but in a foundational manner by trying to apply the most with priority and getting the most out of it every day. That’s what we do here. It’s the same thing.”
Hull is grateful to have worked with noted race car designer David Bruns “when I was really young and dumb.” Bruns, who designed the ADF Formula Ford that dominated that level of racing in the 1970s, worked at Dan Gurney’s All-American Racers and designed the Swift Indy car chassis in the 1990s.
“Everything happens for a reason and people come into your life at the right time, but it’s up to you to realize that and be able to realize the fact they’re unselfish and they want to help you,” Hull said. “They see something in you that you don’t see in yourself. I live by that adage and I try to give back. I’ve been lucky enough to stay in this industry for this length of time by being shaped by people who made a difference for me.”
Bruns taught Hull that there’s no excuse for taking a shortcut.
“He never tried to solve a problem by copying how somebody else did it,” Hull said. “He tried to think through the problem to where, when you were done with it, you fixed it in a different manner and it never came back to gather you up again. He took me to the next level as far as making sure that you understood that you had to have everything covered, you had to do it the right way and you couldn’t take a shortcut. You had to define priority and you had to get results from what you did.”
From that beginning, Hull has built a resume stands alongside the great team managers and chief mechanics of INDYCAR. If you ask Hull about his record of success, he turns to the Ganassi team’s public relations manager, Kelby Krauss, for specifics.
“I have to ask Kelby all the time where we are on the stats because I have no idea,” Hull said.
More than his own numbers, Hull remembers the important moments for the team, like the final race in 1996 at Laguna Seca, where Alex Zanardi won with a bold last-lap pass of Bryan Herta in the corkscrew and Jimmy Vasser clinched the series championship – the first for the team.
“That was really a breakout year for us, as we proved that the hard work had moved us into a position to run two drivers in support of each other, with either able to win,” Hull said. “Also the way that we wanted to race worked well – unselfish share between not only the drivers, but the entire team worked.”
Chip Ganassi Racing’s first Indianapolis 500 victory, in 2000 with Juan Pablo Montoya, remains special “because of how much that event itself means,” Hull said. “Winning big events, they stand out.”
Forced to pick one, Hull’s favorite memory is the 2016 victory at Le Mans, not just because of what the team accomplished, but for what it meant as an American entry on a world motorsports stage.
“The race was over and the front straightaway was completely lined elbow-to-elbow, shoulder-to-shoulder with people,” he said. “We finished first and third in the race and the second-place entrant, the Ferrari, was from the United States. They raised three American flags and played the national anthem there for the podium ceremony. I’ll always remember that. It was very emotional.”
That’s what brings Mike Hull back to the race shop, and the racetrack, with as much vigor now as he had 26 years ago when this journey with Ganassi began.
“We’ve taken one year at a time for 25 of them,” he said.
And he’s not slowing down.