PULASKI, Va. – A third place finish in the IMSA GS series in 2019 was impressive for BimmerWorld owner James Clay. 2020 was
“We were supposed to win championships right? That’s what we do out there,” Clay said. “This was the year that we had everything put together to really have a pretty impressive program that pulled in a lot of results.”
But with only one race under their belt, events were quickly cancelled due to COVID-19.
“The problem is, if all this goes as planned, starting mid or late June, we’re going to be racing every single weekend until December,” he said. “I don’t know if we’re really going to jam all these things in, sometimes we jam two or three (races) on top of each other, so we’re going to have to start making choices of which series and which events we’re going to.”
Clay races in two series, IMSA and SRO, and with so many unknowns, it doesn’t make it easy to plan for what the future may look like.
“We’re all going to navigate this, there has to be some level of sensible. We can’t fit a years worth of activity in the last half of the year and have that make a lot of sense.”
Lots of NASCAR drivers have taken to iRacing to stay sharp. While Clay admitted that isn’t his thing, he has used to downtime to work on the parts and manufacturing side of his company, BimmerWorld.
"BimmerWorld has kind of had a shift of focus from all this racing to working on the parts business. We have BMW parts for road cars, the cars my mom drives, up to the race car I drive on the weekend."
“We’re still able to stay in business, keep our people employed. Really take the opportunity to enjoy this the best we can, enjoy the aspects of this the best we can, if its not the fans out on the racetrack it’s the people we spend our day with.”