Ross Bentley

I love to write! Well, duh. I guess after eleven books, that's a bit obvious. Throw in my own weekly e-newsletter that's going on 6-years-old, contributing to a variety of other publications, and most recently, writing for Road & Track magazine, it's a good thing I enjoy writing every day. I could tell you all about how, at the age of five, I declared that I would be a professional race driver when I grew up, but that would mean that I grew up - and I don't feel like I have! See, I've spent my life doing what I love: driving race cars, coaching drivers, talking about driving, writing about performance in sports and business, coaching executives and business owners, learning, and writing about them all. Behind the wheel, after years of racing sprints cars, Formula Ford, Formula Atlantic, and Trans-Am, I finally realized my dream of racing Indy cars. And then, after a few years of struggling with underfunded and "under-competitive" Indy cars, I got the opportunity to drive prototype and GT sports cars in IMSA, Grand-Am and ALMS - winning the 1998 U.S. Road Racing Championship and the 2003 Daytona 24-Hour race. When I was ten years old, my best friend's older brother gave me a stack of Road & Track magazines, dating from about 1963-67. They changed my life. I really learned to read with these magazines, and the stories about Grand Prix racing, Le Mans, the Ford GT-40, Lotus, Jim Clark and the latest exotic cars kept me awake late at night. But the writers, like Rob Walker, Henry Manney, Dennis Simanaitis, Peter Egan...and more recently, Jack Baruth and Sam Smith, inspired me to learn to write. Imagine how I now feel contributing on a regular basis to R&T, and sharing the pages with Smith and Egan! I'm a "learning junkie." I've focused my addiction on sports psychology, educational kinesiology, neuroscience, human learning strategies and coaching for performance. As a coach, my drivers have won at practically every level and in every form of motorsport: road racing, oval racing, motorcycles, drifting, and even drag racing, in North America and around the world. I also do a lot of speaking engagements and seminars at car club events, working with both individuals and entire groups, drivers and instructors. Check out http://speedsecrets.com. Performance is performance. It doesn't matter if it's on the race track or in the boardroom. I've had a blast successfully applying the same performance-based approaches to the business world (coaching executives, managers, sales people, teams, etc.) that I do with drivers. Interestingly, some of my business coaching clients don't know a thing about my motorsport background - and it doesn't matter since my focus is on helping them improve performance in the workplace. Oh, I've recently begun learning to fly helicopters. Having co-authored a book on flying (Performance Pilot), flown serious flight simulators, and "played around" with airplanes, it's time to put my learning addiction to the test. While I live in the Pacific Northwest, my coaching and speaking engagements ensures that I travel a lot - something that I have a love-hate relationship with. Hmmm...maybe some day I'll share my travel stories... That's it. I gotta go do some writing.