Of Brains and Brauns

America’s most hard-core racing family produces one teenage driving savant and one teenage novelist.
BY JOHN PHILLIPS, PHOTOGRAPHY BY RICHARD DOLE
November 2006

The family Braun — parents Jeff and Diane, teenage sons Colin and Travis — live atop a 200-foot-tall mesa, some 30 miles south of Abilene. Spread below their 100-acre parcel of pinyon, prickly pear, and mesquite is a mocha-colored valley filled with longhorn cattle. Their view is unobstructed all the way to the next West Texas mesa, 25 miles distant. The nearest neighbors are two miles off, unless you count armadillos, white-tail deer, and rattlesnakes as neighbors.

The Brauns’ house is 185 feet long, a corrugated-metal commercial building that looks like a garage because it is.

Beside it rests a black trampoline that was recently picked up by a tornado and flung a football field away. From most angles, the property appears to have been recently abandoned. The only sound is the rush of hot wind, so omnipresent that a power consortium erected 35 wind turbines just north of the lot line. At night, the towers’ blinking lights look like the red eyes of giant lobsters.

Inside are shock-absorber dynos, a machine shop, tools, and shelves filled with go-kart parts and trophies. “Originally, this was my race-prep shop,” says the head of the family, Jeff Braun. “Diane and I built it 18 years ago. Our boys never lived anywhere else. We figured we’d build a real home elsewhere on the property. Never got around to it.”

Instead, the Brauns live in 900 square feet of the shop. It looks like the interior of a mobile home: three small bedrooms, one bath, and a kitchen open to the living room. The furnishings are modest, save a 30-inch flat-screen Sony that seems hard-wired to the Speed Channel. There’s no way to watch TV without disturbing every occupant in the house. “But if it’s racing,” says Jeff, “then that’s okay.”

Anyone brave enough to scale the Brauns’ locked gate and ascend their steep third-of-a-mile gravel drive — a group that so far includes only the meter reader and the FedEx guy — would likely surmise that these isolated occupants are survivalists or hermits. They’d be wrong. One of the four Brauns — 135-pound Colin — is quite a public figure. Fame befell his gangly, 17-year-old frame on June 29, the day he co-drove a 500-hp Riley-Ford prototype to victory in the Brumos 250 at Daytona, defeating such veteran grown-ups as Scott Pruett and Max Angelelli. He thus became the youngest winner in Grand American Rolex Sports Car Series history.

It’s tough to win any professional race and doubly tough for Colin Braun (the family pronounces its name “brown”). When he flew to a race, for instance, he wasn’t old enough to rent a car to get to the track. And then he was banned from three Grand American races this season when occasional weekend sponsor Philip Morris learned that a minor was competing in its events — technically not a violation of the Master Settlement Agreement but close enough to cause the jittery lawyers to bust open a pack of Marlboros. “I don’t smoke, but it felt like I’d done something wrong,” Colin says. “When it happened, I was tied for the points lead.”

When he was allowed behind the wheel, he struck a second blow for high-speed precociousness, qualifying his Riley-Ford on the pole at Barber Motorsports Park and bagging yet another win, along with co-driver Jörg Bergmeister.

The brain behind the Brauns is patriarch Jeff, 48, whose unruly shock of gray hair has recently started to resemble white straw. He graduated first in his class from the Milwaukee School of Engineering, then quickly found his métier on the race team of boyhood friend and fellow Wisconsinite (and 1992 Winston Cup champ) Alan Kulwicki. Running 60 races a year, Jeff encountered racer after racer who’d beg for suspension-setup advice. He obliged, evolving into what he now describes as a “fly-in engineer.” Since then, he has teamed with a who’s who of driving aces — from Michele Alboreto to Max Papis to NHRA Top Fuel driver Cristen Powell. He has prepped cars in IMSA, CART, IRL, Winston Cup, Trans-Am, Grand American, and ALMS. And for many years he was Andy Evans’s engineer, guiding the famously irascible owner’s Ferrari 333SP to a win at Sebring and a WSC title in ’95.

When he married Diane, Jeff promised she’d never be stranded at home — with good reason: The Brauns are at racetracks or traveling to racetracks 220 days a year. Colin attended his first speedfest — at Road Atlanta — when he was two weeks old. On the road, the Brauns live in a $399,000 American Eagle motorhome, covering 30,000 miles annually. “We’re gone so much,” says Diane, “it took me years to figure out which pets I could keep back home. I tried hermit crabs for a while. They died. Now I have an ant farm.”

Colin took a stab at kindergarten but missed 72 days, prompting a call from the principal. “He said, ‘Ma’am, you better try home-schoolin’ your young’un,’” Diane recalls. Since then, she has logged every single hour that Colin and his brother, Travis, 16, have studied under her tutelage, although, she’s quick to add, “by the time they were in the fifth grade, they were reading the textbooks themselves.”

The teenage Brauns claim to miss “real” school not at all. “I’ve heard things about gangs and shootings,” says Travis, who, at six foot one, is nearly three inches taller than his older brother.

“Anyway, all our friends were at the races,” adds Colin. “I didn’t know I was supposed to be playing with the neighbor kids. I never knew who the neighbors were. And then I had Travis to play with.”

When Colin turned four, he also had a Briggs & Stratton go-kart to play with, a gift from his dad. “He raced it in the dirt around the house,” says Jeff, “lap after lap, till it ran out of gas. I noticed he was making some interesting steering corrections.”

“That’s my first memory of dabbling in motorsports on my own,” says Colin today. “I remember that if I slid the tail around it would go faster, and I liked to kick up rocks to hear them slap off trees. I’d find the groove and steer the kart high, against the cushion. It would really go fast there.”

When the boys weren’t home schoolin’, they were behind-the-house schoolin’ — racing on their private one-third-mile paved road course, which Jeff constructed in 1996, having wearied of the dust the boys were kicking up. He enlisted IMSA Ferrari driver Fermín Vélez to help design the track — the hairpin is now the Vélez turn — and the layout comprises a diabolical blend of esses and sweepers. The course is configurable, with crossover points and turnarounds, as challenging clockwise as counterclockwise. Jeff can further customize the track by inserting hay bales, and he once even erected plywood walls along the berms so Colin could sample a facsimile of a street course.

As the boys whizzed past at 65 mph, father Jeff would stand atop a 10-foot scaffold and coach them via two-way radio. “I’d put out a pylon and say, ‘Make sure your right-front tire touches that on every lap,’” he recalls. And he organized formal drills. “First, I’d put Travis in front and have him do all sorts of blocking, to see if Colin could stay patient until he found a way around. And when he mastered that, we’d give him bad tires and say, ‘Now try to get past.’” In the process, the boys learned how to “dump” each other — slowing unexpectedly mid-turn, then suddenly standing on the gas. “The guy trailing is caught by surprise,” explains Travis, “and he’ll overreact on his braking.”

Colin began a routine of running 200 laps daily, pulling 2.00 g in several of the turns, which not only strengthened his neck and arms but also taught him to cope with the 100-degree Texas heat. “What I do is wear my Nomex suit, a plastic raincoat, and an Eddie Bauer goose-down parka,” he says. “I do 45 minutes, refuel, then another 45 minutes. I’ll lose three to five pounds like that. But it’s really helped, because I’ve never had to wear a cool suit in a car.”

At one point, Colin’s regimen became so fanatical that he’d drive the kart at night, navigating by moonlight alone. “I couldn’t see a turn till I was on top of it,” he says. “It sharpened my reactions — made me concentrate on where I was.” Sometimes he had to swerve to avoid deer, and he once nailed a sizable bat. “That night,” he remembers, “I quit early.” And there are other creatures he swerves to avoid. He points to a fist-sized gouge in one of the metal garage walls. “Shotgun blast,” he says. “Big rattlesnake.”

As Colin was racking up numerous go-kart championships, younger brother Travis gave it a whirl, too, entering a race in Denton, Texas. He was only seven years old, but he was also one of the Brauns. So he won. That unlikely victory, however, induced the most minor of thrills. Travis was already nurturing a passion that surpassed driving. “My father had equipped Colin’s quarter-midgets and karts with a Pi data-acquisition system,” he explains. “I asked for a laptop to download it. That really interested me. At first, I could read the data but not analyze it — you know, couldn’t put it into context. But then Colin began racing three or four different-class karts per weekend, so I began seeing a lot of data, and I’d go to my father and say, ‘Look here, an aberration, an anomaly. What does it mean?’”

“He got so he could confront Colin during practice,” Jeff remembers. “‘Oh, Colin,’ he’d sort of purr sarcastically. ‘You’re lifting off the gas again.’ And Colin would scream, ‘No way. I’m not!’ So Travis would show him the traces.”

By the time he was 14, Travis had so honed his skills that he was hired by a Star-Mazda team to download their data for a season. At age 15, he did the same for one of Kevin Buckler’s Grand American GT Porsches. And for 2006, he is working for SAMAX Motorsport, logging data from their Porsche 911 GT3. He further distinguished himself at the Daytona 24 Hours, where he computed the team’s pit strategies — fuel, tires, driver swaps — which he displayed on a board he’d made himself. “I’d learned from Dad,” he says, “that you can’t have guys always coming up to ask, ‘What do we do next?’ or ‘Do we pit or stay out?’”

If young Travis had apparently turned pro, his brother had long since made the transition. “It was when Colin was almost 14,” his father recalls, “and I’d hear him in his room, phoning suppliers and teams, trying to get an engine program and a fully funded ride. Growing up at the track, he was comfortable talking to adults. We had just spent 50 grand on his karting that year — and that didn’t include my time — and Colin knew we’d need $120,000 for the next step. So he was telling people what he could bring to the package, what they’d get in return. Right then, I realized he wasn’t looking at this like a little boy having fun. He considered it his living. Natural talent? Lots of kids have that. What you also need is organizational skills and a view of the big picture. By the end of his 13th year, Colin had developed that.”

The back-yard training sessions nonetheless continued. “In go-karts,” says Jeff, “there’s no aero, no downforce. It’s all about that contact patch and how well the driver feels it. When Colin came in, I’d say, ‘What was each tire doing? Describe it to me exactly.’ Man, he got good at that.”

“There was one drill,” Colin remembers, “where I’d go out for 15 laps and work the right-front tire real hard but save the left front. Or they’d put on one crappy tire, and it was my job to figure out which it was.”

On the few occasions when Colin raced poorly, he learned not to blame the machinery. “By then, if we missed the setup,” Jeff explains, “I’d say, ‘Well, that’s 50 percent your fault. Good drivers describe problems before the green flag. You didn’t do that. So you lose.’”

But he didn’t lose often. In his 14th year, Colin raced a 102-hp Formula Renault, his first drive in an actual car, not a kart. “You had to be 16 to race those,” recalls Jeff, “so we explained his karting record, and they agreed to give him a shot, but they gave me that look, like, ‘This ain’t gonna work.’ So we showed up at Willow Springs for the first race — a track Colin had never seen before — and he won. People were saying, ‘He must be cheating or something.’”

Remarkably, Colin won eight of the next 11 races — races in which he was now earning money instead of trophies — and that’s when the phone back home began to ring. Colin raided his dad’s Rolodex and had no trouble booking “informal talks” with Tracy Krohn, Robert Yates, Roger Penske, and Joe Gibbs.

“It’s no secret that my goal is Busch or Craftsman Truck, then Nextel Cup,” Colin says. “Thirty races a year, 43 cars in every field, the greatest possible seat time and action. That’s what I want. But my philosophy is only to take a ride where I have a chance to win. To run 20th in a Cup car every week, well, maybe I’d make a good living, but I’d rather stay in pro sports cars and win two or three races a year.”

Now in his final year of home schooling, Colin is contemplating college but worries it might derail his racing. “Ryan Newman earned a degree while he was driving,” Colin says, “so maybe I could, too. I need to learn the business side — negotiating contracts, investing, creating budgets. Wayne Taylor [2005 Grand American champ] helps me with that stuff now.”

For his part, brother Travis harbors exactly zero doubt about college, having made another 90-degree turn in his career. “What happened was, I went crazy over [novelist] John Grisham,” he says. “I read every book he ever wrote. And now it’s like I want to be John Grisham.” In this latest passion, Travis has immersed himself in typical Braun fashion, self-publishing a novel called The Silent Shadow. Now he’s putting the finishing touches on a work he calls The Secret Suspect, a “mystery novel in the Hardy Boys vein,” he says. Not long ago, his byline appeared in Formula Car magazine, and he’s had business cards printed that read, “Travis Braun, Freelance Novelist/Journalist.” His next goal: a journalism degree from Indiana’s Franklin College.

With two teenagers so maniacally focused and presciently capable, Jeff and Diane are occasionally accused of being “sports parents,” in the manner of Tiger Woods’s father and Jimmy Connors’s mother. “I’m not offended by it,” Jeff replies, “but it isn’t true. We never had a master plan like ‘Let’s create the next Ayrton Senna.’” But the question still gets asked: Which came first, Colin’s passion for racing or observing his successful dad at the track 220 days per year? And even if Colin possesses vast talent as a wheelman, it helps to have had his own racetrack and a father capable of preparing cars to win at any level of motorsports, a father on a first-name basis with the bulk of America’s wealthiest owners. Because Colin has been exposed to no other career opportunities, a case could be made that he has reflexively followed the lone path laid before him.

“All I can tell you,” Jeff says, “is that Diane and I don’t want to be his agent, his manager, his handler, his PR guy — none of that. It was always Colin who came to us and said, ‘Can’t I do more racing?’ When he makes a career move, we talk about it over dinner, then I advise him to ask Wayne Taylor. In my defense, I point to my other son and say, ‘Hey, I’m the world’s worst speller and have trouble stringing a decent sentence together, so there’s no way I forced Travis’s particular passion.’ Both boys are on career paths that I’m hugely proud of. Speaking strictly as a parent, how bad is that?”

Until Travis leaves for J-school, the family Braun will remain intact — Jeff as the engineer for Tracy Krohn’s Riley-Ford Daytona Prototype, Colin co-driving the second Krohn prototype, Travis logging data for the SAMAX Porsche, and Diane preparing hundreds of hot meals for what she calls “the three best men on earth.” And during the 145 or so days that the Brauns manage to sneak back to their windy Texas mesa, peace prevails. “For vacation,” Jeff confesses, “we tell people we’re in Hawaii or something, but we secretly come here and take the phone off the hook. The boys run the karts, we shoot traps, and we grill steaks over our own mesquite.”

“I get enough of the crush of people and noise at the races,” adds Colin. “Being home always feels like a reward.” Neither he nor Travis will mosey into Abilene to flirt with girls or feed quarters into video games or hang out at the mall. Neither, in fact, owns a car or even wants one, although Colin, who is said to be earning $75,000 to $100,000 this year, could afford quite a fancy ride.

“Sometimes I’ll drive Mom’s Expedition to help her get groceries,” he says. “Otherwise, I don’t like to leave the property. Travis and I just ride our bikes and ATVs on trails, and we have a big movie collection. Late at night, the four of us pick a movie, then Mom lays ’em on the table and rolls the dice. Whoever’s number comes up first, that’s the movie we watch. We’ll go to bed at maybe 3 a.m. and get up at 11.”

“Okay, so we’re a little weird,” Jeff concedes.

Nowadays, the elder Brauns sometimes discuss retirement. “When that day comes,” Jeff warns, “all I want to do is watch Colin race — not participate — then drive the motorhome to Travis’s book signings.”

“Hah!” cracks Colin, standing in the doorway to the windowless cubbyhole that is his bedroom. “Never happen. He’s a total action junkie. Can’t keep his hands off.”