Heyward Wagner is turning the venerable Sports Car Club of America into tomorrow's sports car sanctioning body.

The Sports Car Club of America was founded in 1944 by returning US servicemen. They created the club to celebrate their passion for the small, quick sports cars they had encountered in Europe. The diminutive MG, Triumph, and Jaguar cars formed the core of the membership's collection, and ownership of a sports car was required for membership.

Fast forward 81 years, and SCCA is now one of the country's most prolific motorsports sanctioning bodies. From the traditional sports car road racing to time trials, hill climbs, enduro racing, Track Night, autocross, rallycross, and road rallies, SCCA offers a menu of events like no other organization. The club also carries the weight of those 81 years of history. SCCA has gone through profound changes in its mission and orientation, from a purely amateur racing club to some of the most consequential professional racing series in history, including the Can-Am and Trans Am series, and Formula 5000.

Today, Heyward Wagner is the vice president of Experiential Programs for SCCA, but the title doesn't begin to describe what he does. Simply put, Wagner spends his days as SCCA's chief visionary, figuring out where the grassroots sports car enthusiast is headed, and developing the events that will bring those enthusiasts into SCCA as members and participants. Wagner is himself a second-generation SCCA member and racer, so he's been steeped in the culture all his life.

(Editor's note: In full disclosure, the interviewer is a second-generation SCCA member and formerly served on the club's Board of Directors.)

PRI: We're both second-generation SCCA people. How did your family find its way into this club?

Wagner: There's a bit of mythology that my conception may have been inspired by a track worker shortage in the late 1970s, but I've not been able to confirm that definitively [laughter]. My parents were heavily involved in flagging and communications throughout the 1960s and spent some time in Europe. They came back to the Atlanta area in 1970, just when Road Atlanta was opening. There was a big influx of folks who were interested in flagging because of the Can-Am race that had happened that year.

In that era, SCCA had a lot of disparate ways of doing things across the country. So when they started bringing drivers from all over the country together for the early National Championship Runoffs, they needed to have consistency in flagging and communications. My dad was the first national administrator for flagging and communications, and he and my mom together wrote the first flagging manual. I was born into that.

PRI: You didn't always work for SCCA, though. How did you come back to the club?

Wagner: I had been super involved in the club in my 20s. I was a corner captain at the Runoffs, and I was a Solo [Autocross] chair for the Atlanta Region. I was going to Solo Nationals every year and really chasing championships hard. I kind of reached a burnout point, from exhaustion, financial, everything. So I just picked up and went to the San Francisco Bay Area and got a job working for a ski and snowboarding store. That gave me ski passes to all the Tahoe resorts. Then in 2013 I was at Solo Nationals and ended up talking to John Walsh, who was the chairman of the board at the time. I sent him an email a couple of weeks later, where I laid out how I saw the club's focus on road racing as an elite activity, while the Solo Nationals had the message that everybody's welcome, and 10 times as many people were competing in Solo.

I ended up giving a presentation to the Board where I talked about my experiences in outdoor recreation. I talked about how summer camps and ski resorts and race tracks all have fences built around them. They all have one way in and one way out. You sign a waiver; you pay some money to get in. They're all completely elective activities, but race tracks are the only ones where people seem to leave being unhappy. People leave summer camps and ski resorts smiling, having had a good time. But race tracks, it seems like we send a lot of people home frustrated, upset, angry, bothered, about something they didn't like. That was really true of volunteers, and it was true of drivers.

Then I posed the question to them: What if we got as serious about recreation as we are about competition? What if we made room for the idea that you can have fun? I was actually hired on April Fool's Day 2014 with no job description, no title, no department, but with this idea that there was something experiential that I was going to chase after that would be fun.

PRI: You're introducing all kinds of new programs and new events, partnering with other sanctioning organizations. Why is this happening now?

Wagner: I think there's a lot of whys. One is that markets and desires change. The focus of interest in the 1960s, '70s, maybe even the '80s, was that winning was really important. So recreational competition was really in alignment with how we valued ourselves and our time as a nation. But I think that in this era, recreation for the sheer sake of enjoyment is far more common than recreation for competition.

There are some crystal-clear examples of that. I enjoy mountain biking. I live in the Asheville, North Carolina, area, and I wouldn't say that everybody I know rides mountain bikes, but a whole lot of them do. It's much more of an experience base than a competition base, so it's a pretty big shift in society. I think that for SCCA to be relevant, we need to respond to those shifts.

There's also a reality that 30, 40 years ago you couldn't get on a race track in the United States unless you were racing. There wasn't an opportunity to just go enjoy the drive. When there's only one pathway in, and as barrier heavy as racing is, a lot of people are just not going to make that effort.

Finally, SCCA is not the only way to get on a race track anymore. So for us to remain relevant in the marketplace, we need to sell things that are desirable to the marketplace. Racing can be that, but a track day, a time trial, something you can do in your everyday car, that's much more access friendly. We need to continue to recognize that these things are changing and fluid, and we need programs that represent the realities that we live in.

PRI: How did you come up with the experiential name, and what does an experiential event really mean?

Wagner: Experiential in the wider world refers to events, programs, and things where it's about the experience rather than the result. I really felt like that was what we needed. We needed to signal a different way of doing motorsport business, a different way of offering club activities.

To me, experiential means...

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