Photo by Stéphane Abrantes
(This story originally appeared on Marqued.com)
There’s a moment in the second episode of To Be an Asset, the docuseries detailing Antares Au’s transition from the world of high finance to a life of full-time endurance racing, in which he says, “We’re in the business of being realistic. Racing is the most brutally, factually realistic thing there is.” And the reality – the truth that he understands and now faces everyday – is that Antares Au is the weak link.
Au was not supposed to be here – at Spa, at Yas Marina, at Sepang – at all. Au did not grow up around cars, did not even get his driver’s license until he was 23 years old. Born in Hong Kong to a stable but not particularly well-off family, Au’s childhood idea of high-performance cars was limited to a Ford Cortina or a Mini Cooper. In his early twenties, a BMW 330ci represented the peak of his automotive aspirations. And yet, here he is, 45 years-old and a relative newcomer to a sport in which the best drivers – the ones lining up next to him on each weekend’s race grid – have been racing since before they could legally smoke, drink, or vote. Au has no illusions about his place in this world. If someone’s going to screw up, he knows, the smart money is on it being him.
Within his race team, and within the Asian Le Mans and Intercontinental GT Challenge series in which he races, Au is what’s known as a “bronze” driver. Endurance racing teams typically feature a trio of drivers who take turns piloting the car throughout the race, with the length and timing of each driver’s stints being determined by everything from strategy to basic human facts such as fatigue (only one driver, Eddie Hall in 1950, has ever managed to drive all twenty-four hours of the 24 Hours of Le Mans). In the Pro-Am (“professional-amateur”) class, this roster will comprise a so-called gold/platinum driver, a silver driver, and a bronze driver.
“Golds and platinums basically have a contract from a manufacturer and they are really good,” says Au. “A silver driver is one that demonstrates some aptitude but hasn't yet been picked up by the factory. The biggest variation always happens with the bronzes. Whether it's lack of performance, a slow lap, their mind not being in the right place, crashing into something or getting a penalty, the chances of a mistake are greater with the bronze drivers.”
This is the point where you, the reader, rightly asks why bronze drivers are on the track at all, if they are just mishaps forever on the verge of happening.
“If this was only about capability, there would be no need for bronzes,” admits Au. “At some point, the organizers and manufacturers realized, ‘Hey, if we have a professionals-only series,, who is paying the bills? We’ve got to find some stupid guy with some stupid dream and have him come in and pay something, so let’s change the rules to require one of these silly guys to show up and pay for something.’”
Just to keep things interesting, then, race regulations mandate that silver and bronze drivers must drive a certain minimum portion of the race – for example, 2 hours and 20 minutes of an 8-hour race. If a team fails to meet this minimum, they will receive a penalty and could be disqualified. For bronze drivers like Au, there is nowhere to hide: their skills and experience, or lack thereof, are on full display.
Au has no illusions about the odds that are stacked against him. If a person gets their FIA or IMSA racing license after the age of thirty, they are automatically licensed as a Bronze driver and, what’s more, there is likely a ceiling on their development. Au is thus a bronze driver and, if he does everything right and all the breaks go his way, he’ll be able to stick around the sport as a bronze driver for a long time, but that will be the extent of it. Some bronze drivers – American Ben Keating comes to mind – become very skilled drivers, even nipping at the heels of some silver drivers, but they are the exception that illustrates the rule.
Au’s backstory, his life before racing, gave him the means to join this world, but it also installed that ceiling on his development as a driver. Before the age of thirty, when those gold and platinum and silver drivers were honing their skills on road courses around the world, Au had other things to worry about. After graduating college in New York City, Au made a career for himself in finance, first at Goldman Sachs and then, beginning in 2006, at Lehman Brothers, where he found himself when the 2008 financial crisis struck. Once the dust settled from the collapse of the subprime mortgage market, everything about Lehman had settled into the past tense and Au found himself without a job. With Wall Street and the global economy reeling, Au and his compatriots decided to chart their own course.
“The only thing we could do was to come out and create our own business,” he says of Ares SSG, the asset management firm he and his colleagues established in 2008.
By this time, Au was beginning to dabble in weekend club racing. Nothing serious, just a little fun at local tracks with friends. In 2009, he dug deep into his savings and bought an orange, second-hand 997 GT3RS track car that had seen its share of hard track laps. Just dabbling, just having fun, he kept telling himself. Over time, however, as Au found himself drawn more into racing – and the time and travel commitments that come with it – he realized that he would have to make a decision. He had to choose a path.
“It's difficult to serve two masters,” he says. “I’d be in Asia apologizing to my European race team for not being there when they're testing and developing something. Similarly, when I'm racing in Europe, I'm waking up at 3:00 AM local time and apologizing to Asian clients for not being there. And by the time the European day starts, my battery would be at 50% and I’d be apologizing again to my team for not being on point because I'm knackered from dealing with issues in the office.”
And so, Au decided to retire from finance in late 2022. In making this decision to commit to racing, and to go racing full-time, Au knew what he was doing. Not that this made the decision any easier.
“Some industries, some careers, when you walk out, the door closes behind you, it locks behind you. Finance is one of those, it changes so bloody quickly. The moment you're out, you're out,” says Au. “But at the same time I had to ask myself, ‘Hey right now I’m 45. How many more years can I actually drive competitively?’ To be honest, as of now I'm not that good, but if I keep working at it, maybe I'll become half decent. And that's why sometimes you have to make a choice and live with the discomfort.”
Au was leaving the world of finance in which, every day, he experienced the rush of competence, the sense that his own shortcomings, whatever they might be, were manageable and need not interfere with the task at hand. He was replacing this world with one in which those shortcomings were suddenly central to an entire team’s aspirations, and, not infrequently, the demise of those goals.
“I'm stepping away from finance, something I know reasonably well, into another field that people make a career out of,” says Au. “There's a platinum driver out there who gets paid a contract on an annual basis to drive, and here I am paying to drive. There’s no better explanation of who’s good and who’s not.”
For his ride, Au chose to stick with Porsches, a marque he loves (just peek into his garage back in Hong Kong) but also one that gives him the competitive edge of familiarity. Choosing the right car, after all, is a decision based not just on horsepower figures or top speed on the straights but also on the workflow required to get the car on track and keep it there.
“I'm something of a boring one trick pony with Porsche GT3Rs,” says Au. ”A lot of amateurs prefer the Mercedes and, sure, it’s easy to drive but I don’t like the way it turns. Ferraris are nice but too expensive. I also have a preference to stay within an ecosystem of people and knowledge. If something happens in our Porsche, we’re probably only three or four phone calls away from a solution. McLarens have kicked our asses on a few occasions, but I wouldn’t begin to know how to solve a problem with them. Say the shift actuator fails on a McLaren: am I now just at the mercy of a huge impersonal corporation, or do I know someone who can say, ‘Oh, yeah, that may fail but try this or that and you’ll be okay’”?
Au’s Porsche passion starts, as the expression has it, at home, where Au’s Hong Kong garage houses a lineage of Porsche Rennsport royalty, including a 2005 Carrera GT, a 1974 Carrera RS 3.0, and a Rothmans-liveried 935/19, which sit alongside a roster of other RS models (a 993 RS, 991 GT3 RS, 996 GT3 RS, to name a few). His choice of track cars, then, was hardly a quantum leap in a different direction.
Initially, 2023 was to be a year of transition for Au, a shift from one life to the next, the year in which he would gradually transition into racing without too many expectations. But then, in early July, his team took home a fairy tale victory at the 24 Hours of Spa, a race that pits 70 entrants across five classes on one of Europe’s most iconic road circuits. Ahead of the race, the Huber team (with whom Au was driving), with their last-minute driver changes and mismatched fire suits, almost seemed out of place at the circuit and, yet, they put the car on the pole and then overcame weather, mistakes, and all the unforeseeable slings and arrows that make up a 24-hour race to take home the trophy.
“We took a rag-tag crew that was put together Tuesday before the [Sunday] race, put the car on pole, and won the class,” says Au in the second episode of “To Be an Asset, following the victory. “I think we did something rather unusual.”
“People might now say, ‘What more do you want? You have won Spa.’ But I tell people, ‘That was our fourth attempt at Spa. Do you know how badly we screwed it up the other three times?’ So does the win mean we’re good, or just diligent? What I take from moments like that is less the victory itself than it is the small wins, maybe in the form of me finally being able to take a corner flat or me not sucking so badly in an area where I had struggled, or building the right team and incentivizing and motivating people – all the things that, hopefully, add up to those trophies in the long run.”
As the 2024 season gets underway, then, Au has embraced his role as the weak link and he welcomes the discomfort that comes not just with finding his own limits as a race car driver but in charting a new course in life.
“2024 will be a year where I try a lot more uncomfortable things. We’re going to race the Nurburgring 24 hours, for example, and I hate driving in the rain, I hate driving on street circuits. Nurburgring is both and there will be these moments of discomfort, but I’m looking forward to seeing how I handle that. I'm a man of diligence, not of talent, so without repetition, I know the initial attempts will be kind of... Yeah, it won't be easy.”
The important stuff never is.