Bruce Flanders went into the family business – racing. His father raced, his brothers built motorcycle parts, his mother kept lap charts and times at the Catalina Grand Prix. As a kid and as a young adult, he was drafted into doing whatever needed to be done, doing the invisible, unsung work that makes racing happen.
One of the skills he picked up was the ability to tell the story of the race, and to tell the story of racing. And that led to a career as one of the world’s best-known racing announcers. His voice and his insights have been heard by race fans around the world. And that voice has become, inextricably, the voice of the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach.
Pictured is Bruce Flanders, left, interviewing auto racing great Parnelli Jones. (Doug Gifford photograph)
“I’ve had a great time,” Flanders, 70, told the Business Journal in a wide-ranging interview at his Southern California home. “I’ve announced in Canada a dozen times, I’ve announced in England three times, I’ve been to Germany. I traveled with IndyCar for two years. I’ve traveled with the Mickey Thompson show. I’ve worked for J.C. Agajanian. There’s not a lot of announcing in Montana or Idaho, but I’ve been to a lot of the other states – and I could be a Cheesehead, man. I love Wisconsin. The Milwaukee Mile – wonderful.”
Flanders’ father raced motorcycles before World War II, and served the nation with his engineering skills during the conflict. This led to a post-war period for the family that was profitable and that laid the foundations of Flanders’ career. His dad started making motorcycle handlebars. The Flanders Manufacturing Company in Duarte still flourishes. Earl also became the distributor for NSU motorcycles at a time when the German company was heavily into motorcycle road racing. Earl Flanders raced as well, and was the head referee at Bonneville Speed Weeks for years.
This was the environment in which young Bruce was raised. How was he not going to become involved in racing? But mother Lucile had laid down the law at home – no one got to race until they had a high school diploma in hand. Bruce complied, got his diploma, and four days later he was racing motorcycles.
He started racing desert events, but switched to speedway (a flat-track, short-oval form of racing for motorcycles with no brakes. No, that’s not a misprint. No brakes!) because “I found out that, if I raced speedway, I was never more than a quarter-mile away from an ambulance,” he said. And his father’s position at Bonneville led to a chance encounter on the salt flats with a fabled Japanese motorcycle tuner whose riders had debauched themselves out of a ride. Flanders got drafted into riding duty and took a land speed record at 141.733 miles an hour on a 903cc Kawasaki.
That speedway experience led to his first announcing job.
“They needed an announcer when they opened up Costa Mesa, Friday the 13, June 1969. They wanted my dad. My dad said, ‘I’m not doing that.’ So he recommended me,” Flanders says.
What does Flanders remember from that first show?
“Nervous. They were expecting a crowd, and a crowd showed up! And the announcing booth was right in the front row,” Flanders says. “And one promoter wanted the track surface to be rock dust. That’s the tailings left over from rock crushers. They are sharp little pieces that hurt when they hit you.
“It’s nerve wracking to put yourself on display in front of people. It’s not so bad when you’ve got props – and racing is a great prop. It’s that in-between time,” Flanders says. “And I didn’t know how to read other people’s copy. I didn’t know how to do a lot of things that I have since learned how to do.”
Flanders announced motocross and cars across the Southland. He was the voice of the Lions Drag Strip motocross course. He announced at the legendary Ascot Park and the much-missed Riverside International Raceway. He was in demand, and that led to his first gig with Chris Pook and Jim Michaelian of the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, for an event in Northern California.
“1978 was really busy for me. I had an off-road race in Fresno and then a Sunday AMA motocross event at Sears Point (a circuit located near Sonoma). I had an airline ticket, but when I got to the airport I found out that the airline didn’t fly on Sunday,” Flanders says. “My contact at the track told me to rent a car, he’d pay for it. I rented a Mustang convertible. Put the top down. Put the hammer down. I got to Sears Point real quick.
“When I arrived, they should have been done with practice. But they weren’t. The racetrack had gone through a change in management and Chris Pook and Jim Michaelian were the new managers. Nobody had booked a doctor. You can’t run the race without a doctor. The stands are full.”
Flanders jumps onto the mike and comes this close to uttering the cliché, “Is there a doctor in the house?”
“I don’t care if they’re a gynecologist from Novato; they’re not going to have to do anything except to say, yep, the leg’s broke, put him in the ambulance,” he says. Several doctors volunteer. The show goes off without a hitch – until Flanders goes to collect.
“I go in to get paid. There’s Michaelian. He says, ‘Fill out this form and I’ll send you a check.’ I said, ‘If you think I am going to go home now after racking up a rental car bill and everything, to wait for a check, you got the wrong monkey here, dude.’ He says, ‘Well, the cash has already gone to the bank.’ I said, ‘I know the sheriffs are coming in next to get paid, and you pay them in cash, so there’s enough for me.’ He says, ‘All I got are five dollar bills.’ I said, ‘They work!’”
Flanders got paid.
“A few weeks later, I got a phone call from him [Michaelian] about the Long Beach Grand Prix,” he says. “I was going to do the motorcycle sidecar race. When it came to Formula One, I’m to do the practice and the qualifying [runs]. There was a staff of radio announcers to do the big show. Come Sunday, the race starts, I flip the switch and head upstairs with a couple of my sprint car buddies to have a sandwich.
“All of a sudden, here comes Pook into the restaurant, looking around. He spots me. ‘Flanders, I need you to get down there and shut that ***** radio off!’” The radio announcers had found a sponsor. Nissan. I go back there. I’m not prepared. The first thing I do is say, ‘Apparently there’s been a technical problem.’ OK, so I lied. I was sharing the booth with the Longines Olivetti timing and scoring guys. And I just kind of leaned over and looked over their shoulders and said, ‘OK, so-and-so’s in front …’”
Since then, Flanders has been the voice of the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach. A serious COPD condition has slowed his announcing, but he’s still the voice of racing at tracks around the area three nights a week. He’s learned some valuable lessons from his career. He’s learned that it’s hard to interview even someone as interesting as Mario Andretti for eight car clubs in a day. And that television camera crewmembers save all their rental car bonus miles for the event in Germany, rent the fastest thing they can get their hands on, and blaze down the autobahn like their hair is on fire.
And he’s made memories, wonderful ones. Even the ones that aren’t about racing are spectacular.
“In 1984, they wanted us in the booth at 6 a.m., so I’m there at 6 a.m. on Sunday morning,” Flanders says. “The PA [public address] engineer radios me and says, ‘Send me a signal.’ I say, ‘What do you want?’ He says, ‘Talk.’ I can’t just talk. He says, ‘Music, then.’
“So I pull out my cassette recorder, plug it in and start playing Aretha Franklin. ‘Respect.’ Wonderful tune. Love it. And I take the headphones off, but I can still hear the song.
“I looked up at the Ramada which had a balcony. People were out on the balconies. Dancing. One of the five PA systems was not only on, but it was on and loud. And the staff wasn’t around to turn it down! The music was blasting uptown. I knew which hotel my wife was in. I looked, and there she was on the balcony. Then I looked more. There’s the whole Alfa Romeo team. They’re dancing. I thought, I wonder if there’s anything I should do about this. Suddenly the engineer comes back on. ‘Turn that ****** down!’
“That’s not a racing memory. But it’s one, just one, of the wonderful memories I have of the race.”