The late John McGill, self-titled "General Overall Director" (GOD) at the Nelson Ledges Road Course for nearly 30 years, was a tireless worker and relentless encourager whose focus helped make a primitive and out-of-the way Ohio racetrack an SCCA® Central Division mainstay. Since its inauguration in 1975, the prestigious SCCA award named in McGill's honor has gone to Club standouts, the list of nearly 50 winners now a veritable who’s who of members who’ve given the Club its shape.
It’s a lengthy list which now includes 2023 recipient Bill Skibbe, a wizard (sans beard) of one of the more indispensable road racing specialties: Timing & Scoring.
Texas resident Skibbe mastered his craft in the heady “old days” of the 1970s and 1980s, when T&S was as much art as science. (Remember sweep-hand stopwatches and live lap charts?) Today it’s all but pure science – transponders, computers, sophisticated software, and more.
Skibbe has been a key figure in shepherding the dramatic transformation.
Mini Brakes, Blackhawk Burgers
Neither motorsports nor lap charts were on his radar when, nearly five decades ago, the native Illinoisan enrolled at the nearby University of Illinois.
“I put the blame [for my involvement] squarely on my mother,” Skibbe says with a wry chuckle. “I was home from college on Christmas vacation and my 1962 Mini station wagon needed some brake work, but parts for a Mini in the Chicago area in 1971 weren’t easy to come by. My mom, though, said, ‘Well, a lady that I work with – her son-in-law is fixing foreign cars in his garage. He might be able to help you out.’”
Indeed, he could.
“I contacted him, went on over and found him working on a Daimler 250,” Skibbe remembers. “He had tons and tons of parts for English cars, including the parts that I needed, and while I was there, he told me that some of his friends were putting together a Triumph Spitfire to race in Midwestern Council events. 'Why don't you come up to Blackhawk Farms sometime,’ he said, 'and you can crew with us, help us out.’”
The seed was planted. At the end of the school year, Skibbe drove out to Blackhawk, found the guys and started helping out in the paddock. Crucially to the Skibbe backstory, some of the crew were also involved doing Timing & Scoring, and one of them chirped, “You know, if you help out in T&S, you can get a lunch ticket for the concession stand – for a burger or hotdog, a bag of chips, and coke.”
To a starving college student, that sounded pretty good.
“A free lunch? Why not!” Skibbe says. "I started doing that, and that's really how I got involved.”
A Life-changing 24 Hours
Working the watches, tapes, and lap charts soon became Skibbe’s primary hobby, but his involvement took a more serious turn early in 1979.
"The Midwestern Council was a pretty busy group, so I concentrated on that for several years,” he recalls. "But in January 1979, the folks that I was working with – Don and Jean Parsons, who were instrumental doing Timing & Scoring in my area – plus my current wife-slash-girlfriend back then decided to go to the Daytona 24 Hour. We did a nonstop drive down there in the Parsons’ VW bus, got there in time for the worker meeting, and just kind of raised our hands and volunteered. Don and Jean knew the T&S chief, and we said, 'Hey, we're here. We'll volunteer.’”
In those days, scoring a 24-hour race with more than 60 cars in several classes was no job for the faint of heart.
“Back then it was all manual,” Skibbe explains. “They needed a whole bunch of people taping and a whole bunch of people collating the tapes and generating one accurate tape for posting. We worked in shifts, but probably had 30-35 people in that timing room at all times.
“Obviously [scoring] was kind of a slow process. We were hours behind by the time the race was well underway, and it took until the next day to generate a final result."
For Skibbe, who loved the challenge, it was the real beginning. Actually, two beginnings: His girlfriend Linda (”LJ”) went with him to Florida ("That was actually our second date”), they married soon thereafter, and they’re together still.
Texas Bound
At the end of the year, Skibbe left his job at an Illinois-based environmental consulting firm and moved to Texas, working offshore for a big construction company and joining SCCA’s Houston Region.
“By the early 1980s, we had graduated to electronic stopwatches, but we were still doing manual time cards,” Skibbe notes. “And we were also keeping live lap charts, which was one of the things I enjoyed doing – both LJ and I enjoyed doing that. That skill led to us getting hired by a local radio station to do a chart for them for their live broadcast of the [1984] Formula 1 race in Dallas."
Tired of his offshore gig keeping him away from home so much, Skibbe landed an office job with a geophysical surveying company which he kept for more than 20 years – even as his T&S “hobby" demanded more and more of his time.
“In the ’80s and ’90s, I worked a lot of races, pro and Club – Trans Am races, Vicki O'Connor's Formula Atlantic events, and a lot more. In 2000, when Championship Auto Race Teams (CART) was transitioning from using Swiss Timing to doing their own in-house stuff, Jeff Horton asked me about coming on board to manage that whole project. But I had already committed to being the chief of timing for IMSA and the chief for Trans Am in 2000. And I was still working at my real job. In Y2K, I was kind of a busy guy, yeah …
"That was a fun time. A lot of travel, but lots of great people, too."
(Bill Skibbe (center) hard at work "back in the day" at a pro race)
Analog to Digital
Skibbe was “instrumental in helping the Club navigate the transition to electronic timing” read the press release announcing him as the 2023 McGill Award winner.
“Yes, well getting it all together and getting everybody on the same page – that took a while,” Skibbe says. "But, yes I was involved as we first tried to get computerized.
"Back in the 1990s, when the Runoffs® was still at Road Atlanta, Rich Langford created a software program that he called Monitor. It would take both time and keyboard input and generate a result sheet,” Skibbe explains, adding that it became the mainstay of computerized Timing & Scoring for SCCA Pro Racing for many years.
“When transponders came along, Monitor was still the main backup. We kept it around until we had enough confidence in the transponder system to go with it standalone like we do now.
"Learning how to scale up was the real challenge,” Skibbe goes on. “Nowadays, you know, transponders can handle just about anything in motorsports. Look at the big running events – marathons, half-marathons, and 10Ks where they keep track of upwards of 50,000 people. It's just crazy that we can do that. It's all in the software, in the database."
(Bill Skibbe (left) has worked a fair number of professional races over the years)
Digital Fun and Games
Transponders, which arrived in the late 1990s, forever changed the T&S landscape.
“I believe the Washington DC Region was the first to take on using them,” Skibbe says. “They got a deal from AMB on a decoder and a couple of cases of transponders. Early on, we didn't have enough transponders to cover an entire field. The first year they were optional at the Runoffs, we had enough to cover maybe three race groups. And so we had to rotate – take the transponder off of one car and put it on another, on the group that was going to be queued up next.
"It was a major, major management issue,” Skibbe recalls, "because they wouldn't always wind up back on the same car. Marci Crawford from San Francisco Region did a lot of heroic work. She put a lot of effort in keeping things sorted out at the Runoffs.”
Eventually transponders became mandatory at the Runoffs, and more and more Regions got their own systems. Gradually, instead of having the Regions be responsible for the transponders, supplier AMB transitioned to an individual ownership model, selling the transponders to competitors.
The hardware engineering was superlative – "We still have guys who have their original transponder, one they bought 20, 25 years ago” – which led to the subscription model employed now.
"AMB [now MYLAPS] figured out that the average motorsports guy doesn't stay in the sport very long,” Skibbe says. "This is particularly true in motocross and karting. Now you can just pass it off to the next guy and he can subscribe to it.”
That, he says, gives the company some recurring revenue which helps support the database: "Racers being racers, we forget that, for the most part, we've never paid for the software that we use. And software's not cheap."
Skibbe became an AMB/MYLAPS employee, and served for four years as the company’s Pro Series liaison.
“That job suited me quite nicely because I got to go to IndyCar races and support NASCAR, IMSA, the Trans Am – all of it. But after a few years, I went back home to Texas. I tried to claim that I was semi-retired, but my wife said, ‘No, you’ve got to have a job.’ So, for a few more years I worked with some Houston Region friends (who had worked with me at CART/ChampCar) doing home network installations, security cameras, high end TVs – all that fun stuff.
“I had a good time doing that, but now I'm just living out in the country, trying to chill and be more retired than I was before."
Just-in-time Priorities
Though he claims to be scaled back, the “semi-retired” Skibbe still gets around.
“The SCCA Hoosier Super Tour and the Runoffs – I'm committed to doing those events for pretty much as long as I can. And then there’s the Shell Eco-marathon which [DC Region member] Carol Reber and I work together. It’s for high school and college teams. The students build their own ultra-high-mileage vehicles using any fuel, any power source. That's an event that we do on an annual basis.
“The other event I enjoy working at is called The Day in the Dirt. It’s a motocross event held on the Thanksgiving weekend out at Glen Helen [in California]."
These days, Skibbe especially enjoys mentoring and sharing his 44 years of accumulated knowledge.
“One of the things that I'm looking to try to do more of is visiting some lower-key SCCA events – see if I can lend a hand, share my expertise, helping others out a little bit. Diane Carter, who normally chiefs all the events in the Southwest Division, got me to take over a U.S. Majors Tour event at Eagles Canyon about a month or so ago, and it was the first time I'd actually been the chief of a non-Runoffs event for several years. I kind of had to prove to myself that I could still do it, keep track of everything,” he laughs.
(Bill Skibbe has won a number of awards through the years, including being named the Timing & Scoring Worker of the Year in 2017.)
“I like coaching, trying to get people pointed in the right direction. I may not be the best at it, but as long as I have the wherewithal to do a little bit of travel and interact with people, I'm gonna give it a go."
Meanwhile, there are four horses and four dogs waiting for him at home.
"When our daughter was nine years old, we bought her a horse, and we’ve had them ever since. Way back when we asked her, ‘Do you want a horse or do you want a go-kart?’ She wanted both, but that wasn't possible. But she showed horses all through school.”
She’s scaled back her involvement because she has her own daughter now, Skibbe says, though the whole family still enjoys the animals.
But when, though, Bill, do you ever have the time?
Final Thought: Recruiting Challenges
The technical issues with transponders have been largely resolved, but that has brought with it a new challenge in many areas of the country: recruiting T&S workers.
“Yeah, it's an issue,” Skibbe says. “Back when my generation got started, there was a lot of effort involved. It was a lot of work. But it was also a lot of fun – we aways had a good time. I remember doing the Runoffs back in the ’80s, with the scoring and timing folks on opposite sides of the tower. Back then, a whole bunch of retirees would come up from Florida to run stopwatches and do time cards for the qualifying days – 25 or 30 of them. More than 100 people would volunteer at the Runoffs for T&S.
“The timing crew was basically done after qualifying was over, so we would break out bottles of champagne and celebrate, and then the Floridians would go spend the rest of the weekend watching races. It was hard work, but everybody pitched in, and it was a good time.
"We still have fun, but there aren't as many people to have fun with,” he adds. Still, there remains a huge need for skilled bodies in the timing booth.
“Taping is still very important,” Skibbe says. "It takes skill and is our main backup system these days. And we often need people in the paddock, getting accurate data – mostly transponder numbers – from many of the cars.
"It's usually the first session of an event for every group that is the most challenging time. [Straightening all that out] is the most fun stuff to do.”
Photos courtesy Bill Skibbe and SCCA
