During the press conference in Cleveland at the stadium, I had a chance to speak with Ronnie Bremer in-between his interviews. Now, if you read this blog, you know I’m a Bremer fan. The kid can drive the hell out of that car. He proved it last year in the Atlantics and proved it by earning that spot on HVM. He deserves all the success in the world.
He had just finished doing a brief interview about funding. The reporter in question remembered asking Ronnie the very same question last year, but back then it was about his Atlantic ride. Ronnie made light of the situation to me afterwards, but you could tell it’s a serious issue to him.
The reason we spoke is that I simply had to thank him for attending the Fan Club dinner on Saturday night in Portland. Now, for those who don’t know, these are fan club dinners on Saturdays during race weekends with a Q and A with some Champ Car official or whatever. Well, that particular dinner, a team member of HVM was scheduled to attend. But, if you remember, Ronnie had a very hard crash that day, went to the hospital and the crew member was unable to attend the dinner on account of having to work ‘overtime’ on the very damaged machine. A perfectly understandable excuse, nobody would be upset about the situation and all would enjoy the other guest, have a nice dinner and discuss Champ Cars amongst friends. Well, wouldn’t you know it, Ronnie shows up as a replacement guest. The guy literally came from the hospital after suffering his biggest crash to date, the night before the race, to meet and chat with fans. How many people would have done that? How many would have done that after suffering a hospital-bound crash? How many would have done that the night before the race?

Anyway, I was thanking him and he told me basically that doing these things is important to him. He realizes that he’s not a household name (to which I added ‘yet’) and that he needs to get himself out there. He’s had to work hard his entire life and realizes how privileged he is to be in a Champ Car. He knows that Champ Car is a community and that the fans are very much part of it. That’s why he enjoys doing all these ‘pr’ things. He said to me “if I’m lucky enough to be in Champ Cars in 5 years, I’ll still be doing every appearance I can, I’ll still be doing the dinners and whatever I can in order to be there for the fans.”

And you wonder why I like him!