A Different Kind of Driving Range

Car Driven

Silikowski has been a car guy since his teen years in Cleveland, where he frequently entered autocross competitions. He earned undergraduate and master’s engineering degrees from Ohio State University—his goal, not surprisingly, was to work for an automaker. Instead, a chance meeting led to a job with the Cleveland office of Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). There he worked on large-scale corporate-change, supply-chain management, and company-turnaround projects—all the while acquiring a variety of sports cars.

He was eventually lured away from Andersen Consulting by a client, which started him on a career track in corporate management. One of his employers was a motorsports company, which gave him the chance to visit a number of automakers in the U.S. and Germany. During a trip to the Porsche factory, Silikowski was invited to meet with the Porsche Cup team owner and to drive a Porsche 911 on the famed Nurburgring Nordschleife racetrack—nicknamed “the green hell” because of its wicked twists and turns.

About 10 years ago, a recruiter offered Silikowski the chance to run a manufacturing and supply-chain practice for a major consulting company—which turned out to be an Andersen subsidiary in the Twin Cities. Silikowski agreed to return to Andersen, moving with his family to Plymouth.

His new house had a four-car garage, but even that wasn’t big enough to accommodate Silikowski’s three sports cars, motorcycle, and boat (not to mention the family’s minivan and SUV). As he hunted around for a storage location, a friend suggested the idea of building a motor-sports park like that being built in Joliet, a city about 50 miles southwest of downtown Chicago.

That facility, the Autobahn Country Club, which opened in April 2005, is the brainchild of Mark Basso. As a kid growing up in Illinois, Basso often played at his father’s golf club—but soon found that he was more interested in driving the golf carts than in golfing. As a grownup, he saw a market for a facility where owners of fast cars could safely (and legally) drive them at interstate-exceeding speeds. “We presold the concept with very limited funds and realized if we built it they would come,” says Mike Keck, Autobahn’s marketing and communications director. “And they have.”

The idea took off fast. Most of the Autobahn’s 300 memberships were snapped up just a few months after the facility’s opening, and the club earned ink in the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, and Car and Driver. The Autobahn Country Club isn’t the first facility of its kind—the former Virginia International Raceway in Alton, Virginia, which reopened as a driving “resort” in 2000, is considered the originator of the concept. But the Autobahn is a model of a different kind—a private car club that is close to a major metropolitan area and a critical mass of upscale car owners. The 350-acre Autobahn includes 3.56 miles of road-course track. Since the Autobahn’s opening, several similar facilities have been built across the country, and more are in development.

Silikowski says he “laughed about the idea” of opening his own motorsports place at first. “Then I thought about it for a couple of years,” he recalls. “About three years ago, I formed an entity to explore it.” One of his moves was hiring the Autobahn owners as consultants.

A key piece of the business plan fell into place as Silikowski hunted for a suitable site for the MotorPlex. (He ended up buying a 40-acre plot on Audubon Road in Chanhassen, just south of Highway 5.) He inquired about some land owned by an old business acquaintance, Ron Offutt, the Fargo-based entrepreneur whose holdings include large potato farms and numerous John Deere dealerships. Offutt’s investment group liked the “private garage-condo” concept and became a 50-percent financial partner in the MotorPlex venture.