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A Pair of Patricks, Dempsey and Long, Brush Off the Rust and Go Racing
It’s Friday night at the Ritz-Carlton Amelia Island in Northeast Florida, and everyone is getting revved up for the Concours d’Elegance on Saturday.
Saturday? Yes, it was supposed to be on Sunday, but a miserable forecast moved all the action up a day.
Tonight, there’s action here, in the Ritz’s biggest ballroom. Actor Patrick Dempsey and Porsche factory racer Patrick Long are on stage, bookended by big video screens, and joined by former racer Justin Bell, who will moderate their discussion. They’re going to show the four-episode documentary called Back on Track that features Long and Dempsey, both essentially retired from professional racing, jumping back in with both feet to compete in the new 2024 Porsche North America Endurance Challenge.
The video series was produced by Mobil 1 and Hagerty Media, and you can watch all four episodes, for free, on YouTube. The executive producer is Bobby Akin, son of the late racer Bob Akin, who won the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring three times, and competed at the 24 Hours of Le Mans six times. Bobby Akin is a television executive, specializing in motorsports.
The first episode covers the initial race of the series, at Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas. Episode two is the next race, at Road America in Wisconsin. Episode three travels to California, to Sonoma Raceway. And episode four returns to Circuit of the Americas for the six-hour finale, which means they’ll need a third driver, and they draft drifting legend Tanner Foust, a little out of his comfort zone. The episodes move along at race pace; you can watch all four in less than an hour. If you enjoy racing, the series is well worth watching. And yes, there are crashes.
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For 18 years, up through and including his retirement from full-time racing in 2021, Patrick Long was the lone American on Porsche’s global team of factory drivers. He has a class win at the Rolex 24 at Daytona, two at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, three at the Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring and three at Petit Le Mans. On the weekend he announced his retirement, Long and his team, Wright Motorsport, wrapped up the Michelin Endurance Cup title in the IMSA GTD category.
Long, 43, remains quite busy in semi-retirement as the co-creator of the traveling Luftgekühlt, an annual celebration of air-cooled Porsches that has become one of the most anticipated events of the year. And in 2024, he launched Air|Water as a standalone auto show in Orange County, California, open to all Porsches. He’s also under contract to Porsche as a brand ambassador and competition advisor. He was the right guy to lead this project.
As for Dempsey, 59, he discovered his love for cars as a child. “When I was a little kid, my dad, who sold insurance, would bring me a Matchbox car home every Friday night. I’d wait at the door,” Dempsey said in an interview I did with him 15 years ago. By then, he had already run the 2009 24 Hours of Le Mans in a Ferrari F430 GT, and he continued racing, notching podium finishes at Le Mans (2015), the Rolex 24 At Daytona (2011, 2015), and Petit Le Mans (2013, 2014).
Dempsey began racing in 2007 in the Panoz Racing Series, after wife Jillian gifted him with a three-day racing school at Skip Barber. Dempsey moved up to the IMSA series with Mazda in 2007. He raced a variety of cars, from a Lola/Judd Prototype in the American Le Mans Series, to an Aston Martin Vantage in the IMSA Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge, to a Maserati GranTurismo in the Maserati World Series.
But Dempsey always came back to Porsches, and the marque was an easy choice for this project—just four races in the U.S. Plus, the two Patricks knew each other well: Dempsey and Long raced together from 2013 to 2015.
What’s amazing is how much racing Dempsey managed to get in while he was starring as TV’s Dr. Derek “McDreamy” Shepherd, who appeared on the first Grey’s Anatomy, which premiered March 27, 2005 and, incredibly, just started its 21st season on ABC this month.
After a decade in the spotlight, Dempsey’s character was killed off on April 23, 2015. He missed racing in the 12 Hours of Sebring that year, which was held two months earlier, because they were still filming, wrapping up his participation on Grey’s Anatomy. When his finale aired, Dempsey and Long were in Bahrain, testing the Porsche they’d be racing at Le Mans in June.
It was also the year that Dempsey signed on to run the full 2015 World Endurance Cup series, which has a brutal travel schedule, starting in England and ending in Bahrain. Dempsey managed to make seven of the eight races, for the first time winning a six-hour race, on a wet Fuji Speedway in Japan, co-driving with Long in a Porsche.
That was in October, and the season was almost over. Dempsey knew it was time to take a break. His plate was overflowing with acting and producing jobs, and racing most weekends. Something had to go, and for a while, it was racing. “I needed to be present for my kids and for my wife and be home because I was just gone all the time,” Dempsey said in an interview with Racer. “It had taken such a big toll, and I was exhausted.”
Dempsey continued to work, but spent some time relaxing. And then came the movie Ferrari, where Dempsey was cast as senior Ferrari factory driver Piero Taruffi. The director, Michael Mann, allowed Dempsey to do his own driving in the film, and that re-lit the fuse, and got Dempsey and Long talking about a relatively low-impact return to racing.
The Porsche North American Endurance Challenge was made to order—just four races, all in the U.S. The first three are 60 minutes, then the six-hour finale. The two drivers, already comfortable sharing duties in the same car, were also familiar with the car they’d be using: a Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 RS Clubsport.
Long reached out to one of his favorite Porsche teams, Wright Racing. If they couldn’t get team owner John Wright on board, well, it might not happen. Wright Racing was pretty busy in 2024: They supplied a Porsche race car for the movie F1, starring Brad Pitt, at the Rolex 24, with Long doing much of the stunt driving in a camera car.
There was a sigh of relief when Wright signed on. “That was one of my requirements,” Long said after the four episodes aired at the Ritz-Carlton, “when Patrick started asking how we were going to do this.
“I really don’t know how I feel about getting back in any race car at a competitive level with modern drivers, and one of the things I needed was to have full trust in the team. And we all knew each other. That was the only way we could get up to speed so quickly, because we really didn’t test before that first race. With just four races to get him to the place he needed to be, we needed that team behind us. And they delivered.”
Both of the Patricks had seen the documentary series, but to watch it on a big screen with an enthusiastic crowd was a bit different.
“It’s interesting,” Long said. “To watch it, up on the stage, with such quiet tranquility, was different. I think the message and the journey that Patrick wanted to put out there, that this isn’t just about gas and brake and going fast, but about that battle he has with the pressure and the mental challenges of this sport—yeah, I think it came out really well.”
“You look back and you wish you had better results, but I was just really grateful to be back on track,” Dempsey said. “To be with Patrick, and the team, and to be able to have that opportunity—I feel really grateful for it.
“I was really lovin’ it. Even the bad days were good days.”
I like Dempsey. He reminds me of say Paul Newman who became a driver and owner . He also freely admitted that his celebrity status gave him the means to an end that others lack. Use it if you got it, more than fair. Seen the recent series. Nah. Too scripted, too docudrama than documentary. Switch channel.