Peter Krause Makes Cars—and Their Drivers—Fast

Peter Krause arrived at the 42nd running of the Lime Rock Historics with an untested race car he bought from Facebook Marketplace. The little Fiat X1/9 had not turned a lap in anger for years—just a few laps during the “Test and Tune” day ahead of the event. And yet, the 65-year-old Krause went on to win all four of his races, against some excellent drivers and more powerful cars. How did he do that? 

For that, we have to go back a bit. . .

“I was a nerd, a geek, when I was a kid,” Krause says. “I loved electronics. I built Heathkit radios and got an amateur radio license when I was 11 or 12. I lived in Philadelphia, which had a wonderful public transportation system. I loved trolleys, trains, electric trains, and all of that. I rode the train every day to school.”

For most of his youth, trains kept him happy. Then, when Krause was 20, cars finally came onto his radar. “A buddy of mine’s dad bought a 530i BMW. We went for a ride. It was like a magic carpet. I don’t know if it was because we were listening to Dark Side of the Moon or the car, but it made an impression on me.”

It was just an impression. The hook hadn’t been set, and he had no need for a car. Then, in 1979, he headed off to college.

“I went to school in Western Massachusetts, and the only way back and forth to college was by bus, but I had had enough of buses.” Somewhat ironically, Krause bought his own bus—a 1967 Volkswagen, for $700. And with the help of a friend, he decided to rebuild the engine. In his dorm room.

Many things go on in dorm rooms, but Krause’s project might just have been a first. He did his best to be considerate of his fellow students, even though he was creating a fire hazard. “I was washing parts in pans of gasoline on the dorm’s roof so the smell didn’t overwhelm the hallway. I got the engine back together and it ran for about 20 minutes before it seized up tight.” Krause discovered his mistake, disassembled and reassembled the engine once more, then ran it in the VW for thousands of miles.

Krause’s dad had always been a car nut, a VW guy specifically, and during Peter’s youth had owned several. Perhaps that’s why the young Krause gravitated to that first bus, but it had really only been a mode of transport for him. In 1983, however, everything changed.

“I was home from school, and my dad brought home a black Rabbit GTI with a red interior. It was the coolest thing I had ever seen.” Now the hook was set. Soon he traded the bus for a Fiat 131, a car he loved because it had been a rally champion, and he would go on to own a BMW 2002 “and a few other cool cars.”

Eventually, however, Peter partied himself out of college and ended up back at home. His father was none too happy and, in a bid to get this newfound car thing out of Peter’s system, took him to Sears and bought him $500 worth of hand tools in order to prove how hard it would be to make a living as a mechanic working on cars. Big mistake.

“I was raring to go,” Krause says. “I put out a bunch of flyers at the colleges around my home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, advertising my services, doing oil and filter changes and brake jobs on the ground in parking lots. I only worked on Fiats and BMW, as those were the only cars I knew, but I had a good thing going. I would work in the morning and play arcade games in the afternoon.”

Krause happened to be at the local Fiat dealer, picking up parts in the middle of winter, when a manager asked if he wanted to work for them. It was a particularly cold winter and Krause had been doing valve jobs outdoors behind a radiator shop owned by some friends. Working for the Fiat dealer would allow him to work inside and have a lift to put cars on. Even though he knew Fiat’s life in the U.S. was winding down, he said yes—“It was a way to get warm.”

“I was having a lot of fun, but I wanted more. I started stalking locals who had exotic cars. I walked into the local Merrill Lynch office, where the head of the place drove a Maserati Ghibli to work every day. I sat down across from him at his desk and told him, ‘I want to work on your car’.” 

What Peter knew about the Maserati he had learned from reading Road & Track. “But I huffed and puffed and bulled my way in there, and for whatever reason, he threw me the keys. I thought he was going to say change the oil. He told me he wanted me to convert the car from an automatic to a five-speed. I jumped in the deep end. I found a guy named Kyle Fleming with a Maserati junkyard with all the needed parts. Three months later, I brought the car back with the proper number of pedals and a ZF five-speed. From there, I started working on all the Raleigh, Durham, and Chapel Hill exotics.”

Before long, Krause had moved on from the Fiat dealership and had a lift in an import specialty shop. There, he worked on all the Italian cars that came in. The scion of a local banking family brought in his Ferrari Lusso.

“He was the regional executive of the local SCCA chapter,” Krause says. “I did a track inspection on the car for an upcoming Ferrari event at Roebling Road Raceway, and he asked me if I wanted to go to a track event.” Krause, who had no track experience and no clue what a “track event” was, had to ask. “I found out it was where the club took their cars and ran around on the track. I said sure.” 

The next day, the Lusso’s owner showed up and told Krause to drive. “He promptly fell asleep in the passenger seat, and I drove for six hours to Savannah. The next day, he threw me the keys again and told me to go have fun.”

Krause got some sage advice that day at Roebling Road from Steve Barney, the local Ferrari dealer. It is wisdom he still follows today. “Steve told me, ‘You better treat this car like a gun, because if it goes off, you’ll wish you were dead’. This was always in my mind when driving other peoples’ cars. I’m amazed I got out of there in one piece.”

An experience at an Aston Martin club event at Lime Rock Park in the late 1980s sent Krause on a new trajectory. There, noted Aston vintage racers Jim Freeman and Tony Goodchild approached him after the first practice session. “They told me you really need to learn how to drive, because you are in way over your head. I thought I was fast and good. That was a dangerous combination.” Krause had been teaching autocross schools, “but I didn’t have any clue about how to drive on the track. So I was driving autocross on the track. My timing and input were all exaggerated. This was not a good thing.”

Bruce MacInnes, one of the great driving coaches, was at the Lime Rock event, too, and Krause picked his brain. “I asked him how I could learn to do this really well. He said, ‘Go to school.’ So I went to school. The next year, I returned and took the Skip Barber school, which opened my eyes. I realized there was an art and a science to driving.”

***

Throughout the 1980s, Nick England had been a pioneer in computer graphics and virtual reality. He was also one of Krause’s clients. In 1989, when England sold his company to Sun Microsystems, he suddenly had a lot of money to play with. He bought a lot of cars and asked Krause to go into business with him. Thus began Krause & England, which for nearly two decades was the largest independent Ferrari and Alfa repair facility between Washington D.C. and Atlanta. 

In addition to his role as a professional mechanic for many years, Krause also became an instructor for several schools that focused on teaching people to drive their street cars on track. “The more I could talk to people and sit in the right seat and instruct them, the more I understood and was able to coach myself,” he says. “I had to become an expert in vehicle dynamics and driver interface with the car in order to teach people to go faster—and so I could give the correct answers to questions. I became addicted to teaching others as much as I was to learning myself.”

In his own time, Krause navigated the vintage racing world in a Fiat 850 Spider, with good success. Enough, anyhow, that people could see how much fun he was having and asked him to build a few more. He ended up building 10 of them.

By 1995, he was working on purpose-built race cars. “I had a good client driving his 348 Ferrari on the track. He knew it wasn’t optimized for the track so he was looking for something different. I recommended the BMW E36 M3 Lightweight.” Soon Krause was on a plane to Charlotte to pick up one of the 85 Lightweights built and drive it back to his shop. “We did some race prep, and within a week, we had it on the track, and it was unbelievable. It was the best drug in the world. It did everything right. We raced that car all over.”

Over the next few years Krause got into small-bore Sports 2000 road racers and started competing in SCCA Nationals. “I probably had 60 of these cars. We would buy them, take them apart, get to know them, race them, and then sell them to people who would hire our shop to maintain them and offer track support.” A mild recession in 2001 had a big impact on Krause & England, but “it was the Sports 2000 that kept my business afloat.” Around this time, Krause also started spending much of his time at Virginia International Raceway (VIR), where he’d been hired as a consultant to help rebuild the track. 

England sold his share of their repair shop in 2004. Business was booming at the time, but Krause’s new partner wanted to grow it even further. “I was making more money than I had ever made in my life, so I didn’t understand why. I went to the track every weekend and enjoyed myself; why change? In the end, [the new partner] bought me out. This allowed me to start a new business without fear.”

By the time Krause sold his share, as well, it was 2007. There were certainly better times to start a business, particularly one based around driving and racing instruction at a track, as fewer and fewer people were pursuing performance driving and instruction. And where there had once been very few private coaches at the club level, quite suddenly, it seemed like every unemployed racing driver was now a coach. 

“There were a lot of young guys coming up and they were fun, but they didn’t have a broad database,” Krause says. “They were teaching their students how they would do it. They weren’t listening to their clients and addressing their needs as a driver. 

Krause’s approach? “I listen to my clients and identify what they need to do to attain their goals. I break it down to basics and refine the best execution of fundamental skills. Soon, they are going fast without effort and functioning at a high level, lap after lap.” Krause is adamant there is no one way to go faster—no silver bullet, no secret sauce, no magic. “Just put your head down and optimize everything you’re doing.”

Because he started out in vintage motorsport, Krause subscribes to a concept he calls “ethical racing.” In short, if you hit something or someone, you have made a mistake. “I also believe that racing or driving on the track is the highest form of personal responsibility.”

Despite an unsettled and increasingly crowded industry, Krause jumped in with both feet. He added to his credentials and attended the Skip Barber instructor training program, which opened his eyes to some skills he lacked. It took Tiger Woods, and a different type of driving, however, to open up his clientele. 

“Tiger Woods was quoted someplace as saying ‘I have a coach’. That was all it took—the world’s greatest golfer admitting that even he needs instruction to improve his game—and Krause’s phone began to ring off the hook. “You weren’t less macho if you asked for help,” he says. “It was all about driver development and driver optimization. There was a whole new dawn, and I used all the new technology to help with driver development.”

Though Krause initially found no real luck among various single-marque club members, members of the Porsche Club of America (PCA) were keenly interested in the training he offered. Even if, at first, he was not: “I had never worked on Porsches before. I didn’t like Porsche owners to bring their cars to my shop. I didn’t like racing against Porsches, because some of the drivers were real *ssh*les! And I know the joke: What’s the difference between a porcupine and a Porsche?”

But he also didn’t know of any other club that was more rabid about going to the track. “I went to my first Porsche event at Sebring in 2010 at the behest of [longtime Porsche enthusiast and mechanic] Chris Musante. He wanted me to help keep one of his best customers from crashing. If he crashed one more time, he would be out as a good customer. I started working with this guy, and he qualified 10 spots higher than ever. He was running a 997 GTR, which was like giving a big gun to a child. And he was on probation for hitting people.” Krause got the customer through the weekend without drama and drew much attention from people impressed by the result. “People came over and said, ‘The car’s not different, the driver’s not different, and the shop’s not different. What’s different?’ It was me.”

He was soon busier than ever, even too busy. Between 2017 and 2020, Krause focused his business on PCA club racing almost exclusively. “I hardly had a chance to drive myself as I was coaching at race tracks all over North America for over 200 days a year. I was getting burnt out.”

Krause stepped away from the track for a few years to focus on other pursuits, like sailing, but the phone calls started up again in 2023.

“I had decided I didn’t want to travel anymore. If people wanted to work with me, they had to come to me at VIR.” By this point, Krause had the luxury of working with who he wanted when he wanted. “This was my idea of success.”

He worked with overall winners at Sebring and class winners at Le Mans. Sending drivers out on track with all the latest data-acquiring equipment allowed him to focus precisely on what each racer needed to improve. “When they came back in, we’d do a major debriefing. I then gave them my suggestions on what would make them go faster with the least amount of added risk. It was an intense workout, and we worked incrementally through a series of exercises to build confidence so my client could be more comfortable and commit. That is the essence, in my mind, of how to go faster.”

These days, Peter has come full circle; he’s racing a Fiat again, most recently to those four victories at Lime Rock. “People said to me all weekend, ‘Wait a minute. You’ve been in a car that did 53-second laps at Lime Rock. Now you are in a car that does 1:04s’. I told them it’s no different. I am moving the car around just as much. It needs just as much care.

“I am reveling in driving a slow car fast. I have finally achieved a balance where I am so at peace with what’s going on that when I get into the car, everything falls away, the world is in complete harmony, and I can just drive.”

This year, at the Lime Rock Historics, Peter Krause was very much at peace. He negotiated traffic, drove smoothly just at the limit of the car without going over it, and showed what years of experience and teaching can do to put you at the top of the podium.