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Mike Holland AKA: Crash
Mike Holland started his racing career at the age of 16.
At age 16, he was immediately racing go-karts in local and IKF events and slalom racing at organized parking lot events. His highest finish in points for the year was fourth in KT-100 for the IKF southwest region, and he won many slalom events in a heavily modified rotary powered 1974 Mazda RX-2.
At age 18, the minimum age at the time for competition, Mike immediately started road racing in SCCA Club events in the San Diego region. Mike won the regional Championship his first year competing and again just a couple years later. During those first few years of road racing, he met a group that was also racing rotary powered Mazdas on the national level. He was going to college for a degree in Mechanical Engineering and taking a job with these people, who had more work than they could handle, seemed only natural. While he continued to race regional events and an occasional national event here and there, it is his experiences with this other group, now known as Autocon Motorsports, where he really developed his fabrication skills.
Autocon Motorsports was on its way to winning numerous national championships and wins at the yearly national SCCA Runoffs in both GT-3 with the Mazdas and in GT-1 with an ex-Trans Am Ford Mustang. It wasn’t long until Autocon, which consisted of Mike Holland and only one other full time employee, were building their own Trans Am cars from the ground up and racing them all over the country in the Trans Am series.
Since, the San Diego region SCCA had largely faded into history by this point and the rest of his family had refocused on short track oval racing at the local track. While they were doing pretty well, and even winning local championships pretty regularly, Mike felt it was time to bring his experiences to the local track and see just how well he could do.
Mike built one car from the ground up and another he substantially rebuilt in order to field a strong two car team. This effort resulted not only in the largest margin of victory for year end points ever in that particular class in over thirty years of racing at that track, but the breaking of an 8 year old track record.
In 2004, that track was closed and San Diego now had no local auto racing facilities except for a very small dirt oval track located on an Indian reservation. This led to a dry spell when Mike ended up completing a mid engine buggy for desert use, building it from the ground up. Desert weekends were fun, but just not intense enough for his liking. He went and worked a couple races with his former employer, Autocon, as they had now advanced to doing American Le Mans Prototype type 1 cars and again it was a great experience.
Recently, he ended up making some suggestions to a group called Prototype Development Group that runs a mid engine V8 powered GTM style kit car from Factory Five Racing. This has also been a fantastic learning experience and with any luck, the opportunity will present itself to allow him to drive selected events this season, 2009, and into the future.
