One year ago, I wouldn't have believed I'd be writing an article for GARRA-fans, the website for fans of Grand American made by the fans of Grand American. But here we are anyway - all of the cogs, including all of us fans who love this form of racing.

With all the cogs surely marking the anniversary of Cognoscenti, I think its fair to look back at where the Cognoscenti and the uniting of the fan community. A few names will come up very often in this article.

• Tommy Brolsma - the really big and fanaitcal founder and webmaster of GARRA fans.com.
• Raimon (Ray) Lewis - One of the Cog's most prominent members, and a staunch defender of Grand American and what they do.
• Steve Gliddon - Veteran sportscar fan, and another fan of Grand-Am.
• Brent Jackson - Yours truly, sportscar fan and one of the first contributors to GARRA-fans.
• Dan and Jacob Dodge - A pair of great fans, and race reporters for the site. Jacob has cystic fibrosis, but he doesn't let it slow him down one bit.
• Tom Kjos - A writer for dailysportscar.com, and the man who could be credited with the beginning of the Cognoscenti, as he did give us the name and his constant pestering drove Ray to start organizing Grand-Am's fans.

The Daytona Prototypes (DPs) appear at the Rolex 24 Hours for the first time as competitors. They lose the battle to the reliable Porsche 911 GT3-RS run by Kevin Buckler and his Racer's Group team. Many fans laugh at the slowness of the DPs, and honestly, yours truly was one of them at the time. But opinions change, don't they?

Malcolm Cracknell's scathing preview of the Phoenix Grand-Am race starts to make many fans see that Cracknell and DSC in general are not too approving of Grand American in general. I come to their defense in a long, and somewhat heated debate with Ray and several other members of the Grand American fan community. Both of us bring up good points.

Ray comes under attack by Tom (TWK as he's more commonly known) about the DPs. Tom starts remarking to Ray about the fans of Grand American. Ray fires back at him, and several of us (including myself) drop in. Tom refers to number of us with the closely related views as the Cognoscenti. Ray smells this as an opportunity, and him and I along with a few others start getting the fans together. Other founder members include Derek Meluzio, Mark Sangster, Will Mitchell and Patrick Brown.

June 2003 - Tommy Brolsma is late to join the Cognoscenti, but has a big idea for it. He e-mails me and several other cogs about the idea of a website devoted to the Cognoscenti. All of us who knew about it at the time thought it was a great idea, and Tommy uses an older webserver to post the first GARRA-fans homepage. it goes online on June 28, 2003.

Those who know about it think it's good (Tommy is a skilled computer guy (Ed.- I have them fooled...), but we start having the idea of actually having a WWW address.

Tommy and member rodamerica's (Steve Gliddon) novel ideas of selling T-shirts in order to help Tommy make the money to get a domain name takes off. The money allows Tommy to register us for a domain name. After some debate, we choose the web address garra-fans.com.

The website of the Grand American Cognoscenti goes up in late October 2003. Several of us start making content for it, which includes my first two articles. I was new to writing such things, and I'm still no expert on how to write articles. But none of us are professionals involved in racing, and the website is the best efforts we can put up with in our spare time.

Our new message board from Proboards goes up with the new site, and we have plenty to talk about. Several new fans appear out of the woodwork on the Grand American message boards, and several of them are amazing to my eye. Paul Verlaine is the best example, and billnchristy is very good too. The cognoscenti has grown some since the beginning. But one of the best additions to my eye (and many others) was the joining of Dan and Jacob Dodge, a father and son team of absolutely fanatical race fans. I have big respect for these guys, and even more respect when I first found out that Jacob has systic fibrosis. Dan and Jacob are both avid supporters of the make a wish foundation, and most of the Grand Am competitors know them. Scuderia Ferrari of Washington know them especially well - the two of them were honorary members of the team at the 24 Hours of Daytona. (ed.- as well as the Crawfords…and many other teams. The Grand American community is awesome…)

Grand American itself knows of us, and likes our efforts to show that the fans do appreciate what they do. One of their directors, Mark Raffauf, came to the site and had a live chat with the member in May, which was a very interesting conversation. We've also had several competitors and even representatives from Riley and Scott and Fabcar become involved in conversations with us. It's quite heartening to see that the people that run the series and the people who build the cars and run the teams do care about what the fans think. That sort of mentality is hard to find in most other professional race series.

One year ago we had a bunch of internet weenies with a dream. Now we have a strong website that gets 40,000 hits a month, and a bunch of committed Cogs who love the racing and are all good friends with each other. Who knows where we'll be in another year? Well, maybe Tommy knows, after all he does run the site and is the de facto leader of the Cognoscenti. (Ed.- I don't know about that…)

Whatever is the future, I say bring it on. Grand-Am is prospering, with strong grids that only look to be getting stronger with time, solid teams and competition that is uncommon in sportscar racing. People have judged this series as unsuccessful. But maybe success, even in racing, isn't judged in dollars and cents. That's the beauty of American sportscar racing - it isn't the most popular form of motorsport or the wealthiest, but maybe that's because not all fans know much about it. Well-kept secret, if you will.

And to think, one Grand American-disliking fan started all this…

Brent Jackson
June 29, 2004

(Ed.- One more note from me…Brent has really improved as a writer in the past year, hasn't he? It's cool to see the growth.)

Got comments on this article? Agree or don't agree with Brent? Discuss it on the message board!