Adam Adelson’s life is never boring or – perish the thought – slow. Every day is a mashup of skills and responsibilities: Driving a car as fast as possible while also leading the organization that puts the car on the track.
Meet one of the newest team owners in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship – a 28-year-old mechanical engineer who didn’t set foot in a race car until 2020 and didn’t officially own a team until a few months ago. It’s only been a little more than four months since his acquisition of Wright Motorsports was made official prior to Long Beach after being completed.
He’s learning quickly, Adelson says, while constantly looking forward.
“There’s more in the future, absolutely,” said Adelson, who completed the purchase of Wright Motorsports in April and co-drives the team’s No. 120 Porsche 911 GT3 R (992) with Elliott Skeer in the Grand Touring Daytona (GTD) class. “I’m not anywhere near where I want to be as a driver. I feel like I’ve just effectively established my foothold in the world of motorsports, but I’m not anywhere near where I need to be in terms of performance and capability.”
In one role, he’s dealing with finances, customers, sponsors, logistics and other demands of running a race team. In the other role, he’s making a Porsche fly.
“The thing that I would say is most difficult is coming to the racetrack and turning off my owner brain and turning on my driver brain,” Adelson said. “It’s a totally different mindset. I’m thinking organization-wide and how to progress Wright Motorsports as a whole when I’m off the track. When I get to the track, I have an agreement with my team: I’m a customer of my own team right now. When I’m a driver, I’m just a customer.”
A good customer at that. After this weekend’s Michelin GT Challenge at VIRginia International Raceway, Adelson and Skeer are sixth in the GTD championship point standings, with a top finish of second in the Rolex 24 At Daytona in January with Ayhancan Guven and Tom Sargent.
He also leads the IMSA VP Racing SportsCar Challenge Grand Touring Daytona X (GTDX) class in a second Porsche, Wright’s No. 24 Porsche 911 GT3 R, with three wins and one race weekend to go.
“Super excited for the last two (events),” Adelson said. “We had a great show-out at Indianapolis last year where we won (the TireRack.com Battle on the Bricks), and the doubleheader for me (with the two series) at Road Atlanta will be a new challenge.”
If he’s a natural at it, Adelson said, he’s a natural who works constantly to improve.
“To be fast in a race car, you have to have some level of natural ability,” he said. “Maybe it’s something you were born with. Maybe it’s something you developed growing up – playing sports or video games or having good hand-eye coordination. However that talent came to be, there’s an aspect of natural talent to it.”
That applies to the business world, as well. Adelson is the son of casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, who died in 2021, and philanthropist Miriam Adelson, who bought a majority stake in the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks from Mark Cuban in 2023.
“I’ve been around the world of business pretty much my whole life,” Adam Adelson said. “I understand the basics.”
But running a team as accomplished as Wright Motorsports is a complicated enterprise, especially when you’re employed as the talent. Adelson credits Bob Viglione, a longtime leader in John Wright’s operation who was named chief operating officer after the sale was announced.
“It’s relying on the experience of those in the organization who have been there for longer than I’ve been in the sport,” Adelson said. “I’m learning from them and taking their advice.”
He also relies on Skeer, who has been his coach and co-driver since 2020. Then a fresh graduate with a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Southern California, Adelson left his research and development job with a defense contractor to focus on racing.
“Once I made it out onto the racetrack, I realized that I actually had a little bit of talent,” he said. “I found a passion for the sport itself instead of just the cars. I decided to try to pursue it.”
At its heart, the pursuit emanated from his childhood.
“I was a speed demon type of kid,” Adelson explained. “Anything that went fast, I was absolutely enamored by. You combine those things, and there’s only one place you can end up, and that’s the world of cars. I actually started racing to try to develop a better understanding of what drivers feel in terms of car dynamics and what they experience and to further my knowledge in that capacity about the automotive world.”
The engineering background intertwined with the racing obsession. After all, if you know how a vehicle works, you want to know how to make it go fast.
“It wasn’t all that difficult for me to understand,” Adelson said. “I knew what the car wanted and how the car should be positioned and placed and what the driver needs to do with the car to make it fast. Then it was just about correlating my ability and inputs and what I’m feeling to my understanding of the physics. I feel like that gave me a big advantage.”
Plenty of responsibility, plenty of passion. Adelson wouldn’t change any of it.
“It is always a pinch-myself moment,” he said. “It’s a privilege to be able to participate in this sport. I think all of us here should feel very lucky that motorsports is as healthy as it is. We still have screaming engines and awesome wheel-to-wheel racing, and all the fans. There’s such a renewed following over the past few years in this sport.”
That renewal pushes Adelson – and his new team – to go even faster.
IMSA Wire Service PR
