It was the thunderous engines. The reek of gasoline in the air. The surge inside his marrow as the cars blew by.
From the moment Dan Lacy stepped into Southern California’s Ascot Park Speedway at age 6, he was hooked on cars.
“It was the sights, the sounds, the smells that drew me in, and I found myself having a deeper and deeper passion for racing,” Lacy said. “The sights and sounds were just intoxicating to me.”
Now Lacy, who was also the vision and force behind the non-profit garage, Bob’s Auto Café, is streaming out his passion to the wider world in the new podcast, DR. Car Cast.
“It’s loud. It’s obnoxious. But it’s relevant,” the show’s tagline warns, and in it, he’s talking all things auto.
“That is,” Lacy says in the show’s premiere, “fixing a car, buy a car, selling a car. How do you drive it? How do you maintain it? How do you operate in it when other people are in the car? We’re going to talk to professional racecar drivers as well, along with industry professionals.”
Lacy comes to the mic with strong opinions informed by decades of living and breathing that motorsports life.
Ask him about electric vehicles, and he’ll give you an earful on their visceral inferiority compared to the full sensory experience of their petrol-powered predecessors, but despite the show’s “loud and obnoxious” disclaimer, Lacy’s easy delivery is almost soothing, and his takeaway is always anchored by Christian spirituality.
For over two decades, he ministered on the road as a racing circuit chaplain.
He started honing his chops on the mic when long-time announcer Tom Hnatiw invited him into the booth, and he quickly found his new role calling color during races also created an opening with drivers.
“When I moved around the paddock as the color guy, it was a whole different level of access to people,” he said.
Athletes who’d initially been hesitant to come to him began seeking council after tragedies on track and requesting regular pre-race prayer sessions.
While he split his time between the booth, the “pulpit,” and the track, also serving as a lane official and working the victory circle, his highest priority on the road always remained “taking care of the men and women of motorsports,” he said.
Dr. Carcast blends Lacy’s dual passions. Segments slip biblical metaphors into the auto news, widening the world of cars into a bigger way of being and seeing.
He makes sense of life through the lens of racing.
“We will go at the very end of the broadcast to what I call the glovebox, to open up that glovebox, to grab that book and to read a little bit of information from the scriptures that pertain to what we’ve been talking about in the broadcast,” he told listeners in the podcast premier.
The show, which launched in early May, is currently available on most major streaming platforms.
Though Lacy says DR. Car Cast’s broadcast schedule is still a work-in-progress, he’s consistently posting new episodes every few days, shifting focus between interviews, industry news and auto advice.
But, ultimately, it’s about entertainment.
“Our whole goal here is to educate and entertain you,” he said. “Let’s have a good time. Let’s talk about those things we want to talk about.”
Find out more about the DR Car Cast Podcast at drcarcast.com.
