If you’ve gone to many road races over the past forty years, you’ve surely seen the white Porsches with red and blue trim and the name Brumos. You’ve seen them win, you’ve seen them lose, but you have never seen them in disarray. Or displaying less than first-class-and-then-some preparation.

Brumos Motor Cars is a Jacksonville, Florida, dealer network with franchises for Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, and Lexus. The number will grow to five with the completion of a second Lexus outlet and another Mercedes-Benz dealership.

The Porsche dealership may be the best one in the known world—especially if you are buying a Porsche to drive, not to be seen in. Hurley Haywood, the nation’s premier endurance racer—five Daytona 24 Hour wins, three Le Mans 24 Hour wins, and two Sebring 12 Hour wins—is vice president of Brumos. Since 1986, Haywood has given personal instruction to new Porsche buyers, and he is chief instructor for the Porsche Driving Experience.

The Brumos Porsche and racing traditions date to the mid-1960s, when racing enthusiast Hubert Brundage owned the dealership. In 1965, following Brundage’s death in a racing accident, Peter Gregg purchased Brumos. Gregg, a talented driver with a sometimes difficult personality, was also a talented businessman who demanded perfection.

One of Gregg’s early moves was to hire Bob Snodgrass as his lead manager. The Brumos racing colors can be traced to Snodgrass.

“Peter asked me if there was one thing I’d change about the team, what would it be,” Snodgrass says. “I told him that I thought an American team, even an American Porsche team, should run in red, white, and blue.”

Gregg established himself as a major road racing talent in the ensuing years. The Brumos cars with the number 59 became fixtures in U.S. closed-wheel road racing. Gregg notched a number of class wins in endurance races, and he and Haywood were co-champions of the 1971 IMSA GT series, their first series championship. Haywood won the series championship the next year.

In 1973, Gregg won both the SCCA’s Trans-Am championship and IMSA’s GT, repeating the twin-cup feat in 1974 and winning the IMSA GT championship in 1975. He won it again in 1978 and 1979 (as the Winston GT series).

Along the way, Gregg won four Daytona 24 Hour races. Gregg committed suicide in 1980, apparently despondent over a physical condition that would have prevented him from racing.

But the Brumos colors went on. Gregg’s wife, Deborah, raced with credibility, and the team also won two Bridgestone Supercar championships.

Today, Snodgrass runs both the dealership and the racing effort. A tall, outspoken man in his sixties, Snodgrass does not suffer fools gladly; in fact, he refuses to suffer them at all. He masterminds the two-car Brumos team in the Rolex Sports Car Series, but he is in the dealership every day.

Watch Snodgrass sitting on his team’s scoring stand in the Brumos pits, and you see a man who loves the sport of road racing. The team, with Haywood in one of the seats, ran fourteen Rolex Series races last year and will run the full series this year as well. Haywood, who is almost sixty, ran his first Daytona race—an SCCA regional—when he was twenty-one. He likely will no longer run full seasons, meaning that at some not-too-distant point there will be another set of changes at Brumos. But the betting odds say the forty-year tradition of excellence at Brumos Racing will continue. It always has.