Quick Stats: Sean Patrick Flanery, actor, author, Toyota Long Beach Grand Prix Pro/Celeb racer
Daily Driver: 2008 Toyota FJ Cruiser (Sean’s rating: 7 on a scale of 1 to 10)
Other cars: see below
Favorite road trip: White Sands, N.M.
Car he learned to drive in: 1977 BMW 530i
First car bought: 1976 BMW 2002
Actor Sean Patrick Flanery has two cars: His 2008 Toyota FJ Cruiser is his daily ride for practicality, but his dad’s handed-down 1977 BMW 530i will always take the top spot in his heart.
Flanery bought the 2008 Toyota FJ Cruiser new, originally for the martial arts academy he owns, Hollywood Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He parks it outside the school most days. “I got that as a company vehicle to wrap it in advertising. Once it became my daily driver, I’ve taken most of the advertising off, but it still says ‘Hollywood Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu’ on the side,” he says.
Flanery gives his Toyota two ratings. “As far as love affair, passion, it’d probably be a 6 or 7,” he says. “But as far as an engineering marvel that performs well on a daily basis, will never leave you stranded, and is just an AK-47 workhorse that no dirt can impair its mechanism, it’s a perfect 10.”
He says all he ever has to do is put gas in it and do routine maintenance. “That has never left me stranded. Absolutely nothing on that car has even given me a hiccup,” he says. “It’s nothing that when you go to the movie theater, you’re going to turn around eight times and make sure it’s parked correctly. But, holy sh-t, man, that thing is made well.”
Flanery tries to drive his 1977 BMW 530i as much as he can, weather permitting, since it’s not as great a ride on hot days. It was the first brand-new car his family bought back in 1977. When he was growing up, he told his dad he wanted to buy the BMW if he ever decided to sell it.
“My dad worked his way up selling medical equipment. His dream was to race cars, my mom got pregnant, so he quit that and became a scrub nurse. Then he started selling medical equipment and the first car he bought once he had a little bit of cash was a 1977 BMW 530i. I thought it was the god of automobiles. And to my opinion, it still is,” he says, with a laugh. “I was 12 years old and I learned to drive in that car. David Hobbs BMW showroom, I remember seeing it on the showroom in downtown Houston, Texas. Silver, red leather with a huge steering wheel. My dad would take me, and I’d sit in his lap driving, before I could reach the pedals.”
Flanery’s dad gave it to him in 2000, and he then lovingly restored it from the ground up. “It is pristine. It is still my pride and joy. I know it’s not worth a lot, but to me, I wouldn’t trade that for the world. It still has my dad’s license frame plate that says ‘PLF,’ Paul Louis Flannery on it,” he says.
The vintage BMW gets a perfect 10 for the nostalgia it holds. “As far as a love affair, it’s a perfect 10. Being a 1977, the cooling system isn’t premium and nor is the AC, so being a daily driver, I do have to plan my route accordingly. If there’s going to be traffic, I don’t want it to overheat,” he says. “So I’ll take side streets. I spend time in the BMW when I know I can plan my route.”
Flanery’s dad let him steer the wheel of the 1977 BMW when he was only 5 years old.
“My first football game, I had just had passed my sixth birthday. I played right near Sharpstown in Houston, Texas. It was a religion in Texas. I played since I was 5 all through to 17. Usually two teams a year,” he recalls. “In every conceivable car we came around, my dad would always let me drive. There was a tractor at my granddaddy’s house, so working the clutch on that. I’ve always been into anything that rolled, I would drive it or ride it, and my dad was right there to give me direction.”
Flanery also drove his dad’s 1970 Ford Torino when his dad would pick him up from practice. “I would sit on the console, steering when I was smaller, and then I would sit on his lap and he would let me drive that thing. I know it was against the law, but it’s kind of funny, my dad would have a Coors Light in a Styrofoam koozie, with me on his lap, driving home,” he says, laughing. “But not on a freeway — from the baseball diamond through subdivision roads. Completely safe.”
With his dad’s love of car racing, cars have been part of Flanery’s entire existence. “We would watch Formula 1 back when they used to play it on ‘Wide World of Sports.’ We followed racing forever,” he says.
After having lived the life of a movie star in Tinseltown, the old BMW is now back where it began. Flannery shipped the car back to Houston in preparation to move back to his home state soon. He says just starting up the automatic BMW, even today, reminds him of his dad.
“It’s just my dad. That car sums up my dad. It’s in his warehouse garage at his house, waiting for me to get to Houston right now,” Flanery says. “It’s got a BorgWarner automatic transmission in it. Three-speed automatic. But the 3-liter inline-six on that BMW sounds different than every other automobile in the road. It’s got such a deep throaty hum, I could hear that from six miles away.”
It is a temperamental car and took a bit of a beating in those searing hot Houston summers, compared to the relatively moderate dry heat in California.
“The car overheats if you’re in traffic at all. My dad worked his way up from nothing, and then when he started his own company, he could afford to go back to what he loves. So now, my dad’s retired and all he does is restore race cars,” he says. “My dad has an emotional connection to it, we both love it, but I think he really enjoys seeing me restore it and using it on the daily basis. Otherwise it was sitting in his garage and he has a brand-new truck that he uses to haul around his race cars.”
The two car enthusiasts enjoy taking a drive in the BMW once a year. The elder Flanery would fly out to Los Angeles, where his son would pick him up in the restored BMW, which now has 177,000 miles, and they’d drive to the Monterey Historics at Laguna Seca.
“It’s up Pacific Coast Highway. You pass Hearst Castle, all the way up to Carmel. It’s a gorgeous drive, and if you’re on the freeway the car runs beautiful,” Flanery says. “It’s only in stop-and-go traffic in summer heat that you run the risk of overheating the car. On this particular car, it was the cooling system that was inferior. It was built for European Autobahn.”
First car bought
Flanery worked various jobs and saved up money to buy his first car, a 1976 BMW 2002 for $2,600. It got him through college.
“I did everything,” Flanery says, with a laugh. “I was going to college, I had a couple jobs at same time – I started a mobile car detailing company, that said, ‘If your car is not becoming, it should be coming to us.’ I printed out fliers with three stages of car detailing, and I would put them on the windshield of fancy cars at parking garages.”
Slowly but surely, Flanery got calls from those fliers. “In my car, I had hoses, I had all the fixtures, I had Armor All, I had all the Carnauba waxes, and I would show up with my tool kit,” he recounts. “I would take the emblems off, wax it, put the emblems back on, depending on what stage of car detailing, and I made a boatload of money doing that. It was incredibly taxing physically.”
Creating his car detailing business was a natural extension for Flanery, who has loved cars since childhood. “My dad would take me to car shows. We’ve been a member of the BMW Car Club of America since I was a child. I remember waxing and cleaning my dad’s car, Q-tipping the AC vents, and removing emblems, and really cleaning it,” he says.
The car detailing business also gave Flanery the chance to work with expensive sports cars he didn’t have the money to own. “Part of my joy doing the car detailing company was having a guy with a Porsche 930 Turbo hiring me to detail his car and I could spend three hours caressing, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful asses on a car, the back end of a 911, just looking at the angles and the design of these cars that I never had a dream of owning on my own. So it was a wonderful opportunity for me. Even if I got to drive it for 18 feet to the water spigot, it was neat,” he says, with a laugh.
Even though becoming a Hollywood actor later enabled him to buy a Porsche, he didn’t. The ride he wanted wasn’t something that came with an expensive price tag. Being far away from his Texas home, the familiar sound, smell, and hum of his dad’s BMW was always the dream. “You can’t purchase the nostalgia that your dad’s car comes with. You can’t purchase that,” he says.
With money he made back then, Flanery also bought what would be the first car he and a friend put together, a 1967 Volkswagen Beetle they bought from parts at a junkyard. “We called it the Toaster because it didn’t have a firewall, so the car got so insanely hot with the engine, and the gas pedal was a metal pedal, we didn’t have rubber on it. In the summer heat, if you let it running too long, it would melt the rubber off the soles of your shoes. We didn’t have a window in it, so it couldn’t roll up. I can’t even believe that we used to drive that thing around and take friends in.”
Flanery’s dad taught him how to operate a manual transmission, as well as other skills that a former racer would likely pass down to his son. “He taught me heel and toe, he taught me some incredibly detailed parts of downshifting, upshifting, not just how to drive, but I was heel-toeing, double-clutching, before I even got on the street,” he says. “He taught me what trail braking was, apexing, late apexing, he taught it all. So I went to a race driving school straight from my dad when I was a kid. I learned the manual transmission with the VW bug, I learned apexing and steering and braking in my dad’s Turino, then with my dad’s BMW. ”
He keeps memorabilia from his dad’s racing days. “I still have some of the printouts for qualifying for my dad, racing at Sebring with Donohue and Roger Penske, and A.J. Foyt and all of these huge names,” he says. “All of these big names that stayed in racing and my dad couldn’t because my mom got pregnant with me, so I was kind’ve the catalyst to making my dad give up racing. It’s only fitting that we both love racing and now he’s come full circle and he restores race cars.”
After having been cast in “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,” one of his first big acting roles, Flanery’s treat car-wise was a new engine for the BMW 2002.
“The first splurge I ever did was I took my BMW 2002 and I brought it to Ray Korman’s in North Carolina. They specialize in 3-liter CSLs, BMW 2002s, and a lot of BMW equipment, and I had him build me a 2.5-liter motor from the Formula 2 series and he built me an engine with about 250 hp, original 2002 with just a 2.5-liter block and put it in that car. I’ve always been pretty scared that I would never get another job,” he says, with a laugh. “So I was always reluctant to drop a lot of money on anything.”
Favorite road trip
In the 1990s, Flanery had turquoise convertible 1965 Coupe Deville he took to White Sands, N.M., up Route 66 on the I-40 through Flagstaff, Arizona.
“I was an idiot and didn’t look at the weather, and it got down to minus 20 degrees and the heater went out. It sounds like a nightmare, but I stopped at a Firestone station along the way and I got some duct tubing, because the heater box had separated,” he says. “So what I did, I took two links of duct tubing from my heater box and I routed them out from underneath the dash and I piped them up through the legs of my jeans, so I had the heater flowing only directly into my blue jeans to make it into White Sands, N.M.”
The whole car was cold. The only heat was piped out through those two AC ducts. “They had wire in them so you could curve them and I steered them up my pant legs, and that’s what pretty much kept me alive in White Sands, New Mexico, because it was freezing. My finger tips were still cold,” he says, laughing.
Flanery was between jobs and wanted to take a drive. He had always heard about the natural beauty of the place, and he wanted to take some photos. One of the photos he took includes a doll he found there that is still in his possession today.
“I took four cases of what were cassettes back then, and I had a wonderful time,” he says.
He parked the car at White Sands one night and enjoyed the natural beauty. “It looks like the Bonneville Salt Flats. It’s perfectly white; it looks like snow,” he says. “And you actually get a whiteout, when the sun goes down and the sky stops being blue, it’s white as far as the eye can see. It’s amazing.”
Final Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach Pro/Celebrity Race
The weekend of April 16 will be the 40th anniversary and final year of the pro/celebrity race. The longest-running corporate-sponsored charity race was a chance for fans to see celebrities who enjoyed their inner speed demons, including George Lucas, Robin Quivers, Keanu Reeves, Adrien Brody, and Martina Navratilova, duke it out on the 1.97–mile street course in downtown Long Beach.
The celebs who were asked back to compete with the pros this year are all champs from previous years, including Flanery, Alfonso Ribeiro, Ricky Schroder, Dara Torres, Brian Austin Green, Frankie Muniz, and (former Celeb Drives) Adam Carolla, Brett Davern, and Rutledge Wood.
In this special anniversary of the race, and in light of the fact it’s the last time of the celebrity edition, Flanery feels privileged to have been asked back.
“This is honestly one of the most exciting events of my life, the top 10 events,” he says. “The first two celebrity races were punctuation marks on my life’s timeline, as far as wow, I can’t even believe I get to do this. And I don’t say to pump the race — it’s true.”
Flanery was able to just show up and be given a race-prepped car, as well as a track time at Willow Springs Raceway for intense practice sessions with (our first Celebrity Drive) Danny McKeever and his instructors at Danny McKeever’s Fastlane Race School.
“There’s thousands of fans in the grandstands. It’s amazing,” Flanery says. “And you have keys to a race car! It’s a gift and it’s a gift that I don’t take for a granted. It’s something that I love to do and it’s a highlight of my life. Absolutely.”
When Flanery started to read the email that asked him back to this final celebrity race, he replied without even reading it. “I said, ‘Yes!’ Before they change their minds. Before they find somebody else. ‘Yes, absolutely, confirmed!’”
Flanery won it the celebrity race in 1997 and the Pro race in 1998. “I won it 18 years ago. These pros, they’ve been doing it since they were 6 years old. What takes us four sessions to get up to speed, it takes them four laps. It really makes sense why they’ve been paid professionally. Against me is Al Unser, Jr, Jimmy Vasser, Max Papis, some incredible names. World champions. So it’s crazy when you see those guys. They just do it at a different level.”
For more information about the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach, please go to ww.gplb.com
“Jane Two” out April 5
This April will be quite a ride for Flannery. In addition to being in the final celebrity race in Long Beach, he is now an author releasing his first novel, “Jane Two.”
While Flanery has been in “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,” “Dexter,” “Powder,” “The Deadzone,” and in “The Boondock Saints,” he is perhaps most proud of his newest work.
For car lovers, the book includes detailed descriptions of Flanery’s own BMW and the VW “Toaster.” The book is about a boy with a crush on a girl in a small Texas town. It’s also a love letter to the protagonist’s grandfather, as well as to a precious time and place in the 1970s and 1980s.
This is a story Flanery has thought about ever since he was 8 years old. “It’s about me, something that happened to me when I was about 10 years old that’s forced me to come back to Texas and reapproach,” Flanery says. “It’s a road map to how I arrived to where I am today, whether that’s good or bad.”
For more information about the book and book signings, please visit www.janetwo.com
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