HOW IT STARTED
AUTHENTIC INSPIRATION. OUR ORIGIN STORY.
Growing up in Southern California, our founder Jill Beck was first exposed to motorsports at the age of nine when sports car racing legend Elliott Forbes-Robinson brought his #4 Budweiser Spyder NF-11 Can-Am race car to her elementary school. As it turns out, Jill and EFR have the shared home town of La Crescenta, California and Forbes-Robinson’s son was her classmate. From that point forward, motorsports would be a consistent theme in her life, whether attending NHRA races with her father as a child or volunteering as a member of the Porsche Club of America’s national staff as an adult. Turning the page on a successful design career, Ms. Beck began working in professional sports car racing in 2008.
In 2012, Ms. Beck was invited to attend the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America induction ceremony at Detroit’s historic Fillmore Theatre where it happened that Forbes-Robinson (a Hall of Fame inductee) was also in attendance. Thirty-three years after their initial meeting, Jill introduced herself to EFR and shared the tremendous impact that his 1979 in-person race car presentation to her 4th grade class had on her life. Amazingly, after their Detroit meeting, Elliott went home and searched through his personal archives, finding a newspaper article about that memorable November day and sending it to Jill (see below).
Today, The Race Day Foundation pays homage to that time by providing similar experiences to school-aged children via its STEM outreach program, bringing a state-of-the-art McLaren race car to school campuses and aiming to spark inspiration in the next generation of motorsports professionals. In an interesting coincidence, Ms. Beck and Mr. Forbes-Robinson are professional colleagues in the NASCAR-owned IMSA SportsCar Championship series - he as a Race Control judge and she as a team owner - bringing their story full circle.
Elliot Forbes-Robinson at Monte Vista Elementary School, November 1979. Ledger newspaper clipping courtesy EFR.
The Race Day Foundation with 4th and 5th Grade students in May 2023.
ABOUT OUR FOUNDER
Following an eight-year stint of leading the Racing4Research program for New York-based non-profit Children's Tumor Foundation, Jill Beck founded The Race Day Foundation in 2016, a 501(c)(3) for-good foundation with an unwavering commitment to offer powerful experiential activities that spark inspiration and kindle hope to deserving children and families across the United States. Leveraging her roots in the automotive and motorsports community, fundraising programs helmed by Ms. Beck have generated more than $4.5 million dollars.
With experience in IMSA, SRO World Challenge, NASCAR, IndyCar and even a little off-roading in the SCORE Baja 1000, Ms. Beck has been responsible for cultivating successful partnerships with drivers, racing teams, corporate partners, automotive manufacturers, and sanctioning bodies. In 2016 she became team owner of Compass Racing, one of North America's longest-running professional sports car racing teams. She was the first woman team owner to win an IMSA championship, with Compass Racing finishing first and second in the Continental Tire Sports Car Championship series TCR class. In 2021, she became the first female team owner to simultaneously campaign GT3 machinery in America’s top professional sports car racing series. That same year, Compass Racing ended the season by winning the Indianapolis 8-Hour, making history along with driver Ashton Harrison, as the first female team owner/female driver combination to win at Indy.
Jill Beck is a graduate of ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California, not far from where she spent her formative years. In 2015, Ms. Beck nominated and successfully led the winning campaign of NF Hero and philanthropic artist Jeff Hanson, recipient of The NASCAR Foundation's Betty Jane France Humanitarian Award.