Who The Hell Is Tavo Hellmund, And Why Is He North America's F1 Hero?

TAVO HELLMUND, the lean, dimpled, gimlet-eyed Texan who deftly negotiates the uptight, ultra-sophisticated, almost sinister world of Formula 1 on a daily basis, recently quit chewing tobacco.

- Steven Cole Smith

One, it isn’t good for him. Two, his wife and kids didn’t much care for it. Three, it frees him from the need to, multiple times a day, search for an empty can in which to spit tobacco juice. Four, giving up a habit he had since college might make him look less like a typical Texas goober, all hat and no cattle, to the globetrotting zillionaires who play high-stakes hands in the game of F1.

But there is no Four; Hellmund doesn’t give a rat’s ass about appearance. He doesn’t wear a hat, has no cattle. What he does have is a nice touch for finding money, locating facilities, creating cooperation among those who seldom do, and delivering not one but two F1 races to North America—first, the U.S. Grand Prix at the Circuit of the Americas near Austin, Texas, a track he first sketched out on a napkin and named over the phone as he spoke with a friend.

Second, there would be no Mexican Grand Prix, staged with enormous success at the old, historic Autódromo Hermanos Rodriguez in Mexico City, had Hellmund not engineered the deal and overseen reconstruction of the track.

In 2015, for the first time since 1992, F1 returned to Mexico City. The crowd, 335,850 over the three-day weekend, was “like being at a football game,” said world champion Lewis Hamilton after the inaugural race. “The fans have been amazing. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

So that’s what Hellmund, 52, did to rate a Forbes.com profile headlined “Formula One’s Billion Dollar Man,” which is roughly the value of the two F1 contracts he secured. And he did it while operating well under the radar.