Chelsea-Area Motorsports Leader Looks Back on GM Racing Legacy

From a rustic cabin on 10 acres near Chelsea, Herb Fishel has plenty of room to think.

That matters these days. Fishel, who spent 40 years at General Motors and retired as executive director of GM Racing, is working on his memoir and looking back on a career that helped change how one of the world’s largest automakers viewed motorsports.

“I cherish the environment, the quietness, and, most importantly, that think time,” Fishel said.

His reflections come at a timely moment. The Motorsports Hall of Fame of America announced April 17 that Fishel has been named to its Class of 2027 in the Business category. The class will be formally inducted in March 2027 in Daytona Beach, Florida.

For Fishel, though, the story has never been only about trophies, famous names or horsepower. From the beginning, he believed racing could be a proving ground.

Fishel said the vision dates back to 1957, when he attended NASCAR races at Bowman Gray Stadium in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and decided he wanted to work in racing. That idea followed him through four decades at GM: racing could help automakers develop technology, test durability and demonstrate performance.

Fishel graduated from North Carolina State University with a mechanical engineering degree in 1963 and joined GM that same year. But he quickly realized his enthusiasm for racing was not widely shared inside Chevrolet.

“I think it took me about two or three weeks to realize that the high majority of people in Chevrolet didn’t share the same level of enthusiasm I did for racing and horsepower,” Fishel said.

At the time, GM’s corporate policy prohibited participation in automobile racing. Fishel described those years as a clandestine era of backdoor operations, secret memos and carefully guarded factory connections.

That mystery only added to racing’s appeal.

“When something’s mysterious, the interest is multiplied,” Fishel said.

Inside GM, Fishel became what he called “basically a salesman within the company promoting motorsports.” He said he could not win support by simply repeating the old phrase “win on Sunday, sell on Monday.” He had to make a stronger case.

His argument centered on products, people and image. Racing, he said, created pressure that ordinary development work could not.

“When the green flag drops on Sunday, the race starts whether you’re ready or not,” Fishel said.

For a manufacturer, Fishel said, the role was to enable success through engineering, components, wind tunnel work, safety testing and technical support.

“Basically, a manufacturer is an enabler,” he said.

Fishel said his strongest selling point inside GM was not only what racing could do for cars, but what it could do for people. Engineers, marketing employees and others who worked in racing learned urgency, preparation, timing and decision-making under pressure, then carried those lessons back into the broader company.

“My strongest selling point was the impact on the people working on a race car,” he said.

Safety also became one of the efforts he is most proud of. Fishel said racing had a “tarnished history” when it came to driver safety, and GM could contribute through cockpit design, structure, seat belts, crash testing and other safety development.

Today, he said, the expectations around racing are different.

“Before every race, the family of the driver is there with three little kids standing there,” Fishel said.

Fishel also helped push changes inside GM itself. He credits executives Lloyd Reuss and Bob Stempel with supporting his work when racing budgets and staffing were under pressure.

“Every day it was guerrilla warfare for departments trying to take my budget, take my head count,” Fishel said.

Over time, the culture shifted. Fishel’s career included leadership roles in Chevrolet Racing and GM Racing. That shift became formal in 1982, when GM changed its policy and opened the door to a more modern racing era.

His list of career highlights is long. Fishel was inducted into the Specialty Equipment Market Association Hall of Fame in 2005 and the Corvette Hall of Fame in 2015. He received the International Drag Racing Hall of Fame Founder’s Award in 2018. In 2003, one of his final GM duties was driving the Chevrolet SSR official pace vehicle to start the Indianapolis 500.

Fishel called driving the pace vehicle at Indianapolis the fulfillment of a boyhood dream.

But from his cabin near Chelsea, the part he keeps returning to is not the résumé.

“At the end of the day, it’s all about people and people relations,” Fishel said.

That is the story he is trying to preserve in his memoir: the people who backed him, the engineers who learned from racing, the drivers and teams who pushed technology forward, and the long effort to make motorsports part of GM’s future.

After a lifetime spent making the case for motorsports, Fishel is still thinking about what racing can teach next.

Featured photo: Herb Fishel sits in his home office surrounded by racing memorabilia. Photo courtesy of Herb Fishel