Quick Stats: Alfonso Ribeiro, actor/host/racer in Long Beach
Daily Driver: 2011 Mercedes-Benz S550 (Ribeiro’s rating: 7 on a scale of 1 to 10)
Other cars: see below
Favorite road trip: Los Angeles to Rhode Island
Car he learned to drive in: 1988 Chevy Camaro RS
First car bought: 1988 Chevy Camaro RS
Alfonso Ribeiro, actor and host of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” and last year’s winner of the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach Pro/Celeb race, will reunite with his former “Silver Spoons” buddy, Ricky Schroder, as well another good friend, Sean Patrick Flanery, at tomorrow’s race.
This year’s 40th anniversary is a bittersweet one for the pro/celeb race because it will be the last celebrity race held during this popular race weekend, as Toyota moves its headquarters from Southern California to Texas. It is the longest-running corporate-sponsored charity race. To some fans, the pro/celeb race has been the most interesting feature of that weekend; it was what drew non-auto racing fans to the races at Long Beach each year to see celebrities race. A Grand Prix representative told the Press-Telegram that other possibilities for a competitive event are being explored for next year.
The end of the pro/celeb race marks the end of an era for a race that came out the same year as “Battle of the Network Stars.” It was “Dancing With the Stars” before its time, a place to see celebs learn a skill and compete on a level playing field.
Fans could relate. They knew the celebs would have to learn the skill and practice, and they would watch for natural talent or fear for the amateur racers. There was always the anticipation on how they would do on a dangerous 1.97-mile street course because they weren’t pros, though they did practice at Willow Springs, taught by Danny McKeever and his instructors. Some celebs even had to be taught how to operate a manual transmission.
“I think it’s super sad,” Ribeiro says, who was also a past winner in “Dancing With the Stars.” “I think that the idea that this has gone on for 40 years, especially for the fans at Long Beach to no longer have the ability to come on a Saturday and watch the pros and celebrities compete against each other, will absolutely be sad. It’s certainly wonderful that they asked me to be a part of it, but I’ll miss just even paying attention to it, whether I’m in the race or just through the years I’ve always paid attention and watched.”
This year’s pro/celeb race is unusual because it features only return champs, and they will race with the pros in that race. The return champs this year include Adam Carolla, Brett Davern, Rutledge Wood, Dara Torres, Frankie Muniz, Brian Austin Green, Chris McDonald, Al Unser Jr., Max Papis, Eddie Lawson, Jimmy Vasser, and Ken Gushi.
“If I went down to Long Beach, I would absolutely watch the pro/celebrity race,” Ribeiro says. “It’s going to be sad, and they’ve done some amazing things because obviously all the money they’ve given to the charity Racing for Kids has been fantastic, and I’m so proud of Toyota for doing that for the last 40 years.”
Ribeiro raced with pal Schroder in 1996. “Going up to the track, again, this has been a lot of fun, hanging out with him, and getting in the car again, and competing a little bit. I’ve got two really good friends in the race. Sean Patrick Flannery and I, we have been best buds for a couple decades now.”
Ribeiro raced in 1994, 1995, 1996, and 2015. Flanery, a previous “Celeb Drive” subject, raced in 1997 and 1998.
“Sean and I in the ’90s used to have our own race team together, so we’ve done a lot of racing together; it’s kind of equally as fun to be back in the car racing with Sean and with Ricky,” Ribeiro says. “We ended up doing a bunch of celebrity races back in the mid ’90s, and that’s how we got to know each other.”
Since Ribeiro competed last year, he might have a slight advantage over his fellow celebs. “I got back into it last year, and last year they put me in the pro category,” he says. “I won the pro division and overall in the race. I was in the first place by the end of lap four, starting 30 seconds behind the celebrities. I caught them basically in four and a half laps.”
It took Ribeiro just a few laps at Willow Springs this time to brush up on the race-prepped Toyota Scion FR-S. “Up at practice I was a bored by the middle of the second day of practice,” he says. “To me, driving is simply about understanding the vehicle. Your talents are how fast you’re able to go. It’s going to be based on your talent and how good you are in the vehicle. All you’re trying to do is learn the vehicle and learn what the vehicle does and how to manipulate it best, so you’re trying new things in different ways to manipulate the vehicle. Once I got to a point by the second day, I had already figured out how to manipulate the vehicle the best that I could, so at that point I was just doing laps to do laps and just have fun, and I still had a blast. But I wasn’t going to go any faster.”
For Ribeiro this race has also been an opportunity to spend time with friends who enjoy cars. “Most of the people in the race this year are people that either I met or have seen or hung out with at different times,” he says, “so there’s a large contingency there of good friends.”
Daily Driver
Off the track, Ribeiro enjoys driving his 2011 Mercedes-Benz S550, which he rates a 7 out of 10. “I think it’s an amazing car, and obviously it’s a few years older now, but I love the car so much. I felt like there was no reason to get rid of it. I work so often, and I’m always so busy that the car has such low miles. I was like, ‘Why get rid of it?’ ” he says.
It only has 30,000 miles on it. “I haven’t gotten a new one yet just because it feels like it’s brand-new,” Ribeiro says. “A couple of friends of mine had one, and I was like, ‘Wow this is actually a great car!’ So I drove my friend’s vehicle a few times, and I went, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got to have this.’ ”
He says he likes the “full-luxury” quality of the S550, especially in 2011 when it had cutting-edge technology in it, as well. “As a family guy, I certainly was getting ready to have my two little ones again, and I wanted something that I could still fit everybody in,” he says. “Rather than getting a two-seater car, I wanted to get a full family mobile.”
At the time he had a two-seater BMW Z4 and wanted a ride that could be fast enough for his tastes but also have enough room for a car seat and “still be able to feel young and still fun at same time,” he says.
Ribeiro still doesn’t get to drive it that much, especially since he’s often out of town, which included doing a show in Connecticut for almost a year. “So that’s why it has such low mileage,” he says. “And the full family mobile, I’ve got the Denali XL for when the whole family is together. So I switch up my driving with other vehicles, but I love to drive it. It’s just a great car.”
2014 GMC Yukon XL Denali
Rating: 9
“For why I need it, it’s a 9,” Ribeiro says. “I need a big vehicle that when I have the in-laws in town or my family in town, with the kids, we can all fit in it,” he says.
Ribeiro likes to take the family on road trips in the Denali. “We have a lot of friends in San Diego, so we drive to San Diego all the time, and I wanted a vehicle that you could still put all your luggage in and still have all the kids and all the strollers and everything and not feel tight,” he says. “I think the Escalade version of the XL is super, super, super nice, so maybe that’s a 10. But I really do love the Denali. The only thing I would say is my wife doesn’t clean it enough. It gets messy because of the fact that we’ve got two boys in it and we just never have enough time to take it to get it washed. So that would be the only real complaint, but other than that, I think it’s a great vehicle.”
A 2014 GMC Yukon XL Denali is shown here
Car he learned to drive in
Ribeiro was on Broadway and then later in the hit TV show “Silver Spoons” as a teen. He bought a Chevy Camaro RS in 1988.
“I was in L.A. at that point already, and I learned to drive in that car,” he says. “I bought the car, and my dad taught me how to drive in my own vehicle. I didn’t want to drive an automatic, so I had a stick shift, and I understood the concept after a few minutes in terms of understanding how to shift.”
Ribeiro said driving felt natural for him from the first few moments his dad taught him, which is why he gravitated toward racing cars for a long time. “I just felt comfortable in a car,” he says. “I understood how to shift. I might have lit up the clutch a little bit the first couple of times, but other than that, I understood the foot work. When you rev the motor too much and slowly engage the clutch, you’ll light it up a little bit, so you get that clutch smell, but that probably only happened a few times right in the beginning.”
In 1988, Ribeiro says the Camaro was indeed a nice ride for a teen to have as his first car. “I was best friends with Ricky Schroder at the time, and he did have a Porsche, so he had a cooler car, but he also made a lot more money than me,” he says. “So as a 16 year-old kid who was able to purchase his car, a Chevy Camaro RS was pretty, pretty cool.”
Ribeiro had it for only two and a half years before upgrading to a BMW 325is. “ ‘Silver Spoons’ had already ended, so between 16 and 18, I was more of a regular kid, and my Camaro was always full of my friends,” he says. “I was the guy who always drove everybody around. Everywhere we went, it was me in the Camaro with all my friends and going and doing your typical teenage stuff.”
Favorite road trip
Ribeiro’s favorite road trip was the time he drove cross-country in the early 1990s. “One of my best buddies and I decided to drive cross country from L.A. all the way to Rhode Island, which was where he was from,” he says. “It was when I had the BMW 325is, and we decided one summer, ‘Hey, let’s drive, let’s see the country, let’s go hang.’ So we took the southern route and went all the way through Houston and then all the way up the East Coast.”
He says they did it over five days, so they didn’t get to take that much time to see the country when the trip go interrupted by work. “It was really cool, and it was a nice way to see parts of the country, and then I ended up getting a job and had to fly back,” he says. “My buddy and a buddy of his drove my car back. It was a movie called ‘Ticks.’ It was a horror movie—it wasn’t a good one.”
One of the most memorable parts of the trip was driving through Texas and getting pulled over by a state trooper. “The eight or nine hours going through Texas at one point, and it was literally nothing—you couldn’t see anything,” he says.
He says he wasn’t going that fast but was one of the only cars on the road, so he got pulled over. “My buddy, who was sitting in the passenger seat after the cop asked me to get out of the car, literally could not see me behind this mammoth guy when he turned around and looked because he was just completely blocking me from sight,” he says.
The cop obviously hadn’t seen him in “Silver Spoons” and didn’t know who he was. “This was the largest man I probably had seen to that day, come up to the car with a super big cowboy hat, and being a young black kid, living in L.A., from New York, our experiences did not mesh very well, but he did the whole, ‘Are you a gangster?’ All of that,” he says. “A full racist rant by a Texas cop that did not go over well, but he ended up not giving me a ticket.”
For more information about this weekend’s race in Long Beach, visit gplb.com.
More Celebrity Drives here:
- Actor and Author Sean Patrick Flanery
- WWE Legend and CMT Host Steve Austin
- ESPN Baseball Analyst Dallas Braden
The post Celebrity Drive: Actor, Host Alfonso Ribeiro appeared first on Motor Trend.
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