Dean Hall: Two Worlds of Achievement

Hall has traveled a speedy route from high-end race car driver to high-end builder.

What do building custom multi-million-dollar Tahoe homes and driving 220 miles per hour have in common? "They both require incredible focus," says Dean Hall, who should know. Before retiring five years ago to become a full-time homebuilder, Hall was a globe-trotting racer who, in 1990, was the fastest rookie ever in the Indianapolis 500.

"You can be anything you want in this life if you focus," says Hall. "A kid from Squaw Valley can be President of the United States. I bring the same focus to building as I did to driving a racecar."

Hall didn't choose the racing profession; it chose him. A Bay Area kid whose parents owned a house in Squaw Valley, Hall grew up spending every weekend on the ski slopes. He took a year off from college to live in Tahoe and never went back, instead finding work as a manual laborer and competing on the Peugeot Pro Tour as a ski racer. In his early twenties, the future Indy 500 speedster had no particular interest in cars, unless it involved racing through deep snow to get to the slopes. Then, during the big winter of 1983, a friend's brother changed his life. "He had decided to try out for a job as a test driver at Sears Point Raceway," Hall says.

"A test driver is the one who goes out and scrubs in the tires and brakes and gets the car ready to go. The day he needed to leave Squaw to go to Sears Point, the roads were all closed under three feet of unplowed snow. I had this hotrod Blazer, so I offered to drive him out. He said 'If you get me to Sears Point, I'll get you into the test so you can try the car, too.'"

"Well, I'd never been in a racecar in my whole life," says Hall, "but at the end of the weekend, out of all the guys there, they offered me the job!"

Seizing the opportunity, Hall quit his job as a carpenter and began testing cars full time. One weekend, a wealthy businessman who'd been racing his own car announced that he'd be out of town during a particular race. According to Hall, "the guy said 'the entry fee's all paid, but I'm going to be gone. So Dean can race my car.'"

Hall scrambled to get a racer's license in time for race day. "The first time I tried, I flunked the test," he says. "The guy thought I was a lunatic, that I was too aggressive and I wouldn't amount to anything."

"I got my license on the next try," Hall says. "And in that first race I finished second." This was, remember, not only Hall's first car race but also the first one he'd ever attended. "As a test driver, I was at the track five days a week," he says. "But on the weekends I'd always head to Tahoe. I'd never stayed around for the races." When the businessman returned to discover how well Hall had done, he was understandably impressed. "He said 'If my car can get second place, then I quit and I'll sponsor you racing for the rest of the year,'" says Hall. "The next year, I ended up with a factory ride—for Swift Cars. I raced all kinds of different cars for them. And we won the national championship." After that, Dean won individual titles the world over, including in New Zealand, Australia, Japan and Europe. "But the highlight of my racing life," he says, "was my rookie year in Indy cars, when I was the fastest rookie to date."

A low point, unfortunately, came just one year later. In the 1991 race, Hall lost control of his car and slammed into the wall, nearly losing his life. "All I remember was hitting a bump," he says. "I was going 220 miles per hour—which is over a football field's length every second, and the wall was only 60 feet away. When I woke up, the track was closed. And they were using the Jaws of Life to pry the car apart. There was blood everywhere, and my wife Sandra and my dad were standing in the pit lane. I saw Sandra's face turn sheet-white, and I knew I was in trouble."

The crash caused fractures in Hall's back, jaw, elbows, hands and knees. "I broke so many capillaries in my eyes from the deceleration," he says, "that I ended up with all these black zones in my eyes where I couldn't see. It was like trying to look through a Dalmatian skin."

Two years and many surgeries later, Dean Hall was back in a racecar. He refused to enter any race until the next Indy 500. And in that race, "by the fifth lap out, I was going faster than I'd gone in the car I crashed," he says.

Five years ago, Hall traded his racing career and glamorous globetrotting lifestyle for a contractor's pickup truck and the stability of a family home on a quiet Squaw Valley street. "Living on the road became more trouble than it was worth," he says. "I'd come home from the racing circuit and my daughter would've grown two inches."

Now, with an 11-year-old daughter and an 8-year-old son, Hall is the owner of Dean & David Construction. "I always built houses between the car racing," says Hall. While he started building 1500- square-foot houses in Tahoe Donner, these days Hall focuses exclusively on the high end of the market. In addition to Squaw, he's built homes in Northstar and Tahoe City. "We've got a good niche," he says. "We have clients who don't even feel that they need to pick out tiles or the color of their walls, because they know we do a good job."

Dean & David's houses are filled with interesting combinations of woods, glass and stone. For one house, Hall used 200-year-old beams reclaimed from a warehouse in New England. In another, a fireplace is built atop a large rock that is set directly into the house's foundation. Light fixtures are often the creations of local artists.

Hall's pace is a lot more measured than in his car racing days. "We don't come in and slam houses together," he says. "It takes us 16 to 18 months to build one."

Racing is not completely out of this builder's blood, however. "I plan to own my own race team someday," he says. "I have a shop in Reno, and I'd like to put together a sports car team to race the 24 Hours of Le Mans or Daytona."

—Michael Penwarden