On a recent Friday afternoon, a silver Porsche 993 Turbo emerged from the maw of the IDS Center parking ramp into the sun. The driver was Peter Kitchak. “Look,” he said to his passenger as he maneuvered the nimble two-seater through downtown Minneapolis, “the last thing anyone needs is for you to write about how we went one hundred miles per hour in my Porsche.”
“Of course,” I said. “I’m not looking to get anyone in trouble.”
“The truth is,” he said as we headed toward I-94, “I do all my fast driving on the race track.” I nodded.
Kitchak is an intense, compact, silver-haired sixty-four-year-old whom you’ve never heard of. But that’s only because you aren’t an insider in the national real-estate scene or the international world of auto racing.
In 1983, Duluth-born Kitchak founded Keewaydin Real Estate Advisors. He has brokered and managed real estate deals in New York City and many other U.S. cities, though most of his work is in Minnesota. He and his wife, Patricia, have lived in the same house in Excelsior, on Lake Minnetonka, for thirty years. Right now, he is orchestrating what he calls one of the most important projects ever in Minneapolis—the construction of the new Guthrie Theater. Kitchak and Keewaydin have managed the Guthrie project from the start, including the selection of French architect Jean Nouvel.
Kitchak also races cars—in particular, Porsches that are a lot like his everyday ride. Back in the early 1970s, Kitchak raced on the club-car circuit—what he refers to as “parking lot Grand Prix racing.” But then he gave it up to concentrate on other things, like work and family. In 1990, though, Kitchak bought a high-performance, limited-production, historic Porsche. “I was thinking about racing,” he told me, “but I was suspicious that at almost fifty, I wouldn’t have the reactions and so forth to be able to race a car effectively.” He needn’t have worried.
In 1992, he formed his own race team, Toad Hall Motor Racing. He started improving at the club-car level and by 1996 was driving well enough to enter his first professional race—the Minneapolis Grand Prix. His top-ten finish got him noticed. The following year he won the Minneapolis race and was invited to race in the Twenty-Four Hours of LeMans, the most famous endurance road race in the world. Only forty-eight cars are allowed to compete, each with three drivers. Driving on a French team, with Keewaydin as a minor sponsor, Kitchak, was the second oldest driver there—Mario Andretti was the oldest. (Andretti crashed that year at LeMans; Kitchak didn’t.)
In 1998, as part of a five-man team driving for a team sponsored by Germany’s Konrad Motorsport, Kitchak hit the high point of his racing career. Driving a Porsche 911 Turbo, his team won the GT2 division of the Twenty-four Hours of Daytona, and placed fourth overall. In 1999, Toad Hall and Kitchak competed in the Speedvision World Challenge GT, a pro series. He came in second place, losing the championship by a single point. Today, Kitchak and Toad Hall aren’t in the big pro races anymore, but they still dominate in the smaller historic race-car events.
Naturally, Kitchak knows what he’s doing behind the wheel, even when the wheel’s attached to a four-hundred-horsepower Porsche 993 Turbo capable of accelerating from 0 to 60 in 3.8 seconds and hitting two hundred miles per hour.
Of our drive together, I can only say that for about thirty seconds, Kitchak drove very, very fast, that he accelerated with such swift and stunning power that I was forced back into my seat, ripples of adrenaline and something like euphoria coursing through my blood. I couldn’t move my head very effectively, but when I did manage to glance over at the driver, he wore a broad grin.
—Bill Clements
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