Tim Rogers Turned a Desert Gamble Everyone Called Crazy Into a Motorsports Empire.
Tim Rogers has run water utilities in Anchorage, blended crude oil in the California desert, supplied gasoline to more than 11,000 7-Eleven stores, and built a 487-acre racetrack that Ferrari and BMW now call home. He’ll tell you, without much prompting, that none of it was easy, and that the hardest one taught him the most.
The first thing you notice at The Thermal Club isn’t the cars. It’s the quiet between them: engines cycling through gears somewhere out on the track, a light plane crossing low overhead, then nothing but wind moving through 700 acres of date palms. Tim Rogers built all of it, on purpose, the way he’s built nearly everything else in his life: because nobody else was doing it, and he thought somebody should.
Ask him who he is, and he undersells it.
“Tim Rogers is a person who has had a lot of different businesses and learned from all of them. I worked for Arco. I managed water, sewer, and telephone utilities in Anchorage, Alaska, and started my own businesses. Continues to be. And this just happens to be my latest business.”
TIM ROGERS
Ask him what he’s most proud of, and he doesn’t reach for the racetrack, the fuel empire, or the money.
He reaches for the fact that nobody handed him any of it. That’s the real story here (not the racetrack, not the $7.5 billion he once moved in gasoline, not the Ferraris parked outside his restaurants). Rogers has spent four decades being extremely good at building things other people doubted, one unglamorous job at a time. It’s a quiet, stubborn thread running underneath a career most people would call charmed.
The Apprenticeship
Tim Rogers was born and grew up in Torrance, California, a small town of refineries and machine shops that doesn’t produce many magazine profiles. Before any of it, he serviced outboard boat engines for a living, patrolled a harbor, and guided hunting trips. Jobs like that don’t build résumés so much as calluses. Then he left. He went to graduate school at Pepperdine University, then took a job running municipal water, sewer, and telephone utilities more than 3,000 miles north, in Anchorage, Alaska: about as far from a Southern California harbor, geographically and spiritually, as a person can get. A stint at Arco followed. Then he went out on his own: six years blending crude oil at his own facility starting in the mid-1980s, six more running a propane and gasoline trucking outfit out of Paso Robles. Unglamorous work, done well, repeatedly, in a half-dozen different places. It became the whole method.
The Empire Nobody Noticed
By the time Rogers was through building it, his fuel distribution business was moving roughly 140,000 barrels a day to more than 11,000 7-Eleven stores across 36 states, generating over $7.5 billion a year in sales, run through a network that most customers who filled their tanks at those stores never thought to ask about.
“We supplied all the gasoline to 7-Elevens in 36 states. We were $7.5 billion in sales, and we did that from ’92 up until about ten years ago. No business lasts forever. So find a need that someone has … fulfill that need with high ethics and fair pricing, and it’s very good rewards in life and in our business.”
TIM ROGERS
He sold it. He sold the 54-store grocery-and-gas chain he built alongside it, too. Neither exit seems to register as a loss. What he kept, he says, wasn’t the scale. It was the method: find the need, meet it honestly, expect it to end.
The Confession
Then, decades and several states later, Rogers came home to California. Not to Torrance, but close: 487 acres of raw Coachella Valley desert, roughly a two-hour drive from the small town where he grew up, that he decided to turn into a racetrack, at a moment when, by his own telling, everyone around him thought the idea was absurd.
“I was asked to speak at one of the country clubs here about the Thermal racetrack, and of course, everyone thought I was crazy to build it, and that it’s never going to work. They asked, ‘What if you had to do it over again, what would you do differently?’ I said I never would have built it, because I’ve had to work so hard to make it successful. But in order to be successful in what we do, we need to fail in some way, because it’s hard. That’s what makes the difference between other people and us when they’re thinking about getting into business.”
TIM ROGERS
Most founders, handed a microphone and an audience of people who once doubted them, reach for the victory lap. Rogers, by his own account, told them the truth instead: that the club had cost him more than he expected, and that knowing what he knows now, he wouldn’t sign up for it twice. It isn’t false modesty. Modesty would be brushing off the compliment. This is closer to an audit.
He extends the same honesty to his own kindness, in a way that undercuts any temptation to sentimentalize him.
“I just want to treat everyone how I would want to be treated, and they do a better job. It’s really, I’m selfish, because then they do a better job. But at the same time, it is what they do that represents you.”
TIM ROGERS
He’ll let you call it decency. He’d rather you call it self-interest that happens to look like decency from the outside. Either way, it built a company that, by design, runs without a board of directors.
“We have no board of directors, and I just feel the employees are family. We’ve got a total of 400 employees here in the valley with the different businesses, and then their families: it’s probably 1,500 or 2,000 that are dependent on them having a job.”
TIM ROGERS
Ask him whether that makes him something like a father figure to the people who work for him, and he laughs it off before answering it honestly.
“The employees are so important. You’re only as good as your employees.”
TIM ROGERS
“Working with Tim is basically like working with your best friend. He’s always there to bounce ideas off of and talk to about things: supportive and open to different ideas. He never just throws an idea out. We always talk about what’s the best option, so it’s really enjoyable to figure out together how to move forward.”
NICK RHOADES, GENERAL MANAGER, TRACK OPERATIONS
The same instinct governs his other businesses. His construction crew has built roughly 90 to 95 percent of the homes and structures at the club, at a disclosed 12 percent markup over cost. His car dealership runs the same way.
“We’re transparent on what we charge (12 percent markup over cost), but we have the best contractors. They’ve been here 15 years working with us. We also have a car dealership here. We don’t want our members to be cheated, so we’re transparent on what fees we charge them.”
TIM ROGERS
That car dealership is a fifty-year friendship formalized into a business. Frank Ferrara, who runs it with Rogers today, met him as a teenager, back when Ferrara’s father did body and paint work on the Rogers family’s cars. Rogers once asked him to get into the gasoline business together. Ferrara said no; his own family needed him. Decades later, they built something else instead.
“Tim and I became friends through our dads about fifty years ago. He once asked me, would you like to come buy and sell gasoline with me? And I said, “I’d love to, but I just can’t. My family needed help with their business.” Seven or eight years ago, we started this, Cars by Thermal. We picked up where we thought we’d left off. We didn’t. We just started something new.”
FRANK FERRARA, CARS BY THERMAL
Ask Ferrara what fifty years have taught him about his friend, and he doesn’t talk about the racetrack at all.
“Tim’s the same guy I met fifty years ago. All of his accomplishments have gained him wisdom, understanding, and knowledge. His people skills are awesome, and I’m saying that because they are. People who work for him don’t want to leave. I’ve done business with a lot of car dealership owners and other company owners, and they change as their wealth grows. Tim didn’t change.”
FRANK FERRARA, CARS BY THERMAL
The Proof
The racetrack itself is what happens when that philosophy gets 487 acres and $375 million to work with. Rogers built it because, in his view, the traditional country club left out anyone who didn’t play golf or tennis.
“This is a racetrack. We got an award for the best motorsports facility in the world, and we’ve continued to build since then. It’s like a private country club for golf or tennis, but not everyone plays golf and tennis.”
TIM ROGERS
Thermal isn’t a single racetrack; it’s four of them, laid out across the property so members can run everything from a tight technical course to a full-length circuit without ever leaving the club. Rogers isn’t finished either. A fifth track is already planned, with construction expected to start in 2027, making Thermal home to more distinct circuits than most professional road courses in the country. Today, it shares tenants with Ferrari, Pagani, Koenigsegg, and BMW, and it hosted an INDYCAR championship points race in 2025.
Membership runs to an initiation fee of $400,000, up from $80,000 when the doors opened, plus lots starting around $2 million and dues of $3,200 a month. Around 210 members have bought in, and going by everything Rogers says about the rest of his businesses, they’re buying his standards as much as his real estate.
The Michelin Standard
The club’s hospitality wing carries the same standard as everything else built at Thermal. Three restaurants anchor the property, each staffed by chefs who trained in kitchens carrying two and three Michelin stars before Rogers brought them out to the desert.
He personally sends his executive chef, Frederic Nail, on research trips to destinations like The French Laundry, not because a consultant told him to, but because he wants the kitchen to stay sharp.
Aqua, inside the club’s own hotel, serves Mexican cuisine.
The View earns its name honestly, seated with a direct sightline onto the racetrack itself, so members can watch cars work through the esses while they eat.
The tower is the formal room, the one built for the night’s members to actually dress for. It’s an unusual level of culinary ambition for a motorsports club, but it fits the pattern Rogers has built everything else on: if Thermal was going to have restaurants at all, they were going to be run at a standard most members would expect to find in a five-star hotel, not parked next to a racetrack.
Aqua, the club’s 48-casita Hotel, offers members and their guests a place to stay without ever leaving the property, along with a full spa, a gym, tennis courts, and both a family pool and an adults-only pool.
The Thermal Members
Rogers’s own account of Thermal is impressive by any measure, though it’s the kind of accounting a founder always risks over-polishing. The version told by members who wrote the checks and now live on the property carries a different kind of weight.
Jaime June came to Thermal through Ferrari, where she works as a motorsports director, and now owns the property with her husband. What strikes her isn’t the roster of brands parked on site, though it reads like a paddock: Ferrari, Pagani, Koenigsegg, BMW, each with its own footprint. It’s how little that roster seems to matter once you’re inside the gate.
“Everyone is on the same playing field. You love the cars, but what you find and love about Thermal, you love the people the most.”
JAIME JUNE, THERMAL MEMBER
For June, the appeal comes down to a piece of logistics most country clubs can’t offer: a garage that opens directly onto the racing surface, and a staff that takes it from there.
“How cool is it that you have a house on the racetrack? You open your garage, you take the car, and you literally come here. We just did this morning with our cars, and we’re going to be racing around with our friends. Our employees are white glove: they’ll come pick it up, gas it, wash it, and have it ready for you.”
JAIME JUNE, THERMAL MEMBER
“One of my favorite things is that the Thermal airport is right there, a non-towered airport, and it’s so much fun to fly our helicopter in. He’s so gracious to let helicopter pilots land here and bring their guests. It makes it nice.”
JAIME JUNE, THERMAL MEMBER
Her husband, Tim Hyde, arrived at Thermal from a more skeptical angle. He found the club through the BMW Performance Center, where a broker pitched him a membership. He turned it down and bought in as an owner instead.
“I decided I’d rather be a direct owner instead of a member. We started with one of the smaller lots, and once I saw how much time and energy it would take, we traded up to a much better position.”
TIM HYDE, THERMAL MEMBER
It’s Rogers’s own construction crew, the one that has already built roughly 90 to 95 percent of the homes and buildings at the club, that put up the Hydes’ place too. Asked to sum up Thermal in a sentence, Hyde didn’t reach for the acreage or the INDYCAR headlines.
“Thermal is Tim Rogers. Tim Rogers is Thermal.”
TIM HYDE, THERMAL MEMBER
What Tim Rogers Still Wants for Thermal and Himself?
It is likely the last thing this size Rogers will ever build, and he talks about what comes next not like a man closing a chapter, but like one who intends to keep adding to it: more building, more growing, the club still becoming itself. Ask him why, and the answer isn’t the acreage or the Ferraris.
It’s the roughly 400 employees across the valley, and the 1,500 to 2,000 family members who depend on those jobs staying open. A king doesn’t usually stay up at night over payroll. Rogers still does. Somewhere in that is the whole story.
For more Information about Thermal, visit https://www.thermal.cc/
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