Milner surpasses 3500 'bird' charity T-shirt sales

Leave it to IMSA veteran Tommy Milner to turn the most heated and unforgettable moment of the Rolex 24 At Daytona into a positive.

The factory Corvette Racing by Pratt Miller driver’s encounter with BMW and Paul Miller Racing’s defensive line in the final hours of race – eventually won by Ford – ultimately led Milner to open the sliding window on his Z06.GT3.R, extend his left arm, and give Augusto Farfus the middle finger as the BMW was ordered to pit lane for a drive-through penalty for his egregious blocking of the GTD Pro race leader.

Caught on the NBC broadcast, Milner’s delivery of the bird to his Brazilian protagonist became an instant meme that helped Pratt Miller to generate 2.7 million views across its social channels. It also created an opportunity for Milner and artist Abel Toth to collaborate on a bird-themed t-shirt that commemorates the American’s middle finger while sending the proceeds of the shirt to the American Eagle Foundation in Tennessee to care for bald eagles.

An impromptu Rolex 24 bird that’s now helping birds; Milner says more than 3500 shirts have been sold since they went online a week ago. They’ll be available until the week prior to the next race, March 15’s Mobil 1 Twelve Hours of Sebring, before the shirt is taken offline.

“All this started on the Monday and even a little bit of Sunday after the race, I was getting lots of text messages from friends and colleagues from the racing world, talking about what had happened,” Milner said. “And I could see already the artwork there from Abel Toth, and that one really struck a chord with a lot of people, so I quickly reached out to him and wanted to see if he’d be up for collaborating on doing a T-shirt. I noticed a lot of the fans were interested in T shirts, so I wanted to kind of take the moment and and just basically turn it turning into something good.

“Wasn’t my intention, initially. It was, ‘Let’s not allow lots of people to try to make a bunch of money off of this.’ And it wasn’t my intention at all from the beginning to try to make any money doing it. Everything happened so fast. I had a quick message from JF Musial, and we were joking about the potential of me selling some T shirts, and he right away said, ‘Turning this into something good will prevent any backlash that that would come from selling the T shirts.’”

Just as the situation with BMW/PMR/Farfus was unexpected, what came next for Milner was another surprise.

“We were joking about flipping the bird and helping support the birds, so I reached out to the American Eagle Foundation and the executive director there,” he continued. “Actually, the email was hard to write for me because I didn’t really know how to approach the . ‘I got into a sort of a little bit of a fight, so to speak, on the racetrack, and I flipped somebody off… And do you guys want to be associated with that?’ “So I sort of slow-played the email a little bit. I just explained who I was, and Jessica from AEF responded pretty quickly and said, ‘I know all about it, I’m honored that you messaged us about this.’ So that was a big relief when I when I didn’t have to further explain what I did. So she already understood, and she was all on board right away, and has been great from the couple phone calls that we’ve had together to help making sure that they’re OK with being associated with this little money drive for them.” And then there’s the part about Milner’s credit card being blown up by the unanticipated costs to create thousands of on-demand T-shirts, plus the full story of what went down with BMW/PMR/Farfus, which he shares in the podcast below: