GHiT 0748: Adam Jabaay is Back and We Talk All Things GridLife
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Concept
Road America
Road America is a famous racetrack in Wisconsin where many car races take place. It's known for its long track and exciting turns.
Concept
Watkins Glen
Watkins Glen is another well-known racetrack in New York where car races happen. It's famous for its beautiful scenery and exciting races.
Car
Ford F350
The Ford F-350 is a big truck that can carry and pull really heavy things, like trailers or equipment. People often use it for work or when they need to transport a lot of stuff, and it's known for being tough and reliable.
Concept
amateur racing
Amateur racing is when regular people race cars for fun, not for money. It's usually less formal and more about enjoying the sport than competing at a professional level.
Concept
BOP
Balance of Performance (BOP) is a way to make sure all cars in a race have similar chances to win. It adjusts things like speed and power so no one car has an unfair advantage.
Concept
IMSA
IMSA is a group that organizes car races in North America, especially long races where cars compete for hours. They have different types of cars racing together.
Concept
spec racing
Spec racing means everyone races the same type of car, so the winner is decided by how well they drive, not how fast their car is. It makes the races more exciting and fair.
Term
ECU
The ECU is like the brain of the car's engine. It helps control how the engine runs to make it work better and use fuel more efficiently.
Term
power to weight ratio
Power to weight ratio tells you how powerful a car is compared to how heavy it is. If a car has a lot of power but isn't too heavy, it can go faster and perform better.
Term
daily driver
A daily driver is the car you use most often, like to go to work or school. It's usually a car that's easy to drive and dependable.
Concept
grid life
Grid Life is a fun event where car lovers come together to race and enjoy music. It's about sharing the love for cars and having a good time with friends.
Term
throttle cable
The throttle cable is a wire that helps control how much power the engine gets when you press the gas pedal. If it breaks, the car can go really fast without you wanting it to.
LIVE
There I was, scrolling my phone.
Then someone cracked open a Mountain Dew Baja Cabo Citrus.
I grabbed my own and took a sip.
Next thing I know, I heard a rip.
My friend tried the splits and skinny jeans.
The crew couldn't stop laughing.
But hey, not a drop of Baja Cabo Citrus was spilled.
Have a blast with Mountain Dew Baja Cabo Citrus, a punch
of tropical citrus flavor.
From the great halls of their house, there are assembled three,
who hope to one day be the world's greatest driving heroes.
Created from the cosmic legends of the universe,
comes our team captain, The Vision, Bill Fisher.
And their soon-to-be wonder woman, Vicky Fisher.
And our captain marvel and head flight trainee,
the Captain Marvel, the Captain Marvel.
And our captain marvel and head flight trainee,
Jennifer Scriptjunk.
Their mission, to fight injustice,
share what is right and wrong to get you out of your house
and come out racing with them and serve all mankind.
They are the Garage Heroes in training team.
Welcome to the Garage Heroes in training podcast.
I'm the only host for this episode.
My name is Bill, but I have a guest.
I have a guest.
Oh, we're so lonely right now.
I know, but you know, if there's one person
that I can literally just pull the string
and the hour roll go by, it's our guest,
Adam Jubei from Good Life.
Welcome back, Adam.
You just asked me if we should pre-assign some topics
or talk about things or just wing it like always.
I'd run it live.
I'm not pre-planning a conversation.
No, I think between the two of us,
we're getting close to 2,000 episodes.
So, you know, we should be able to talk for an hour
without pretty much a hassle there.
Many, but how's things with you?
How's the East Coast doing?
How's the deep car in Duros?
How's life?
Well, post Christmas festivities,
I think both of us had like 15 different reasons
why we kept delaying this podcast.
So, you know, we were supposed to be pre-Christmas,
but you know, things happen.
Middle January's, it's before this Christmas
coming up.
Mia just went back to school,
prepping the car for next season.
Gonna have Scott Robertson and Becky
are gonna be helping us out, both Vicki and I.
So, we may actually be somewhat decent next year.
Who knows?
So, Adam, I figured we'd start with a soft one.
Why do you hate Road America?
I do not hate Road America.
I don't know if there's a race actually.
And to hosts, even.
Yeah, the entire grid life world kind of exploded.
A little bit, yeah.
Yeah, they got a little bit mad at us
that we weren't going back to Road America
or we're swapping up for Watkins Glen this year.
But a big portion of it came down to like,
and we talked about it in the state of the grid
at PRI, I think I talked about it in like,
we did one, I've done a couple of podcasts.
I don't even remember which ones they were.
Ours, Slip Angle and something else,
but like effectively like the last three.
Was it Dewey's?
One of Dewey's?
Or you came on to Dewey's, I think.
Maybe I gave a statement to Heat Exchanger.
I don't even remember.
I think it might have been that.
It might have been a statement
to the Heat Exchanger podcast.
Like I gave Houghton a statement
and he read it on that podcast.
But effectively like for three years
we've been operating two years, three years, two years.
We've been like on a agreement that like,
we never loved and we knew would be a really tough swing.
But the board of Road America kind of forced
the staff of Road America into this agreement
and they forced us into this agreement.
Like, all right, so we'll swing hard,
we'll try this agreement.
And it was a rev split.
And the rev split just really,
just really wouldn't work out very good.
Like it didn't work out great for us.
So we almost got to the point where we needed to be,
which was the breakeven point.
Last year.
Is in not losing money, yes.
Yeah, breakeven point means you're not losing any money.
But we had, I mean, we had like 12,000 people there
on Saturday or something.
Sure, it was a huge event.
It felt great.
Everybody thinks you're making a million dollars
and you're still losing $152,000.
So effectively we're in contract negotiation.
And also we've been talking with Watkins Glen for years
ever since we were there.
A lot of the staff that caused us some hiccups
the first year has left.
And a lot of the staff that wanted us to come back
has stayed and they've been pursuing us for years as well.
And the date happened to work.
And so we're shifting the summer Apex effort
towards Watkins Glen without burning any bridges
at Road America.
Like they were even in our state of the grid at PRI.
Friends, you know, the team at Road America was there.
Like we maintain a friendship.
This year?
Yeah.
Like they were actually at our press conference.
Like we're maintaining nothing but friendship
and we want to work with them again.
We have, we've hosted there off and on
for the last 10 years.
We did three, I think two or,
I think there's three years of our season championships there
as it escalated into silliness, you know,
from like, oh, season championships to like,
whoa, season championships.
You know, we did a bunch of years.
And then we did the summer Apex events
a couple of years after that.
So there's, I don't think there's a world
where grid life won't go back to Road America
like in the next few years.
I think that's 100% in the cards.
But I also, you know, I'm really stoked to reignite
and like rekindle a new relationship
and an old and rekindle a new relationship
with the team at Watkins Glen.
Right.
Facilities, like it's almost like the same facility
but with a different shape.
You can do as much there at Road America and Watkins Glen.
You can do like, you can host the same event.
It's just kind of a different shape
and a different layout and a different crowd.
But I think this year is gonna be kind of fun
doing a little bit more of a more of a right coast effort
you know, like a East Coast heavy push.
And we've been, we've been at Lime Rock, what for?
This is our fourth year, we're going on our fifth year.
You were at a couple of the, one or two of the NJMPs.
We did two or three there, I forget.
I think we did two.
I think you did two.
You missed one and then we baked that one.
The really wet Watkins Glen festival
that ended up being a rain out in April,
April and April, early May of 2023, we'll forget.
I mean, there's still a couple thousand people there.
It's still a pretty rad little event,
but this one will be kind of a banger.
We're, we're, they're real excited.
We're really excited.
The lineup and layout and there's gonna be like,
I mean, the whole facility's huge.
You can't camp what 30,000 people there overnight.
You know, it's gonna be fun.
We're really excited about it.
The first time we went there,
we were like, oh, we'll just bump into the paddock.
It'll be no problem.
We'll see you there.
I didn't see him the whole time, all weekend, nothing.
We're pretty excited about the size and layout
and just what you can do there.
So Chris has been, he's been to a bunch of like fish stuff
there and some other big festivals there.
And like the, the cool thing about that track
is that it has a history
of hosting enormous music events.
Like wrote America does not have that history.
And so it didn't have like the built in client base
and like festival goer and like
the locals don't, they're not ready for it
or thinking it's coming.
Yeah.
I'll pull that in there.
But historically there is over the last like literally 40 years
there's like huge, huge music festivals
that have been at Watkins Glen,
which should be, you know, like that,
that like car curious music attendee,
sort of the grid life attendee.
So hopefully that works out.
Shortly, we're selling tickets right now
for spectators, early entries.
Single day or single event driver tickets
go on sale on Friday.
Season pass and goal pass have gone up.
And how did those do?
They usually fly off the shelves.
Pretty fly off the shelfy.
So that's good.
Grid life's not dead.
We got a pretty full field already on track.
Anything sold out or we still got spots?
Time attack for, I know for wrote America
and or wrote Atlanta, I mean,
and for Midwest festival, I think is basically sold out.
GLTC and GLGT actually has a really solid field for both.
That'll be fun.
That'll be fun.
The third field for both of those.
Lot of GLGT uptake, which is like our new
nine to one part of eight, 8.91 part of eight
wheel to wheel class and Rush has a whole bunch
of season and goal pass.
Goal pass is four or five
and season is all six for the, for the season.
So yeah, so, yeah, really, really solid overall
like season and goal pass ticket sales
and then single events go on sale like in two days.
Like I said, so awesome.
Sounds like I gotta get this one out.
Okay.
Well, if this is out before they're on sale,
I did my job.
If this isn't, then I didn't do my job,
but that's fine.
I've not done my job.
There's definitely some stuff sold out already.
And but yeah, we were also for the people
that like are kind of curious about the grid life
world and haven't ever participated
or have only done one or two.
There is always like that, like I wanna get a ticket
for set event.
And generally, if you are ready
and you have a car ready
and you have the weekend off of work,
I can only count like on my 10 fingers and 10 toes.
How many times I haven't been able to like
me and John and Abe and the other motorsports staff.
Like if you email motorsport at grid.life,
if you email us and say, I really want a ticket,
we're gonna put you on our shortlist.
And if we see anything, if we hear anything,
there's a pretty good chance
we'll be able to transfer a ticket.
Like it's almost inevitable that people blow up in the dyno,
they blow up in testing the week before,
they blow up in the event before.
And you name your event,
there's a pretty good chance
we'll be able to find you a ticket.
Yeah, they seem to be.
So, they do think the worst part
about racing is the car.
Yeah, and the crabby people.
Those are. No, screw them.
Hopefully we don't hang out with those.
No, they can go and do something else.
That's fine.
So, that was the easy question.
We'll relax a little bit from now.
Road America had to be addressed
and I figured we'd start off with it.
So, it looks like you revised your schedule.
We did, yeah.
Towards less is more,
but less, more as well.
I lost it for a second.
It looks like you revised your schedule towards less is more,
but the less is more as well.
That's kind of the synopsis, yeah.
For years we've been doing too much for the team
and probably too much for our drivers.
Our drivers are way too loyal
and our average driver's been doing five to seven events
which is a lot when they're like
three and four and five day events.
And they're not close to each other?
No, generally they're going from Connecticut
to Laguna Seca in 10 days or 20 days or whatever.
And then everywhere in between previous
to that in the calendar.
But yeah, so we kind of like,
effectively to be a business
you have to not spend more than you make.
And we're seeing kind of like, there's a couple of things
like some of the smaller events
like Audubon has been a great event
for us for literally nine years.
But it might make a few thousand
it might lose a few thousand
it might make a bunch
it might lose a whole bunch
depends on the year.
We're also like at capacity with that event
and it doesn't pay the bills.
If you bring a live stream
like the live stream costs a large amount of money.
And if you do all the things
like you can't bring enough spectators
it's too small.
Yeah, like you just can't park enough people there
you can't camp them.
The track is awesome to deal with
but like it's just not set up to do
it's not set up to do a 2000 person event
which is kind of what need to spectator wise
which is what kind of needs to happen
in order to pay the bills for like a festival
and like a full live stream
all the pieces live stream everything else.
Yeah, not like a music festival
really kind of needs to be double that.
Is there any way you could have like
a bus parking area and bring people in there
or is it just landlocked?
Probably not so much at that place
but realistically like this is kind of a reset year
and we've done a lot of years
where we've done some club and festival events
and we need to kind of establish what we are
which is we're gonna try to host really good events
really memorable like memorable Midwest Festival style events
and then react a little bit in the changing economy
to like what it is demanding
whether it's HPE club style events or HPE only also
like we've done everything the last 22 years
but you can't be all things to everybody at all times
and like if you try that's like a recipe for bankruptcy.
I mean, anybody who's like started a business
realizes you need to like focus in on what might work.
So right now we're sort of focusing a little bit
but with a mind to in the next couple of years
we'd love to host more of what brought us to some of this
and like maybe refine and maintain
these six festival properties
whether they stay where they're at
or whether they move around
like six is probably the biggest amount
that we could host successfully of festival.
We've tried seven, we've tried eight
of like festival-ish events.
These will be six pretty large festival events
full-spectator events, camping and music
whether it be real music or karaoke
in the case of Lime Rock.
Lime Rock will be the only one
that's like a karaoke style event
because of the overall like evening sound regulations
of the township or whatever.
But I mean, if you've been to Lime Rock
it's one of the better parties that you can go to
but camping events that you can go to.
But so we need to like keep building
and establishing these things.
And last year we kind of had a full reset
as far as like budgets and staffing
and there was like a lot of upheaval.
And so for many years we had like not done
all the little pieces to know what we had spent on things
like bookkeeping was a bit of a mess
and staffing was a bit of a mess.
So we basically spent the entire year
turning this like large business
from like a large hobby-ish business
into like a real business that was like
we can actually show it to ourselves next year
and say, here's exactly what we spent
and here's what it costs and here's why it costs this
and here's how we trimmed in reaction to ticket sales
or like spent in reaction to ticket sales.
It was a big evolution year for us.
Like the long and short of it was like
we were a mess, we're less of a mess.
We're trying to really focus in on like what we need
to do in order to keep the business streamlined
and growing and sustainable.
Sustainable is really the only word.
So sustainability and like just keep establishing
the events that have worked well for us
and like build those audiences
and like best weekend ever, best weekend ever
over and over and over
and start to grow a few new things.
Last year we had a really good year with Rhode Atlanta
with the collaboration with Formula Drift.
We've been working with them off and on
like as far as like schedule collaboration
for the last eight or 10 years ever since
like the form of the drift drivers started using our events
as sort of like a piece of their sponsor package
and like try to pitch the partners and stuff.
So form of the drift and grid life
would like collaborate and schedules
because we shared drivers and we're trying to make
you know, both like their drivers and our drivers
the ones that we shared
they're trying to like build programs off of this.
So like it behooves both of us to make it
like collaborative and schedules.
And like that kind of morphed into friendships
with the leadership team at FD
and then FD really wanted to bring us in last year
for more of like an all day spectacle
for their spectators versus like
Pieces, yeah.
It was like this event, that event, this event
and now it's just one big event for spectators
at Drift Atlanta.
So it went really, really well last year.
We had spectators walking in the door at 8 a.m.
like sticking their faces in people's pits
and then it was like all day action, both days
which is great.
It might even stretch to more than two days
which would be excellent
because that's a really packed schedule.
Yeah, I was gonna say just not like you're swimming
in time because if something goes wrong
or breaks or hits a wall or whatever.
We're gonna drift at like three
and so they need like 230 on to set up for going hot at three.
So we might need to start on Thursday.
Well, a little bit of TBD on that one.
Well, I remember when we first started talking
when we first heard about Gridlife Long ago
and your first episode on,
you said that the goal was to have the events
for your friends that they would wanna go to
and I think you've done a good job on centering on that.
No.
When was the first year that you and I talked?
I forget.
It was six years ago?
Six or seven, might've been.
It was early.
It's a thousand years ago.
I know.
I'll look it up while we're playing
but yeah, it was a while.
It's been like the amount of like learning and change
and like the time since then, from then to now,
I mean, I feel like I've gone to college every year
since then and learned from the greatest professors
and all those professors have punched us in the face.
Like over and over.
And I really think it's like the school of hard knocks
is probably the best school for fun.
It is also probably the most expensive school
but it is definitely the most real.
So.
You know how long ago it was?
What was the first year?
It was, I don't have a year yet.
I'm still working on it.
There was only four grassroots racing podcasts at the time.
Really?
That was a long time ago.
They're everywhere now.
We might've been like the second one.
Yeah, I think you were.
I think you beat us.
You were going long before we had been.
Thankfully, you slowed down so we could catch up.
You went gurgly.
What's that, madam?
I said there was a little while
where everybody thought we were cool, but.
Yeah, that's okay.
They still think you're cool.
They missed the RV discussion.
That's all I'm saying.
Yeah, once in a while we'd talk about them.
Abe and I did one a few weeks ago.
We'll do another one in a week or so.
Oh, I thought you retired.
I mean.
We did one a couple of weeks ago.
Show us how much you've followed along.
I've listened to everyone that comes out there.
I am a subscriber.
They just come to me.
Well, a couple of weeks ago, there's a good one.
I think a couple of weeks ago is underestimating it,
sir. I believe it's like a month ago.
It's okay. It's all right.
You're missed.
I'm trying to like find my personal love for the sport.
I don't know if it's going to come back.
But yeah.
You turned your hobby into a job, sir.
It's not going to happen.
And a word of caution to like anybody who like,
has an ambition of this.
In 2015, when we started like slip angle
and that was like the second season
of good life, et cetera, like 2014 and 2015,
we got like Austin and I,
Austin who I started the podcast with Austin Cabot.
Like we were, we were kind of like forced into being
the MCs of good life a little bit.
Like it sort of actually happened.
And a couple of people and then Matt Farah
and they were like, you guys should do a podcast.
This is this is like fun to hang out with you guys.
Yep.
So we did.
And it like, that was like a time of,
at the time it was, it was like a moment
that worked really well for me.
I just had Emma, our daughter,
my wife and I were like, you know, we were young-ish.
We were, I was feeling real scrappy.
Like I would claw at anything to get ahead.
Like all I had to do was provide for the family
and also, and I would love if simultaneously
it could be part of like the thing that I'd love to do,
which was like play with this dumb race car
and once driving on a racetrack and then grid life ramped up
from like two events a year to three events a year
to four to five to six.
I think at one point we did 17 events.
Yeah.
You were craziness.
In events, including Honda Meet maybe.
And a lot of those were smaller track day events
like track day picnic or taco track day,
West Michigan Honda Meet, the spring kickoff,
the fall, whatever we called it at Gingerman.
There was, I mean, anything and everything.
Yep.
But the, over the past 10 years,
like my daughter's 11 now,
she was literally like an infant
when we started the podcast.
And when grid life was start, our first grid life,
Emma was nine weeks old, like she was really little.
I listened to them all again,
so I went all the way back.
He's lived through all of it.
And the first one was like,
we had like two planning phone calls
and there was a couple of thousand people
that like camped and hung out.
It was like a glorified version of our Honda Meet event.
And the biggest change was that,
okay, we're gonna have some garbage,
like we need extra garbage cans,
we need extra porta-potties,
there's gonna be more merchandise.
How are we gonna get the merchandise there?
Okay, Adam's gonna go pick up the merchandise
in his F-350, I stole my truck from work
and I had a whole truck full of merchandise.
And then we get there and like,
all right, this is a little more intense.
We're doing three days of on-track stuff
versus two days of Honda Meet at the time.
And oh, we forgot to call a tow truck.
We had a safety team, but we didn't have a tow truck.
It was a different version of Gingerman back in the day.
So like, me and my buddy Jason and Dan
became the tow team in my F-350
that was also the merchandise hauler.
And like, everything was so exciting.
It was like so fun.
And over the years,
like we accidentally started a sanctioning body.
And then you get all the egos and like the,
this is what the seventh,
and this is the eighth year of GLTC, 19, 20, 21,
24, 25, 26, this will be the eighth season of GLTC.
The fourth season of Rush with us.
It'll be the second season of GLGT.
And literally like the 15th season or 16th, whatever,
13th season of Time Attack.
And it just like, there's a human evolution thing that I think
at some point you build a community long enough
and they start turning on themselves.
I think you need to butt against that.
And I think that's sort of the point where we're at
where a lot of the people have realized
that like, this is very hard.
I'm mad at something because I haven't won
or because it's too hard.
It's just not fair, Adam.
Yeah, I mean, we're like budding against that.
We're running up against that natural wall
of human ambition.
I mean, realistically, every real life is fine,
driver-wise, it's gonna be,
they're gonna be great events and stuff.
But I really want, like this year,
my personal focus is like to make the drivers remember
that this is a really, like this is special,
it's really fun if you do it right.
I feel like they are the ones who are ruining it
for themselves and for others if it gets ruined.
Largely, it hasn't been ruined,
but there's been like new circumstances,
especially last year, where you get some finger pointing
of like cheating this, cheating that, blah, blah, blah,
blah, blah, blah, blah, where-
Cheating and racing out?
What?
Yeah, who to thank?
Never.
But there's been these,
there's been a few situations that have like,
it grosses me out, like it makes me so mad
that my friends are mad at my friends.
Like I'm friends with like generally everybody.
Like it's pretty rare that like somebody's in our paddock
and I'm not like even acquaintances with them.
Because I make a point to go around
and talk to as many people as I can
because I think that's part of this.
Like if you're not welcomed, you're like,
you're not part of it.
So everybody should, you should say hi to everybody.
And if I haven't done that, I'm blowing it.
And maybe you got a car that looks just like somebody else
and I thought I did
and it might take me a few events to do it.
But now one of us is gonna try to be friends
with all of them or friends of, you know,
like acquaintances know you like, hey, what's up?
Like it should be a friendly environment.
And then when you get to that point,
it really hurts more when somebody points fingers
at somebody else and it gets loud.
And that happened a few times.
I'm sure some of that's, and some of it was like,
you know, it was well known last year
where, you know, somebody found,
somebody built the best mousetrap
and like everybody else said, it's hard to win
if you win at something that everybody's trying
to win at.
Do you even win?
How many winners are there?
I don't know if one.
Everybody's trying to win.
And only one person does.
Inevitably, nobody wins the most
because like the tide changes
like for that person that did win.
And we've seen that for a bunch of years with TC
which bums me out.
Like you see people being like just non-congratulatory
to the person that like they loved racing against
for six, seven weekends, whatever.
And so there is something to be,
like there's a project that I haven't quite found
how we need to steer that.
But like, if I had a really good time racing against Bill
for five weekends,
and then he'll beat me by five points,
that the five points being beaten by
shouldn't be what steers my entire vibe
for the entire off season.
Like, I would love to recall the 20 days or 30 days
I spent at racetracks like hanging out
with Bill and his friends.
And there's something to be,
there's some like, there's some work to be done.
I'm not positive where we're going,
but that's where my head is at is like,
how do we reclaim some of the joy in some of this?
And there's probably not a perfect way to do that,
but that's where my head is at.
I think part of it, and you know,
this is external observation
because we kind of burned ourselves out.
It's not the 20 or 30 days at the track.
It's the two or 300 days prepping the car
and working the car and getting the car
and traveling to the track
and getting back from the track.
And eventually, you know, you wear yourself down,
you get beat up and you're overtired and cranky.
And if things don't go your way,
it's not fun anymore.
And sometimes you just need to pull back.
And I think you guys pulling back on the number of events
and the mileage, if you just did the miles between,
if all you did was go from racetrack to racetrack
to racetrack, it was a lot of miles.
Never mind counting prep time or back and forth to the track
or all the other things that are involved
because everybody, you know,
there's no professional grid life racing
that I know of where they make their living
with their auspices.
There is what?
There is really.
People making their living at grid life.
Really?
All right, well, that's just foreign to me,
but it's hard to do.
I mean, it's really hard to do
because, you know, you gotta have a side hustle.
You gotta have, and if you try to do a solo
or a very few people, there's just so much you can do.
And if you're getting your head beat in
because the other people are doing better,
you know, sometimes you'll just burn yourself out
because the days in between the race, you wear yourself out.
I look at like, you know, for years,
up until like literally like last year,
I've been like a fan,
like the biggest fan of amateur racing.
I've never been super interested in pro racing.
Like that, to me, a lot of that feels like racing BOP,
especially like an IMSA and stuff like great shows,
awesome drivers, but a lot of BOP gaming,
same thing with like a IndyCar or whatever.
To me, it's not like, I'd rather follow spec me out of
because I know what the rules are
and like it will distill down
who the best spec me out of driver is or whatever.
And it's always been kind of what I wanted
out of our wheel to wheel programs is just purity.
And like, it's not easy to do that.
It gets really, really hard,
especially when more and more people try really hard.
And especially when it's non-spec rush, it's a lot easier.
You can like get a go note of how many times
the ECU has been flashed and like it did it way,
the right amounts, do they have the right tires?
No, it's probably legal.
But over the years, it's been kind of the burden of me
of building TC into kind of like the best possible parody
for a mixed class or mixed mark,
you know, mixed style of prep.
It's not a spec class,
but it's all one power to weight ratio.
I look at like the qualifying results
and like the average race result.
And I'm really proud of it.
And I wish it was like perfect,
but it's not possible perfect.
And I compare it to like spec Mx5 and pro and like,
oh, so our qualifying is better than spec Mx5.
Like our top 10 is closer than that often
and closer to spec me out or whatever.
But like the drivers putting the effort in demand more,
they want it even better, always and always and always.
And that exhaustion has like,
that's probably gotten me to the point
of complete and utter burnout on racing,
which I do need to fight back on
in order to continue doing this.
Which is hard, like that's the point that I'm at.
I'm at right, I'm right there right now is like,
what do I wanna do?
Do I wanna do this for more than one year at a time
and convince myself to keep doing it?
If I never went to a racetrack ever again,
would that be fine?
Like that's where my head is at right now.
And it's not even like you're worn out
from half the season or anything, you're still.
Oh no, in the pre-season sort of.
Several months and I loved being at pit race
for one of the last pit races.
That was our last event.
I even took my car and I drove it and it was great.
I didn't race it, but I drove around
to practices and qualifying since it was fun.
Yeah, pit race was awesome.
There is like, there's something
that's missing for me personally.
And I talked about it in a recent slip angle,
the most recent one, which now Bill tells me
it was a month ago, so probably should do another one.
But for years, I haven't had a street car.
Like I haven't had something to like go get ice cream in
or whatever.
So I'm gonna build myself a street car
and that's gonna be my daily driver
to be my only car besides the race car if I keep it.
But like, I'm like struggling to love the hobby.
And yeah, I'm in a weird spot,
but also like I'm very proud
of what grid life has turned into and what it has done.
Even if it turns into like nothing, even it goes away.
Like these won't be bad memories.
Like these were still hundreds of amazing weekends.
Even if it clicks off right now, it turns off.
The last 10 years have been insane.
Like, if you had showed 18 year old me,
38 year old me, he would have been like,
what is going on?
Like, it was the coolest life I could ever imagine.
And it was, it was the coolest life I could ever imagine.
And if it's done, which I don't think it is.
But if it is done eventually, great.
Like it was a good, it was a good run,
but I want it to go on forever.
I want it to be, I want, you know,
I would love grid life touring cup
to have a 25th anniversary.
Like that's kind of like currently
that's my only actual like, maybe that'd be sick.
If we could do another 15 years or 20 years or whatever.
So yeah, that's where my head is at.
The sport is hard.
I don't want our drivers to kill themselves and burn out,
but you also have to save themselves from themselves
and save ourselves from ourselves.
So maybe like six events a year for a little while
or right now is needed.
So I think it's got a lot of benefits for you.
And I'm, I'm interested to talk to you again,
you know, mid season, next season,
I'll definitely see you at Lime Rock as always.
And maybe I'll go with Watkins Len.
I don't think it's a party that happens every night, man.
No, exactly.
I think, what are the chances you could get a one night
you know, Laguna Seca type noise exclusion for Lime Rock?
Is it zero?
One night meaning like a loud, loud concert
or a festival?
Probably impossible for music,
probably not impossible for racing.
That'd be interesting.
Okay.
There is, we've explored the language
in like their community agreement.
And the language, they've done,
they've done overnight duro's.
Like they've done like pro stuff
that like goes into the evening in the past.
Which doesn't specify a 6 p.m. hard cutoff.
There is potential of racing into the night,
more than there is potential of like music overnight.
Music is sort of like a,
like you're, yeah, that's,
you're hedging into like a bit of unknown
ask forgiveness territory.
So yeah, they probably don't want to risk it just for that,
but it'd be fun to have a festival there.
Also the karaoke party under the tent,
like the karaoke party under the tent
has become one of my favorite nights
and one of most people's favorite nights.
They've gone to multiple grid life events.
If you've only ever gone to the karaoke party
at Lime Rock Circuit Legends,
that's maybe one of the more chill, fun, wild events.
Like obviously the spectacle of like Midwest Festival
with like 40 foot LED walls
and like 10,000 people watching the concert is a thing.
But there's something really, really fun about like,
about the karaoke party.
It's really good.
Yeah.
We've never made a karaoke.
Like drinking and playing video games and singing karaoke.
It's not terrible.
We've yet to make karaoke and we've yet to make a festival.
That's on the list for this year though.
We're going to get the one of them, maybe both.
Let's see what we can do.
At the very least, it's really good time.
Yeah, we'll give it a run.
So looking back, you were on in 2020.
600 plus episodes ago was when we first started, came on.
So, interesting.
Stein was in 2020.
I mean, we talked for that whole season
because I was talking about how to get a car into stuff
and you were like, full, I mean, well, subtitle, full.
But yes, I was going to try.
It's 2020.
Pervitable in like the,
I think a lot of the event space,
if it didn't break you, it changed you.
One, it was until July, I think,
that we could even host an event, maybe June.
So we were doing a bunch of virtual stuff.
We had done, I found out about COVID
at Circuit of the Americas
when we were co-hosting at the Super Lab Battle.
We had GLTC there for the first year
co-hosting with Super Lab Battle.
And I found out about COVID there
and we drove back and that was like a misadventure
of like my air brakes and my RV were freezing
because it was seven, so we left Chicago
and it was just like a wild, crazy weekend.
The throttle cable snapped
and stuck like a three-quarter wide open throttle
and we were gone for the last four hours.
And yeah, it was a gnarly trip, but,
yeah, and then rapidly we descended into stupidity
for an entry, then we couldn't hold events
and then we canceled, I think we canceled NCM.
That was the only event we've ever canceled
and we were forced to do that, obviously.
Right.
But yeah, what a lot of changes.
And then we had, I mean, the culmination of that year
was we couldn't get camping permits,
we couldn't do outdoor concerts at most places.
We didn't do any concerts that year.
I think the last event of the year was October-ish
and it was at Gingerman.
We'd like shifted Midwest Festival from early June,
we shifted it to October in order to not refund
all the people that pre-bought the year before
or in the early part of the year.
And those people showed up, a lot of them did
and they just camped and watched us club race
and we had big bonfires.
And if it wasn't for like those few thousand people
just like showing up and like,
yeah, you got great camping spots.
Like there wasn't that many people there,
but it was still a pretty great event.
We had some food trucks, it was a good hang.
We even did like fireworks off of Spectator Hill.
If those people hadn't like asked,
if they had like demanded a refund,
we would have had to give it to them.
And we wouldn't be a company,
but those people showed up and like just hung out
at Gingerman since of them.
And they just like, I remember the RVs and the tents
and it was cold and it was, but it was also great.
Like there's something really like hard,
but also like any special about October of 2020.
So I had a couple of people right in,
they knew you were coming.
One request was, is there any HPDE solution
coming for good life?
We've got a couple of things that we have like,
we've always got our West Michigan High to Meet,
which is like second or third weekend.
Let me double check, but it's July.
It's usually second weekend to July, which I think it is.
That's not officially a good life event, but it is us.
The, the good life HPDE world,
it's not dead, it's not happening great right now,
but largely that is because there's so many,
like there's so many HPDE events
that can do a better job because they have more time
in the schedule when you're trying to like,
put a beginner and intermediate advanced
or like two of those beginner and like group one,
group two, whatever, when you're trying to plop that
into an already insanely full schedule,
you end up like really making HPDE suffer.
And there's only a couple of run groups
and there's only three times a day, maybe,
depending on the event,
or you relegate them to like Sunday,
like we did for most of one year,
which is like, I don't know, that doesn't feel right.
So some of that needs to, like we need to stabilize,
like as a company, we need to like figure out
what we do well and then like build up the next thing again.
Because like we know we can host a good HPDE,
we've been doing it for 22 years,
like Hanemi, it's maybe my favorite event that we do
and it's just an HPDE, just real fun, real chill,
barbecue at night, like great HPDE,
like four run groups, whatever, five run groups,
have a good time, done.
But when you start piloting it into like a heavy comp,
like what has turned into like a crazy national level
competition over and over and over,
like it's not a good environment
for somebody to like have their first track day
when like a bunch of other people are having their,
their like literally Super Bowl.
The California guys like last year at Laguna Seca,
probably had 15 of them tell me like,
all right, dude, this is our Super Bowl,
this is our world championships, like this is that,
like it's just that these things don't,
it's oil and water, they don't mix well together.
So at some point it can't be all things
that help everybody, but we don't intend
to not be HPDE again someday.
I guess the concern is, you know,
how do you feed yourself, you know?
I mean, others can do it for you, but they're not.
Yeah, there is something to that where it's like,
did you cut off the bottom of your ladder
and can no one service the top of the ladder again?
I'm not sure.
But also like, we've tried it so many different ways.
At some point we need to try it this way also, so.
Sure.
We've tried being everything, we've tried being something,
we've tried many events of like no HPDE,
but a lot of them, yeah, I think there will be,
there will be kind of a 2020, 2021 version of Gridlife
someday again, but that'll be more of like a club
versus festival round, but we sort of need the environment of,
right now, like especially in the Midwest,
I don't know about the East Coast,
I don't know about the West Coast a little bit more,
it does seem like HPDE's have been a bit of a race
to the bottom.
Yeah, sort of, yeah.
Well, I can grab a random Saturday.
I'll wrench it out to my friends.
Now I'm like Johnny, somebody track days
and like Jimmy Jimbo's track days
and like Speed Something's track days
and like there's, and then they all like compete
for how cheap they can make it.
And then pretty soon everyone's losing money
and they're all losing money
and they're like, well, I only lost 20,000 bucks
this year so I'm gonna do it again next year
and then they're gonna lose 25,000 bucks
on their company and it's like a race to the bottom.
Like it's like maybe you shouldn't race.
Yeah, so that's kind of the market
that we got caught up in in California
is like, we know what a cost a rent willow springs.
Like the big willow costs X,
straight to willow costs X or did
when we hosted events there for four or five years
and like if you sold it out,
you'd break even at the prices you were charging.
Like what are you doing track day?
Like it's hard to compete
when somebody's hosting $89 track days.
But I think some of that is going away
but also we've seen our costs go up
like an average of 18% every year for the last five years.
Like track days.
Probably worse this year.
Yeah, a little bit, most of them.
Track days are getting harder and harder to produce
when people are expecting $150 a day
and they rebel and scream at $180 a day.
Like it's hard.
Like it's really or $200 a day or whatever
but 150 bucks a day doesn't buy anything
with track day worldly more.
So no.
I mean the ones that we like aren't even close to that.
So you really do get what you're paying for
as some of those are just, you know, a track day.
Yeah, I mean, I've been doing it, we looked at.
So Chris, my co-founder partner, BFF,
his uncle died recently
and he was going through his uncle's things
and his unclehood came to all of our Michigan events.
Uncle Dave and Uncle Dave always printed everything out.
And so he's like sifting through papers
and he found a schedule
and like something and like the main page,
Dave had printed out the schedule
and main page of our third event ever, fourth event ever,
like 2008 or seven.
And it was a single day event and it was 89 bucks or 85 bucks.
And it was like four run groups at 85 bucks.
I'm like, that's impo, you can't do that now.
Like 85 bucks.
Like I can't go to,
I can't take my wife and daughter out for lunch for 85 bucks.
So it's all changed so much, but people still remember that.
And then they kind of hold you,
they hold your feet to the fire
and they're like, how come it's so expensive?
I'm like, well, because it is, like it just kind of is.
So and our insurance is like tripled
in the past five years.
And like that's a, our insurance bill every year
is more than I paid for my house, you know, like it's.
So insurance triple tracks probably close to double,
if not more is just a guess, you know, it's, it's not cheap.
Yeah. And CODIS go in private.
Great.
That will do nothing but help.
But also pretty, pretty wild, sick hobby still.
If you want to do it.
Yeah.
If we could just, you know,
we had another person right in,
they said with the millions that you've made, Adam,
could you buy pit race for us?
I would love to.
I like it more that where I put that money.
I get scared.
It's in one of these pants here.
That's why you sit tilted all the time
because your wallet's so thick, right?
There's something like there's still something about,
you know, I can, I can moan and I don't mean to moan.
If I am moaning, I'm sorry, but there's still something
about the, and I know you've had this many times,
I'm sure in most of my friends, I've had this,
I've had this conversation with a bunch of people
where it's like, you've had a bad week.
You worked on your stupid car all week
and like good grief is this hard.
And then you had to like hook up the truck
and then like some wire was bad and you had to fix the
trailer and then like, man,
you blew a trailer tire on the way out.
Or it comes off.
Those are always entertaining.
The wheel falls off and you have to do a lot of it.
No matter like all the hurdles you go through,
even if it's a track, you don't like that much.
If you do get in, like there's no,
there's no easier place to get into like a full Zen flow
state than being in a car, running around,
even if it's just a DE, there's no better way
like to just completely erase like a year's worth of stress
than to have like a great 15 minute session.
To me, it feels like probably
like when you have a good one,
it feels like you can exist on that
in like your baseline human stress is okay
and manageable for like a full year.
Yeah.
You have a good one.
But if the world strives to make you lose your teeth
and you don't get on track, those suck.
Yeah, if you just fight the car at the race track,
that's...
It's really possible, right?
Yeah.
It's like just, you know, just take me to the dentist.
Don't use the Novocaine.
Hell, don't even use the sharp drill.
Just sit there and grind on me a little bit.
That would be better than what I'm doing right now.
A couple of dull bits with no Novocaine.
I don't even want to see the clown on something.
Take him off.
Take him off.
I just, you know, it'll dull the pain of,
you know, beating your head against the brick wall
that a race car can be sometimes.
Oh, man, but let's see.
So new things for this year.
You had GLGT, which looked cool.
I think it was a little bit sparse.
Yeah, we had like,
often we'd have like 15 registered and like 10 start
and like five finish throughout the weekend.
Like, so I mean, it was like pretty good.
Like we, it was exactly what we thought it would be.
We'd hoped it would be like 20 cars,
but like generally we'd have like 15 registered,
10 would start and like five would keep working on them
and they'd like shuffle throughout the weekend
and blow their stuff up.
But I think we have more than that sold
for every event already this year.
That's awesome.
That's growing.
We're also like seeing some of the VA crowd jump up.
Some of, some people have bought,
you know, XGT4, XTCR cars,
which slot in very nicely.
We, I think we announced it way too late last year.
We announced it at PRI from the most peep,
like the story we heard over and over was like,
ah, yeah, we already had our plans to go doing WRL.
We're doing AER.
We were going to do so that and yeah.
So hopefully that was the bit of the curse,
but it does appear to be like a niche hole
that like does need to be filled
in like the short sprint racing.
So hopefully that,
we had some of the best battles
that we had all year were in GT,
like some really good battles.
There might have only been 10 cars on track
or eight cars on track, but like great racing.
Yeah.
It looked like they were having a great time.
It was just, you just wanted to have more.
You don't get that kind of battle in a 70 car field,
which we overdid TC for several years.
So we have pulled the head,
the head number of GLTC cars down to like,
all right, we're not going to sell more than 50 or 45
or whatever, just for quality racing.
That worked out pretty well this year,
just to have slightly better racing, slightly less,
you know, okay, well,
we got somebody stalled into there,
stalled here and they put themselves into the wall,
you know, single car crash into the wall here.
And some of that has sort of sifted itself out,
but GT wasn't terrible.
It was pretty solid this year.
That one year qualifying at Lime Rock with GLTC was,
that was the time.
That was actually really, really solid though.
There was so many.
And they did.
It was solid, but it was like, oh my God,
is this, I wouldn't want to be out there.
I was just like, okay, that's passed me.
It was 0.24 you're referring to,
we were doing A main and B main,
but we gave a single 35 minute qualifying session.
So they could come and go as they please
and there was no car limit.
And it worked, man, it was chaos.
And it was fun to watch,
but it was also, it was so stressful.
Well, I distinctly remember like looking left
and like hoping for the checker flag and out it came.
And we hadn't had,
I don't think we had even more
than like 30 seconds of yellow flag.
I don't think it did.
It was just, it was, it was so difficult.
It was like a lemon's race, but, you know, 15 times faster.
Everyone did really, really well.
But a buddy of mine, Greg and me,
who's like a long time SCCA steward,
he and I were on like an SCC rules committee together.
We've been on forums forever for 15 years together.
And he beforehand, he was like, good luck, man.
This is going to be nuts.
He was just there spectating and hanging it out.
And afterwards he was like,
I didn't think they could do it, but they did a great job.
And I thought, well, once in a while I can get lucky.
Yeah, I mean, all of them can drive.
Just I'm sitting there going, wow, this is tough right now.
But yeah, just madness.
So one more thing before you bid us a fond farewell
and put in your overtime for entertaining us as always.
I wanted to give a compliment to Kyle
and who's ever working with him
on everything that's going on with the video stream
and the presentation.
It is still, you know, I suck up to you a little bit,
but I mean it, you're still my favorite former racing
to watch on TV.
And Kyle's just making it better and better and better.
Yeah, the amount of effort that goes into the live stream,
we did switch like teams this year
to a team out of Florida who does an incredible job
of really rivaling the team that did the last several years.
But the team that we used forever
was kind of tired of traveling the world.
And Kyle has really put in a ton of work.
And he's also put a ton of work into the new driver portal,
which is like a gridlife.club.
At a gridlife.club, that's kind of like a new
ticketing management system just for drivers.
And it also has like garages for all your cars.
So if you have a time attack and a GLTC car
or GLGT and TC or you're a rush and TC
and you've done everything like Jeremy Boyson or whatever,
you can have a garage for all those things.
You can just buy a ticket and assign things.
You can move things around.
It's got, you could save your historical,
like your cop forms, if you're in the wheel to wheel
classes, you could save setups, you can do whatever.
It's a really cool platform that he has effectively
been building since September when we found out
that torque hub was going to be sun setting.
And so we needed to kind of rebuild
what we had built in 2023.
We had started to build this in 2023, I think,
prior to our implementation of torque hub.
But so yeah, that a lot of things have changed
in the coding world in the last few years, obviously.
But Kyle has been crushing a lot of things,
not just the live stream, but you can't do some of this
without, you can't do any of this
without like a really good team behind you.
And Kyle is, I think, our second longest employee
behind our buddy, Sean, who works more in partnerships
and business development and all the minutiae things.
So yeah, Kyle rules, custom, good job.
Now we just have to get him out there
on the track a little bit more on that degree.
Yeah, he's got a couple of cars
that are track ready and worthy.
He does, he's pretty good at iRacer.
He can steer a car.
I am, he's no slouch.
I just, I think he enjoys broadcasting
so much it's tough to get him behind the wheel, so.
Hit raise, hadn't been in the stream in a while.
He wrote me into the live stream.
We really enjoyed it, had a great time.
Yeah, he's a good time.
Awesome, sir.
Well, I wanted to thank you for getting this done.
We both battled schedules and tried to get this done
for more times than I don't even want to care
to remember, but it's always good to talk to you, Adam.
And the holidays are always hard.
I apologize about some of my delays, your delays.
We both did it, it was fine.
We knew we'd get it done
and the good thing about a podcast is
you can put it out whenever you want
and there's always another episode next week.
So we're good, no worries.
I appreciate it, man.
Good life.
You broke up on that one.
I said, I appreciate it.
Good life official on all the things, I think.
Yeah, par.
Thank you, Adam.
You have a great night.
Thank you, man.
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About this episode
Bill Fisher welcomes back Adam Jabaay from GridLife to discuss the upcoming racing season and the recent decision to shift events from Road America to Watkins Glen. They delve into the challenges of event planning, including financial aspects and the importance of maintaining good relationships with venues. Adam shares insights on the evolving GridLife community, ticket sales, and the excitement surrounding new opportunities at Watkins Glen, highlighting its potential for both racing and music festivals. The conversation is filled with humor and camaraderie, making it an engaging listen for motorsport fans.
Original notes
GHiT 0748: Adam Jabaay is Back and We Talk All Things GridLife
We wanted to catch up with Adam and talk about GridLlife 2025 and 2026 and beyond. So we did.
Did we miss something? Please let us know at [email protected]
A link to the episode is: https://tinyurl.com/AdamJabaay748
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