Adam Jabaay joins Garage Heroes In Training to unpack Gridlife’s recent “FMA” merger news and what it means for the future of the event series. They discuss why Gridlife needed more stability after years of rising costs, thin margins, and the post-COVID grind—without turning into a cash-out private equity play. Adam also covers Gridlife’s origins, the core focus on community and “best weekend ever” vibes, live-stream upgrades, and plans to shift back toward club-style HPDE/track-day feeder events as the lineup evolves.
GHiT 0754: Adam Jabaay Comes on Talk About the Recent Gridlife News and More
You may have seen the headlines with GridLife being sold, even in Forbes Magazine and Grassroots Motorsports among many others. We wanted to get the details and talk about what the changes mean and what the internet rumors were. Adam shared an evening with us and we are very excited about the future of GridLife.
A link to the episode is: https://tinyurl.com/754Gridlife
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"Why did you form a venture capital group to own grid life and then buy pit race and become your own data resource center?"
Gridlife is a company/community that’s tied to car events and track culture. The hosts are asking why the person built it up and then branched into other automotive businesses.
Gridlife is an automotive community and motorsports media platform centered on grassroots track culture. In the context of the conversation, it’s being discussed as a business venture that the guest helped build and then expanded into other related automotive enterprises.
"Why did you form a venture capital group to own grid life and then buy pit race and become your own data resource center?"
Venture capital is money from investors who bet on growing companies. The host is asking why the guest used that kind of funding approach to build and expand the motorsports businesses.
A venture capital group is a type of investment organization that funds early-stage or high-growth businesses in exchange for ownership stakes. The host is using it to describe how the guest structured the business behind Gridlife and related ventures.
"So we saw this email come out from grassroots motorsports and Forbes and everybody and then the world lit itself on fire."
Forbes is a well-known business magazine. When it covers something in the car world, it can make the news spread much faster and get more people talking.
Forbes is a major business publication, and it’s mentioned as a source that helped amplify the news being discussed. In motorsports culture, mainstream coverage can significantly increase attention and scrutiny for grassroots initiatives.
"Because you had to give up HPDEs. You had this really nice system getting people out there. I think we did two or three of them."
HPDEs are track days where people learn how to drive faster and safer on a racetrack, usually with instructors. Here, they’re saying they had to stop doing those events.
HPDE stands for High Performance Driver Education, which are track days where drivers learn and improve with coaching. The speaker says Gridlife had to give up HPDEs, implying a shift away from that format—likely due to cost, logistics, or business sustainability.
"But the track rentals for that, just a simple event. No competition, no nothing."
When people say “track rentals,” they mean the money you pay to use a race track for a day. It costs money even if you’re not racing—just driving and hanging out on track.
Track rentals are the fees organizers pay to use a racetrack for an event. Even non-competitive “track days” can be expensive because you’re paying for access, staffing, and track operations.
"And a fuel price are 3x and insurance costs just to ensure your streetcar"
Insurance is what you pay to protect yourself if something goes wrong. For cars used in events, the insurance can get pricey, and that adds to the overall cost of the hobby.
Insurance costs are a major part of motorsport and track-day budgeting, especially when insuring a car for street use and/or track activities. Higher premiums can make the hobby feel like it’s getting more expensive year over year.
"[504.4s] But like one or two less, like it does make, you know,
[508.9s] it maybe makes the season more sustainable for drivers.
[512.5s] But then in some cases it makes it like,"
This refers to the idea that fewer events can reduce costs and time demands on competitors. In grassroots and club racing, sustainability often means balancing entry fees, travel, and car maintenance workload.
"[525.2s] And like also this car is like a series of like, all right,
[528.1s] what is the best worst decision?
[530.7s] Like what's the best decision that we don't want to have to make?
[534.9s] Yeah.
[535.6s] Like that's really, it's like everything's a Sophie's choice"
They’re using “Sophie’s choice” to mean you’re stuck making a tough decision where every option has a downside. It’s like having to choose between two things you’d rather not have to choose between.
“Sophie’s choice” is used here as a metaphor for being forced to pick between bad options. In motorsports, it often describes tradeoffs like cost vs. participation, or schedule vs. travel.
"You probably hear that from like NASA regions. You hear that from all the people that I know that like our regional chairman of like SCCA orgs and stuff, like there's like a hundred some SCCA regions, but like none of them are having a great time."
SCCA is a big car club, and “regions” are the local groups that run events in different areas. The speaker is saying that even though there are many of them, they often have a hard time.
SCCA regions are local chapters of the Sports Car Club of America (SCCA) that organize events and racing activities. The speaker references the scale of the organization (many regions) and suggests that most are struggling rather than thriving.
"So when we got the chance to like jump into a bigger talent pool of
sponsorship sales people and like just networking, like the
biggest thing is it's like not what you know, it's like who you know
in business."
Sponsorship sales are when companies pay to be part of a racing event. They put their name on things so they can reach the people who show up and watch.
Sponsorship sales are the business side of motorsports where companies pay to be associated with events, teams, or drivers. In return, they get branding exposure and marketing opportunities to the audience that attends track weekends.
"[749.6s] Force equals mass times acceleration or whatever.
[753.9s] Sure.
[754.5s] FML means force."
This is a physics rule that explains acceleration. If you push harder (more force), the car speeds up more, and if the car is heavier (more mass), it accelerates less for the same push.
This is Newton’s Second Law of Motion. It says that the force applied to an object determines how quickly it accelerates, based on the object’s mass.
"And like, what's the next step? [831.4s] I like going fast, but I don't like speeding tickets. [834.2s] I don't like endangering people on, you know, the general roadways. [837.4s] So we get into racing, we get into stuff like that."
They’re saying they like driving fast, but they don’t want to do it on public roads. Racing lets you go fast in a controlled environment with rules and safety measures.
The speaker is describing a shift from general road driving to racing as a safer, more controlled way to go fast. In motorsports, speed is pursued within rules, track boundaries, and safety systems rather than public roads.
"[1043.1s] we show up on site, or like by the time the gates open, at least, you know, [1047.3s] and some of that comes in, in ad strategy and like smart people buying ads."
Ad strategy is the plan for advertising—like what you’re trying to get people to do and who you’re trying to reach. They’re saying they improved how they plan ads.
“Ad strategy” refers to how a campaign is planned and executed—what you’re promoting, who you’re targeting, and how you allocate budget. In the segment, it’s tied to reaching revenue goals before showing up on-site.
"[1063.9s] ...the ever changing like modern landscape of [1067.4s] like how you purchase ads and how you like target people and stuff like that."
Targeting people means choosing which kind of audience you want your ads to reach. Instead of showing ads to everyone, you try to reach the right group.
“Target people” refers to audience targeting—choosing specific groups likely to be interested in the product or event. In modern ad buying, this is often done via demographics, interests, and online behavior.
"[1071.8s] But it's a kind of a fascinating, like it feels like I'm going to like marketing 101 and all the way up to like a master's class"
“Marketing 101” just means the basics of marketing. They’re saying the conversation went from basic ideas to more advanced stuff.
“Marketing 101” is a shorthand for the basic fundamentals of marketing—things like positioning, messaging, and understanding your audience. In the segment, it’s used to contrast simple basics with more advanced strategy.
"We hosted our first event in 2014, but we've been hosting track events since since 2004. So yeah, like basically 12 year, 11 years, 12 years of grid life in 20."
Track events are organized days where cars drive on a real race track instead of public roads. They usually have rules, schedules, and safety procedures.
“Track events” refers to organized on-circuit driving where cars run on a closed course under rules and scheduling. The discussion frames years of experience hosting these events, which matters for logistics, safety, and event quality.
"and using drift cars and stuff. [1281.0s] And he'd been getting into like kind of the, the, the assisting his friends"
Drift cars are cars used for drifting, where the driver makes the car slide sideways on purpose. It’s a controlled way of going around corners, not just gripping the road normally.
“Drift cars” are vehicles set up to intentionally oversteer and slide through corners. In drifting, the driver maintains a controlled slide while keeping speed and angle, which is different from normal racing where you aim for maximum grip.
"Now we've done Laguna Seca. Um, like we have, we have like, we've played in a lot of like, like sandboxes and a lot of these areas too."
Laguna Seca is a famous race track in California. The speaker is saying they’ve held events there, which is a big deal for motorsports.
Laguna Seca is WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca, a famous road course in California. It’s commonly associated with high-profile motorsports, so mentioning it highlights the scale/visibility of the speaker’s event circuit.
"Like if you go to a race track, like you're, even if somebody has a completely different car and like a completely different job"
A race track is a closed course built for fast driving. It’s also where a lot of car people meet and connect because they’re all there for the same kind of driving.
A race track is a purpose-built circuit where cars are driven at speed in a controlled environment. In motorsports culture, the track is also where communities form—people meet through shared events, cars, and interests.
"Everybody talks about rules. They talk about, uh, entry fees. They talk about live streams, whatever."
Entry fees are the money you pay to join an event. They can change who can afford to participate.
Entry fees are the cost to participate in an event, such as a race weekend or motorsport gathering. They can affect who shows up and how accessible the event is for new competitors.
"it feels like the younger your audience and paddock also, like the more you have to remind them to be friends"
At a race, the paddock is like the “hangout and work area” near the track. It’s where people talk cars, show parts, and meet other fans and racers.
The paddock is the area at a race event where teams, drivers, and fans hang out between sessions. It’s where you’ll often see cars being worked on, people talking setups, and gear like wheels being shown off.
"Like you look at like a case examples, like an Eric Cattil Eric Cattil's first time on a road course. He had like started a group chat with me and three of my buddies asking about like, how do you set it up for a road course?"
A road course is a race track with lots of turns, not just long straightaways. It’s where drivers practice things like when to slow down for corners and how to steer smoothly through them.
A road course is a type of race track that uses a mix of left and right turns and varying corner types, usually on a circuit designed for cars rather than ovals. When someone says “first time on a road course,” it typically means learning braking points, corner entry/exit, and driving lines in a more technical environment than straight-line racing.
"So things that we've seen, things that we've seen on the internet, is there any truth to Winston becoming the title sponsor?"
A title sponsor is the main company that puts its name on the event. They typically get the most prominent logo placement and marketing exposure.
A title sponsor is the brand that gets top billing in an event’s name and branding, like “Brand X Cup.” It usually comes with the biggest visibility and marketing rights compared to other sponsorship tiers.
"I mean, they weren't copyright anymore or trademark anymore, whatever you call it."
A trademark is the law that protects a brand’s name or logo. It can still matter even if other legal protections (like copyright) don’t.
Trademark is a legal protection for brand identifiers like names, logos, and distinctive packaging. Even if a company’s copyright is no longer an issue, trademarks can still restrict how similar logos are used on merch or broadcasts.
"I mean, they weren't copyright anymore or trademark anymore, whatever you call it."
Copyright is the law that protects creative content. If a logo or design is still copyrighted, copying it for merch can be illegal.
Copyright protects original creative works (like artwork, photos, and some designs). In the context of merch, it can affect whether you can legally reproduce or closely mimic a logo or graphic.
"Remember when they had the fake Marlboro coloring? Cause they couldn't put the word, but they had everything else."
Marlboro is a cigarette brand. In racing and media, using their exact brand name or wording can be restricted, so people sometimes try to copy the look without using the name.
Marlboro is a cigarette brand whose branding and packaging are heavily regulated in advertising. The discussion about “fake Marlboro coloring” highlights how motorsports teams sometimes try to evoke a brand visually while avoiding restricted wording.
"But the thing that we like the heart and soul for Chris and I and for John and for a bunch of the team is like club events. We really like we loved hosting really fun club weekends..."
Club events are smaller, community-focused race weekends. They’re aiming for a fun atmosphere with serious driving, but typically with less chaos than side-by-side racing.
Club events are positioned as the “heart and soul” of the organizers, emphasizing fun weekends with high-level time attack and less stress than wheel-to-wheel. They also describe club events as supporting infrastructure for larger events.
"Well this should be fantastic we will we will make our annual pilgrimage to Lime Rock we still have our open invite for you to stop by..."
Lime Rock is a famous race track. They’re saying they’ll be going there again and inviting the guest to stop by.
Lime Rock Park is a well-known road course in the northeastern U.S., commonly associated with club racing and track events. The “annual pilgrimage” and open invite suggest it’s a recurring Gridlife destination.
"No I was just saying if you're driving by and you need a new engine we probably have one if it's a car we've had I've probably got too many spare parts for it so."
Spare parts are extra components kept on hand for repairs or replacements. Having a stock of parts is especially valuable in motorsports or enthusiast circles where downtime is costly and parts may be hard to source quickly.
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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 going to be one of the hosts for today.
This one should be fun. Miss Vicky, you're here.
I am. I'm here.
Excellent. Excellent. We have one of our faves. He's back again.
He thought he was off the hook, but then he put out this announcement,
and we had to talk about it.
I didn't put it out.
Well, somebody put it out and let the internet on fire.
There's an announcement.
There's an announcement.
So with that, let's introduce Adam Jabay.
I never like to preface a podcast that I'm going to be on with.
This should be good.
This should be good.
So Adam, the internet knows everything.
They know every single detail.
So why?
I didn't know.
Why? I know. It's amazing.
Why did you form a venture capital group to own grid life
and then buy pit race and become your own data resource center?
Is this true, Adam? Why did you do this?
These electric bills are getting so hard to pay.
I forgot. Yeah, shit, dude.
So with your multi-billions of dollars that you've made over the years
from grid life, you decided to start up an AI business.
That's actually all of everything you said in the last 10 seconds is completely false.
Don't quantify it only 10 seconds, Adam.
I speak falsely all the time.
So we saw this email come out from grassroots motorsports and Forbes
and everybody and then the world lit itself on fire.
We tried to get you on.
We've had scheduling fun.
You played with Dewey because honestly, you love Dewey more.
And we understand that.
I mean, Dewey's a lovable kind of guy.
He's not a little teddy bear. He's a big teddy bear, but great guy.
But I thought we'd go over it and get into it.
I appreciate it.
Congratulations on the...
I don't know if sales the right word.
It's more like a merger.
Yeah, kind of combining of resources and stuff.
Build a friend group, build our sales team.
The thing that makes racing go is sponsorship or partnership
and all the people you know.
And the more people you know, the better it is for your org
and the people that are racing inside of your org
and attending your events and blah, blah, blah.
So it's really more like a build and grow and a build and grow.
And also in the time of sales or whatever you want to call this,
we get to eliminate some of the things that haunted us over the years,
which is like you have a few bad festivals and suddenly you have some debt
that you're carrying around and that affects the quality of your life
and the sustainability of your business and all that.
So it really is like...
It's more of a...
This is not private equity.
It's definitely not private equity.
They aren't looking to cash out. There's no timelines.
There's no payback schedules. There's nothing like that.
No data center.
Yeah, they don't want... There's no data centers.
There's no data centers.
I'll use ChatGBT one time.
It doesn't give me anything good, so I don't use it.
The biggest thing is like turn this into a business
that is a lot more bulletproof than it used to be,
but also is kind of like the best possible version of what it has been,
what it could be, which is very exciting to us especially.
We want to see it go and go and go.
We want to see it be the thing that...
Especially for the large events,
which is like everything on our calendar this year,
the six events is a large event.
We want to see those really, really work.
And then maybe we get back to half a dozen club rounds
slash track day rounds, stuff like that.
So it's like a best picture,
best possible version of 2026 for us.
And this has been happening.
It's been in the background, been talked about for quite a while.
We felt like these are the right people to do this with.
They really see the vision.
They see the creativity in our team.
They want the people in our team.
They don't want to touch motor sports like you got this.
Do whatever you do, which is... It's great to hear.
So we're very excited about a lot of things.
So going back years, when you first came on,
and you said this on your podcast,
you still have a podcast, right?
We just did one the other day.
I'll look at you, fancy boy.
Just make sure you don't try to clear up all the internet rumors.
Going back originally,
the thing that always made me happiest about Gridlife was,
you said you wanted to have the events that you friends wanted to go to.
And I think this step that you guys are doing
is a way for you to do that and be sustainable
and maybe grow scope.
Because you had to give up HPDEs.
You had this really nice system getting people out there.
I think we did two or three of them.
And like you said, you were kind of hand-to-mouth budget-wise.
Because I know tracks obviously get rented for $5 a weekend.
No problem there.
And insurance, they pay you to go to the track
so they have something that could possibly cost them millions of dollars.
So they obviously pay you.
So you're making money everywhere you go.
I'm glad you got a figured out bill.
You mean that's not it?
Tracks cost more than $5 and insurance doesn't pay you?
Man, if the people only knew like the money you spend
just like putting on a basic day.
A simple event, which isn't actually a real-life event.
It's like a Chris and Adam event.
It's an aridoming event.
And even that is like, I mean, the amount of money we spend
just on like barbecue, like feed everybody on Saturday night.
But the track rentals for that, just a simple event.
No competition, no nothing.
We've been doing it for, this is our 23rd year coming up on this year.
And like the costs have gotten really like it's an,
it's almost like an exponential thing.
If you look at it over 25, 20, whatever years,
like it's gotten very expensive.
Like this hobby has gotten expensive too.
And a fuel price are 3x and insurance costs just to ensure your streetcar
is like 50% or more up or whatever.
Like we all know that like the daily cost of like life is high.
And so like the unnecessary is definitely suffer,
which is part of the reason that like,
we did make a strategic move to take a couple of events out
because we do want to hang out with our friends year over year.
A lot of them do do a lot of events.
So if there's like one less event,
although we did intend for Petrace to be on the schedule this year,
but then the track evaporated.
But like one or two less, like it does make, you know,
it maybe makes the season more sustainable for drivers.
But then in some cases it makes it like,
oh, you know, I got to drive a little further.
You know, like, yeah, there's this, this whole thing is just a,
you don't have to though.
But it's a serious like this hobby.
And like also this car is like a series of like, all right,
what is the best worst decision?
Like what's the best decision that we don't want to have to make?
Yeah.
Like that's really, it's like everything's a Sophie's choice
or whatever that movie was from the 80s.
It's her fault then.
She bought Petrace.
She might have, I'm not sure.
Meryl Streep.
It's a series of decisions you don't want to have to make in order to
like just be in existence.
And hopefully this whole like this new group FMA allows us to,
and some of the conversations that have just happened in the last
couple of weeks, like, and I'm not even in a lot of these conversations.
This is like, but a lot of these, like the stuff that I'm hearing is
absolutely crazy, the people that are interested in the companies that
are interested in partnering with this new group and using the
talents of this new group to build their businesses.
It's very exciting.
Ever since, even since I was on, I was on heat exchange or like two
or three weeks ago, talking with James.
And I recorded with Austin and Abe on our podcast, like the day
before we announced, and then Abe put it out for like a week, because
he was like riding a bicycle in Adelaide or something.
He's got to get his 100 miles every day, you know.
You got to get those pedals.
But the, like the things that the conversations I'm hearing about
and think the conversations we're having and the people that want to
work with this new group, it's a very exciting time.
Like this is how maybe grid life gets to go on.
Because there was, I mean, there's been a lot of times where we were
back up, back against the wall, like small business stuff.
And maybe it wasn't going to work.
Like this was a, this is a very difficult business.
And you probably hear that from like NASA regions.
You hear that from all the people that I know that like our regional
chairman of like SCCA orgs and stuff, like there's like a hundred some
SCCA regions, but like none of them are having a great time.
This is all very difficult.
So when we got the chance to like jump into a bigger talent pool of
like sponsorship sales people and like just networking, like the
biggest thing is it's like not what you know, it's like who you know
in business.
And the thing that makes grid life go is actually the business behind
it.
Like the people that make the tracks, track events happen.
John, myself and like a killer team of like 15, 20 people.
They like, why would they change that?
Like we already do a pretty okay-ish job in my opinion of like
hosting a really tight, busy competition weekend.
So we get to do that.
The fact that we get to keep doing that, that's like the biggest
win for me.
Right.
So I think you, I think you lost, you lost me a little bit when you
guys missed the opportunity because I noticed that looking at
your face the last couple of years, seeing how, seeing how you
were and then just reading body expressions.
I think you guys had the opportunity instead of FMA, I would
lobby hard if it's not too late, FML.
FML would have fit your personality after the, you know, the
past couple of years.
I'm just saying it's a, it's a marketing thing.
I'm not, I'm an engineer.
I'm not great at this creativity stuff, but you know, there's an
opportunity there, I think.
I didn't get to name it the group, but I'm glad I didn't get to name
the group.
So I mean, you know, I mean,
No pressure, right?
You do you.
FMA was good, but FML, I think FML could be the way to go.
Force equals mass times acceleration or whatever.
Sure.
FML means force.
No, it's not force.
It's not clicking, but I think it, I think you had a chance.
There's a four letter word of it or something.
Somewhere.
Yeah.
Those are about where my brain starts to lose, you know, I can't
count any more higher than that.
So first time we met was what like five, six years ago.
Is it about that?
I think it was six.
I might have been five, but I think it was six.
I was probably a little bit more cheery faced when you met.
You seemed like less life had sucked out of your body.
Yeah, maybe a little bit kind of feel like we might be approaching
those days again, which is good.
I mean, like the less life sucked out of your body days is what I
want.
I want like, oh, okay.
That's good.
Yeah.
Cause that's actually what we're, what we're seeking is it did feel
like, and I talked about this a bit on like Dewey's podcast or
heat exchanger, Dewey, Jim Devin.
They, like we, after like, I don't know, it's probably two hours.
We started to circle back to like the things that like, what gets
us into this is like, oh, general, general car curiosity, like a
general level of excitement about this.
And like, what's the next step?
I like going fast, but I don't like speeding tickets.
I don't like endangering people on, you know, the general roadways.
So we get into racing, we get into stuff like that.
And I had kind of lost like just the base general excitement, the
last, I don't know, probably two, three years.
And it started, it started like, you know, I think a lot of people,
especially people in the event space, got really, got really like
trodden on over 2020 COVID stuff, like really kicked you in the
face the first six months of like, just like trying to put people
in an environment together.
If that was part of your core business model, like you were
aft, whether you're aft or like whatever, unless you were
Walmart, then you could like put as many people in the Walmart
or Costco as you want.
Doesn't seem to matter.
I think baking yourself for three days at New Jersey was probably
not the best either.
That was the hottest weekend of my entire life.
God, it was a lot.
But it sort of takes some of the, some of the fun out of it.
And then like, just the general, like the malaise of whatever the
last five, six years have been, like we all have some of that.
But it started to become a very hard business.
And, you know, we were robbing in 2024 to pay 2023 Robin 2023 to
pay 2022.
And it just got to a certain point where it's like, what are we doing?
Like this is very hard business to do.
And we're throwing some great events that we're very proud of and like
some of the best memories of our lives.
But then you got to like spend, you know, one to two months in between
those events, just like figuring out how you pay your bills.
And yeah, some of this is just, it's just a really hard business,
especially when you came from no capitalization, like you bootstrapped
your way all the way up to this big thing.
And this big thing is a very tenuous position.
Like, yeah, if it doesn't work, like it really doesn't work, you know,
like, and so being, you know, knowing more people and being
potentially like slightly capitalized and having like a backstop,
like this is what makes us keep going, which to me is like the biggest
excitement because like considering bankruptcy for the thing that like
you, you built out of complete love.
And then you like turned into like your entire friend and family group.
Considering bankruptcy on that is like the most gut wrenching thought.
Like it's not to say that like we had considered that, but we definitely
had considered that.
So it's, yeah, it's a terrible thought, you know, it's
as the events grew, the swings got bigger.
Yeah.
When, when you, you start to look at the possibilities of like, oh,
what if we, what if we do this and we spend more on that and more on
advertising and we really doubled down on this and like, then you start
looking at like return on an ad spend and blah, blah, blah.
And it's like, well, we're still crossing our fingers all the way to the
finish line.
And then you hope for that.
The weather is good.
Or the walkup is good.
Exactly.
If the weather is bad, like the walkup is terrible.
Like getting to the finish line sometimes doesn't happen until Saturday
afternoon of a Friday, Saturday, Sunday event.
So, yeah, hopefully the, just kind of like iron cladding our old wooden
worship, you know, like let's it, let's it not have to worry about those
things.
And we have gotten to the finish line monetarily, you know, long before
we show up on site, or like by the time the gates open, at least, you
know, and some of that comes in, in ad strategy and like smart people
buying ads.
And we've changed a lot of that stuff in the past six months even like
some of the buzzwords and stuff that fly around in these conference
calls.
Like I have to Google them because I'm kind of a simple 10 as far as
some of this, you know, the ever changing like modern landscape of
like how you purchase ads and how you like target people and stuff like
that.
But it's a kind of a fascinating, like it feels like a, feels like I'm
going to like marketing 101 and all the way up to like a master's class
of marketing, like in the same phone call with with a whole bunch of
smart people, which is it's kind of exciting for me.
But the ability to like to keep on going is it's like a full on privilege.
I can't complain about it.
And like people asked like, Oh, man, are you excited or is this bad or
is this good?
And like, I'm I haven't been this excited maybe since it's since like
2019.
I haven't stoked in a long time because it's been a slog.
It's been hard.
And I'm really excited about the possibility and especially the
possibility for like our team members, like the people that have like
sacrificed a whole lot to like come work race events with us, you know,
all over the country.
The stability this might bring to them and like the quality that that we
are, you know, potentially allowed to do at the events now, like doing
that doing everything correctly is has kind of been a goal, like whether
it be like insurance or we've been doing that, whether it be like
insurance or like staffing or whatever, doing it quality, doing it
well for those people, like the more solid people and the better you
treat them, hopefully the better the event overall, we seem to have
alignment across the entire team on that, like do it right.
Do it the first time, make a great event.
I'm excited to hopefully keep making good events.
So yeah, it's nothing good, in my opinion.
How long, how long has a great life been around?
We hosted our first event in 2014, but we've been hosting track events
since since 2004.
So yeah, like basically 12 year, 11 years, 12 years of grid life in 20.
This is like our 22nd, 23rd year of hosting track events.
So, way more than, way more than we ever thought we would have been
around.
Right.
Now, my question is, is that, I mean, I know Adam Jabay.
I know Adam Jabay is just like this really cool guy and he's always kind
of out and about what, like, is this, is grid life yours?
No, I was, I was co-founder of grid life with my buddy Chris Stewart.
Okay.
He was the primary visionary of this.
And Chris, Chris came from the ad world.
Uh-huh.
From the ad world, he's not dead.
He, uh,
FML is still available, just saying.
He's kind of like the person who, so many years ago,
he and I started hosting this West Michigan Honda Meet event together
at Jinderman Raceway.
And it was kind of like his idea at first.
He was like, if we just give them money, they'll like let us use the
race track and we can like sell tickets.
Can you build this?
And so like, I was kind of like his, uh, his right hand guy that weekend.
And then over the years, like the whole motorsport side of it,
like kind of became like, well, Adam just handles that.
Um, and then in 2013 or early 2014, he was like, Hey, you want to host
this other event?
Like he, we both had friends in like road racing world and in
just getting into SCCA road racing.
We were both doing lemon stuff.
Um, he had like produce some music videos with, uh, with some people
and using drift cars and stuff.
And he'd been getting into like kind of the, the, the assisting his
friends and like producing shows around Chicago, um, EDM shows,
stuff like that.
Uh-huh.
He was into like moped world, which kind of moped world.
Moped world, especially back then, especially like 10, 15 years ago
was like, it was like, it was like, uh, like the cutest Hell's Angels
never thought about.
Like they were, they were adorable, nice people.
Uh, they were like the adorable, nice version of like the Hell's Angels,
like Chicago chapter and like the San Diego chapter and all this stuff.
And, uh, there was a website.
It might be around still moped army.
And they would host these big rallies and like people would come from
all across the country in the world and like hundreds of mopeds
like mob these cities for a weekend.
And they were always like a really good time.
Uh, and so like him and some buddies had hosted like some pretty
big moped rallies and like he was always a really big community builder.
And, uh, and I was, uh, I was, I was getting pretty good at like
hosting a motor sports event.
Um, at least I thought back then, you know, in 2013, 2012, whatever.
And I had been to a bunch of SCCA races and lemons races and NASA stuff.
And we were, you know, we were just doing, you know, general hobby racetrack stuff.
Um, so we, we threw this one big party at gingerman raceway in 2014 that was
like supposed to be like the place where all of our friends are drift
friends are autocross friends or car show friends are like cars and coffee
before it was called cars and coffee friends parking, let me buddies where
they all like wanted to come and like music was kind of the glue and camping
was kind of the glue.
Um, and that was what the first and second grid lives were.
Um, and then like the time attack series starting getting pretty serious as
racers do, they start to be, they try to be better and better.
Like, and we were racers.
So we try to make the series better and better and the rule sets better and better.
Um, and then I was, I was from like 2015, 2016.
I was, I wanted to host a sprint race.
Like, cause that was my, my like heart and soul was like, I love doing
sprint racing.
Like that was the thing that I really loved back then.
I actually rolled out grid life touring cup in 2019 and it became kind of
like the, the, like our, our, our highest piece.
I had like, I had to kind of kick it into existence as far as insurance goes
and like even convincing like Chris and some of the team that we were going
to do it and it was going to be great.
I really had to, I feel like I had to kick it into existence.
Um, and like literally sell all the spots myself, like tell all my friends
and then like it just popped and like it turned into this.
We started live streaming it.
Um, and the live stream quality, we just kept building on it and reinvesting
like all of this is just, did we make 500 bucks?
How can we spend 600 bucks next time?
Because maybe then we'll make 700 bucks and we can spend 800 bucks next time.
And then maybe like 900 bucks.
It was always like a gamble on the build the future.
Um, just to keep building and building and building.
So you're your own Ponzi scheme.
A hundred percent.
Yeah.
We're definitely, grid life is grid life is a Ponzi scheme that rubs
from itself.
Uh, but, uh, just reinvesting into like the, into like what it is
and like making it, uh, beautiful as far as like even like ads go and like
or silly or like, uh, just like trying to bring in the car or curious to
a road course to say, to show them like, Oh, you got this 350 Z that you like
to go to parking lot meets with and you do burnouts and you know your dad.
Like you can cut, like there's a place where you can like, like do,
you can do the thing that like you didn't even know existed.
And like maybe it's a safe place.
Uh, like you won't get the cops won't bust you.
Uh, you can run time.
You can do HPD.
Uh, or you can just like come like set up track side, build a sick campsite
like Larry channel, take pictures of your campsite, half a formula drift or
drink all your beer and the smash your tables.
Like best party ever.
What do you want out of this?
Like there's a lot of ways to like have a best weekend ever at like a big
gridlife festival.
Um, and so we try to like make it a, uh, like a good place for all of those
things without letting people like run themselves, like actually into walls
and hurt themselves like at 2 a.m. when they've had too many.
Uh, but, uh, you know, we literally build like a hospital just in case at
Midwest festival and some of the people began a field at Gingerman.
Like there's a giant hospital tent just in case you like step on something
and hurt yourself.
Yeah.
But it's, but it's like, it's also kind of like, uh, it's your personal
version of like best weekend ever.
Uh, try to build like the place that the most possible people can have
their personal version of best weekend ever.
And they all have the same thing in common.
And it's like cars and music and hanging out to friends.
Um, so that's really like, that's the five minute of like, what do you do
here?
So that's real life started out out to be, and then it like turned into
all, all these other things, like baby IMSA, uh, it like kind of turned
into baby IMSA, uh, which we didn't really mean for it to be, but
then a whole bunch of heavy hitters from NASA and SCCA and, uh, even like
actually IMSA and SRO and they all started building cars for it.
And it's all like ultimate streetcar challenge and Optima and they all came
into one place and they all became friends too.
Uh, and then it really like, like GLTC and some of the higher level
time attack stuff and like now GLGT and like we brought this other thing,
the rush, little mini sports racer cars in, uh, and like they're all competing
at a really crazy high level.
Um, and we never, I never thought it would get there.
Like I never thought it would be respected, uh, by like, and, and like
the place where people wanted to end up.
And I'm sure some people probably look at it like a whole bunch of
flat brain idiots that like vape and go to concerts, but it also probably
is the highest level amateur stuff in the country.
And we didn't, on average, you know, across all these classes and stuff
and like it happens all these, it's like the SCCA runoffs, but it's over
and over and over.
Like we didn't expect that.
Um, but it also is like, all right, now it's here.
So you kind of owe it something.
You have to like keep doing it because like if they, if they want this
and they've put all this effort in like, okay, we owe it to them to like
give them the high level competition and like the beautiful live stream
and, uh, the best weekend ever over and over.
So, um, it's kind of like rocking a hard place.
Like didn't mean to build this.
Guess we built that.
We should probably maintain that.
Um, we should probably still try to make it fun and remind them that it's
fun and like there's, there's several of our drivers this year that are like
going to run pro series also, which is, wow.
It's bizarre, but like they, like Matan Rosenberg is running.
Uh, he's like got a factory Hyundai ride in SRO and he's also running GLGT
and he's a two-time TC champion and he started out driving Crown Vix with
this when he was 15 in HPD.
That was like three years ago because he's not exactly old.
It was only like five, six years ago.
But, uh, it, it, yeah, it's become this whole thing that like
he starts spinning one plate and then you're like, oh my gosh, how many plates
are spinning?
And, but like we're getting pretty good at balancing these plates.
Um, hopefully we can keep spinning these plates because like we really like
seeing all these plates happen and like they're spinning is important to us.
And, uh, so that's where we're at.
We're like trying to maintain the ability to spin a lot of plates, which, uh,
given the, uh, some of the recent changes, like, yeah, oh man, we got a lot more
fingers to spin these plates and make sure everything balances, which is very exciting.
Did you, did you ever like think it would get so big so fast?
No, never.
Never.
None of my wildest dreams in 2019.
We're going to host a couple of smart races and I thought, well, it's going to,
2019 was like peak grid life for me.
It was like pre COVID.
Um, we were kind of on a rocket ship as far as like spectators go.
Like we thought, uh, we thought like some of these events were getting really big.
Uh, we were at the time, like doing okay money wise.
Like we're paying a few salaries, uh, track rentals were way cheaper.
Insurance was like fairly reasonable.
Um, we were still semi Midwest.
So we were like driving truck and all the events.
We had done some events, um, down Atlanta.
2019 was our last year in Atlanta until we went back last year with formula drift in 2025.
Um, but like Atlanta was our furthest away event.
And then we like started doing, uh, some events in, uh, Colorado Springs.
And that even that was like a one day drive.
It wasn't that far.
Um, and then we started dabbling in the, the West coast.
Uh, in California, we did some events at streets of Willow.
Uh, and then we did big Willow and then, I mean, a couple of years ago,
we've done Thunder Hill.
Now we've done Laguna Seca.
Um, like we have, we have like, we've played in a lot of like,
like sandboxes and a lot of these areas too.
Like the East coast is very different than the Midwest and the Midwest is very
different than like central, uh, like call it central, whatever Colorado would be.
Uh, and then it's so different from the West coast,
but also like all of these people, especially in the last 10 years have like
become friends on Facebook and on forums anyway.
Starting to look for a reason to go like visit their friends out there,
like meet those people that they've been talking to, uh,
or whose posts they've been seeing or whose cars they've admired from like,
you know, the internet or magazines, even when magazines were more of a thing.
Um, and so it's kind of been fun to see like the organic, like, yeah,
I'll truck about to California a couple of times.
So make some friends, uh, or like when you see all of Michigan,
Indiana, Chicago, Wisconsin, like in 2016, our first time in Atlanta,
they all like trailer to Atlanta and it was like a two thirds.
Like it was, I think it was like 55 or 65% of our drivers that that event,
our first event wrote Atlanta, uh, which was a pretty, pretty good festival.
It was, you know, it was fine.
Uh, and that event popped off in a couple of years too.
We, we had Luda Chris.
We had a whole bunch of like pretty big music acts and not the first year,
but like second, third, fourth year.
Uh, but to see all of our friends like truck down and just spend time
at a new racetrack and like meet a whole bunch of new people because
where Atlanta had been like this, like a hotspot for, uh,
for global time attack for several years.
And so they all like got to go head to head.
And, but then they all became friends because they're all the same person.
Like if you go to a race track, like you're,
even if somebody has a completely different car and like a completely different job
and their watch is worth 10,000 bucks and you wear,
wear a time X like you're the same person.
It doesn't matter.
Like you could spend all this money, but like, okay,
we're all, we kind of want the same thing out of this very rarely.
Do you not have like more in common, more in common than you don't
with the person next to you in the hot pits, you know?
So it's been fun to see like the company grow, uh,
like coming to racetracks and going to racetracks with and like seeing them
like make new friends and it's still all this, like the biggest thing,
like being hard of it is really community building.
I'm rambling now, but like community is kind of the thing that we think a lot of it about.
I like a lot about, um, but it's also the hardest thing to like put your
thumb on like, how do we do this?
You know, um, what's the, there's no secret.
Like there's no secret recipe.
I think like the more I like, I think about it.
Like I think the, the biggest key to success early on, and especially like
2019, 2020, 2021, uh, that I think the key to success was like,
the grid life staff was like approachable and nice.
And they were, they tried to be friends with the people that were driving with them.
Um, and the people that were driving with them, uh, came and made new friends
and you just like built and built and built.
And I think this, like it never gets talked about.
Everybody talks about rules.
They talk about, uh, entry fees.
They talk about live streams, whatever.
To me, I mean, at least from my side, which is much more motor sports than
like marketing and camping and music and stuff like that.
But to me, like the thing that if you do it right is like go up to somebody
and ask them two or three questions and then just try to remember their name
and like show some interest in, in another fellow human.
Uh, they show interest in you and then you just have a new friend.
Like the more new actual real friends you have, like that's life is actually like better.
What is it?
It's like, um, what is it?
Race people make the best friends.
Um, race people are the best people, especially in the meat space.
If the most competitive people and you can make some enemies so fast,
it's so much harder to make an enemy than it is to make a friend.
It really is.
Um, but so many people forget, especially as we get older,
like we forget how much fun it is to like go make a new friend.
Like, well, I mean, if you also think about it too,
it's just social media has pulled us out of, out of like the real world.
So it's really important to have, right?
It's really important to get out there, um, and do these things.
And no matter what it is, if it's racing, if it's marathons,
if it's kayaking or something, it's just getting out and just meeting people
and being in the same space because people are so thirsty for that.
They don't even realize how thirsty they are for it.
They don't even realize it.
They don't.
We, and we forget, you know, being in 40s, 50s, whatever age we are,
we forget how natural it was before the internet for us to be like,
I'm throwing into a new place.
All right.
Who's this person?
I'm going to go make this friend.
We're having a good day.
This happens.
And I watched my daughter who like, she's watched YouTube,
but she really didn't go on the internet.
She doesn't have social media.
She's 11.
It's so easy for her to make friends.
I watched my nieces and nephews.
They're all under five.
It's so easy to go make friends.
Like it's just a natural human thing.
But then like you spend 10 years on Facebook or Instagram or whatever.
And suddenly like you're, you're at a, you're like at a completely
different place with interactions.
Like you're, you're combating and you're like fighting for the most
attention.
And it's like, it's such a toxic way to view life.
So like, I mean, you kind of look at like a 20 year old,
20 or 30 year old, you have to like almost give them like a couple.
They need like a handicap on friendship.
You got to ask them like five questions instead of three to break
them out of their natural competitiveness because like maybe they
like your shoes and they're mad at you now because they like your shoes
or like your car.
You pull up next to them and like, oh, clearly you have better wheels
than me.
So I hate you now.
Like this is a, this is like some of the hurdles that you see just
with like the way generations have gone through life.
Um, and so I mean, it's not like something you can really like put
an SOP to fix together, you know, but, uh, but I mean, like the
core of some of these events is or any event is just community
building.
We're all going to go to the same place.
We're all going to do the same.
So generally we're probably all going to be friends if we let ourselves
so like just like let yourself be friends with someone.
Um, if you don't like them, then don't be.
Be friends with them.
Maybe go for friends with somebody else.
If that person next to you sucks, maybe they just kind of suck, but
also like doesn't mean everybody sucks at the racetrack.
But even, you know what, even if they do, you know, I really think
that people meet on the same level, like you said, at some point.
And I know that in the racing that I do, it's just so easy to walk up
and talk to buddy, somebody, anybody, because they're just, they're
so passionate about what they do and they just want to share it.
Yeah.
And you're equally as passionate about it.
And you just want to know.
And I, I didn't know the competitiveness kind of gets in the
way a little bit, but genuinely, you know, the people that you can sit down
and have like a nice beer with or a glass of wine or something like
that.
And just, Hey, let's talk about those wheels you've got.
Where'd you get them?
They're pretty badass.
You know,
it feels like the younger your audience and paddock also, like the
more you have to remind them to be friends, which is odd.
But it does seem to be, but I think we've kind of broken some of that
because like, there's always somebody awake in a garage and there's 10
people hanging out, like no matter the hour.
And that, that's not, that's not always a thing when you're into
an older paddock, like I was at SCCA or whatever, because they go to bed
and they'll go to the hotel or they go on their totter or whatever.
I do, I am really thankful that we have a young paddock that like
stays up and fixes everybody else's crap.
And I, like the thing that I'm like most excited about now is maybe
the ability to be excited again, to go see all my friends.
Like it to a place where this became like, there was a couple
events where, and largely the events that I fear the most or feared
the most in the past over the last few years, because we were going
into them at like a huge deficit.
Like we were upside down, we're talking like $600,000 or whatever.
We need, we need a beautiful Friday and Saturday.
We need the advertising to work, like the radio ads, like the Spotify ads,
the gas station pump ads, whatever.
But you drive to these events on like a Monday or Tuesday or Wednesday
or whatever, and it feels like you're going to your death.
Like it feels like you're driving to your own execution when that is
happening, and you don't have that money.
So you're going to have to figure it out on the backside.
I just don't want to feel that anymore.
I want to be, and we've kind of gotten past some of that last year.
We like started to pick up some of those pieces of years past.
I didn't feel like I was driving to my death at all last year,
which was a lovely change.
But, but we are also dragging around a whole bunch of events that like I drove
to, and I felt like you're going to your execution.
But that does take some of the like the spark out of like wanting to talk to
the people that you talk to a couple of times, two, three times a year.
And I think like, if you have a whole bunch of that, like this business is
too hard.
So I am not stoked to be here, but I have to be here because it's part of
my job.
And like, if you like spread that vibe across a whole bunch of like staff,
like the whole event's going to suffer too.
The thing that I would love to completely go away is that like that that
dirge feeling like driving to your execution.
I don't want to ever feel that I don't want any of our employees to feel that
I don't want any of our staff to feel that I want them to be like, man,
great racetrack.
Walken's Glen get to go back to Quacken's Glen.
It's going to be so sick.
Can't wait.
Man, what a pretty get to go to, you know, that one turn that I really liked
or like, damn, that's the biggest hot pit I've ever seen in my entire life.
The grandstands are huge.
How can they let us be here?
Like I want the entire excitement that we had the first time we go there.
Like I'm excited to go back because like we never like got to finish that
story.
I'm excited to finish that story.
I can't wait to like go back to road America someday and like and, you know,
be our just keep building and just the fact that I'm like now excited about it.
Like that's what leads me to think that like we needed this change.
Our drivers needed this change.
Our staff needs this change.
I think it's going to be good for the entirety of like if it's good for us,
if it's good for our drivers, it's probably good for the sport.
And if it's good for the sport, it's good for like, even our competitors,
like we have competitors that have drivers like competitors,
meaning other sanctioning bodies of their series.
Like we have drivers that have crossed over to them.
They, you know, they're like, this is all like rising tides,
razor boats, whatever, like a merger.
It all relies like this entire sport though relies on all these little
20 minute conversations.
If like every, if everybody went to the race track and didn't talk to anybody,
like the sport would not be very cool.
And like all the conversations need to be good.
I'm excited for our conversations to hopefully be good and positive next year.
So this year, like starting in a month, whenever we're just.
Yeah, I'm kind of stoked to, I'm stoked to be stoked again.
Hope our drivers and our staff and everybody else is because I think
if good life staff and good life drivers are stoked about racing,
that, that bodes well for racing, like those are all for well for like race tracks
for like HPDEs and time attack.
And yeah, it's like, let's, let's rise that tide, you know.
So being the
experienced podcast host that we are, we jumped in the middle of this and
some of our listeners may not even know what we're talking about.
So we talked about the origins of good life.
I'm just saying the, the, the expansion of the team, you know,
you and Chris are now not just you and Chris and your team that works with you.
You've got a bigger family of friends and resources.
So last year at Midwest Festival, right before, right beforehand,
a guy named James Schieffer had reached out.
I forget who he contacted first.
It was Chris or Michael, our CEO, who also like mostly sells our partnerships
all the time and works all the hours and he just kills it.
It reached out to one of those two and got in touch with Chris.
And so James Schieffer had, he had sold his ad agency.
I don't remember the name of his ad agency, but he had built it from like
literally zero to hundreds of employees.
But his father was like a national level and national or international
champion drag racer back in the day, like 60, 70s, 80s.
His father, his grandfather started a big clutch company clutch and disc brake stuff,
I think, and I think it was luck or one of those sacks.
I don't remember, but I started a big one and was also the first Seema Hall of Fame
inductee in 69, 67, but he also was like one of the founders of Seema,
like James's grandfather.
James is our new like FMA CEO.
So he had this idea to put this like group together because he was pretty closely
aligned with Racer and ID agency, who's like a pretty automotive centric ad
agency that's a big agency.
They're like one of Ford's agency record.
They do all the Mattel's Hot Wheels tour, you know, that kind of stuff,
like stuff you've seen.
They do some really cool stuff.
Chris and Victor from ID agency had like talked off and on for several years.
They like knew each other had become friends, I think at Seema and at some
other event, I forget which one, but so there's like a lot of like, oh,
we know that person.
Oh, great.
That dude's great.
That person's awesome.
That company does great stuff.
We like that company.
Like we've been friends with Paul Fanner, the founder or racer ever since Chris
did a talk for PRI, the E-part trade, like industry talks.
Chris had done one and Paul Fanner, the founder of Racer had reached out.
We had like some of the coolest conversations with Paul.
I've never met Paul in real life, but I've been on conference calls with him
for like 10 hours just talking about industry and talking about like,
what can we do together?
And this is going back four or five years, you know, we had had some articles
in Racer, like there's a lot of ambition to like keep working with them.
A couple years ago, we did a NASCAR support series event.
We were part of like, with Carrera Cup, we were like supporting the
Xfinity series at Road America and Racer put an article out and like,
it was like the highest like shared article of like the month for them.
We got thousands of shares that like Gridlife is going to be a
support series for NASCAR.
And that's like stuff like that was really exciting for us.
It's like just reaching this new audience and like legitimizing what
we, what our drivers do and like what we are, you know.
So these like three companies, ID agency and Racer and Gridlife all knew
each other and James liked all of us, James Schieffer.
And he like started trying to put some dollars together from the right
people that would, that could like turn these into one company and like
just kind of a line because we're all, we all have the same people that
do the same things.
Like if you do it better together, like it, that's how you like rise
yourself monetarily or just like, just do cooler stuff, you know.
So like it just makes business sense to like do it together versus do it
separate.
And that's, and so he's sort of like kicking and screaming, push this
thing through, found the right people.
Some of the, some of the people behind it, like literally are longtime
IMSA drivers.
They have been ever the Dyson's and it's a whole bunch of like really cool
people behind it.
So it's not like some group you've never heard of.
It's like it's a hall of famer is like one of the people that put money into
this.
It's wild.
Wow.
So it's the right people, the right time.
It feels correct.
Feels like the right place to park our energies and hopefully a good
use of their funds to like keep building this thing, which is awesome.
So it's like also humbling.
It's like weird to talk about like, because I've, you know, generally
being like a Dutch reform Christian person, I like kind of hate everything
I do.
And like, it kind of feels like, feels weird to talk about, but it feels
really good for our staff and for our drivers to like say, Hey, this is
like the goal is for this to be here to stay.
So like drivers that have been building their lives around this for eight,
nine, 10 years, you know, like you look at, and some of them built pretty
good social profiles and like they've turned into like influencers on their
own, right?
Like you look at like a case examples, like an Eric Cattil Eric Cattil's
first time on a road course.
He had like started a group chat with me and three of my buddies asking
about like, how do you set it up for a road course?
And like, and now he's one of the, he almost won the runoffs a few times.
He's been a UTC champion.
He's won a ton of races.
He's one of the more high profile people in our paddock.
And it's, he's like literally built his life around this.
Like we want to do right by that.
We want to do right by like the person that like today, I still have a
construction company.
I go to my yard.
I rent part of an old lumber yard and there was a car at one of the
office buildings that had a grid life banner, grid life window stickers.
It's a slam Subaru, like nice looking Subaru, not slammed that bad way,
like in a tasteful way, pretty new, new WRX.
And I don't know who this person is, but like that person thinks that we're
cool enough that they want to put giant stickers on their car and they
paid us to put them on their car because they're enthusiastic about the sport.
And so it's good for that person.
And it's good for like a Cattil and it's good for everybody in between.
I don't know yet.
Like it's, it's bizarre to like be in this position.
It's humbling to be in this position that like people want this to go.
They want to see it keep going.
So like, I guess we don't have any choice, but to like make it totally awesome.
So like boo-hoo, I guess we're going to do that.
Apparently you've made a lot of, of the right decisions along the way.
And, you know, running out of runway, something wrong with running out of
runway with such a great thing.
Yeah.
You know, and then having people cupping in saying, Hey, this thing is a really
great.
Yeah.
It's a really great thing.
We, you know, this is, this is worth it.
So it's, it, it, it feels like we weren't, we weren't out of runway, but
like we really need a little bit more thrust and like.
Yes.
It's nice to have people like come in and pull harder on the stick and like,
push the thruster through the dashboard.
Like we could, this is, this could really like take off.
This could really, really take off.
What I was saying earlier is like, it's also like, it's hard to do this if you
aren't stoked about it, because it's been so hard to do this.
It's hard to do this even.
Some of that, like, like say you guys went to a champ car, lemon's car race,
and then you went to that one and blew your car blow up and you went to the next
one, your car blew up and you like went to 15 of them and your car blew up
and your RV exploded and the beer tasted bad.
And like, you just did that and you're like, we have to keep doing this
because this is what we do.
But like, it feels like the beer tastes good now.
And like the card didn't blow up anymore.
It like takes some of that, like the, the, the micro problems away.
And this, this is really fun to do.
And having, having some more team behind it.
There's a lot to be excited about.
Like, I want to, I want to be stoked to meet and greet everybody at the gates
again, which is kind of the last couple of years has been like, like my favorite
part of the weekend is like, oh, just put Adam at the gates.
He'll talk to all the drivers.
He'll start everybody's weekend off in the right spot.
And I don't want to fake that enthusiasm.
I've had to fake that enthusiasm a few times generally when I see my friends,
my driver friends, whatever, like the enthusiasm is not faked.
But I have had to fake some enthusiasm just because I didn't always want to be
at an event.
I'm excited to not have to fake it here and there.
And yeah, just get back to what we, like what we always wanted to do is throw
the best weekend ever.
And if we can keep throwing the best weekend ever, then, then great.
We'll just keep refining, we'll keep building and keep, you know,
upping the ante for like what the sport is allowed to do, what amateur
racing is even allowed to do, you know.
We're stoked to be excited again, which has been needed.
That's good.
That's really good.
I may have missed it, but it sounded like you were doing a hypothetical.
You said if we went to a race and the car broke and then we went to another race
and the car broke and we went to like 15 races and the car broke and the RV broke.
What is the hypothetical part?
Where's the hypothetical?
That's like last few years.
I'm excited to see if that didn't happen.
Oh, okay.
It could not happen.
Yeah, I guess.
Hopefully.
It might happen too.
It might happen too often, but like think of still.
To me, it was like we hosted a lot of really fun events, but like they weren't
always the most fun for us.
I really want them to be fun for us too.
I want to be stoked to be there because it makes sense to be there and it's good
long-term for us, for the drivers, for the staff or whatever.
That's the exciting part is, and not to say that we were like on this road to
playing a perdition or whatever.
It wasn't like the sky wasn't falling, but the sky is a lot higher now than it
was a couple of months ago.
Right.
I mean, you guys were killing yourselves.
You're a whole team and the events kept getting bigger, which meant the swings
get bigger, which meant-
You saw it.
You know, it's just, and you know, when you're looking at house type number of
negative stuff, that's not good.
I don't think people-
Winds get big, but also the potential winds get big too.
Yeah.
And it's just, you know, it doesn't take too many of those in a row to be in a
bad spot.
And I don't think people realize that with this business and honestly with most
businesses.
It's-
Yeah, margins are slim and really, like if you have a job, there's somebody
above you who's probably pretty stressed about this.
Yeah.
About your day to day.
You might not give two shits about your job, but there's somebody who like wants
your paycheck to work.
Yeah.
And they might, maybe they had a really good year five years ago, last year.
Maybe.
But that person has probably like rolled some pretty big dice to like keep the
ability for you to have a job, like for your company to exist, whatever.
And sometimes it like turns, I didn't want to be and I, and really like the
thing that I'm most excited about is my, one of my best friends is Chris, Chris
Stewart, like co-founder, founder, whatever you're going to call him.
He's the majority partner.
Like I missed the tone of voice on phone calls yesterday, the day before, whatever.
I have 2019 Chris Stewart back and I feel like my, like my motor sports team and
like my driver friends have like 2019 me back.
There was a, there was like, the tone has, like it's a big change in like just
excitement.
It just, just needed a pressure relief.
Like there's, we needed a little bit of help.
It wasn't a bad business.
It wasn't a great business.
We definitely needed a little bit of help to make it a totally sick business.
Hopefully we found the right people to do that with, which is exciting.
Yeah.
So you got your friend back.
Yeah.
Chris is stoked, stoked about like the other day.
So often he'll call me on the, on the drive back from the office and like, it's
like six o'clock at night, Chicago time.
So his full-time job is just counting the money that you rake in from grid life.
Obviously.
I mean, you know, that office.
I don't know how this works, but I'm just repeating what I see on you.
I know.
He'll like vent to me about what's stressing him out.
And like we talk about it, but like we create some potential solutions and like
we jump into the next day, right?
And he called me.
This is last week, maybe.
And I had like grown to almost dread his six, six 30 PM calls.
And the other day he calls me and I say, Hey, man, what's up?
He's like, just call and say, Hey, just call him to say, Hey, are you all right?
That hadn't happened in a while.
Had happened in years.
And I'm pretty stoked about, I'm pretty stoked that it could happen again.
Yeah.
It's, and then we like, obviously like talked about some stuff, personnel
things, we talked about business stuff, like whatever, like, yeah, really
worried about this.
Got to do that.
You know, this person that might need some help.
But this is going great.
Stoked about this.
Like there's, there's more to be excited about, which is sometimes needed.
So it's awesome.
Ramble, but just have him say, just called to say, Hey, that's cool.
That's, that must have been an amazing feeling after that.
If I did feelings, I'd be feeling amazed, but I don't, I try not to.
I wouldn't do feelings if you can help it.
I stay robot as much as possible.
So he's not lying.
No, I don't.
I feel like it's very deeply like people that like I'm in group chats
with, they probably know that it's real big highs and lows.
And they're like, it's, but it's also like, it's, it's kind of a,
it's almost like a valuable skill.
Like you need to be able to read the room.
You need to, you need to like see problems before they show up.
Like it's part of, it's part, like it actually like feeling,
feelings very big is like a skill if you can utilize it.
And I tried to like actually turn it into like a valuable skill for the
company, but it's not easy to live with, you know,
it's not always the easiest thing to live with.
But if you can minimize some lows, some of the low feelings are the
ones that take all of the joy out of the high feelings.
And even like, you know, 1% better every day.
Like that's a, that's a saying that like, if you can do that in a
hundred days, like you're in a better spot.
And that's kind of been a model of mine for like last year,
year and a half is like, just keep on going.
Like manage the feelings better every day, manage the, you know,
the internal like the tornado of thought every day.
If you can manage it just a little bit better every day.
Great. But if you get an opportunity like what we got the
opportunity of now, you'd be insane to, to not, to not join a team
like this.
Because like we went from being able to be 1% better every day to
being like, okay, well, we just like reset the playing field.
And now we get to be 1% better every day from like a level that
would be never even dreamed to be at.
We get to work from there versus like dig out of a hole,
which is very, like it's, yeah, it's, it's, I feel very blessed.
I feel very blessed to be a part of the team and to, to be able to,
to keep going.
So things that we've seen, things that we've seen on the internet,
is there any truth to Winston becoming the title sponsor?
So you could be the Winston grid life cup.
I freaking hope so, man.
Wouldn't it be cool?
That would be the sickest.
Well, I'm thinking they're not allowed to advertise on TV,
but if you do the YouTube, you probably have a loophole.
What if, what if they only pay us in cigarettes and we just have
a really big cigarette dispenser?
I mean, you know, I don't think that's the best for the long-term
health of your, your clients, but it is, it is a path.
I don't smoke either.
Someone do me any good.
But when, when the logos from like back in the day,
when they disallowed advertising, there was like a certain timeline
where those logos from cigarette companies were like, they were,
I mean, they weren't copyright anymore or trademark anymore,
whatever you call it.
So we made a whole bunch of like fun generic merch that like kind
of mimics some of those logos.
There's the coolest merch of all time too.
Like those are the coolest logos.
I know.
Remember when they had the fake Marlboro coloring?
Cause they couldn't put the word, but they had everything else.
Oh yeah.
We, we've had, we had a rush car actually that was,
it was literally in a marble livery and there were FCC sensors that
were like trying to like encroach on our stream and like
You're not on broadcast.
Well, we kind of are at a certain point that it like got to be this
like weird gray area.
And I feel high it escalated, but we did ask that rush driver.
He only drove a couple of live streamed events, but we did ask him
like, you have to take the Marlboro words off.
Yeah.
The words have to go.
There's like actually like federal law that says you can't do that.
But I'm, I don't even play like on TV, but if you're not broadcasting
on the federal airwaves, their rules don't apply.
Yeah.
I know it did get weird though.
Like it, the conversation is not worth fighting, but you know,
the conversation escalated way harder than I thought it actually would.
That's wacky.
All right.
Questions.
What does the, what does this do to, I'm just doing what I've,
what the internet wants me to ask.
I'm asking you to hard questions.
You're not a data center.
So we got that one taken care of.
What's going on with the live stream?
Any, any, is it going away?
Is it YouTube gone or where are we going?
You're up in.
It's going to be so sick.
It's going to be so sick.
That's what I love to hear.
My favorite racing broadcast bar.
None.
There, there is a, there's going to be a whole bunch of,
so the team that we worked with last year,
we had a really great live stream team for four or five years.
They were like literally friends of ours that like just tried really hard.
They bring themselves out like sort of didn't want to do this anymore.
So we moved to project prime out of Florida last year who was like,
started doing stuff for like clear, clear,
clear this Farland and a whole bunch of people out of Florida.
And they, man, they crushed it last year.
The CMPX first day, they were like getting their freedom under them.
And then they just got better and better every single day.
They've got such great ideas right now.
And Kyle, Kyle higher is just, he's put so much effort and time into
trying to make it look cool from a tech backend.
And he, like the grid life, gridlife.club is the new like driver interface,
which you buy a ticket, like the email gets referenced to gridlife.club.
You get either encouraged to start an account or like if you have an account,
it links your ticket to it.
So like it's got all of the driver data.
Everything is accessible to the live stream.
Like the whole thing is like years worth of effort into like,
here's what we want to do, but it's so hard to do.
Here's what I'm going to do, but it's so hard to do.
And like now it's working.
So the live stream as far as like data for announcers,
data for just visualizations, like some of the cool stuff they're talking about doing.
I don't want to, I don't even want to talk about the stuff that I've heard is going to happen.
But there's a bunch of stuff that's going to happen.
And it's going to be on YouTube still.
And then it's also going to be on racer TV, which is like MAV TV on cable.
So it's going to be literally accessible on your cable box in some format,
which is going to be wild.
So like hundreds of millions of people, maybe or 50 million people now have access to it.
Because they don't go on YouTube, but they do have cable.
So like it does broaden the, it broadens like just the,
the reach of our drivers to build up their own programs,
the reach of us to like build our program.
Like it's just exciting.
It's, it's a lot to be excited about.
Excellent.
Cannot wait.
And then the last one, because we want to be, well, who we can, we want to be respectful.
We don't want to take up your entire evening.
So you talked about a little bit.
One of the things that I got concerned about, not, not because I thought you were making a bad decision,
but I was concerned about it for your long-term sustainability.
You were essentially forced to get rid of your HBDE just due to track time, weekend time, you know, logistical reasons.
Is there any thoughts towards either bringing that back in some way or having some type of feeder to keep growing, you know,
because once Eric's running Indy in two years, apparently, or Matan is, you know, F1,
you're going to need to replace those cars.
So is there any kind of feeder plan or training partnership?
A couple of years ago, we, we did our last grid life HBDE.
But then last year we did several, they were just gingerman raceway events, but we did several events that did have HBDE.
But HBDE has been less and less easy to sell out because of the, like, it feels like almost a race to the bottom as far as event promotion goes.
Everybody wants to host an HBDE whenever they can get a weekend and then they want to sell it for as cheap as possible.
So they sell it out and like, it feels like everybody just wants to lose money on HBDE.
So you're being compared to somebody who's actually losing money on HBDE's at like $200 a day or whatever.
Nowadays, it's like, you can't do it for $200 a day, especially with like a semi pro staff hosting the event,
even if it's like, like you got to look at it on a per hour basis.
It's like, a couple of years ago, we like phased them out of festivals, like actually just because we had so much demand for time attack, so much demand for drift and rush came in, you know, all that.
Yeah, rush is selling 30 to 50 car fields.
And then like the, the thought of like, we really, we've had so much inquiry about like a slightly higher horsepower, you know, wheel to wheel class.
So it did get kind of kicked out of festivals except for Sunday afternoons or test and tunes prior to the events.
But the thing that we like the heart and soul for Chris and I and for John and for a bunch of the team is like club events.
We really like we loved hosting really fun club weekends where there's no live stream, but like there's high level time attack.
There's like maybe like a little bit less stress wheel to wheel if there is a wheel to wheel event.
And then just intermediate advanced and beginner HPD like we love doing that we've done it forever.
And then there is like there's there's some ambition from racer and from some people inside a racer to like host a really like, like what's like what's the pot like just the just the question of like, how do you how do you host a really accessible HPD like what are the thoughts
what are the goals. So like there's a bunch of like, like combined and like aligned thoughts on unlike what we want to do.
So this does the possibility. If we have like a really established and stable team hosting six to 10 large events or medium sized events.
Probably festival events doesn't get more than six realistically it's kind of where we're at.
I tried the model of like a festival event and then like a couple of supporting events that are like club style.
It's actually probably where we will go back to is if if we're not super stressed about money or like just just like manpower or like burning ourselves to the, you know, literally bring ourselves out like it doesn't introduce the ability to to like do a logical club style event that supports the big events.
That's definitely the hope so.
That would be fantastic.
It's awesome because it you know eventually it's kind of like when you put everything behind the paywall you're not growing any new customers.
And you know you just don't want to.
It's rocking and rolling right now no issues right now but eventually that next gen.
Yeah, we've also seen, we've seen ourselves become like a place that people from other orgs will transition into so we're definitely getting new drivers which is great but we robbed those orgs either so you do want to you want to build up, just like, like you said from from like created
of the grave you want to like build it all the way through versus like just be the place that a bunch of axe murders come to chop each other into pieces.
Just be that either you know like not to say that that we're the only place for that but like it does kind of feel that way.
When you look at some of the higher level, it's a place that a whole bunch of axe murders from other places have came to hit each other with axes.
Over and over.
And it does become like an intimidating like, like to be blunt, it is an intimidating place to jump into for somebody like me that's like a mid pack Larry.
And it takes some
LTC away, but I would be much more inclined to go run a club or club round that had, you know, like a bunch of mid pack Larry's trying to have a good time together.
So like there is there's a lot of goal to have a bunch of club rounds as well, which which I think we will get back to that is that's the plan that's the hope and that is like that's definitely the march towards so.
That sounds great.
Well, I can't express how happy I am that this this is working out for you. I hope everything comes out exactly how you foresee it maybe even better.
And it's good for you to start, you know, getting some enthusiasm and love back into the sport.
I mean, we had a tough year last year.
You look like you were, you were still putting up the good fight, but could he used a little bit of sometimes.
This really only is just to keep on going to keep to keep building to and really we owe it to the people that have helped us get here like there's there's people that have worked grid for like six, eight, 10 years for us.
We won't even know their names but they're like they fist bump, you know, Andrew or Carson or Dalen or Justin or whoever like the drivers know that but they haven't even like said hello to them yet but like these people are just so into grid life we want grid life to be the
place that they can come work for five, six times a year and like have it be the place that like they they're part of it.
And if it doesn't exist or if it exists in some stupid way or some different way that that doesn't make sense like it needs to be needs to be the best possible version of what it is so like we owe it to them to us to the staff to the drivers just to like the
community like a good good grid life means a good community around it and a good community around it is probably good for the sport and blah blah blah so
Well this should be fantastic we will we will make our annual pilgrimage to Lime Rock we still have our open invite for you to stop by either on the way in or on the way out because we will bribe you with large pieces of cow and can't wait to see again.
If my if my Honda Fit head and shed a spark plug right out the top of it last year there was like a half way decent chance you were getting a text for me.
That's fine we have Honda Fit spark plugs you know if you need it so.
Put all the threads with it and it came back home on a trailer and it's a whole.
We have a spare engine if you need one it's sitting in there.
It's all behind the front.
I know.
No I was just saying if you're driving by and you need a new engine we probably have one if it's a car we've had I've probably got too many spare parts for it so.
Covered by by cars that you have maybe by cars you have and then use you as an intermediary in between me and events.
Yeah absolutely we can be the the less advanced auto parts store less.
Thank you again for coming on and it's always great fun.
Thanks for having me guys I appreciate you and thanks for having an open mind about this whole thing some people definitely didn't it was like hard to see that.
But it was also like overwhelming the amount of people that like is this good for you and we say yeah they're like sick is it good for the company.
Oh it's even better for the company.
And then they're just pure excited and it's excited to have open minded friends.
And can Adam Gibray breathe easy.
A little bit.
But this I'm going to sleep a little better.
Yeah you guys.
It's fun to have my friend Chris call me and say just calling to say hey.
But that was like to me that was like the biggest that was the biggest change.
That's awesome.
So with that behind you all you have to do now is avoid having another tornado tear down the play set right.
Yeah tornadoes thunderstorms floods data centers data centers encroaching.
Pennsylvania.
Big wind storms we've had sand storms in California.
We've had hail storms.
Super fog.
We have we've had insane fog.
We haven't had an earthquake.
We haven't had.
We haven't had nuclear war.
Like there's a few things we haven't had.
I hope we don't have.
Let's let's let's keep that as a zero in the scorecard.
I wouldn't mind aliens aliens coming down and like spectating some TC or time attack.
I don't know Adam.
I've seen some of your drivers drive.
I'm thinking you got some aliens there buddy.
I mean like you know the Starship with the light.
That kind.
Okay.
Yeah.
But no more fog.
We got to be done with those things.
You know what you got to worry about though.
If you have aliens come down to William Shatner is going to come to a race.
He's going to start kissing all up on them.
It's going to be terrible.
Everybody loves William Shatner too.
That's true.
That's true.
I'd have him on the podcast.
I don't care if he drives.
I can still lie to you.
He is.
He is.
He still does.
There's a whole bunch of fun stories about him.
He's constantly confusing somebody that I'm friends with who lives near him as that he's
somebody else and he's so nice and so old they're not going to ever correct him.
So they just keep going by the wrong name.
He's got a lot of interesting stories that follow him.
He does.
He's been to space for real.
He's been to space fake times like thousands of times.
All right.
Thanks, Adam.
Thanks for coming on, Adam.
That's it.
Bye.
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