Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
If you follow Instagram car culture and you're into drift
cars, you're into race cars. It's the Internet in real life.
Not going to find anything like it anywhere around.
Welcome back to the Circle of Drift podcast presented by SIM
HQ. My name is Austin and today we
have on Adam, one of the cofounders here at Grid Life.
Nowadays, like literally everybody's watching race tracks
(00:20):
demand you do it right now versus it was so loose back
then. It was real simple.
You could just give them money and do whatever you want it to
jump into the sport. Got to buy a truck and a trailer
and tires. Pre built race car versus like
now you can clamp stuff to your desk and like you're a driver.
You can't like take every opportunity because like Chris
always says, it's not a party. If it happens every night, then
(00:40):
it's just alcoholism. You just burn yourself out.
Oh, yeah, that too. Yeah, look out for all of that
and many more in this episode. So look below the video and make
sure that subscribe button is pressed.
And without further ado, let's get into the episode forever.
I've been in the field. Wherever they throw out me brush
it, I'll pick myself up. Moving on.
Little better. Hey, ain't no errors, baby.
(01:03):
It's a new error. Solid.
All right, Well, we got quite a special one for this one.
I don't know. It's that special.
I would call it special. This is for me at least.
So we got Adam from Good Life. Hi, if you don't know one of the
founders, correct? Yeah, Chris and.
I started renting this racetrackin 2004.
No shit. We've been here for 20.
Yeah, there are 20. Second season here.
(01:24):
Yeah, because this is this is exactly where good life all
started and all that stuff. So when, when did you finally
realize throughout the point of growing this and starting the
first I guess event here, did you know that it would become
anything like this? Not at.
All this is absurd dude. Yeah, it's wild.
This is like our Super Bowl, we call it.
You know, like the drivers referred it is, but yeah, it's
(01:46):
super like a great track for a lot of uses.
You know, you can, the track puts up with us, we can run a
lot of hours. You know, you kind of got to
build a city and a field. There's not a lot of
infrastructure, but great peopleto work with and a really safe
facility for, you know, the track itself, there's not a lot
of walls to smash into. So really diverse group of cars.
(02:07):
You can do a lot of stuff here, so super fun place so.
When why this track? Why did it start here?
Like wait, was it just local or that was on I?
I met Chris in Michigan, like literally in a parking lot.
It was like a car meet, you know, this giant car meet
Rodgers Plaza in Grand Rapids, probably an O1.
(02:27):
And the we had we both had like Honda Civics and he was like,
hey, if you ever need any parts,like actually Jimmy Eat World
concert. He saw my car.
He left a note. I met him in person to like buy
a transmission like a month later.
That's how I got his number. I was going to college up there.
He was going to college up there, then he got his first
job, then I moved back to Chicago, and then he got a job
(02:49):
in Chicago and we kept hosting here.
This was just kind of the home track to Grand Rapids, you know,
like we were an hour north and now we're two hours that way.
But he had done some HPD ES here, and so had I.
And then we found out that if you give a track money, they'll
let you use it. So yeah, it's amazing.
(03:10):
What a way to find that out. So like we we started our first
event, actually it was our fourth event three years in a
row. We did like parking lot meets,
West Michigan Honda meet and we still do West Michigan Honda
meet. We're on Honda meet 24 this
year. But yeah, that's in a month.
That's just like a three day DE BBQ party, like HPD, just track
(03:31):
day, real basic. No drift, no time attack, no, no
racing. But yeah, so we've been hosting
that event forever. And then I don't know, like 12
years ago, Chris was like, we'rework.
We were working on a Honda Element I think in my garage in
Chicago. And it was his buddy who is the
(03:52):
DJ Flosstradamus, who has playeda bunch of great lives.
And he was like, hey, you want to host another event?
Yeah. Well, like he had friends in the
in the car show world and the drift world because he had like,
produced a flushed dramas video and like a bunch of drift cars
were part of it and stuff I was doing.
He he also was driving lemons races with us.
(04:14):
You know, like 24 hour lemons. Oh yeah, yeah.
And we had an old CRX that we lemons raced.
How the hell and sorry I'm. Not surprised you don't
incorporate that here. That'd be it.
I mean, there's. A wheel here but I had friends
in the auto cross world. I was racing SCCA Sprint races.
So we had like all these friendsthat they all thought the other
ones were weird because they were different.
(04:35):
Like The Drifters didn't talk tothe car show guys maybe a little
bit, you know, like it was, it was still like a really chopped
up segmented car culture. And so we like through the 1st
grid life and it was like we have all these friends, let's
like use music and camping as the glue.
And it was like it was fine. It was a huge event.
I think the stage was like A2 car trailer that we lifted up
(04:58):
and it wasn't crazy. It was just a really small
stage. It wasn't huge.
You towed it behind like a 1500 pickup truck.
We put it by the pond over theretoo.
But that wasn't like the first event here, no that.
Was our first grid life event. OK.
So what was like, just for context, what did the first
actual event that you guys ran here even look?
Like so we, we showed up here ona Monday and like we were, we
(05:22):
took, I think we took money in cash or PayPal only.
And we had this little forum EF Dash Honda because it was 88 to
91 CRX and hatchback generation.Chris and his buddy Gabe owned
the forum. I think that name still
redirects to Grid that life. But yeah, the form info still
exists. But the forum's down right now.
But so I think we basically promoted it there.
(05:46):
I don't even know if Facebook was a thing back then.
No, it wasn't. Oh, probably not.
No at. Least not as far as events and
stuff like that. I.
Think we had like 3 run groups and it was mostly our friends.
I think we like all lost hundreds of dollars each.
It was like 10 of us that pooledmoney to do it.
What? Should it cost back then?
Never on Monday. I want to say it was like 3900.
(06:07):
Dollars. Or like $5500 or something, but
there's probably only 50 cars maybe.
And the track itself was so different at the time.
I think we had like 3 people working corner workers.
There was like, no, half the buildings were like, not really
done yet. At the time.
The track was only nine years old.
(06:29):
It was built 95. Did the math right.
Yeah, 95, but it was real like amateur at the time.
Like I think the manager was like skimming money off the top
and got fired like the next yearhe like lived in a trailer right
here. It was bizarre.
The old Suburban that still runsaround is like the garbage truck
used to be like the safety truckand it's still like has the
(06:51):
ghosted sticker logos on it. I remember like he was going out
to pull somebody off at turn 3 and he's like literally drifting
the truck their turn to this ancient Suburban at the time, it
was wild. So yeah, it's pretty Wild West
back then and that that event grew and grew.
A couple years later we did a 2 day event over 4th of July
weekend or something and that like just popped off.
(07:13):
Back then though, like early 2000s, there wasn't a lot of
options for HPDE. Like you couldn't do track days.
Like there was like 2 of them that rented here.
You had to like go to a competition school and actually
wheel to wheel race. There wasn't any drifting on big
tracks. Like we hadn't even heard of
drifting. You know, maybe like a little
bit on like street fire.net or whatever.
(07:34):
The websites were like Japanese stuff, but yeah the the the
options to drive in a race trackwere super limited so.
Did you have to get any licensesor anything for that?
You can host it. No, you just.
I think we then. Why was there a lack of it, man?
Because like, it wasn't a thing.Nobody knew how to do it.
There was Club SI, which is likeanother forum.
(07:56):
They hosted one event a year. I want to there was something at
speed trials, I think. And it was a company out of
California that hosted one eventa year here and then like some
Volkswagen Group and like we, wesaw a calendar a bunch of years
ago in the office here from likeO four and like only like 12
events that year. Like the track was like
hemorrhaging money. And now the track is like
(08:19):
thriving. There's so much car culture in
this area. And like just happy to have been
a part of like building that, you know, like 'cause just
through that event, how to meet evolved into a three day like
300 car event, like a big event.We filled the place out with
that event usually too, and thatjust built the base culture of
driver stuff that we needed to like build this.
(08:41):
And there's still a lot of people, like I saw somebody
earlier, our very first time to meet shirt 2004, I saw somebody
down in the paddock wearing 1. So there's people that have
followed us for 20 years, which is so cool, so humbling to have
that. I mean, you go and talk to some
of these guys that are actually driving too and they've been
driving with gridlock for. Long time too.
There's a lot of there's a lot of hot turnover in like the grip
(09:05):
racing track time attack racing world.
That's it's just like hard to it's a hard habit to do Same
thing with drifting too. You know, you do four or five
years and you're like, wow, credit card debt sucks, but it's
super cool to have such a high like retention rate of drivers
are, you know, it's just such a loyal crowd and like so thankful
(09:26):
that we those people are our friends and family that follow
us around the country. So pretty wild.
So at what? At what point though, did it end
up like it's not just racing? We've got to incorporate some
other stuff because obviously wehave EDM.
That's a big part of grid life. And 2014 is the first grid life
that had some drift, had really basic time attack.
(09:48):
And now that our time attack series has kind of evolved into
like it's probably the biggest in the world, like per per car
count and across the country, a lot of time attack series all
over the world. They're like, oh, we host 3
events at one track and that's what they are.
We host nationwide. So yeah, it's really, we've been
trying to build that community and make it easier for the
(10:08):
smaller groups to like host timeattack events.
We've been really trying to build the, the amateur wheel to
wheel community with our Grid Life Touring Cup.
But like truing cup for, for your listeners is like a single
class of wheel to wheel versus if you go to mini sanctioning
bodies, amateur sanctioning bodies, they'll put like 6
classes out at one time. And so you never know who's
(10:29):
racing each other because there's just a bunch of classes
out there. Because they got to fill track
the hell out of me. Yeah, our our race series,
everybody's racing each other. The Rush series, the GLTC series
and the G, the new GT series, which is debuting this weekend.
Everybody on track is single class racing each other.
So like all the spectators, they, they can kind of tell
who's winning, you know, and thecars are relatable to versus
(10:52):
like NASCAR's or Indycars aren'tsuper relatable.
Even those little rush cars, like it's the most affordable
prototype in the world, very durable, bunch of body panels.
So it's super easy to fix. You just zip it off, put a new
one back on if you crash. It's trying to like keep the
sport and hobby like relatable is.
(11:13):
It's important you know you can.How do you choose what series to
run? Wait, what?
My Moto compacto fell over. Oh shit, that's fine when you go
pick it up. No, you're fine.
All right. The, So we designed some of
these series like GLTC specifically, I was racing in
SCCA Sports Recall of America and NASA in like the Honda
(11:36):
Challenge class and the Super Touring light class.
And I had an old CRX, right? And there was a lot of cars that
ran around the same speed. And so we designed that rule set
to be basically power to weight based.
So you can have like a 1900 LB car and it can have say 175
horsepower and it can race against like a detuned Chevy
Corvette that's got like 260. And there's modifiers for how
(12:00):
flat the power band is so we canget him to race.
Well, heavier cars get bigger tires, lighter cars get smaller
tires. And over the past this, our 7th
season of TC, the balance of performance has really evolved
to be, I mean, we'll have a civic race in a BRZ race in
three Corvettes and AV8 swapped M3.
And they're all on the, you know, in qualifying, probably
(12:22):
the top 15 are going to be within 3/10 of a second.
So it's that, that part of the, of the, of the business is
really like what I do. That's that's kind of my
background. I have drifted a little bit.
I kind of suck at it, but it's. Really.
But yeah. We all do.
It that's where I come, that's. How you get a SIM?
(12:43):
I kind of suck at those too. The The funny thing about Sims
is like everybody that played video games like goes through
Sims and then they get into realcars and they are awesome.
But if you'd never I never play video games you.
Flip it. It doesn't work.
It's. Hard because you like, lose all
that, like sensory input, you know, like the seat of the pants
(13:03):
is gone and like the noise and vibrations are gone.
So I've always struggled. With it what have you.
What SIM did you try? We've got a whole bunch of Sims
that travel with us. And so I've tried a bunch of
different kind because we got the arcade up there.
That's right. Yeah.
They they follow us around and Ijust, I don't put enough time
into it. I'm sure I could do it.
But like, it's kind of funny howlike, man, if I was 10 years
(13:24):
younger, I'd probably be way faster because I would have came
up through that. But yeah.
I feel you because even wheneverI started on the SIM, I did the
same thing. I started in the car 1st and
then jumped to the SIM. Yeah like got a Logitech and
it's it was OK. You like?
Lose some of the inputs versus like, you know, from a SIM to a
car, you're like, right, I got more.
I got more to play with, you know?
(13:44):
I just recently got like a full SIM magic setup and stuff now
from SIM HQ and dude, that's like an actual car just without
motion. So now I'm like, I had to
relearn how to drift when I got the Logitech and now I'm having
to relearn how to drift again with an actual more realistic
setup. So it's dude, it's so confusing,
(14:04):
but it's. That part of the of the sport,
like call it the sport is it makes it so much more
approachable too, because if somebody's like car curious, you
know, a few 100 bucks, they can get started and they can play
some a set. Of course they can do like they
can do it on their clamp it ontoyour desk even, you know, like
that's how I did it. That wasn't a thing 25 years
ago, which is also probably why it was.
(14:25):
It was hard to get HPDS off the ground and track days off the
ground because like people didn't know to jump into the
sport. You had to like spend $20,000 or
50,000 bucks and like and then all of a sudden you got to buy a
truck and a trailer and tires pre built race car versus like
now you can clamp stuff to your desk and like you're a driver.
(14:58):
Things that I've noticed since upgrading to a full SIM magic
setup. For one, I would have never
guessed how many adjustments areactually on this frame and I can
really set it up to be almost identical to my real car.
And I would have never guessed the amount of adjustments that
you can make to all the pedals and even the handbrake on these
things. Although I actually have a weird
quick release in your car. But if you have a normal NRG or
(15:20):
anything like that, you can takeit out of your drift car and put
it directly on to the Alpha mini.
On top of that, when your motor blows like minded, you can
always try and, you know, catch up on lossy time.
(16:09):
Well, Speaking of getting into the sport, how are for some of
these series, what is the, I guess line of path that you have
to take to get into? Racing track days are they're
everywhere now. So you gotta have a safe race
car or not race car, streetcar. And there's so much knowledge
now even like with Facebook and forums are a little bit less
(16:30):
popular now. But like there's like you have
an S2000 or a Miata or whatever,somebody can tell you what to do
with it and you can make it a pretty, a car that turns pretty
good. Spend a few 100 bucks, even like
a track night in America, you goon a Wednesday night or whatever
to your local racetrack with SCCA, swipe your car for 150
bucks. You get an instructor, they'll
tell you what to do drift stuff.You know, there's, it depends on
(16:51):
where you're at. But circle track drift, parking
lot drift, There's so many more approachable ways to get into it
now. But yeah, safe car and just kind
of a a level of stoke that jumpsyou over the first hurdle and
suddenly you're you might be race car drive.
Well, for for anyone on the the more racing and I guess grip
(17:13):
side of things, is there any other event that is even closely
comparable to what grid life does we?
Also have like we, we do a bunchof track days.
Our haunted meat event, we stilldo.
We did 2 events in May here. Taco track day was our May 5
event and then we what we call the Rev up, which is like a test
(17:34):
weekend for the grip drivers here.
We had to scale back some of ourtrack day offerings this year
just because like we're it's hard to fill in when you're only
doing one event in an area because we got so much demand
for a time attack, so much demand for a wheel to wheel and
drift that like you run out of track time.
So if anybody does have like, hey, how do I get into this,
(17:56):
just reach out to our help desk.We know people all over the
country that host these track days.
It's it's very accessible now, super accessible.
You just got to have a safe car and a helmet, so.
That's good. Yeah.
Well, I noticed that you guys buckled down quite a bit,
especially in South Carolina. Yeah, on a lot of the tech
inspections and stuff like that,not just for drift cars, but
literally every car on track, wewere right there to go into
(18:18):
Falls grid. So I mean they're checking
harnesses before any car no matter how many times.
In order to like you can't run an especially when you get
eyeballs on an event like that, you don't want to run kind of a,
a loose show. You got to you got to be
buttoned up to have insurance. Insurance is getting harder and
harder to get and you also you got to do it correctly or else
(18:41):
you damage all the other. If if you have a bad incident,
it's bad for the whole sport. And that means, you know,
insurance rates go up or track rentals go up or like, you got
to do it right nowadays because everybody's watching.
And there's, you know, versus 25years ago, nobody even
remembered who drove a car into the trees over there.
And now it's all over the Internet.
You know, it's documented. Insurance remembers, you know,
(19:05):
Yeah, literally it's a million hit video.
You know. If you flip a CRX into the
woods, which we did in 2005 and nobody knew about it in 2005.
But is there a clip of it somewhere?
I'm not going to tell you. Dang it.
Yeah. The nowadays, like literally
everybody's watching you race tracks demand you do it right
(19:26):
now versus it was so loose back then, which I'm kind of glad we
evolved when we did because we got to learn along with some of
these club tracks that were justreal.
It was real simple. You could just give them money
and do whatever you wanted. And that's not a thing anymore
just because you have to do it right?
Because everybody's watching, you know, and tech inspection,
(19:47):
half of that is just to save theracetrack from cars that are
leaking and cars whose wiring isa rat's nest and it gets sucked
into the Serpentine belt. And you can't have a harness
that's not hooked up, right? Yeah.
Well the way I see it is it's the babysitter for all of the
guys that don't want to do just that last minute bolt check.
Just make sure. There's a lot of people who
don't actually read the rules much either, like, oh, I think I
(20:08):
know this. So yeah, you got to, you just
got to do it right. I mean, I, I've been really
impressed with in the past few years, the level of build in the
drift world too. Like there's so many almost pro
level builds that are just builtso well versus like 10 years
ago, it was like cars would enter the racetrack and the body
parts would fall off and like you'd see a harness fly out the
(20:31):
window because like nobody was checking that stuff and like.
The standard is so high. Which is great.
Which is rather than. YouTube.
I would. I would blame it off.
Because you can see when things go wrong.
And yeah, so now everybody has adesire to do it right.
It's just good. So is that a lot of the reason
why there's a whole license thatyou just had to be had for
(20:52):
Drifters too for? Tracking purposes too.
And that's becoming more of like, like we got to know who's
in the car, We got to know insurance needs to know
everything about everything. You got to do it right now.
And that also, I mean it just the evolution of the series.
We've always had licensing in our wheel to wheel series and
(21:13):
it's really standardizing thingsand processes.
In order to do it right. You just kind of got to follow
the right path. It can't be super loose.
So many reasons for. It I bring this up just simply
because I've heard it from a lotof the drivers is do you think
it's entirely fair specifically for The Drifters given that we
(21:36):
are more of just the show of what's going on versus so?
Part of it also. Is like fighting for something I
guess, right? Part part of it with the drift
licensing specifically is to tryand make it a lot of people
didn't know how to get into gridlife drift because like it would
sell out so fast. And he headed like almost know a
guy. And we didn't want to be that.
(21:57):
Like we didn't want to feel likestandoffish.
So if somebody really wants to do it, we want to know.
And if we approve them for a license, they now have access to
the tickets versus like, oh, yougot to know so and so I can't
get into Grid live. So it kind of fixes one problem
and creates another. There's a lot of, there's a lot
(22:18):
of stuff like that, but we're pretty humbled by the amount of
applicants we got for it. But yeah, that's it really.
It was trying to fix the approachability of it.
Like it, you almost had to be inthe cool kids club in the past
and we didn't want that to be a thing, you know?
You don't don't. You think that's almost kind of
(22:40):
important? Though it is, but that's the the
licensing process kind of gives someone the ability to get in
that club, you know what I mean?Yeah.
Because otherwise you didn't know how.
We heard that a lot. So.
Yeah. Damn.
But it also is kind of an insurance requirement more and
more and more so. I kind of, that was my guess,
more or less was that insurance is just piling and piling
(23:03):
because it seems like every yearthere's some new rule that
everyone has to go by. Trying to exist.
You know, just trying to exist. So how does that cut you back as
far as like financials, because that's got to shorten some
things up, Insurance is very. Expensive, I mean, for our
events, insurance costs like a House of worth of money for all
of our events for a year. And you have to do everything
(23:26):
different and better every year in order to exist.
So there's a there's a lot of plates to keep spinning, so to
speak, you know, but yeah, the we kept, I kept hearing it,
especially in the last year thatlike, I don't know how to get
into grid life drift. And like these dudes had like
great cars. They a lot of experience, but
(23:47):
the events with like Laguna or this one or CMP, they would sell
out so fast. So it kind of needed a, a path
and that's a hard, it's a hard thing that you almost have to
like try it and see if it works.And now we've got like, I think
hundreds of licensed drift drivers that want that have
access now. So pluses and minuses and you,
(24:08):
you kind of you live and learn. But largely I think it was.
It was OK. I would also argue that you guys
are reaching that standard of more high class almost where you
if. You saw that first session, That
first session was so clean and the cars were real pretty and
none of them fell apart and I'm pretty stoked on that.
(24:31):
That's a hey, that's a good point too.
It keeps on that like the cleanliness of it like so
nothing if something goes wrong,it's a bad.
Experience less likely yeah, foreverybody involved if a car
falls apart constantly and all the sessions gets messed, messed
up too. So not like we're trying to like
kick people out, but at some point like you've got to have a
good car in order to be out there because you're trying to
(24:52):
like you. You diminish the sport if you
don't decent drivers, good cars like the vetting.
The vetting can't just be like, hey, Swan, is this guy cool?
Like it can't. It's not fair to him either, you
know? And that's how it became like,
it's hard to get in because he knows so many cool drivers, but
he also like doesn't know everybody.
He can't. It's impossible, especially with
(25:14):
how many. Events just to nail down like
specifics, What would you say a driver needs to focus on in
order to get approved for a gridlife?
Car quality is very important mainly.
What do you mean by that though?Like.
A car that doesn't look like it's gonna fall apart and
historically has ran well. Not my car.
Safety is important. Track dependent like a Laguna,
(25:39):
we're basically full cage because of the was because of
what it is same thing with Rd. Atlanta, we can do half cages
and like a track like this at CMP.
We also like now with CMP and Road America, we've got awesome
skid or cart tracks that we can run drift constant.
So there's almost like you need 2 levels of license, which is
(26:01):
the path we went. But a solid driver history and
like a resume of events, you know, and also like a solid
vouch from somebody we know, etcetera.
That always helps. But yeah, just decent
experience. It's not a good environment to
learn to drift at. Absolutely.
It's. It would almost.
You're in front of a lot of people.
(26:22):
Yeah, that's the problem. The pressure is there.
And, and, and also like we're trying to put on a show for
spectators and for the drivers. So you want, you want the
drivers to have a great weekend,not a weekend where they sit in
the heat because we're towing that car off the track for the
17th time. You know, all the sessions get
wrecked by two different cars over and over and over.
(26:43):
And yeah, it's just kind of likea where's the chicken, where's
the egg problem? Like where do you start fixing
some of things? And also try to be approachable
to like a quality driver. So yeah, that's part of it.
It's do you think drifting will ever grow within grid life to
something more or will it alwaysstay kind of just the show of
it? Depends on where grid life goes
(27:04):
probably like we've also we've always had dreams of like doing
a drift only week or like weekend here where it's like all
different levels and we we bringin some like some pros to coach,
some really experienced drivers to coach.
It's just we're such a small team and we're so spread thin.
We've talked about that for fiveyears, though.
(27:24):
That would probably be a thing. If we evolve, if we have the
ability to evolve drift, that would be where I would want to
go, where it's, you know, more of a chill spectator event, no
heavy spend on music and stuff like that.
But it'll never be a competition.
Or yeah, you could throw a greatevent, though.
We did do one drift competition.We we did it in at New Orleans
(27:45):
in to 2020. Oh really?
Yeah, we did one competition ever and it was like kind of a
gimmicky fun competition, calledit double drift.
And it was like a tandem competition.
And it ended up happening in therain.
And Robert Thorne and Andy Smetigard actually won it, but
it got a little weird and gimmicky.
(28:06):
But they had extra steering wheels, I think in their cars
and they got locked into like a perfect.
I mean, they did the whole cart course.
It was like a choose your own adventure on the big cart course
there, which is I don't think they allow drifting on it
anymore. I think drift week like beat up
a bunch of curves or something. But it was a choose your own
(28:27):
adventure. You can make your own path.
And it was judged. I think Jared and Greg Bussell
and somebody else judged it. Maybe Sam from Maxima drift
cast. I think it was Sam.
But, and this is like when Seemagot cancelled in 2020, we got
that weekend at NOLA like last minute real reasonable.
(28:47):
And we we threw like a pretty good party.
It was a great event. But yeah, double drift.
I think they won it. They finished in the middle of
the cart track and we're like, you know, locked together and
they pulled this, the fake steering wheels out.
So it looked like they had takentheir wheels off and like, it's
kind of rad. Playing the game, I guess that's
(29:08):
cool. A little bit gimmicky and
finally, like we're not really looking to be a drift
competition, you know, just likethe other side of the sport is
like showing it to like demo stuff like we do, you know, just
party drifting is super. Cool, that's what I would hope
if y'all ever do incorporate anytype of competition you follow.
Either the more final bout aspect of it to where it's all
style and like cool driving or just make it a a fun experience.
(29:33):
I I love the way the final bout does it.
And we've been friends with those guys forever.
Like Simba helps us run our Autobahn drift program sometimes
and like great people. And it's so unique too, you
know, it's, it's like such a different side of the culture.
But yeah, you don't FD does it really good on one side.
I don't, I don't think that we need to jump into that.
(29:54):
I think there's a whole another part of it.
And I, I think it's just party drifting is it needs a, it needs
a stage. And like, we're stoked to be
that so. You've carved out your own
little area of it. It's really.
Cool. All on accident.
Sort of on purpose, but but yeah, kind of on accident too.
Is there anything special that'scoming up in the The next grid
lives or the? So Rd.
(30:15):
America this year, Rd. America's next for us with
drift. We do have like a big
competition round at Mid Ohio inthe middle, non broadcast, not
really a spectator event becausethey have Indy the next weekend,
but we got huge fields of competition.
But Rd. America is our next thing up in
Wisconsin. Awesome, awesome cart track to
drift on, like one of the best. Swan thinks it's the coolest.
(30:38):
And then last year was the firstyear that anybody drifted the
big track at Rd. America, I believe.
And if you're not familiar with it, it's like the fastest track.
It's so fast. We're talking like 5th and 6th
gear entries, like Big Crazy Speed and last year Dead Mouse
was our headliner. Really cool event.
(30:59):
So I would love anybody to come out to it.
It's it's a great track too. It's kind of like a National
Park. It's so big you can hike around
the inside and outside of the whole thing.
Great food, dedicated restaurants all over.
Isn't there like shops all around the?
Campus, one of the restaurants, like the Snack Shack, literally
has a Michelin star because the food is so good.
(31:21):
It's such a cool place. It's so unique.
It's so unique. Yeah.
Well, yeah. Super cool place.
How do some of these relationships with the tracks
even happen? I mean, at some point it's like
we had done a couple of grid lives and then, oh, my Rush cars
are on track. We had done a couple of grid
lives and rode Atlanta, messagedus and was like, hey, can you do
(31:43):
one of those with us? And we did four years at Rd.
Atlanta. So tracks have always just
reached out, probably because ofthe content and like the
following and all that they want.
We always hear that tracks want the younger audience too, which
is like, I don't know if most tracks understand how much
effort goes into these two. Like we've had people here since
(32:04):
Saturday and it's Friday now. That's incredible, building out
everything. It's such a heavy lift.
And really we just want to not lose money.
We want to keep building the sport.
And if we didn't have good relationships with big companies
that want to talk to our audience, it would be impossible
to be in business. But it's yeah, trying to build
(32:26):
the sport always and the tracks reach out and when, when a date
works, that's where we go. So but yeah, it's that's the
hardest part is actually making a schedule that works because
it's not a party. If it happens every night, it's
impossible to do. You know, you got to have a
little bit of gap. You can't kill the team.
One time we did 3 events in two weeks.
(32:50):
So it's like 15 days. We were support series for
NASCAR at Rd. America.
Then we had an event at Mid Ohio, big event.
And like a week later we were atLime Rock in Connecticut.
I mean, it was, it was way too much.
That was 23, so we kind of learned from you can't like take
(33:11):
every opportunity because like, like I said, Chris always says
it's not a party. If it happens every night, then
it's just alcoholism. You just burn yourself out.
Oh yeah, that too. Yeah.
For. Real.
Yeah, it's hard. It's hard.
You burn. Yeah, you burn out real fast.
But we're a small team. The core team is.
We don't have 100 staffers, we have 100 like temporary
employees this weekend, but it'sonly a few of us.
(33:34):
A really smart quality team too.We've, we've, we've had, we've
had some awesome people work with us.
And I think we've, we've kind ofevolved to a really, a really
good team in the last few years.And I can't thank those people
enough. They work so hard to make these
things happen 365 days a year. So maybe not Christmas, but most
(33:55):
of the days it's a lot of work. Well, you guys do a damn good
job at it. I appreciate your coming.
I appreciate it myself, just being able to experience it.
My first grid life ever was lastyear.
Which one was that? The South Carolina.
Yeah. OK, Yeah, Yeah.
But yeah, it's incredible before.
On that note, with all the smallgroup and everything.
(34:16):
Yeah. Is there one of the most
memorable stories from all of these years of grid life that
you have with all of these people?
I have a bad memorable story anda good memorable story.
Great. A very famous ex drag racer and
(34:37):
drift car builder and I both rode on the roof of golf carts
at high rates of speed at Rode Atlanta years ago.
That was bad. Everybody knows who he is.
I'm not going to say what. His name?
Oh my. God, one of us might have been
surfing the roof of a golf cart at like 30 miles an hour.
FD loved to party at the early grid lives here.
(34:59):
I mean, there was for a couple of years we had a thing called
Party Bullies because FD still not AFD, but like a lot of the
pro drivers, they would like commandeer golf carts and like
go through because there's like thousands of people camping out
there. They would go through the GA
campground and like take over the party and like play beer
(35:24):
pong. And we made it.
We made a party bullies shirt that was just a table cracked in
half because Vaughn one time, maybe it wasn't Vaughn.
It was definitely somebody that resembled Vaughn, but Vaughn
made a habit of like, like people's elbowing the table and
wrecking tables. And yeah, they, it was like, so
(35:46):
fun for the spectators until FD and FD friends drank all the
booze and then went to the next party and everyone's like, my
table's broke. Yeah, there's some wild parties
out there. They'd steal like they'd steal
golf carts to have so much fun. But yeah.
Yeah, that's hilarious. That's wild.
(36:06):
I love that. And then like on a racing side,
the very first real life touringcup and real life touring, like
our wheel of wheel series in 2019 at Mid Ohio.
It was also one of our first live streams and I was stuck
being an announcer. So I I had never technically
hosted a wheel to wheel race andI had to be in the live stream
(36:27):
with our buddy Tom Mcgorman. He's a pro race car driver.
Luckily he carried most of the weight.
He's a great announcer too. He carried most of the weight of
the live stream. But I was the most nervous I've
ever been about anything becausewe had like 2530 cars racing at
a dangerous track and we had like a perfect first race.
(36:48):
It was that was one of the moment.
Like I've never felt like so heavy and then so light like
mentally. Yeah, in such a.
Short period of time. I have yet to be.
I almost had to go do a nappy boy event and being an announcer
and I was like just reading the text message.
I was shitting myself. Announcing is hard.
(37:08):
I mean, I've been on the stream a bunch of times.
Whole different game it's. Like, especially if you're also
trying to do another job, like it's, you got to have your head
really focused to be a good announcer.
Like there is not a lot of Jared's or Kyle or Kyle.
Like there's not a lot of them. Like, yeah, it's, it's hard to
do it. Well, it does take a special
(37:31):
talent, so. I would agree.
Well, I do want to touch on Atlanta.
I've got to ask, well, how did that event go this year now that
being back and do we see anotherfuture with it?
A. 100% I see a future there. Yes.
So our friends at Global Time Attack used to be the support
series for that and we were going to like Co host and bring
(37:52):
our wheel to wheel stuff with them and then they pulled out
because they're california-based.
It's a hard event for them and our drivers were so excited
because everybody loves that track.
And the drift drivers were like,they were so stoked too, because
we're like, there's not a lot ofopportunities to do party
drifting at Rd. Atlanta.
(38:13):
And yeah, I mean, it's, it's just, it's from Atlanta driving
the whole track instead of just the FD layout.
You know, when you when you see somebody bomb turn 12 and like
Manji, the back this, the front straight and then drift, you
know, 3 down to five, it's like it's a wild place, man.
It's like the biggest of big boytracks.
(38:33):
Oh yeah. But yeah, that was my first full
FD ever, really ever. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
It was sort of top it off with grid life if the vibes were just
a. Better weather.
Yeah, yeah, the weather was better.
I. Can't complain too much.
It was the track was great to work with FD was awesome to work
with FD. Like really pulled for us to be
(38:54):
the like the support for it, theyeah, it was a really cool
event, really special event. So next year we're good to go.
I hope so. Awesome.
That's the plan. My wife didn't love that it was
on Mother's Day weekend, but yeah.
Fair. Somebody got to move Mother's
Day weekend. Yeah, that's true.
FD small but they always do it on that.
(39:15):
It was a really, really cool event.
So we were, we were humbled to be a part of it and like really
thrilled with how it went. So very intense though.
We were like hot track from 8:00to 2:00 with no breaks.
We had rush TC and like 100 carsa time attack.
It was wild. I think we had like 40 or 50
drift cars too. It was really, really cool.
I'm really excited to see how that turns out in the future.
(39:37):
That was a fun one, keeping it there.
The hardest part was like fitting all of our drivers in
the other paddock, like there was so many.
Cars. It wasn't that big of a paddock,
yeah. We had we had people parking out
in the field. You.
Know. Down past the skid pad.
But yeah, it was, it was a greatevent.
Super cool. It was, it was wild to be back.
You know, we hosted there for four years.
Oh, another great memory. We had Ludacris play at Rd.
(40:01):
Atlanta years ago. And that was the night.
It was the night of the Floyd Mayweather, Conor McGregor
fight. And so no, I was standing in the
back of the Ludacris concert andI walked down the hill and then
like there's. There's people dancing on top of
semis with, like, the biggest fight that's ever happened on
(40:23):
projectors. And it looked, you know that
scene, the race wars scene in the first Fast and Furious?
Yeah, that's what it looked like.
And like, you didn't think that was real.
Like, there's tiki torches everywhere.
It like actually looked like therace wars.
Scene. Oh my.
God, that's a that's a wild memory.
Like, how did this happen? And we were so we were so new
back then. We really didn't know what we
(40:45):
were doing. Yeah, and it just.
And now it's this. Yeah, I mean the.
Every single time. That that speaks to like the
whole like the culture kind of built this event.
Like we can't really take creditfor it because like we're just
almost like the enabler. It's like.
All you're guiding it in your own lane.
We're trying not to get anybody killed, but like these, like the
(41:07):
people spectating the drivers like they are grid life, like
we're actually the hired help, you know, like it's not.
One way to look at it, yeah. Literally like good life is not
just ten of us, it's like 10,000of us.
So which is super cool. Incredible man probably said
super cool like 80 times so I apologize it's.
All good, dude. Well, is there anything else
(41:29):
that you want to mention before I have break?
I let you go. Love to see people at Rd.
America though. What a great track.
Like anybody in that area. I mean it's worth.
It's worth a 20 hour drive. That's how cool that facility is
and yeah, I'm really looking forward to.
That event, what's your like 30 second pitch on good life.
Why you should go? Let's just hear that.
(41:50):
It's if you follow like Instagram car culture and you're
into drift cars, you're into race cars, like it's the
Internet in real life. Which is like, that's a great
way. To put it, that's kind of like
what we always wanted it to be. And it organically became the
Internet. In person, it's almost kind of
hard to, like, ride my little Moto compacto around the hot
(42:11):
pits because, like, so many people are like taking pictures
of the cars because they're like, oh, I follow that driver.
I've heard that 1000 times. Yeah.
And like. Amateur is just an EDM person
just walking by like I've never seen what I'm looking at.
Yeah. It's a it's a cool experience.
You're not going to find anything like it anywhere around
SO, and we'd hope to see people at Wisconsin.
(42:33):
So I appreciate your time man. Hell yeah, you're welcome to
anytime. Hope to catch up with you Rd.
America. Maybe.
Oh yeah, let's. Do it.
See bro, I'll let's be back to it.
Thanks again. Trust no bitch can't catch no
feelings. I've been taking long flights
from the baby with bezel. Get home, run.
I'm a ball like Jeter. I just want 444 then I leave.
I'm a young pop star called the boy.
Justin Bieber got a little money.
(42:54):
If you want a teacher whole lifea movie you can watch it in
theater to the center. Trust no bitch, can't catch, no
feelings.