#GRIDlife

Adam Jabaay - Founder for GRIDlife

GRIDLIFE TrackBattle puts both safety and fun first. The approachable rule set makes it easy for longtime Track Day drivers to transition to competitive driving without the complexities and costs of other sanctioning bodies. Each competitor will run in a primary competition group based on modifications and tire choice.

Contact: Adam Jabaay at adam@grid.life | N/A | Visit Online!

            

• Origin Story: the who/what/where/when of GRIDlife – how did it all get started?
• What’s the difference between GRIDlife and GRIDlife Festival
• Let’s talk about the different programs and motorsports available through GRIDlife Motorsports: Track Days, Time Attack, Touring Cup (GLTC), Drifting
• Let’s talk more about GLTC
• How did drifting become part of GRIDlife?
• Where can people sign up for GL events? What does it generally cost? Is it per motorsport discipline or one cost for the entire weekend
• Gridlife in the Virtual World? (iRacing)
• Ways of getting involved with gridlife (outside of being a participant)
• Gridlife is also associated with a podcast that many might already be familiar with called “Slip Angle” – with over 460 episodes ; what is the show about? 

and much, much more!

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] BreakFix podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from all over the autosphere, from wrench turners and racers to artists, authors, designers, and everything in between. Our goal is to inspire a new generation of petrolheads that wonder. How did they get that job or become that person?

The road to success is paved by all of us, because everyone has a story.

Crew Chief Eric: When you think about automotive festivals, your imagination probably wanders to visions of flat brimmed, hat wearing, electronic music pumping social media junkies who spend as much time, effort, and money modifying their vape rigs as they do their lowered, extremely cambered suspensions.

Crew Chief Brad: Whoa, whoa, way to stereotype, Eric, but here’s where you’re wrong. Gridlife has many moving parts. There’s a car show, nonstop on track activities, a rotating mix of drifting, high performance driving events or education, sessions for drivers with various skill [00:01:00] levels and compete against the clock time attack races, plus two evenings worth of music and some great food trucks.

And joining us tonight is Adam Jebe, co founder plus motorsports director for Gridlife, to explain how this petrol filled multidiscipline weekend, festival, and lifestyle works and where you fit in. So welcome

Crew Chief Eric: to Break Fix, Adam.

Adam Jabaay: Yeah, welcome. We’re fresh off of our ninth year of festival. It was real busy and kind of tired.

Crew Chief Eric: Ninth one at this point. So why don’t we wind the clock back up a little bit and talk about the origin story of grid life. The who, the what, the where, and the when. How did it all get started?

Adam Jabaay: Yeah. So this would have been our eighth Midwest festival. If you start, I don’t know, or the ninth year, I don’t know how you actually want to count it, but we evolved into a, like a full touring series slash sanctioned body over the past eight seasons, but in 2001, some buddies of mine at their house had what they called West Michigan Honda meet up in grand Rapids, Michigan, and we were into Honda’s [00:02:00] I’m Chris and myself are still into Honda’s Chris, the other founder for a couple of years, we did like Random parking lot meets.

And then every year we’d have a West Michigan Honda meet, and it would basically be three different Honda scenes of people in Michigan. We were at a zoo one year. We were at a park next to a river the next year. And then how to meet four in 2004, we figured out you can rent a racetrack if you hand them money.

And so we rented Gingerman Raceway for the first time in oh four. Which feels like about a million years ago. It was like three lifetimes worth of evolution ago. It was pretty ragtag first event. We’d really didn’t know what we were doing. And then we kept doing that event every year. It evolved into a two day and then it was a weekend and then it’s a three day.

And it became a really, really fun group of people to hang out with at a racetrack. Chris said in 2013, Hey, do you want to do more events? And we just kind of did this one event a year. And I was instructing all over the country at road courses and we’d go to different tracks all over, you know, with our other friends, but we [00:03:00] only did our one event and Chris had gotten into the concert world in Chicago.

He had some friends that were in like the EDM scene. He and I both had friends in like the drift and autocross worlds. We were both pretty much like track rat kids. So we hosted this other event called grid life for the first time in 2014. It was kind of like a car show, a little bit of drift stuff. We kind of had like a ton of HPD at the time of kind of a rag tag time attack because timing and scoring stuff like wasn’t working well that year.

And camping and like a concert on, I think it was on Saturday night. It was just a two day event. Camping and concert was kind of like the thing that glued it all together. It seemed like the biggest event we had ever been to at the time. Like we saw some pictures of it recently and it was. Pretty tiny.

And, uh, I mean, it was like a big track day, you know, with maybe a thousand or 2000 spectators. And over a few years, that event really blew up at Gingerman raceway, which is sort of like our home track. It’s obviously the first track that we rented. We branched off in 2015, I think we rent or maybe 2016, 2015.

I think we [00:04:00] rented Audubon country club for the first time, which is sort of local to us. We were based out of Chicago. We’re actually going there next weekend for our track battle, Chicago round. And. And then I think in 2016 was the first year we went to Mid Ohio and to Road Atlanta. We held a festival at Road Atlanta as well for four years.

And those were real big events down at Road Atlanta. It wasn’t the best weekend. It was kind of the back to school college weekend. It was always a million degrees. Just sort of kept evolving. The time attack series has become one of the biggest in the country. The rule set, which is one of my primary jobs is obviously operating the racetrack and making the rules and everything.

The rule set has evolved a little bit, got a few more classes. Uh, we’re real proud of how time attack is going. We’ve got amazing parody at the front of all the fields, pretty much every weekend. Most of the weekends it’s. Everybody’s in the same second in like the top five. It’s got great competition. Uh, we’re real happy with a lot of pieces of that, but it was a good eight or nine year struggle to kind of get to where we are in a lot of aspects.

Our bigger events have Drift [00:05:00] also. Colorado is the festival that we’ve been doing for three years now, going into our fourth year there at Pikes Peak International Raceway, which is sort of An ex IndyCar NASCAR oval, and it’s got an infield road course. It’s kind of like a two thirds scaled Daytona or half scale.

Daytona got a kind of a fun road course infield. You use about three turns of the, uh, the big oval and you dropped on the infield. We set up a big concert stage right next to the racetrack. At night, it’s a wild drift party. We have lasers and lights. It’s a really cool spectator event because you can kind of walk around the entire infield the whole time.

That event is one of our most drift focused events. It’s really, it’s a touring show of, of all different kinds of automotive enthusiasm. Got our new wheel to wheel series, which is entering its fourth year in its fourth year now grid life touring cup. Yeah. A lot of, a lot of moving pieces, a lot of different style events.

And we’ve really kind of been all over the country the past couple of years.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, we’re going to expand upon all those different things as we continue the conversation. And I have to say, you know, humble beginnings, they sound a lot more exciting [00:06:00] than, you know, the Volkswagen guys that, you know, go behind the Dairy Queen and just talk about their cars.

You know, we hung

Adam Jabaay: out with those guys too. We were those guys.

Yeah. If you gave somebody 3, 500 bucks, you could do that at a racetrack, endanger your vehicles and your lives. Potentially,

Crew Chief Eric: by the way, big shout out to Gingerman Raceway who was on the show during our second season. So we got together with them for their 25th anniversary and they actually mentioned you guys and how you’re, they’re the home of grid light and things like that.

So

Crew Chief Brad: you might want to re say that. Remember the guy corrected us, Gingerman Raceway,

Adam Jabaay: Gingerman. Zach is an interesting dude. He’s particular about things, but we call it Gingerman. So that’s fine.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah. So to clarify, sure. There are differences. What is the difference between grid life and the grid life festival

Adam Jabaay: at pretty much all of our events?

We do a lot of the same things. It’s sort of like a club race weekend. Typically we get some spectators and we, uh, we might have, uh, like an evening barbecue party kind of thing, but the [00:07:00] festivals are typically a day longer. A lot of our events are live streamed. We’ve been really building out a really robust live stream.

So they all might look the same on the live stream, but the festivals typically have a much bigger camping component. The big festivals in the non COVID years, they have big music production. We’ve had all different kinds of artists play, you know, everybody from, uh, Waka Flocka to Ludacris to Andrew WK to, we just had Cascade, uh, last weekend up in Michigan, big EDM act for like the past 20 years.

And then, you know, trap and house and actual physical rock where they play guitars. That have play, uh, off of a computer, anything and everything has played over the past eight years. Those typically have a much bigger spectator camping component because there’s more of a festival atmosphere, you know, food trucks, all the stuff you kind of talked about at the beginning.

And Gingerman’s a great place for it because between turn two and turn, basically turn five, we fill that with spectators and they set up shop for the weekend, they have a big old party out there. We kind of run [00:08:00] out of room as far as driver paddock area. So it’s kind of the most. tight, packed, crazy, full driver paddock that I’ve really ever been to might be one of the tightest in the country.

It’s almost annoying how tight we have to fit everybody in there, but we use all the space and hopefully it doesn’t rain the week before so the trucks don’t get stuck and uh, we threw a big party. So the festivals are really more like They’re across between a club race weekend and like a music festival, a big car festival, that kind of thing.

So kind of a mishmash of a lot of different things and it uses that festival component as the glue. You bring all these people with the same disease and a different symptom together.

Crew Chief Eric: We had the guys from Hyperfest on. Not too long ago. And I’m wondering how does grid life compare for those that are familiar with Hyperfest here on the East coast and who did it first and who did it best?

Adam Jabaay: I think in a lot of the aspects of the spectator, they’re probably pretty similar, you know, you seeing a bunch of different automotive stuff on a racetrack. I believe they started probably [00:09:00] six or so years ahead of us. They were doing, I think at summit point earlier, and they moved to VIR a few years ago.

We’ve talked with Chris Cabetto a few times. I think we’re very different. Chris and I have never, uh, my Chris, Chris Stewart, we’ve never been to a Hyperfest. I only know a few people that have, I think they serve quite a bit of a different audience. Yeah, I wasn’t sure if you guys were

Crew Chief Eric: inspired by Hyperfest or not, you know?

Adam Jabaay: No, it was two events in before we actually like knew what Hyperfest was. It was sort of a scene unto itself. It seems like, and they’ve definitely exploded that event as far as the drift component, especially, you know, bringing in a lot of big personalities and stuff like that, they’re different, but they’re definitely similar in a lot of different ways,

Crew Chief Eric: same, same, but different.

Adam Jabaay: Yeah, probably we keep saying we’re going to go and see what hyperfest is, but it’s always within about a week or two of one of our events. And we also like have small children and want to stay married. So we’ve never been, I don’t know

Crew Chief Eric: grid life also seems to be a bit of a traveling circus, right? Where you’ve got different regions across the country that are handling grid life events, like festivals, et [00:10:00] cetera.

Adam Jabaay: We’re doing all of the events. It’s all in house. It’s all one team.

Crew Chief Eric: So that being said, do you offer the same schedule kind of events, things like that at those different locations? So let’s. Okay, so you would have track days, time attack, touring cup, drifting, et cetera, at any one of the Gridlife locations?

Adam Jabaay: For the most part, the only one this year that didn’t have actual Gridlife touring cup, we did a weekend out at Willow Springs, and that was much more time trial and HPD focused. Did not have touring cup out there. We’re also a support series with the touring cup at Circuit of the Americas the past three years for the Super Lap battle.

Time attack event hosted by the global time attack guys who are kind of like allies and friends of ours. Touring cup has become this other thing in a few spots that is like a support series that might be sort of the evolution of that series too, in some aspects, but it’s a really fun to watch wheel to wheel event because everybody’s racing each other.

It’s a single class of wheel to wheel. Versus a lot of sprint races, they are multi class racing. So you [00:11:00] really don’t know who’s winning and we’ve condensed down the timeframe and we just do it more times per weekend. So we run four to five individual sprint races. They’re about 15 minutes flag to flag.

So it’s a really condensed, a YouTube friendly. Fun to watch. You don’t have to commit 45 minutes of your day to watching the race. Uh, it’s a quick hit, really fun to watch the field. Doesn’t spread out that much in a short period of time. So kind of an interesting, different way to do club racing sprint racing.

So real proud of how easy it is to digest, you know, the person up front is beating the people behind them.

Crew Chief Brad: And so you’ve touched on a couple of the tracks. You’ve said ginger man, road Atlanta circuit of the Americas. Mid Ohio. What is GridLife’s footprint? Is it nationwide? Like, what are some of the non listed tracks that you guys run at?

Talk about the different regions of GridLife, if there are any.

Adam Jabaay: We’ve done three years out in California. We’ve been building the customer and friend base out there. This year was an explosive event. It was huge. We were real, real Pleased with the feedback we got too, [00:12:00] because it seems like California has segmented itself off into like, you know, I run with speed ventures or I always run with NASA or I always run with this.

And we brought like everybody together in one place, it seemed because we’re kind of the outside coming in. We broke up some clicks, which seemed to be a really cool vibe. It was fun. So California is kind of out on its own because it’s so far away. Three years at PPR, which is kind of in the middle of the country.

Between there and Chicago, we’re going into our second year at Heartland Park in Topeka, Kansas, which is an amazing track. Actually, if anybody hasn’t been there, it’s like this amazing facility everybody forgot or never heard of. It’s like a road America or better level facility. It’s really beautiful place.

We’re actually hosting our championship there. This year, because Road America, which has held our championship for the past couple of years, is getting repaved on our historic date that we’ve had, which kind of stinks. But, and yeah, the Midwest has kind of always been our home. We’ve always done one to two track battle rounds, which is our name for our club race style weekend.

We’ve done one to two of those. At Gingerbread Raceway per year. And one of those is obviously the [00:13:00] festival. We’ve done one at Autobahn for the past five, six years. Mid Ohio for the past four or five years. The furthest we’ve been on the East Coast so far has been Summit Point, West Virginia. But this year we’re doing a sort of an automotive festival at Lime Rock.

We’ve got a sound restriction free weekend at Lime Rock. We’re calling it Circuit Legends and we’re going to try to make it. More of a historic motor sports style festival for our generation, for like the eighties, nineties, two thousands kids that love speed world challenge. The pro and semi pro series of that era.

We’re going to hopefully bring a bunch of those for display and for like a leaderboard style time attack. And it will also be a stop for our track battle series. And we’re going to do one at NJMP also, that’ll be just prior to the Lime Rock event. Kind of drifting all around. We were at AMP earlier this year in March, AMP Atlanta motor sports park, which is a

Beautiful little facility. If anybody hasn’t been there, uh, and then NCM a few weeks later. So yeah, March and April, we’re real busy. We were CODA, NCM and AMP and then Willow Springs. And it got a little busy there for [00:14:00] a while. It feels like it hasn’t slowed down. And next we’re going into Chicago next weekend.

Like I said, a smattering all over the country, basically.

Crew Chief Brad: Not hearing Watkins Glenn in

Adam Jabaay: there anywhere. It is really hard to get into Watkins Glenn. They actually, when we said, uh, uh, via email, we have somebody that knows Somebody there that like is a higher up and they put in a good word for us. And the guy was like, well, probably be about 10 years before it can get you a weekend.

That place is definitely in demand. And everybody says you got to go Watkins Glen, but it’s in demand for a reason.

Crew Chief Brad: Well, changing gears a little bit, since Gridlife does do HPDE events. Can you talk a little bit about your HPDE program, uh, just the process for being a student and advancing through the different classes?

How does one become a coach and instruct for gridlife? You know, things like that. Absolutely.

Adam Jabaay: We actually do a bunch of HPD only events. Also, we’ve obviously had our West Michigan Honda meet event, which we’ve done for. This is our 21st or this is our 18th year at a racetrack and 21st, 22nd year doing [00:15:00] it.

That’s only HPD, no competition. We did a few years of VTEC club time attack, but they wanted to keep VTEC club on the West coast primarily, but it went pretty well and that was our first foray into time attack really ever. HPDE with us, it’s sort of, we’ve evolved into more of a competition series, and so it has evolved along with us.

It used to be the biggest part of what we did, HPDE was. We obviously have kind of something for every driver level. We’ve got beginner, intermediate, and advanced, and we’ve also got this other group that we sometimes call novice, depending on the event. Sometimes we only have room in the schedule for two run groups of HPDE.

So novice is sort of part beginner, part intermediate, and a lot more coaching and classroom sessions. Advanced HPDE, we usually have one to two classroom sessions. We’ve got a couple of really, really good coaches and a lot of pro drivers that kind of frequent our paddocks. Usually a pretty in depth coaching availability.

Got a few pro level coaches that drive with us and sort of have a clientele list that They coach [00:16:00] individually, one on one kind of stuff. And ever since 2017, we have been like a pro style coaching model versus a right seat instructor model, because we did have an instructor go into the wall and break his collarbone down at Road Atlantis.

That was right when SCCA, who we were pretty good friends with, Started their track night in America model. It’s more of a sideline coaching and classroom based HPE. And we developed along with the SCCA Ohio Valley region, figured out how we wanted to do it. And a bunch of our instructors actually typically do SCCA Ohio Valley region.

They do their PDXs also, but we developed this model. It’s, it’s pretty. Meeting intents in the morning for beginners or novices go through all the basic steps, all the things from placement in the car to like take the napkins out of the visor. So they don’t fly all over the apex, you know, all the little things about, uh, you’d seen a regular meeting.

And then we place instructors all around the track, obviously within sight lines of all the corners up in corner worker stations or [00:17:00] next to the track, you know, obviously in a safe zone, but get them all on radio. They’re all taking notes and talking to each other. about how beginners are doing. They usually have a couple of beginners a piece.

Usually the first session is some lead follow, and then they break out and go run around on their own work up to pace on their own, at their own pace, at their own skill level, comfort level. After every session, they get a nice little debrief, usually video work or data work, and then get coached by their coaches, their coaches are a lot of people that have, they run with us.

We have. We’ve got a pretty robust instructor group now. I think we’ve got about 70 people that regularly instruct with us. The model has worked incredibly well. It often keeps drivers retained in the beginner program because they don’t feel the pressure of somebody they don’t know telling them what to do.

They’re able to work at their own pace. They usually pick something to work on every session. It really sets the core principles versus the drivers run seat of the pants and basically just get told what to do. They’re working up through all the little pieces and [00:18:00] it’s pretty similar to how a lot of pro schools used to do it and still do it because a lot of those schools are single seater cars, you know, little, little old formula cars, et cetera.

And, uh, we’re real happy with. How it’s been going and it’s, we’ve beginner sells out and intermediate does fine and advanced does fine. And it’s, it’s, it seems like it’s working. There’s really no great metric to tell how it’s working. Other than we’re out of driver spots. Most of the time, I think it’s okay.

Usually pretty good feedback. I think back to my first HPDE and I had an instructor with me riding right seat who actually just saw on an airplane last year, which is strange. I hadn’t talked to him in like two or three years. And then I randomly saw him on an airplane, which was kind of cool. But the instructor was basically, he was yelling at me the whole time.

So I wasn’t focusing. I was just doing what he said. I didn’t know why I was breaking at this point and why I was throttling out at this point and why I had to turn in here and hit that cone. Area with a concrete patch on the left. I was just doing what he said. And it took me a couple of years of like back [00:19:00] engineering, the things that he said in my brain to like, figure out why this was like early internet days for me too.

So there wasn’t nearly as much of a track day presence. It wasn’t like a HPDs weren’t nearly as much of a thing in the early two thousands, but you couldn’t get all the, you know, the Ross Bentley speed secrets. You couldn’t get a lot of those things. You had to actually go to go to Barnes and Noble and buy the.

book and I was too broke to buy the book and I didn’t know the book existed. It has brought a lot of our beginners into a comfort zone because they’re not paired up with somebody and they’re able to kind of do their own thing, work at their own pace. We mainly judge it based on safety and offs per session, et cetera.

And we have had significantly less offs in the past four years since we’ve been doing it. Then we did in the four years prior. So we’ve had basically no hard impacts into any walls. I mean, somebody booped the wall in the rain one time at mid Ohio, which is slicker than snot in the rain, but we’re real happy with the beginner safety record and hopefully it keeps going.

That’s kind of how we do HPD. And we also do, like I said, a bunch of. HPD only events. We do one on Cinco de Mayo at [00:20:00] Gingerman called taco track day for the past few years. It’s just a simple, basic HPD. I love simple HPDs, especially after a bunch of years of hosting really, really tight schedule race events.

HPDs are just kind of a joy. Just get back to your roots a little bit, you know.

Crew Chief Brad: Yeah, I definitely need to figure out how to get out there for taco track day for the name alone. I just want the t shirt and swag that you guys there are some

Adam Jabaay: really good tacos too. I mean, last year I tried one that had a thing on it called Diablo sauce, which I had never heard of.

It was very spicy and it made me seek out Diablo sauce. So you find new things at the racetrack and it might not just be apexes.

Crew Chief Brad: And it sounded like your first instructor is very similar to an instructor that I know of. That loves to drive from the right seat. I’m not going to name names or

anything,

Crew Chief Brad: but he has a pension for getting lap times down with a novice students just by driving and yelling at them from the right seat.

Crew Chief Eric: It’s a hundred [00:21:00] percent money back guarantee. And I’ve never issued a refund. All right. That’s all I’m going to say.

Adam Jabaay: It can totally be effective for sure.

Crew Chief Eric: He exaggerates right? Seriously. But getting back to the points at hand, I want to ask this question is gridlife associated with global time attack by chance?

Adam Jabaay: So we’ve been friends with Jason and, uh, and the team over there for a bunch of years. Ever since we started, Chris and JD knew each other a little bit. And Jason, who’s sort of their lead over there at GTA. He encouraged us to kind of have a similar rule set as a base series, because obviously we both wanted to build the sport and the series of Time Attack.

So we sort of started with their rule set with a few mods. So we’re not really affiliated, but we started at their encouragement from a similar place. And we do share a lot of drivers, a lot of the higher level drivers, they drive all the way out to California to compete, or a bunch of their drivers drive out to us to compete.

And I really think it’s pretty cool that at first the driver Pools were a little bit adversarial. It was kind of an us versus them. And now it’s definitely not [00:22:00] that, especially since we’ve been kind of co hosting the circuit of the Americas event for the past three years. It’s really kind of unified those two driver pools, which has been great.

We’re loosely affiliated more of friends with them. We started a thing a few years ago called the North American time attack council. N A T A dot. Org I think is the website and with them and with the SCCA who had just gotten into a national level time trials push and SCCA is actually the sanctioning body for them for GTA and for super lap battle.

So yeah, NATA, we bought that website a bunch of years ago, kind of as a us versus them, like let’s be national instead of global, like, and then we kind of decided that it would be. In the words of Hayward Wagner from SCCA, it would probably be better for us to build more ovens instead of slice this pie thinner.

We need to make more pies. And so we’ve been kind of trying to build the, the sport and hobby of time trials and time attack all together, thought leadership and date sharing and stuff like that. That’s definitely been a, that’s been a solid partnership and, and friendship with those two orgs.

Crew Chief Eric: There’s lots of different disciplines being represented at [00:23:00] Gridlife.

Like we said, track days, time attack, the touring cup, drifting, etc. So when’s Gridlife going to add autocross to the mix?

Adam Jabaay: Somebody just asked me about that on Sunday, actually. It’s never been a thing that we’ve thought about doing because other people do it very, very well. And man, it’s hard to secure a place to do an autocross.

Crew Chief Eric: What about the concept of track cross?

Adam Jabaay: That’s an interesting concept to me. I would love to do one. I’ve never actually done one. I keep meaning to run an SCCA TT event and I want to go to the TT Nats quite badly with my own car because, and they do track cross, you know, they do a bunch of different disciplines inside of that weekend or any of those TT Nats style weekends.

We’re sort of out of track time at most events. We do have something new coming up pretty soon. It’s unannounced. Right now we’re poking into the world of running for more than 20 minutes at a time, but not running seven hours at a time. We’re going to dip our toes into the longer races world. And that’s a rule set that’s not quite published yet, but it’s just about done.

You know, we just secured a weekend out in [00:24:00] Pittsburgh at pit race. That’s sort of something that’s upcoming with Gridlife. So I’m not going to give any spoilers. But there might be slightly longer races, not seven hour enduros, but maybe some longer ones coming. But autocross is a thing that I started out doing a bunch of years ago.

When we got busy hosting events, I stopped doing it. Schedules are hard to do and raising a family and working two jobs and stuff is tough. It was always fun except for when I got lost in the cones because I like did it wrong. Windy City Miata Club had some really intricate tight courses and there was one where I DNF’d.

I literally did the course wrong six times in a row before I figured out what I was doing wrong because my worker position like allowed me to see that I was going to the left instead of the right of that one cone, you know. Autocross is very cool. It’s just something that we’ve never done though.

Crew Chief Eric: Your mention of the slightly longer races, we’re going to call them that right.

The SLR slightly longer races.

Adam Jabaay: SLR. That’s actually not a bad little, I might maybe use that and say that I, uh, but I didn’t steal it from you. [00:25:00]

Crew Chief Brad: You might have to give money to Mercedes for that. Yeah.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. Right. We accept donations in the form of crypto and Patreon. So it’s all good. I don’t know

Crew Chief Brad: if we want crypto right now.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah, that’s true.

Adam Jabaay: If you get it right now, maybe it’ll be worth something in the future. You never know. There

Crew Chief Eric: you go.

Adam Jabaay: The pit race event, there will be some HPD and then probably a three class rule set of not regular, you know, turn the flag on at eight and shut it off and go check our flag at five kind of Enduro, but more of a different style of experience where there’s.

A shorter sprint race and like a three hour enduro and that sort of thing. More of like a team driving experience where it’s not quite, you know, burn the car to the ground and rebuild it after, you know, the entire weekend of driving, something that we’re going to try out, we’re kind of excited about the rule set.

It should be kind of a cool way to show a bunch of HPD drivers, a couple of different aspects. Of wheel to wheel as well. There’ll be some sprint elements and qualifying elements, some pit stop stuff. It should be a fun weekend to kind of relax at the track in October when supposedly it’s pretty beautiful down there.

So we’re [00:26:00] excited to announce that pretty soon.

Crew Chief Eric: So actually that’s a great segue to expand upon the GLTC, the grid life touring cup for the people that are hearing about this for the first time. Is it club racing? And if

Adam Jabaay: so,

Crew Chief Eric: so how is it broken down classing wise? Because if you’re familiar with SCCA and NASA classing rules, they can get very complicated.

It can be races of, you know, three cars or 30 cars, or maybe 50 cars. If it’s spec Miata, how do you guys break down your touring cup?

Adam Jabaay: So Turing Cup is one class. In about 2015, I started working on rules because I was running a Honda challenge with NASA and SCCA STL, a super Turing light. And I also raced improved Turing A for a while on an old CRX that I had.

And Chris and I, and some other buddies had done 24 hour lemons. Some champ car events. So we’d kind of competed in a bunch of different things. The things that I didn’t like about sprint racing with SCCA and NASA, it wasn’t an easy thing to put my finger on. So I thought about [00:27:00] it for a long time. And the biggest things I didn’t like was that as a spectator, my wife or my friends that were with me at the track, never knew who was winning.

There was too many cars out there and there was six classes, three classes, five classes. Mixed class racing. It obviously is something that you have to do in like a regional club race environment, and I thought. I don’t want to do that. So we kind of rolled the dice and built one class. And the sweet spot that we picked was a rough 12 and a half to one power to weight ratio.

Basically you take your horsepower and you divide by 0. 08, your wheel horsepower on a dyno jet. That is your rough weight with driver that you need to be at the end of the race. And for the first few years, we allowed a mixed bag of tires. You could run Hoosiers and but they had to be Hoosiers similar, you know, they have, but they had to be narrower and you had to run heavier than if you ran 200 treadwear and you can run a wider 200 treadwear versus a narrower Hoosier, etc.

And the balance was pretty good. But this year we actually jumped to 200 tread wear only, and not all the 200 tread wears, just an allowed block of 200 tread wears that we knew would [00:28:00] race pretty similarly. And we’ve really seen the fields stay nice and close. And obviously tire budgets are down a little bit for people.

The crazy people still want to run two different sets a weekend or three different sets a weekend, but… You can’t control racers from spending money. It’s hard to do, but, but yeah, it’s a single class of wheel to wheel. Everybody out there is, is racing each other. So there’s a practice, a qual cars with arrow.

They have to be a little bit heavier. A splitter is 3%, a wing is 3 percent heavier. There’s no underbody flat stuff. You can really be creative with engine swaps. The rules were built around like the rule set that we really wanted to have. If we were building a car for it, I actually was building a car for it.

At the time it’s based around kind of the tuner mindset of like a tinkerer, build your best mousetrap kind of mindset. So we see a huge variety of cars. Race one is obviously the results of qualifying. So fastest in qual starts up front. Uh, and works their way back, slowest in qual starts at the back. And then race two is based on the fastest lap time of each driver of race one.

Race three is based [00:29:00] on the finishing order of race two. And then race four is based on the order of race three with a random invert. of the basically the top 12 lines and there’s a random number generator at the start of race 3 that’s it and then it tells us what number the invert is so p8 and forward is the invert or p7 forward is the invert because we don’t want the drivers to know what the invert is because we don’t want people racing for p8 we want them all racing as hard as they can There’s rewards weight inside the weekend.

Uh, there’s a maximum of 6 percent rewards weight. And so if you win a couple of races, you run in 6 percent heavier than you were at qualifying. And recently we have acquired a two wheel drive chassis dyno. And so there is a dyno for impound. There’s obviously scales for impound and scrutineering as far as.

Build and vent choice and all that kind of stuff. You got to make sure your car is built to the rules. It’s became a very high level of sprint club racing.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. It’s really good that you guys are dyno testing after a session and my intercooler is completely saturated. So I’ll be down on power anyway.

That’s good. [00:30:00] Good plan. We’ve

Adam Jabaay: thought about that. We’ve got some really good fans. We know how this works.

Crew Chief Eric: Uh huh. So that being said, the point system must be absolutely insane because the Corvettes with 900 horsepower are always going to beat the Miatas with 90 horsepower. So how do you do a balance of power here?

Or do you implement a PAC system like SCCA tends to use?

Adam Jabaay: No, we do have a bunch of Corvettes that run with us. Last year, the very last race of the season determined the season champion. And it was between a four cylinder Civic. And I think he’s got a six liter Corvette, but it’s a power to weight class.

You don’t want to have a 900 horsepower Corvette because I think it would have to weigh 12, 000 pounds in GLTC. Um, so these, these Corvettes. Often they’re doing a dry sump and it’s a built motor, but they’re running a drive by wire throttle body. And so that thing makes 225 right? And it also makes 225 horsepower at 7, 000 rpms.

So they’re running about as flat of a power band as you can [00:31:00] get. The power band rules are, it’s a judged power band rule this year. It used to be three to 6 percent adder for power band, depending on how flat it was on any detuned engine, we review dino sheets and we issue a percentage modifiers. Say you had 4, 000 RPMs of flat power on your Corvette.

You’re going to run about five to 6 percent heavier than like a K series swapped S 2000 or a stock motor S 2000 or a BP engine Miata, or. Whatever that is a full effort tune. If you’re both making 225 horsepower, the super flat power band is going to run 5 percent heavier. And we’ve seen a really, really solid parody.

We measure parody and we have a half a dozen aim solos that we put in different cars throughout the session. We also claim data from anybody with an aim data system. And we have literally our buddy, Scott Malloy, his job is pull data, compare data. We want to see who’s cheating on data. And we also want to measure parity for future rules creation.

And the parity that we’re looking for is straight line acceleration. [00:32:00] On like an AIM system, you can overlay those acceleration curves, the ramp angle on acceleration. And it doesn’t even matter if somebody got a bad exit out of a corner, you can judge the angle of acceleration and you can see what cars are too good.

We’ve seen unbelievable parody the last couple of years, and it’s only getting better. The main goal of the rules creation is to let anything race anything. If it’s inside of our box and we’ve seen just about anything. I mean, we’ve seen all wheel drive Audis, naturally aspirated Subarus, swapped VWs, tons of swapped Miatas.

Stock motor Miatas, D series, B series, K series, H series, F series, Hondas, anything and everything. V8 Camaros, V8 Corvettes. We’ve even had a V8 Miata. So there’s a lot of different cars out there in GLTC. A

Crew Chief Eric: couple of years ago, SCCA adopted the idea of bracket racing, a concept that’s known more to the drag racing community than to sprint racers and time attack people and so on.

But it was very well received because it eliminated a lot of the confusion and a lot [00:33:00] of the complexity. On their previous classing systems. And even this classing system, as much as you simplified it, there’s a lot of underlying complexity here that you have to understand to know where you’re going to end up, or if the mods that you’re making are going to either help you or hinder you, you know, how many bags of cement am I putting in the trunk of my car to make a weight?

Basically, why not adopt bracket racing instead of the system you have today?

Adam Jabaay: Because I wanted it to be a raw, I’m racing that person. I wanted everybody on the spectator side to know that the person in P1 is racing for P1. I wanted short sprint racing and we’ve really found what we wanted out of it. It is some of the most exciting club racing, amateur racing I’ve ever seen.

To me, it’s more exciting to watch a recap of a GLTC race on YouTube than it is to watch pretty much any pro racing series, unless you get one of those. Crazy freak IMSA or SRO races that it’s just super close and they’ve fallen a great battle. We’ve got great battles throughout the entire field. And we wanted to have that raw [00:34:00] intensity of the first lap and the last lap of a sprint race.

And we wanted them to only be about six laps apart. And we wanted everybody out there to be in that same battle with bracket stuff. It just doesn’t work quite as well for sprint racing that we’ve seen. It’s really up to how sandbagging were you in qualifying, et cetera. We wanted it to be a full comparable parody across the entire field.

Last weekend at Gingerbread Raceway, we had 57 cars racing everything from a BMW to an S10 pickup to a Honda Odyssey minivan racing touring cup, and they’re all running about the same acceleration curves, really fun to watch. It’s really intense to compete in. It’s really the best racing I’ve ever competed in.

It’s some of the most fun racing I’ve ever watched. We’re pretty proud of the formula and we, we tried to take a different approach to it as far as the formula of classing, how you get a car to make the same speed, but also like the interesting layout of the weekend itself. It makes for really good parody in the top 10, top 15.

They’re all usually within like the same [00:35:00] third of a second. I think at mid Ohio last year, the top 12 were all within like. Same two tenths of a second, the parody is definitely there. It’s just a matter of what mousetrap do you want to build to win? So it’s, it’s a fun builders class and it’s really, it’s a pretty intense class to compete into.

Crew Chief Eric: So what about the guy that is used to running NASA and SCCA and has his spec Miata, and he comes to a GLTC event, he can only do so much for the car, he physically can’t change it outside the parameters of his spec class, because that invalidates his other series that he’s a part of. How does he, or she rank?

When they come to a GLTC event, when they can’t mod the vehicle, are they always going to be in P57 because they’re literally the slowest car out there? So are they competitive?

Adam Jabaay: A spec Miata that’s to the letter of spec Miata rules is probably going to either have to pull a bunch of weight out. And they’re going to have to put some 200 tread wear tires on, or they’re going to run.

Yeah, we, they’re going to run a little bit towards the back. We have seen a, basically a stock motor BP and the Miata run on the top 10. It [00:36:00] was very, very light. It was a lot lighter than the spec Miata would be. Most of the cars don’t have a built motor or anything in GLTC. Definitely became a class of its own.

So there’s a lot of people building to the class. Cars that could catch easily from other sanctioning bodies would be most anything in the super touring light or super touring under category in SCCA. We’ve had some E production cars run really well with minor changes or no changes. Got a couple of F production cars run really well.

And Tegra, Kevin Ruck, who’s a multi time runoff champion has ran. in gltc and he was in the top 10 right out of the box. He was just using it for testing weekend and ran really well. There’s a lot of parity in those classes in SCCA. We have had some GTL cars run from SCCA because there is an allowance for tube frame cars.

It’s a 4 percent modifier for tube frame cars and that’s brought out a couple of GTL cars. Which are like the mini tiny NASCARs, you know, usually based on a CRX or a Sentra. Cool builds. And then in NASA world, GTS three, GTS [00:37:00] two cars, maybe with some power taken out. We’ve got about a half a dozen spec E46 guys that run with us frequently.

We’ve had a few Honda challenge two and Honda challenge one cars run. The biggest thing that we really made a push for, this is years ago. And we started at 29. Team or 18 was our first year. I can’t remember. And the biggest thing we wanted to do was show sprint racing to the next generation of racers that weren’t really enamored with the current offerings that weren’t drawn to something, but we’re in our paddock, like they were already there.

They’re already spectating. They’re already driving time attack with us. They were already running HPD with us. We’ve really built most of these drivers from within and from. Spectators watching this have jumped into HPD and they ran time attack a year later or two years later, and they just built their first GLTC car this year.

It’s a, that’s a story we’ve heard half a dozen times, even this year, inside of every weekend, we wanted to make the driver licensing. very accessible versus sometimes to get a license and other sanctioning bodies, you got to show up first thing in March with a [00:38:00] car and you run this really intense program for a day or two, or you can only do it this weekend.

You can only do it that weekend. We built an, an in weekend, no cost, no loss of track time driver licensing program. And my buddy Scott Giles is sort of in charge of that. We call it comp evaluation and it’s a bunch of classroom. It’s coaching throughout the weekend. You obviously have to be a vetted driver.

We’re not going to teach anybody how to drive on a racetrack. It’s not a start from zero comp school. You really need to be an advanced or instructor level HPD driver, or somebody has driven time trials or time attack with us, or been vetted by one of our sister organizations, or somebody that has raced with other groups or hasn’t raced in 10 years.

But did it a bunch of years ago, the kids went to college time to race again. Those are all stories that we’ve heard. We strive for like a no contact, no crash race series. So we really try to put everybody through a classroom portion and it’s pretty intense laying out expectations, laying out what we want to see out of the racing.

So we do kind of an in weekend comp school every weekend. We’ve seen good success with that. It’s approachable. The biggest thing that I’m proud of [00:39:00] in GLTC is we’ve put a hundred and I think 110 people through that comp school. So those are racers that hadn’t raced anywhere else, might not have raced anywhere else, and now they are wheel to wheel racers, like, like I said earlier, we’re not trying to rob pieces of the pie from NASA or SCCA.

We are trying to make more pies. I think sprint racing, club racing is. The coolest thing. It’s also one of the most strenuous things that I’ve ever had to be on the officiating side of, but it’s an amazing thing to watch and it’s an amazing thing to experience. It’s one of those things that you will remember until you’re not here anymore.

You’ll tell stories to your grandkids when you’re not doing it. And, uh, I wanted to show that to a bunch of people that really didn’t know it was approachable because we have this social media presence and this portal to a young generation of car enthusiasts that they’re following us because of festivals or car shows or whatever.

And I wanted them to know that they could do this. They have figured it out. They’ve seen it. We have people competing that. Would have never competed with somebody else. Obviously we’ve got some friends that race elsewhere. Also. I don’t think [00:40:00] we’ve really robbed anybody, stolen them full time to run grid life, GLTC versus somebody else.

That’s not the goal to me. That is the short sighted goal. It’s a bad way to build a series. We’ve really wanted to build drivers from drivers that wouldn’t have gotten there. And I think largely that’s been what we’ve gotten. We might’ve robbed our time trial and time attack audience a little bit, but we’ve had nothing but sold out time attack events.

So I’m not too stressed.

Crew Chief Eric: So that being said, does the time attack series borrow the same classing from the GLTC series? Or is it different?

Adam Jabaay: It’s quite a bit different. There’s the traditional street, street mod, track mod, and unlimited. And those are kind of a graduated level of modifications. Those were our base for classes street is like bolt ons and.

Smaller 200 treadwear tires street mod is you can do some engine swaps. You can add a turbo to your S2000, but you’re still on 285 or less. All wheel drives 255 or less tires. Currently track mod is like unlimited on 60 treadwear or higher and not as much aero, but you can do a lot of aero. It’s [00:41:00] sort of the tweener class.

That’s the one that’s getting rethunk next year. And unlimited is basically, was your car sold at a dealership? At one point you did all kinds of things that doesn’t fit anywhere else. And you’ve got a wing the size of your trailer, like the big, wild, crazy cars. We’ve got a couple other classes that are kind of in the middle of those though, club TR, which stands for track rat.

It’s sort of like GLTC level modifications. Like you can do a lot of different things, but you have to kind of fit inside this other box. Not exactly, but a lot of GLTC cars could run in club TR it’s a two 55 or less Falcon tire. And you can do engine swaps, four cylinders. There’s a few six and five cylinders that are allowed.

But they have to be unopened internally. It’s got the same arrow rules as GLTC. It’s really more for like kind of the cars that didn’t fit anywhere in our time trials and time attack classing. Our most popular class is called Sunday cup. I don’t know if you ever played grand Turismo back in the day with the slow cars that were Honda fits and stuff like that.

The B spec

Crew Chief Eric: cars. Yeah, it’s.

Adam Jabaay: Basically B spect on 200 [00:42:00] tread wear falcons can run in Sunday cup under current B spect classing rules, but Sunday Cup is largely Honda fits Mazda twos. We’ve got Kia Rios and all they can do is a 2 0 5 Falcon. They can do a single dampening adjustable coil over, they can do intake exhaust and they have to fit in a 25 and a half to one power to weight ratio.

I think it’s 25 and a half to one. I write all these rules and I forget what they are, but it’s roughly, you know, an average American driver. In a Honda Fit or in a Mini or in a Kia Rio or something like that is roughly 25 to 1. So that’s really one of our most popular classes. It’s super fun to watch because they’re all so slow in a straight line.

These drivers are animals in the back section of the racetrack, and they’re usually doing it nose to tail, about four cars in a row bumping each other down the back straight. And that’s a really, really fun class to be in because it’s attainable. It’s approachable. You have to spend all your money doing it.

You can drive the car to the racetrack. A Honda fit can swallow like eight tires and a Jack tent and everything. It’s a [00:43:00] attainable, approachable and sustainable class. It’s really fun to watch. It’s fun to compete in my daily driver car is a Honda fit. That is a little bit Sunday cupped out. I got P4 at road America last year, not bragging.

It’s just a fun little class to watch fun class to drive in that class is now a part of the one lap of America. We’ve convinced Brock Yates jr. To. Let that be one of the classes sponsored one lap of America Sunday cup had four cars running around and they had the best time this year in May. It’s a, it’s a cool class.

That’s one of my favorite classes to watch. We’ve also got some unsubscribed classes that are out there, but haven’t, we haven’t seen many yet. Like track battle EV is for like the build it yourself. EVs that kind of go up Pike’s peak. Sometimes in the hill climb, we’ve had a few of them and super unlimited is for basically tube frame NASCARs, which When we go to Wisconsin to Road America, there’s always half a dozen ARCA cars and, uh, ASA cars that run with us.

Yeah. Those are our core classes in Time Attack. We usually have about an 80 to 120 car field. So usually everybody’s competing with 10 to 15 cars in class. Generally [00:44:00] a really fun. Place to try to beat your best lap. So you’re, you’re running up against a bunch of buddies trying to fix each other’s blown up stuff.

All my good vibes in the paddock, especially when people are yanking the heads of a Honda K series motors and changing the transmissions, which tends to be a theme, a lot of K series transmission.

Crew Chief Brad: All right. Well, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about something that’s really interesting to me.

Drifting. I’m fascinated by drifting. I know it’s a, I’d say relatively new in the U S but gaining popularity in the U S. So how did it become a part of grid life? I think

Adam Jabaay: it was in 2011, Chris was directing a music video. He was an art director for a big advertising agency. And he was also friends with. A bunch of people in the Chicago music scene.

One of them was the group Flostradamus back in the day, and he was directing their video for, I forget the name of the song, but there’s a bunch of drift cars in the video, and so he found a bunch of friends in the drift world. And we obviously knew what drift was, but we had never done anything with it.

And he made a bunch of friends in that world [00:45:00] directing this music video, which was pretty cool. I think it was the first or second gridlife. I can’t remember the first one we had drift at. It might’ve been gridlife two in 2015 when he was like, well, we’re going to bring drift cars there also. I was like, Oh, come on.

Cause I was this uppity track rat kid that didn’t know anything about drift cars and didn’t know that it was. Maybe the coolest thing that I had never seen yet, my jaw dropped. The first time I saw Ryan Turk, who’s a pro drifter, one of the most famous drifters on the planet. He came to our Midwest festival, I think in 2015, and he entered turn one at like a hundred miles an hour sideways, and he pulled it off in his old street car, which is like a two Jay Z crazy 900 horsepower Toyota 86 or whatever.

You know, BRZ, the drift scene at grid life at festivals. And we also do a smaller version of open track drift at Audubon country club. We’re the only ones that have ever drifted Audubon. We’re actually going to have a pro demo at Lime Rock. So we’ll be the first people to ever have a drift car at Lime Rock.

Which is going to be wild. We also do a bunch of drift out of horse thief mile out of Willow Springs the last few [00:46:00] years, which is kind of their dedicated drift and motorcycle track up on the mountain. But the drift scene in grid life is different at every event at the festivals, especially it’s became a pretty cool place for everybody from an amateur who’s pretty good to like the top level pros in the U S and they kind of all mixed together and it’s just party drifting.

There’s no competition. It’s no egos. They’re just trying to put on a good show for the spectators and have fun with their buddies. It’s different than a lot of the competition groups. There’s a bunch of different groups around the country that have feeder series for the formula drift, or, you know, their, their, their own pro series, you know, clutch kickers down in Florida, et cetera.

It’s really became like a nice melting pot for the drift community. A lot of these drivers, the younger drivers that, you know, they grew up. The last 10 years watching Formula Drift. And now they get to literally drive on Gingerman or PPR or road Atlanta with the people that they watched last weekend run at English town.

It’s a cool place for drift. I think a lot of the pros use it as part of what they pitched to their sponsors. It’s like a part of their [00:47:00] season. They they’re. Gonna do the grid life festivals and they’re also gonna do FD or clutch kickers or whatever. But we have drifters that drive there. They drive from Detroit all the way to to Gingerman and they ship a bunch of tires in and they thrash on their two 40 throughout the weekend.

Definitely not a place to learn to drift. It’s kind of a cool mix of drivers and talents and personalities and. You know, the goal we’re trying to pull off is like thing that we create is like vibes and smiles. So we’re trying to make good vibes in the campground area because the people that are camped along the racetrack, they throw the best parties and they want to watch drift and they want to watch GLTC and we want to put on a good show for them.

And we also want to really. Put on a good vibe in the paddock. We want everybody to get to know your new best friend. And you find your new best friend often at the racetrack because you accidentally parked next to them. Some of the best friends that I have, I met in parking lot and I met in racetrack and some of the most interesting people too.

So like we’re trying to put on best weekend ever. If we can put on the best weekend ever for a small percentage of the people that come to every grid life, I think. We’re nailing it. It’s just another [00:48:00] piece of what we do. And it’s a cool show for spectators too. If you’ve never seen pro level drifting, it’s absolutely insanity.

It’s just insanity. Especially with some of the demo cars, like Chris Forsberg and his Ultimaniac four seat tube frame Ultima, with like 2000 motor. It’s just nuts. It doesn’t even look like it’s trying hard and it’s putting off more smoke than you can see through. It’s insanity. But it’s also, if they do it right, The racetrack is still pretty clear and we can run some HPD sessions right behind them.

Just another piece of what we do. Like I said earlier, it’s the same disease, but it’s just kind of a different symptom in the automotive enthusiasm realm, you know,

Crew Chief Eric: I’m revved up for the next grid life. And for those of you that are listening and hearing about this for the first time, I don’t know what rock you’ve been under, but you’re probably wondering where can I sign up for the next grid life event?

And that’s the big question. So are we able to register for grid life events on something like MSR? Which we’re used to for other track day events, time attacks, and so on. Or do you register through the grid life website? And the bigger question, the ultimate question, how [00:49:00] much does it generally cost? Is it by motorsport discipline or is there one cost for the entire weekend?

Is there some sort of all you can eat different spectator fees? How does all this break down for somebody looking to come to the next grid life event?

Adam Jabaay: So cost wise, we try to stay in line with. other similar organizations for a three day and four day, depending on what class you’re running in at gingerbread raceway, it was under 500 drifters.

They don’t run as much seat times. I think they were in the 2 range and spectators. It totally varies whether you want to buy VIP or you just want to show up for Saturday afternoon, you know, anything from like 60 bucks up to that’s with. Two nights of headlining music and up to, you can spend a couple hundred dollars getting the track side camping and lighting and all that kind of stuff.

Several of our events are usually on sale on MSR. Also grid dot life is the main website. There’s links to all the events there. We often sell through both. pieces. MSR is one place we sell and we also use our own ticketing service. It’s pretty easy to buy a ticket, should [00:50:00] be multiple places you can find it.

Don’t buy a scalped one, that’s been becoming a problem for festivals, but the biggest problem that we actually have right now is drivers buy the driver tickets really fast and the driver tickets are typically sold out pretty quickly. We’ve got this traveling circus of about 75 percent of the same people and there are people that are I can never get Tickets for grid life, which is a terrible problem to have.

I totally hate that problem. I don’t know how to do it better other than to keep doing more events. It’s really hard to do more events. We’re a small teams, their spectator tickets, car show tickets, a lot of places to buy should be pretty easy to find if you look on our website, grid. life and a lot of people put a.

com after that, but don’t do that. It’s just. Grid. life.

Crew Chief Eric: So if you can’t get space at the next grid life event, you can always try in the virtual world. As many of us migrated there during COVID to iRacing, Assetto Corsa, Forza, whatever was available that we could get together with our buddies and compete against one another.

So I see that grid life has done the same thing. Is that continuing on as part of the [00:51:00] circus as well?

Adam Jabaay: Yeah, we’ve done several years of sim racing. And I think actually during early pandemic, there was complete inability to buy sim gear at one point. There’s so many new sim racers because of that, which is wild to think about.

But we have a gridlife iRacers, which is a pretty popular iRacing series actually. And they’ve got their own discord and all that stuff. Gridlife iRacers, Facebook is probably the best way to get involved with that. Or email kyle at grid dot life. He’s more in charge of all the sim world. He also runs a company called sim TV.

Kyle works with us full time and he runs sim TV also, which is sort of a sim hosting. He does live streams for a bunch of different people on iRacing, which is very cool. Does a great job announcing as well. He’s our, he’s our lead presenter and we’ve done stuff on a set of Corsa. We’ve done stuff on Forza.

I’ve done stuff on iRacing. We also, for the last several years, have hosted a SEMA party. Gridlife SEMA party, but it’s spent at the, what’s that one? The one that’s the, the pyramid. Which one is that? The Luxor. Luxor, yeah. They’ve got this video [00:52:00] game nightclub, an amphitheater basically built for gaming at the esports arena.

We’ve hosted several SEMA parties there. Really cool places to get to know people in the industry. And that is sort of where we really launched in 2018. We launched some of our iRacing stuff. I’m a bit more of a caveman. I deal with carpentry and real race cars, but Kyle at grid. life can answer any questions in that world.

He is the dude that knows all about the sim world. I’ll be good. Life iRace is really fun to watch, especially in the winter time. They’ve got a several different series throughout the winter, quote unquote off season, which never seems to actually be off. It’s fun to watch. Kyle does a great job with the streams.

A rotating cast of broadcasting talent goes through their great streams to watch too.

Crew Chief Eric: Are there any other ways that someone can get involved with gridlife outside of being a participant or being in the virtual world? Are there opportunities to come volunteer or help even maybe flag something like that?

Adam Jabaay: Absolutely. Grid. life slash volunteers got a volunteer application on there. We’ve got a super cool culture of volunteers that really help us run the [00:53:00] events. It’s actually more fun for many of them to volunteer. And then they drive a couple of sessions than it is to like buy a ticket and just. Focus on their car.

You know, you get to talk to all the drivers, you’re working tech, you’re working merch at the festivals. You might even get to work the bar and hang out at backstage in the concert. You never know. We need people everywhere because these events are so expensive to run and they require so many people to run them safely.

We’ll take any help we can get. We’ll train you up. We’ve got volunteers that have volunteered with us for six years straight. And traveled the country following us around flagging. Typically we buy flagger help from the racetracks typically, or flaggers by Phoenicia, which is a traveling flagger group that does everything from IndyCar to our ragtag group of unshaven misfits.

That’s typically through the racetrack. Most tracks, they’re always looking for flaggers too. It’s also a great way to experience the weekends. You can get the best view in the house. You’re standing inside of all the turns protected by a barrier. Watching every single car and you get to play with cool Motorola radios, too.

Yeah, we, we would love anybody and everybody [00:54:00] who’s interested in like experiencing motor sports. It’s a great way to really get into it as well. Like if you don’t know if this is what you want to do, but you’ve been watching these Instagram videos or the YouTube videos or the Twitch videos, we would love to show you behind the curtain, show you the backside of grid life, all the dirty work, the people that help and help these crazy weekends actually become a reality.

So we would love if somebody wants to volunteer for sure.

Crew Chief Brad: And Gridlife is also associated with a podcast that many might already be familiar with called Slip Angle with over 460 episodes. So for those of us that aren’t in the know, what is the show about?

Adam Jabaay: The second Gridlife ever, 2015. Matt Farrah, he’s a YouTuber.

He’s got the Smoking Tire podcast. He came out, he and I were announcing time attack or something, I forget. Along with my buddy Austin, Matt was like, you too should just do a podcast. You guys got got like a great on air vibe and that was the first time that somebody had told us. But he and I actually had both been talking about doing it.

We started doing shows once [00:55:00] a week in 2015 and often twice a week. And we sort of never quit. Austin kind of got out of cars, got burned out. He worked in the, uh, the track event world full time for quite a while. And he pops in every few months. He’ll be on the show still, but my time attack and competition director, Abe Schmucker is now kind of the co host and producer.

And we just have a pretty good time chatting. It’s often an interview. It’s often us talking about our broken RVs that we had to drive to the racetrack or street cars, kind of BSing anything and everything. It’s kind of a loose affiliation, obviously with grid life. But I’m obviously affiliated with both.

So it’s become sort of the unofficial podcast of gridlife. We never really wanted to have an official podcast in case we said something stupid on air. I didn’t want it to affect the other company, but it’s got a great listener base and most of the paddocks seems to listen to it. Which is sort of the reason that we keep doing it.

We get to talk to our friends and it keeps the good life community together. And it’s really definitely helped us branch out around the country as well. When we were out in California in March, all I [00:56:00] seemed to do was talk to people about the podcast and they were stoked that we brought an event out there, which is great.

I love that. The podcast was started as if we recorded like a hangout session, when the track went cold, we would always talk about anything and everything. We were literally fixing somebody’s truck, or we were like fixing somebody’s race car or talking about how much fun the day was, you know, BS ing about RVs or actually building a race car in the tower and recording it.

It was anything and everything. And then you also get to talk to some interesting people. We’ve had a ton of pro racers on, crew chiefs. We’ve had officials from IMSA, SRO. We’ve had Well, people all from all over all walks of life and anybody in the sport we’ve had on it’s ever evolving and you never know what we’re going to talk about.

Probably going to talk about RVs at some point though, because lately that’s been a theme. So I traveled the country in a 1991 diesel pusher motorhome. So there’s always something to fix.

Crew Chief Eric: So with that, Adam, any shout outs, promotions, or anything else you’d like to share that we didn’t talk about thus far in the episode?

Adam Jabaay: We have a great [00:57:00] designer on staff, the founder of gridlife, my partner in business world life. Chris Stewart is one of the best designers. He makes amazing. shirts. He makes amazing apparel. We’ve got some amazing people helping him. Check out our store on grid. life. We’ve got some awesome apparel on there.

The line for apparel at festivals is typically hours long. People love it. They love the apparel. Check that stuff out. In Chicago, we’re actually starting another company called Car Club. It’s going to be Car storage and kind of a hangout space on the north side, the near north side, right off of I 94. So if you are in Chicago, you’re looking to maybe store something somewhere, shoot me an email, adamantgrid.

life. I can connect you with the right people. That should be open probably in October. Early storage might be available pretty soon. Actually grid. life is the main website grid life official, uh, Instagram. We have a ton of different Facebook pages for events selves or our track battle or good life touring cup series.

Anything under grid life itself. You’ll know if it’s fake, we do get cloned pages all the time and [00:58:00] they usually disappear after a few hours. And then, yeah, the dumb little podcast, a slip angle podcast, all one word. You can pretty much get it anywhere that podcasts are given away for free. And we do have a Patrion for slip angle.

I don’t even know how to get there. I think it just. Look up Slip Angle on Patreon. We don’t push Patreon very hard, but we do really appreciate our patrons. We try to throw t shirts at them randomly. Some of the shows we put up there, there’s a reason they get hidden on Patreon. So some of the debauchery gets hidden there.

There are some good shows, but there’s definitely some debauchery. You hear weird stories, especially from people that live in Iowa.

Crew Chief Eric: All right, guys. So I think you’ve convinced me it’s more than just flat brim hats and vapes. It’s more than just a festival. Gridlife is a motorsports movement. I’m not sure about you, Brad, but I think we need to become part of the hashtag grid lifestyle and pick our favorite event and go

Crew Chief Brad: full send.

I agree. And to learn more about GridLife and how you can participate, log on [00:59:00] to www. grid. life. You can email Adam at adam at grid. life or follow them on social at gridlifefest on Twitter and at gridlifeofficial on Instagram and Facebook.

Crew Chief Eric: That said, Adam, it has been an absolute pleasure to have you on the show.

I can’t thank you enough for coming on and telling the origin story of GridLife properly for the 10, 000th time, but to a new audience of folks that may or may not be familiar with GridLife and who are hopefully looking forward to participating and joining one of your upcoming events here in the near future.

So again, thanks for coming on BreakFix.

Adam Jabaay: You guys have been a good time to talk to. I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s right, listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our Patreon for a follow on pit stop, mini sowed. So check that out on www. patreon. com forward slash GT motorsports and get access to all sorts of [01:00:00] behind the scenes content from this episode and more.

Crew Chief Brad: If you like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about GTM, be sure to check us out on www. gtmotorsports. org. You can also find us on Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, You can call or text us at 202 630 1770 or send us an email at crewchief at gtmotorsports.

org. We’d love to hear from you.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey everybody, Crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that GTM remains a no annual fees organization. And our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge. As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies, and GTM swag.

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Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

• 00:00 Introduction to BreakFix Podcast
• 00:27 What is Gridlife?
• 01:27 Origins of Gridlife
• 02:46 Evolution and Expansion
• 05:52 Festival Atmosphere
• 14:32 HPDE Program Insights
• 26:01 Gridlife Touring Cup (GLTC)
• 31:43 Data Analysis and Parity in Racing
• 32:25 Diverse Car Builds in GLTC
• 32:46 Adopting Bracket Racing
• 33:24 Excitement of Sprint Racing
• 35:16 Challenges for Spec Miata in GLTC
• 36:07 Building a Competitive GLTC Car
• 37:46 Driver Licensing and Accessibility
• 40:25 Time Attack Classing Explained
• 41:48 The Popularity of Sunday Cup
• 44:16 Drifting at Gridlife
• 48:47 Registering for Gridlife Events
• 50:46 Gridlife in the Virtual World
• 52:46 Volunteering at Gridlife
• 54:23 Slip Angle Podcast
• 56:52 Final Thoughts and Promotions

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