The Hardest Part of Racing Isn't the Driving

Last year I finally did the thing I'd been circling for most of my life: I got into racing, for real. And the reason it actually happened, instead of staying stuck on the someday list, is that I stopped trying to figure it all out on my own and signed on with TWOth Autosport, an experienced team that already had it figured out. They've spent years developing drivers, they run a serious program, and more than anything they keep you focused on the right things at the right time. They put me in the car and pointed me in the right direction.

And here's the part nobody warns you about:

The driving was the easy part.

Don't get me wrong, the driving is hard. It's humbling in a way that's tough to explain until you've come out of a corner two seconds off the pace and realized the person who did it right made it look like nothing. But it's a clean kind of hard. You, the car, the track. That part makes sense.

It's everything around the car that nearly stopped me.

The stuff nobody puts in a nice tidy guide

Getting into this sport means teaching yourself an entire second language, mostly by accident. Which license do I actually need, and who issues it? What counts toward it? What does a race weekend actually cost once you add up entry, tires, fuel, the car, the support, the stuff you didn't know you needed until Friday morning? What's the difference between a club night and a regional weekend and a national one? Who do I call? What am I forgetting?

None of that is written down in one place. You piece it together from forum posts, from a guy in the next paddock spot, from an email chain, from finding out the hard way. The information exists. It's just scattered across a dozen heads and a hundred PDFs, and every new driver has to reassemble it from scratch.

And that's just the driver's side. The teams are running events on spreadsheets and group texts. The licensing bodies are managing pathways with paperwork. Everyone in this sport is doing incredible work despite the tools, not because of them.

Here's what really gets me, though. If something like what we're building had existed when I first got the itch, I'm almost certain I'd have started racing years ago. The thing standing between me and the grid was never really the desire. It was that getting in looked so confusing, and honestly so intimidating, that it was always easier to put off.

That's the part that shouldn't exist. The on ramp to the most fun thing I've ever done is unnecessarily, almost absurdly hard. Not because the sport is exclusive on purpose, but because nobody has ever built the thing that makes everything outside the car simple.

So we're going to build it.

The mission

The team that got me racing, TWOth, is run by Travis Hill and his brother Trevor Hill. Travis is who I've partnered with to build this. He's spent years developing drivers and running race programs; he's an IMSA driver himself. He's seen the friction from every seat: the driver's, the team's, the paddock's. Between his side of the sport and mine, we kept landing on the same conclusion.

Racing happens in the car. Everything else should just run.

That's the whole idea behind ShiftGate. Make everything outside the car simpler. For the driver, for the team, and for the licensing bodies too. The career tools, the licensing pathway, the budgeting, the scheduling, the progress you can actually see. One place instead of twelve. So that the next person who wants to try this doesn't have to spend their first season just figuring out how the sport works before they can get good at it.

Because when you lower the friction, more people get in. And more people getting in is good for all of us.

Proof the climb is real

If you want to know how far this sport can take you, look at Toby Lütke. He's the founder of Shopify. A Canadian tech guy, not a lifelong professional racer. He fell in love with the sport and started at the very bottom, in a Mazda Miata, with a team called TWOth.

The same team I'm racing with now.

From that Miata he stepped up to a Radical, the same car I'm driving this season, then into LMP3, then LMP2. And this June, he lined up for the 24 Hours of Le Mans: the biggest, most demanding endurance race in the world, sharing a car with professional drivers.

That's the ladder. Miata to Le Mans, one rung at a time. It's not a fantasy. It's a real path, and I'm standing on one of its lower rungs right now.

But here's the thing: that ladder is invisible to almost everyone standing at the bottom of it. Toby had people around him who knew every rung. What came next, what it took, how to get there. Most drivers don't. And you can't climb a ladder you can't see. That's what ShiftGate is really about: making the whole thing visible, and handing you the tools to actually climb it.

What this blog is

Here's the part I care about most: I'm not writing this from the outside looking in. I'm in the middle of it right now.

I'm running a full season this year. My own car time, my own licensing grind, my own budget I have to justify, my own weekends where things go right and things go sideways. And I'm going to document all of it, honestly, in real time, right here.

The wins and the expensive mistakes. What a weekend actually costs. How the license process really works. What the tracks are like. What I wish someone had told me before I showed up.

If you're thinking about getting into racing in Canada, or you're already in it and tired of figuring everything out alone, this is being written for you. Come along for the season.