Off the heels of crashing my Evo VIII at Brainerd International Raceway and landing myself in the hospital with a pelvis broken in 5 places, I knew two facts: First, I sucked as a driver. Second, I had two options, to quit, or to correct that first fact. And I chose the latter.
4 months, an insurance battle that nearly found its way to a courtroom, and plenty of shopping later, I drove home in a new to me 2006 Evo IX. The car you see here. Except back then, it was a bone stock car on some off-the-shelf Apexi coilovers. The chassis itself has a storied history of hurting feelings, including having spent a stint as a 900whp highway car. I made two promises to owners #2 and 3, both of whom were friends of mine. I wouldn't ruin it, and I would do everything in my power to ensure it kept hurting feelings. And that meant I had to actually learn how to wheel a car.
My first season with the car, in 2014, I lucked into a set of Volk CE-28N Time Attacks in 17x9 Evo fitment, clad in Z1 * specs with a couple track days left in them, and threw every instructor I could into the passenger seat. By July, I was comfortable enough to return to BIR, where I averaged fairly impressive stopwatch times for a stock Evo. I had my baseline, I knew I could safely turn laps, now it was time to prove myself. In September, I took that same car, on those same tires, and won my class in the BIR Proving Grounds Triple Track Showdown, a combined scoring of drag, autox, and standing start time attack. It was the first time anyone ever handed me a trophy that I had genuinely earned, and it had the number 1 on it.
So if I could win locally, I felt like it was time to turn the difficulty up a notch. So in March of 2015, I packed the car with a few spares and a pile of tools and drove it 13 hours to the opposite end of Interstate 35 to compete in the Optima Search for the Ultimate Street Car event at Texas Motor Speedway, where I finished 4th in class. Seeing a chance to be competitive, I did a few other events to varying results, all within the top 10, but sadly missed out on an invite to Vegas due to being unable to attend any double points events. I ended my season as the highest scoring driver with only standard points. Needless to say, I was hooked on national competition, but upcoming rule changes meant chasing wins in Optima was going to be near impossible for me, so I looked for a new home.
And in 2016, I found Gridlife, and by extension my forever track family. I followed the series from Gingerman Raceway to Road Atlanta and back that year. By now the car had grown along with me to include a rear sway bar, adjustable rear alignment arms, and new coilovers, a set of custom Reinharte R1s, and at the fall event at Gingerman, set my first time attack record in HPDE+ AWD. I did however miss one event that year, which kept me off the season podium, and gave me a goal for the following year.
2017 was my first full Gridlife season, and we started off prepping for Mid-Ohio by adding some power. Exhaust, a lower IC pipe, and a tune on 93 pump gas gave me an entirely different car to play with, and I didn't squander it. The class had grown, and new rivalries made this one of my favorite years of racing. By the end of it all, I came out on top, winning the championship in HPDE+ and in the process, putting enough eyes on the class that they finally had to treat us like real competitors and give us a real name, Street, for 2018.
Over the next few seasons, we'd see the class explode in popularity and with it, bring budgets I couldn't hope to match. I continued to build the car as I could and rely on driver mod to stay relevant, but podiums became harder fought and as corners were cut to keep the car running from event to event, we eventually fell off the podiums to be more of a top-5 contender. In 2022, I took most of the year off to shift budget over to the development side. At the end of the year, I attended the Gridlife finals at Heartland Motorsports Park for testing, and at the end of the weekend had secured a 3rd place finish, but more importantly, with minimal upgrades, had gone 3 seconds faster than 2021's car. Being competitive was back on the menu.
Unfortunately, 2023 as a complete season was not to be. We made all 5 of our planned events, including a 2 day tow to Lime Rock Park and a 3 day tow out to Laguna Seca, but the car refused to cooperate. Between growing pains with a new built motor and catastrophic failures involving both a head gasket and later on, a melted piston, the season ended on a low note. 2024 wasn't much better with a late start, immediately followed by the engine attempting to melt itself down again. 2025 was a double repeat of the same failure, which finally resulted in us figuring out all of the multiple causes and implementing safety systems to prevent them moving forward.
For 2026, I chose to take another development year to work budget levels back to a comfortable place and really focus on getting the car right. Most of the way through now, we’re getting ready to get the car back on track for some final validation, and from there will tear it all back down again to build it into something even crazier. In 2027 I won’t just be chasing lap times, I’ll be chasing glory.
