Why I'm Taking a Break From Racing

The last couple of years have been a wild ride. When the opportunity to compete in Gridlife full-time presented itself, I could not say no: I knew that I would regret it if I did. Racing in GLTC with my closest friends has been nothing short of core memories. Nevertheless, when our season ended early this year due to burnout, it allowed me some much-needed introspection.

I've come to a challenging but liberating realization: it's time for a break from racing.

This Story Begins...

...back in 2022, when Carlos Mendez cleaned up in Spec E30 and Super Touring 5 at the 2021 NASA Championships at Daytona International Speedway, taking the national title in both classes. Carlos and many of the other Florida-region Spec E30 racers were treating the event as a glorious send-off to the series that they'd raced for about a decade. The writing was on the wall: Spec E30 was not long for this world.

Carlos and a core group of advisors had already laid out the rulebook for Spec E9X, and he sold his E30 not long after the championship run. However, Carlos wisely knew that it would take many years to grow the new class and that in the meantime, competition would be sparse. Riding high from the national titles, he was looking into higher-level racing series, including Global MX5 Cup and NLS (at the Nurburgring). However, owning a BMW parts company meant MX5 Cup didn't make much sense, and NLS was an incredible time and money commitment (living on a different continent and all).

I was a fresh transplant from Florida to North Carolina, still figuring out where my racing career (at the time, in NASA Time Trials) was headed. I'd experienced some success in moderately competitive, modestly large regional time trial competitions and had developed enough ego to think I could hang in a nationally competitive series such as the Gridlife Touring Cup. GLTC was a series I'd only heard about here and there, usually in the context of "GLTC is rad, I'd like to do that someday." That someday came pretty quickly for us!

We started watching and following the series closely, thanks to the awesome livestreams that are a cornerstone of GLTC's worldwide exposure. We dipped our toes in at the nearest event in 2023, at Carolina Motorsports Park. I didn't even have a real race car or a competition license yet.

Carlos was hooked and immediately went on to run five GLTC weekends in 2023. I bought my E90 race car a month after our first Gridlife event. We decided to run together as a team in 2024, and Carlos invested in the Condor hauler to drag our cars across the country. I obtained my NASA competition license in late 2023, solely to ensure that GLTC would accept me as a new driver.

The 2024 Season

I'd sum up my rookie racing season in 2024 as a rollercoaster of emotions. It was some of the most fun, scariest, daunting, and humbling experiences of my adult life. Every event, I had a different state of mind: I love this, I'm not sure about this, I want nothing more than to improve, I'm done with this, this is awesome. Nevertheless, there was an unwavering commitment to complete the season as we'd set out to do.

By the end of the year, fresh off some upgrades to the car and the repetition of racing 24 races within a 6-month season, I was getting pretty comfortable with the discomfort of racing. There was basically no second-guessing that we would do this again in 2025.

The 2025 Season

The GLTC rules barely changed between seasons, the most notable change being that Corvettes were "nerfed" and running about 5-8% more penalty than in the year before. This gave us a false hope that we'd automatically be more competitive than we were in 2024—which, to be honest, we weren't.

We came out swinging and both had top-10 finishes at the 2025 season opener, but while my resolve was steadfast this season, the results were a rollercoaster. Strong performances were almost always followed up by lackluster results and points-scoring dry spells, for myself at least. It was up and down, with some flashes of brilliance, but still a relatively poor overall performance in a highly competitive series.

Carlos's results were consistently better than mine, but only by a modest margin. He, too, wanted and expected better results than we were seemingly capable of achieving.

Naive Optimism

I'm generally an optimistic person. Even if a situation is bleak—such as wanting to be in the top 5 but barely getting into the top 20—I tend to think it just means I need to try harder, practice more, and upgrade the car accordingly. Surely it's possible to get there.

And with enough time, resources (read: money), and a willingness to *ahem*💕exploit 💕 the rules, that's probably true.

I regret spurring Carlos on in our early days in the series, telling him that we're only a few upgrades and some better driving away from fighting at the front.

Those days never came. I was wrong. The rules of GLTC are so lacking and fundamentally insufficient at creating parity that we never really had a chance. Not with what we were driving, and how we were approaching the "spirit of the rules."

I owe you an apology, Carlos, for doubting you and being patronizing!

Blind Ambition

As recently as two events ago, I still had the mindset mentioned above: that we can figure this out. That we should be able to make it up front. Even as Carlos utterly flamed out at Road America, I was encouraged, because both of us legitimately drove our cars into the top 10 that weekend, after qualifying P20 and P21, squarely in the middle of a field of 40 cars.

Just three weeks later, Carlos had a good performance at Lime Rock Park, but I was back on the rollercoaster and couldn't finish any better than P19.

Even though our cars were better than they'd ever been, we were burnt out. Six events spanning thousands of miles within 4 months took their toll. With the extended 3-day Gridlife schedule and travel days, I was usually gone for 4 or 5 days at each event, and Carlos was gone 6 or 7 days (towing the hauler).

Confluence of Factors

A lot is working against us to compete in this series. Between the financial burden, the time away from work and family, the four and a half page rulebook that can't possibly do enough to create parity and prevent exploitation, and an organization that is proving (willingly or not) that we are the product and not the customer, it was finally dawning on me that the deck is too stacked against us.