I've been an entrepreneur my entire life. For most of it, my identity was wrapped up in that. The wins, the visible ones, the kind you could point to. They started to appear, and then COVID erased them. My business. And then me.
What followed was about three years of hard days. Depression. Withdrawal from the belief that it was ever going to get better.
Life happens for us, not to us. I didn't believe that during those years. I believe it now. And the difference between those two versions of me is the only thing this story is actually about.
I've had the privilege of losing what feels like everything, and in it, found that what once felt like everything was actually nothing at all, and what remained turned out to be everything.
What remained was my family. And in the middle of that spiral, my son, who was 13, asked to start kart racing.
It was money we didn't have. It was time I couldn't justify. It was every reason a responsible person would say no. I said yes because I couldn't bear the idea that my failure was going to leak into his life directly. Whatever I'd lost, he wasn't going to lose with me.
At first, I prayed for wins. Not for him, for me. Everything in my world felt like a losing proposition, and I wanted the track to be the one place the math worked out. It didn't. The wins didn't come. He didn't take his first checkered flag until halfway through his second season.
But about halfway through year one, something shifted. Not on the scoreboard, in him. He started to improve. Not in the way that shows up in lap times first, but in the way that shows up in how a kid carries himself between sessions. The fight was there. The will to learn was there. And I started to notice that the win I'd been praying for had already arrived. It just wasn't the one I'd been keeping score of.
Motorsport is competitive suffering. You can get everything right, pace dialed in, machine running perfectly, and one mistake from yourself or a driver near you ends the day with nothing to show for it but broken parts and a sad story. That's the sport. That's also the lesson. You keep going anyway, because progression is what keeps us alive, and progression is what kept Motorsport alive for us.
The frustration turned into obsession. Reading, watching, listening to anything karting related. Scrapping together money, time, energy to race a little more. Growing together as a team of two at every step.
And somewhere in there, the scorecard rebalanced. I hadn't lost everything, or even anything. I had been given the time to share my energy with my son. The thing I'd been chasing as an entrepreneur, visible wins, proof of self, had pulled me away from my family for years. If I'd gotten what I was after back then, karting wouldn't have happened. The van rides wouldn't have happened. None of this would have happened. The collapse was the gift. I just couldn't read the card.
The van rides home are where this story lives. Even the worst weekends came with one guaranteed win. Hours in the front seats, just the two of us. That's the place where a teenager who won't talk about anything at the dinner table will talk about everything. Friends. Social pressure. Girls. Politics. Religion. School. The big questions. We weren't father and son in the van. We were two guys who'd just been through the same day, talking about life as peers.
That's the power of Motorsport when you're on the inside. Win or lose, it's distributed equally to the team. We were a team of two, and all of it, the blame, the victory, the long quiet stretches of highway, rested on the two dudes in the front seats.
It was on one of those drives, somewhere on a long stretch of highway, that I brought up something he'd said to me when he was ten. I was trying to pry information out of him the way fathers do. I'd asked what kind of work adults did that seemed interesting. He said, "I'm not sure, Dad." So I tried it inverted. What kind of work looked uninteresting? He paused, looking defeated that he didn't have a quick answer. Then he said, "I'm not sure, Dad. I just know that I don't want to be forgotten."
I went silent. I wasn't expecting philosophical depth from a ten year old. I told him, "then let's make it our goal to ensure that doesn't happen."
That line became a north star in my parenting. When he needed a nudge, about a friend, a decision, a habit, I'd ask him, "is that something someone who isn't going to be forgotten would do?" Big goals and a big life come from staying on course with the right discipline, the right people, the right determination. He's heard it for years now. He hasn't forgotten.
So in the van that day, I asked him about it again. We agreed the most important part of "not being forgotten" wasn't celebrity. It was by whom. Family was the answer. The question that remained was: what could we do that would make our lives so unforgettable to our future family members that they'd carry our names for generations?
We sat with the question for a while. What could "it" actually be? The accomplishment had to be real, not a fantasy, not a lottery ticket, not something that required the universe to bend in our favor. It had to be a goal with a straight line.
Formula One was out. Too many uncontrollable variables, too much politics, too much luck disguised as merit. We'd never been interested in oval racing, so Indy was out, and anything dirt related was out with it. What we kept coming back to was sports car racing. The discipline rewards exactly what we were already learning to do. Show up, suffer well, get a little better, drive a long stint, hand the car off in working order or at least one piece. It's a sport that respects the team in the front seats.
It was early June. June produces some of the most prolific Motorsport events of the year, and the one that sits at the top of the calendar is Le Mans. He said it before I did. "What about Le Mans?"
My heart sank as I let myself imagine it. Le Mans is the kind of goal that's achievable. Not easily. Not practically. But possible, for the right driver, with the right team, on the right path. It's a straight line. Long, but straight.
Le Mans could be described in a million words, but in that moment all I could think was: it ends on Father's Day. There is no higher accomplishment I can imagine than standing in pit lane, watching my son race and win at Le Mans, on Father's Day.
From that day forward, there has only been one plan.
PMG is the first big step. I told him I'd match energy to energy. And after watching him push harder, train harder, run more sim laps, log more gym reps, become a more complete driver, I matched it with the formation of this company. Every sponsor puts us one step closer. Every lap, every rep, every conversation. It's a goal of a million small steps. He's moving every day. We both are.
Make it come true, and accept the journey as it happens for you.