Formula BMW USA

My chase for Formula 1

I grew up racing karts in Portland. By my teens I was nationally ranked, and one day I got the call: I'd been selected as one of 20 drivers in the country to fly to Valencia, Spain and earn my Formula BMW racing license. That was the start of the open-wheel career.

Formula BMW was built to funnel the next generation of Formula 1 drivers into the pipeline. We ran on the same weekends as F1 and INDYCAR, on some of the most iconic tracks in the world. Indianapolis one weekend, Montreal the next, Bahrain after that. I was one of the youngest on the grid, and I had no business being there. But I was there.

The seasons

I ran two full Formula BMW USA seasons with HBR Motorsport Team USA in 2005 and 2006.

The highlight was the Grand Prix of Denver, where I put it on the podium with a P3 finish — my career-best result on the record. Standing on that podium as a rookie is still one of my favorite memories from the whole career.

We also got to run two F1 race weekends as the support series — Indianapolis Motor Speedway for the United States Grand Prix, and Circuit Gilles-Villeneuve in Montreal for the Canadian Grand Prix. Racing on those tracks the same weekend as F1, as a teenager, is something I'll never forget.

The stat I'm most proud of came in 2006. Mid-season, BMW's press release noted that I was the only driver in the entire field to have finished every race in the top 10. Not the fastest. Not the flashiest. Just the guy who kept bringing the car home. I finished that year with a pole position and a year-over-year jump in the championship standings.

In December 2005 I also represented the USA at the inaugural Formula BMW World Final in Bahrain. 34 drivers from 15 nations, the prize was a test with the BMW Sauber F1 team. The guy who won the whole thing was Nico Hülkenberg, who went on to race in F1. His main rival that weekend was Sebastien Buemi, who later ran F1, won Formula E, and won Le Mans. Other drivers I shared grids with across those two seasons: Robert Wickens, Simona de Silvestro, Alexander Rossi, Stefano Coletti, James Davison. That's the grid we were on.

The business side (where it really started)

Racing at that level isn't free. Not even close. The cars, the travel, the team. Someone has to pay for all of it, and at 16 years old that someone was me.

So I did what I had to do. I raised over $500K in sponsorships from Portland-based brands. Pitched the companies, managed the relationships, and figured out how to deliver real value back beyond a logo on a sidepod.

I'd host executives and clients at the track, walk them through the garage, translate the technical stuff, and make the weekend feel like something they couldn't get anywhere else. I was running a one-person B2B sales and account management operation out of a race transporter. I just didn't know that's what it was called yet.

Looking back, that experience basically wrote the playbook for everything I did at Pixly a decade later.

The decision

Senior year of high school is when it got real. Racing full-time was the dream, but future funding was shaky, and the next rung up the ladder (F3, GP2, eventually F1) was exponentially more expensive than the last.

I chose to go to the University of Arizona and study business and entrepreneurship.

Hard call. Still the right one.

What it gave me

Six years of racing at that level teaches you things you can't really unlearn. How to perform when the stakes are real. How to recalculate fast when the plan breaks. How to pitch, how to host, how to build a relationship that lasts past the last lap. How to stay calm when everything's moving at 150 mph.

I don't race anymore, but I operate the same way. Heads down, keep grinding, don't screw it up.