Thirty-five years of racing. Friendships, winning, losing and loss.
Ten years ago I started sharing a race car with Troy Lindstrom. I thought I was getting a teammate. What I got was one of the best friendships of my life, a decade of places I would never have seen on my own, and a reminder I keep coming back to: none of this is owed to any of us.
Troy has been racing for more than thirty years, and he has done nearly all of it. He came up through offroad — SCORE and stadium trucks — then moved onto the road course side with SCCA, NASA, WERC, WRL and Lucky Dog. He holds NASA championships with his Supertruck and a class win at the NASA 25 Hour in 2005.
He has never really stopped adding to it. NASA SoCal Pro Truck and the NASCAR King Taco Super Trucks in 2008. Trans-Am TA2 in 2021. A win and a podium in Pirelli GT4 America in 2024. Thirty years in, he is still turning up and still winning.
I have my own version of that list — an SCCA FP Regional Championship in 2004, NASA class championships, the WERC E1 Championship in 2016, and the E1 class win at the NASA 25 Hour in 2005. Over the years I have been on teams running E2 and E3 at the 25 Hour with multiple podiums in those classes, and I spent three years as WERC Director starting in 2012.
Put the two lists side by side and they look like a lot of weekends. What they do not show is that for most of those years we did not know each other.
Ten years in the same car
We had both been racing in the same organisations for years before any of this — SCCA and NASA — but never with each other and never against each other. Different classes, different grids, sprint racing. It was not until about ten years ago that we teamed up and started running endurance races together, and we have not stopped since.
It started in his 700 hp NASCAR Supertruck at NASA WERC events up and down the West Coast — a truck that had no business being as quick as it was. About seven years ago we added the BMW to the mix. Then the truck got parked, and we have been racing the BMW ever since: WRL GP1 and GTO in E46s — the number 180 car in GP1 and the 181 in GTO. Her name is Eileen.
Eileen is also a red-headed doll. She belonged to one of Troy’s granddaughters until the family dog got hold of her and chewed up her leg. That was the end of her career as a doll and the start of her career as a race team mascot. She turns up in all our videos, and the car is named after her.
Somewhere along the way we stopped counting the races.
Friends first, teammates second
We have been friends and business partners the whole way, and the racing is only part of what we have done together. Backcountry cat trips in Canada and the States. Travelling with friends and family. Shop nights, tow days, airports, and hotel parking lots at two in the morning, and more endurance events as teammates than either of us has bothered to add up. The races are the part people see. The rest of it is the part that actually built the thing.
That is what people outside endurance racing tend to miss. A fifteen-hour race is not won on the fastest lap. It is won by the team that hands the car over clean, says the right thing on the radio at hour nine, and does not panic when something breaks at two in the morning. You cannot fake that with someone you met in the paddock on Friday. After ten years, Troy and I know how the other one thinks before he says it. It shows up in the results — but the results are not really why either of us keeps turning up.
Dennis
It was not only ever the two of us. Dennis Foster was a great friend to Troy and to me and a partner in the 180 car, and we lost him in a flying accident a few years ago.
Losing him changed how both of us look at a race weekend. You spend fifteen hours trusting someone with a car you built together, and years of drives and trips and ordinary days on either side of it, and at some point you work out that the racing was never really the point. The people were the point.
Troy owns SoCal Rustlers Motorsports and both cars — 180 in GP1, 181 in GTO. SRC sponsors the team, and I drive it. Follow him at @supertruck66.
Read about our last round at WRL Utah →
Watch a lap of Utah Motorsports Campus, corner by corner →
Why SRC is built the way it is
There is a reason I am telling you all of this on a radio company's website.
Between us, Troy and I have raced with SCORE and in stadium trucks, with SCCA, NASA, WERC, WRL, Lucky Dog, Trans-Am and Pirelli GT4 America, across more than thirty-five years — sprint races, drift, circle track, 25-hour enduros and thousand-mile nights. I spent three of those years running the WERC series as its director. In all that time the thing that has never changed is the radio in the car.
The radio in the 180 is an SRC radio. The helmet kits are SRC helmet kits. The headsets the crew are wearing on the pit box in these photos are the same ones that ship in our systems. We are not a company that sells racing radios. We are a race team that got good enough at communications to sell it.
That matters more than it sounds. A radio system that works fine on a bench behaves differently at hour nine of a fifteen-hour race — hot car, tired crew, a 20-watt mobile mounted three feet from a camera transmitter, and a crew chief trying to call a fuel number over a loud pit lane. We know where those systems fail because we have had them fail on us, at two in the morning, with the car still circulating. Then we fixed them. That fix is what you are buying.
So when you call SRC and ask whether you need 5 watts or 20, whether your helmet should be wired IMSA or NASCAR, what antenna will actually reach the far side of Thunderhill, or why your spotter cannot hear the car through a particular corner — you are not getting a script off a card. You are getting an answer from somebody who was out there last weekend finding out.
If you are putting a system together, the racing radio systems are the place to start, and the phone number is on every page. Tell us what you race and we will tell you what you actually need.
Every day is a blessing
That is what I would want anyone reading this to take away, more than any result on any timing sheet. We get to do this. We get to load up a car, drive somewhere beautiful, work on something hard alongside people we care about, and come home to tell everyone about it. Not everybody gets that, and nobody gets it forever.
So we try not to take the days for granted any more. Not the race weekends, not the trips, not the shop nights that run too late, not the ordinary phone calls in between. Ten years in, that is the part I am most grateful for — not the trophies sitting on the roof of the car, but the fact that we are still here, still going, and still friends.
If you have someone like that in your life, go racing with them. Or go skiing, or go fishing, or just go. Do not wait for a better year.