What got you hooked on Racing?

Thought i'd make this thread as i'm curious to hear how others came to love Racing. It is typically a very niche Sport so i'd love to know what race it was that got you hooked, or year or era etc. With the span of people on the Site i'm sure there'll be a few interesting one's out there!

I wasn't really into Racing all that much initially; i was a kid so i just loved watching all the highlights for the crashes! But i remember watching quite a few rounds of the V8 Supercar Championship in 2006 and 7 and was often enjoying it but there wasn't a huge amount of appeal to follow it as a Sport as it was just boring old cars driving around in circles a bunch of times. In 2008 that mindset changed though, i remember watching the 08 Australian Grand Prix, and despite being so confused why there were so many Race Starts in Formula One (Looking back i realise that they were instant Replays ) i loved all the carnage in F1, with that race in particular having a high retirement rate. I remember the Coulthard/Massa wreck at Turn One and Timo Glock spinning violently with suspension flying everywhere very clearly! I knew from there that i wanted to watch more F1, thankfully the next rounds were Malaysia and China, both on at suitable times for a 10 year old and i started to love it for the Racing, not just the Crashes.
In the middle of that year i begun persuing real-world karting as well, however it was initially more fun than anything else. However after following nearly the whole 2008 F1 Season, that Brazillian Grand Prix Championship Decider decided my Sport of Choice. I was a McLaren fanboy so i was jumping up and down nearly in tears that Felipe had won the championship.... or so i thought... i had seen nothing like it in live real-world sport. From then on i took things much more seriously and begun to buy books on the history of the sport, countless DVD's and well, became obsessed with the sport. I eventually learnt more about the Politics of the sport, the dynamics etc and just came to love it more and more, naturally expanding out to other categories as well. As much as i love my Sportscar racing, F1 was the corner stone for why i love Racing, and also why i'm heavily biased toward those gorgeous 2008 Fighter Jets on wheels.

That was how i got hooked on the greatest Sport on earth..... how about you?

Good question this one. For me the family had always been far more interested in cricket and AFL, and so did I. About age 7 or 8 I got given TOCA 3 for the original xbox and I think that's what really got me hooked on racing. I always watched racing on and off by myself, especially the V8's. Being able to watch the watch the races, and then being able to drive as my favorite driver from that race and try and replicate them was what really got me interested. I also remember playing a lot with the what i consider quite an advanced damage model at the time and a lot of my races was me starting from that back of the grid at Adeliade and seeing how many people i could take out in 1 corner, or doing hot laps at barbagallo and seeing what speed i could hit down the straight before going straight on at turn 7.

From there, my interest grew and grew and grew. I think the first F1 race i really sat down to watch properly was Melbourne 2007, and then the first season i really comited to watching was 2009.

Late in 2010 i was given a PS3 for my birthday and a copy of F1 2010 and again i spent hours in the career mode trying to beat my heros i saw race week in, week out.

From 2010 onwards i became really heavily invested in motorsport. I watched just about anything, and to this day i still watch a lot of those same catergories such as F1, V8's and MotoGP. In the last few years i became even more invested in motorsport and branched out to new catergories such as Indycar, World Superbikes, Formula E, and most importantly to me, grass roots local motorsport.

As a passionate motorsports fan, i chose to study motorsports at uni, and I'm currently in my 2nd year. Throughout the course of last year, I invested a lot of my free time into the local motorsports community and helped out a lot of the local Formula 1000 teams. Having given up a lot of my time for those teams, i wanted a sea change as such and decided to become an official. Best decision of my life. If you can't be in the thick of the action on track, next best place to be is right next to it and still be involved as an official. Theres no greater feeling, rush of adrenaline, or sense of wonder than having a full grid of cars bellow you as you sit with your finger on the button in the starters box ready to send them on their way.

Long story short, think I started to get interested when i was about 5 or 6, and then really got interested once i was about 8 or 8

somewhere in early 1985 the #27 Ferrari of Michele Alboreto entered my consciousness & never left. i think the scarlet red & the fact an italian driver were putting the team back on top was what really did it for me & by mid that year he was leading the championship. it was a great season for many reasons (not the second half for Ferrari, nil points in the last 5 races) Prosts' first title, Senna & Mansell's first victories, Lauda's retirement, Spa on the calender once more, everyone running out of fuel in Imola....

jump fwd 10 years & '95 was my first & Adelaide's first GP.... I was on the outside of the t1-t3 corners when i saw the cars for the first time. i was hanging off the front of the corporate box there, just a few metres away from the cars as they came past under full throttle. when the Ferrari of Alesi first came past me & the screaming v12 sent those shockwaves through my body...... shock & awe are the only words to describe it. i was transported back 10 years in an instant. i spent 3 days looking for the Ferrari to come by each lap & dont remember who won & wasnt interested in anything else except those amazing sounding cars from Maranello

great thread Beau

My dad loved watching Motorsport and his mates from Sydney Trevor Ashby and Steve Reed ran a group A commodore (Landsvale Smash Repairs) in the Australian touring car championship that we would follow.
We lived on the Gold Coast and when they would come up to race at Surfers Paradise raceway they would stay at a hotel nearby with the team and prep the car in our garage at home. I would stay up late watching them working on the car then take it to the track at dawn and hang out in the pits all day.

I think the first race that I can remember being really into was the 1986 Adelaide Grand Prix when Nigel Mansel had the massive tyre explosion down the back straight. I was watching it live and that was the first time I realized how dangerous the sport could be and how on edge these guys were. (See link below for those young fellas that don't know what I'm talking about)


Then GT came out on ps1 and I was hooked big time. I was working at a fast food joint with my mate who I shared a house with, we would work till 11pm and go home and race till 3-4am doing career mode, taking turns alternating races. He grew out of it but me, well...

As a kid in the 80's I grew up watching the touring cars with my dad. He was a Ford fan so we loved that #17 car of Dick Johnson, especially his Sierra. Loved watching the Sierra's, the Benson & Hedges BMW's (I think, if my memory is correct), and all the others race around. I remember one year we actually scaled a fence at the back of Sandown to get in and have a look, this was when I was quite young and looking back now I find it pretty funny that my dad and I did that. Every chance I got I'd rent the Havoc series of VHS tapes from the local video store, basically a montage of crashes from British touring cars and whatnot, always loved my motorsport crashes!

We always had some kind of gaming system in our house and I always loved racing games. Started with the Intellivision, and went on through the Sega Master System, Mega Drive, PlayStation, PS2, Xbox, 360, PS3, and now PS4. A few PC's as well. Every system I had had some kind of racing game but it wasn't until Gran Turismo and Need For Speed that I got seriously into racing games.

I had a couple of friends who were rev heads so by the time we were old enough to drive we were all modifying our cars. My first car wasn't much to write home about (120Y wagon) but for my second I found a blue 200b SX in great condition and proceeded to sink thousands of dollars into it. Ended up with a car with a race spec engine, extremely loud (could hear me coming a mile away), very quick (could drag off pretty much anything except V8's), and handled like a dream. Many weekends and late nights were spent under that car. I could take it apart and put it back together with something like 3 or 4 spanners. I think by the end of it I could have done it blindfolded. I never took it to the track but did a lot of silly things like street racing at night. That car hit a nasty patch of oil one day and I slid it sideways into a large embankment; total write off. I found a crappy 200b rolling shell and transferred all the good bits into it but it just wasn't the same. I drove the wheels off that car for another couple of years until the engine finally gave in. Since then I haven't modified any of my cars; other priorities took over.

Meanwhile my best mate was getting heavily into the rally scene. He'd always loved Geminis and ended up finding a ZZ/R that we converted into a full on rally car. Spent many weekends working on developing that car and serving as pit crew, many nights soaked through but lots of fun. He's since gone onto an MX-5 that he rallies and also takes to sprint rounds at Victorian circuits.

I'm sure once my kids have grown up and we have a little more money to spend I'll get back into modifying my cars but for the moment I'm sticking to online racing.

For me it started when I was about 2 or 3, where often when Mum was trying to get me to sleep on a Sunday night she discovered I really enjoyed watching the F1 cars go round and round on our old, giant CRT Teac telly. I would clap with excitement whenever Schumacher, Irvine or Barrichello would come on screen as I loved the striking red of the Ferraris. And on most occasions I would ask, how can they be racing in the day time if it's night time here?

We had an N64 at home, and back then Dad used to play it all the time, trying to beat games like Super Mario 64, GoldenEye 007 and Zelda OOT, until one day I came home from Pre School and heard the same noises I heard on a Sunday night. He had bought a copy of F-1 World Grand Prix and it was the most amazing thing in the world. I still remember vividly him trying to complete 58 Laps of Melbourne as Mika Häkkinen and finishing 4th that day. Soon I was hooked on the game too, and Hockenheim became my favourite track, probably because it had less corners for a 4 year old to mess up! I soon got better and better, before finally winning a race in Frentzen's Williams. It was just a silly 8 lap race but I was celebrating like I'd won the world championship!

I'm told now I loved listening to Murray Walker on the telly with his enthralling commentary. Channel 9 were pretty unreliable with broadcast times before ten took over the rights in 2003, so Dad got me watching V8 Supercars in the afternoons, and sure enough I loved that too. I already loved F1, but Lowndsey's 00 Motorsport Green Eyed Monster made me drool. Dad was horrified I was a Ford "fan" but I just loved that car. I soon came back to Holden though after Dad rented a copy of HSV Adventure Racing on N64 from the Blacktown Blockbuster with unlockabke HRT's. A very fun game which I played the hell out of as a kid and still play now. Mark Webber's 5th place in the Minardi is firmly etched in memory as one I'll never forget.

With ten taking over F1, it became my favourite channel. Soon we bought a VCR tape so I could record all of races and watch them after school. As a result I've rarely missed a race since. We had no internet or pay tv so shows like RPM were a religion to me. I wanted to know about all motorsports, so Dad's mate in Bundaberg would mail me week old copies of Motorsports News magazine every fortnight to gloss over. I still have some of them stashed away somewhere.

Despite my huge passion for it, I had to wait until my 11th birthday in 2007 just to hop in a hire kart! It was an unforgettable experience, I begged for them to let me race for real but it was way too unaffordable for my parents and we had no connections. I focused on golf instead. As I got older I played just about every racing game I could get my hands on, but none really satisfied like Gran Turismo 3/4 and F1 2006 on the PS2 did. I first played GT3 in 2004 when my cousin brought over his PS2 and upon booting it up I swore the opening cutscene was real! About a week later we bought a PS2 with GT3 and it changed my life.

Then in 2013 after many many messages from Stu, after accidently stumbling into the wrong lobby, I bit the bullet and joined ROOZ and the rest is history. Present day, I finally will be going to my first Grand Prix next month, something I begged my parents to take me to for over a decade but could never afford it. I cannot wait for it!

If I had to pinpoint the 1 moment that lead to me being into racing, it would have to be when I was born.

But more seriously, as far as sim racing is concerned. Early 90s, Microprose Formula 1 Grand Prix.
One of my school friends got it as soon as it came out (and added memory to his PC so it would actually run on the 386) we ended up completing multiple full length race seasons on that thing, we would quallify in the morning before school then after school run a 'take-it-in-turns' multiplayer race, full distance, AI on Ace. The AI would take control of your car when it wasn't your turn, and hopefully not crash it. The AI was pretty tough, you had to nail laps consistently to be competitive.

Hard to pinpoint exactly which got me into motorsport as from the age of a few months I was at Calder while my Dad did track days in his 65' Mustang, Although I can't say those were what intrigued me as I grew older around like 6-7 I remember watching V8 Supercar rounds which I really enjoyed which I have memories from around 2005-2008 mainly the Bahrain round in '08 which at the time I would have been 9, Being able to hear the V10's and the rather not pleasant V8's whilst at primary school and at home during the F1GP weekends which at the time I thought was amazing. Even very early on a Thursday morning during the turbo era I could hear the 2 seat car which I believe is an old 2.4 v8 (assuming) as I went to my final schooling years.

Around 2008 my Dad and older Brother took on a project building a sports sedan which as a 9yro meant nothing to me at all, as I once again got older I got a bit more intrigued with it asking heaps of questions of how this worked how that worked blah blah hassling my dad a million questions a day at age 12 being really interested. By the time the car got running for the first time in 2013 I still was learning heaps about cars but basically living with this car being built in the shed whilst watching engines being built in the backyard obviously got me asking a million more questions. But that still wasn't the icing on the cake which brings me here today wanting to race, Being the younger brother I watched him play every Grand Turismo available on PS2 because that's how the younger sibling unwritten rules work right. Anyhow whenever I was allowed to play I made the most of it, eventually I was lucky to get a PS3 very young which he got GT5 for me which I kinda had no interest in until early 2013. During this time I just played the game without a care or no meaning. This feels like its going back a while now but I was playing GT5 daily just before the GT6 release date without a clue it was coming out soon, which I overhead people talking about in a Monza lobby and their convo's mentioning steering wheels which well being me, I went and googled all sorts of wheels to get to play GT6 for fun to do burnouts ect nothing too serious. Asked Santa kindly enough for Grand Turismo 6, some form of steering wheel to joke around with, F1 2013 (adding to the collection that had been going since F1 2011).

Christmas day of 2013 14 years old I unwrapped a Logitech G29 which I over the moon with, not having any form of Simulator clamped it right to the dining table and got driving, having no real racing crafts or concepts I was still over the moon with how bad I sucked, But this seemed around the time racing was now my thing. My older brother gave me heaps of driving tips which set me up until I stopped lapping Bathurst at 2:11's in the z4 GT3 as months went on I was really addicted with the wooden cockpit f1 sim set up I had going my Dad made for me, I found ANZGT now known as pitlane in a random lobby which was something different I never learnt how to preserve tyres or make strategies since 90% was boost and no wear racing, I actually felt me driving ability went backwards in those few months driving like it was Grand Theft Auto, The league owner the infamous KENTY was bad mouthing Raceonoz in a practise lobby together which being me once again straight at google to whatever a "ROOZ" was. As he was rambling on I was making my Raceonoz account 2 years and 8 months ago.

The first few weeks within the site were amazing for me went from a supposed to be a D6 driver to a D3. Eventually to Div1 12 months later. I still feel every day I am learning more about Racing in here.

I can find myself over Motorsport at the same time also spending long weekends at Winton and Phillip Island whilst my brother races, mainly the hotel beds that I tend to be a foot taller than which is a 1/10 not very sleep worthy.

Anyhow all that ended up me doing studies in light motor vehicles at school along with experience of working on my brothers racecar, did I really have a choice to not like racing well I doubt it.


One forgotten note- Bathurst was generally a party BBQ at our house so from as long as I can remember that's what we were watching.

what hope did I ever actually have not to like it?

Forgot to also add I religiously watched F1 for Mark Webber, Only recently I stopped hating Vettel...

So much more to the story but maybe another time

Hard to know for sure, but when you had a new PC and could choose between Solitaire and this, well it's not hard to imagine how things started



I don't think I paid much attention to televised races until we upgraded to a Pentium 4 to play this


Technically I still have never attended a car race in person (only recently have I been to the PI Moto GP), but I'll tape all the V8SC races on free to air and also the Bathurst endurance races (just watched the 6 hour race on YouTube). I also enjoy BTCC but it's hard to find. I usually watch parts of Le Mans 24hrs as well.

Haha wow Test Drive 1, that brought back some memories. I used to play that all the time, I loved the lotus.