[00:00:00] Intro.
[00:00:06] Mark Boudreau: You're listening to the Motorsport Prospects Podcast.
Hey, it's Mark from Motorsport Prospects and welcome to the Motorsport Prospects Podcast. This is where we dive into the world of motorsport with the people who live and breathe it. From driver coaches and sponsorship experts, to team owners, pro drivers and more, you'll hear real stories, practical advice and insights you can actually use, whether you're just starting out or already chasing success on the track.
Now, everybody keeps asking me why I started Motorsport Prospects. I founded Motorsport Prospects in the Verified by Motorsport Prospects designation because I keep hearing the same questions time and again from drivers, aspiring drivers, their families, their advisors, and that's always, who can I trust.
Many people are struggling to find reliable guidance, so I created Motorsport Prospects to help them make informed decisions. The professionals I feature on this podcast represent that trust.
So if you work with drivers or racing teams, building trust is one of the most important things you can do.
Obviously this, if it wasn't, I wouldn't be getting all these questions. So over the years I found that being clear about what you offer, following through in your promises, and genuinely caring about your clients goals makes all the difference.
I put together some practical advice in a free white paper called the Three Essentials for Motorsport Business Owners, which shares simple ways to strengthen relationships, attract the right clients and grow your motorsport business. Naturally, you can find it in the show notes
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So that said, let's get started.
My guest today is Tyler Cooke. Tyler is a professional GT3 driver competing at the highest levels of endurance and sprint racing. With starts in GT World Challenge Europe and imsa.
Welcome to the Motorsport Prospects Podcast. Tyler, thanks so much for taking the time out to speak to me from.
From a wedding in Mexico.
[00:02:17] Tyler Cooke: Yeah, yeah, I had to go find signal because I found out there's no signal down here.
So I had, I had to get some wi fi. But yeah, happy to be on this and you know, thanks for having me, Mark. Yeah, this is really cool.
[00:02:30] Mark Boudreau: Hey, great. You know, I really appreciate you taking the time. Now I asked the one question and we've talked before. So you're a professional driver.
Based on your experience and expertise as a professional driver, what would be the one most important piece of advice you could offer a current or aspiring race driver or. Or an independent driver?
[00:02:54] Tyler Cooke: The best advice that I could ever give is it's a really hard road, it is not the easiest road and don't think it's Going to be an easy road.
You know, I've had, I've had kids, you know, 16, 17 years old. They go, why? I'm winning a bunch of races. You know, companies are going to want to be a part of me because I'm doing that.
And I always say, winning is not the only thing. You know, back when I did spec Miata, you know, I, I, my winning percentage was super high. And then I got into pro racing, it was getting a lot of polls, podiums, wins, and you have to be a really good business person on the side of being a good driver.
And so one thing is a lot of people get wrapped up with, oh, I just have to get asked to race. Well, there's a lot of drivers sitting on the couch that are not getting asked to race, and they're still waiting for that call. Be more in control of your destiny and go find that funding, Go find that sponsorship. It is out there. And, you know, maybe if you need $300,000 to go race and one company is saying, no, they're saying, we can't do that, maybe get five different companies to give you 20 or $30,000, you know, it's a lot more accessible that way. I did a little piece on LinkedIn that was, you know, the difference between Formula One and sports car racing. And so, you know, F1 cars, we all know they're very expensive. They're hundreds of billions of dollars. And I want to show companies that you get close to the same exposure in a GT3 car, you know, or an LMP2 or something like that, but try to be different and try to be out of your comfort zone. You know, the worst thing you do is get comfortable. I see a lot of people just get comfortable and they start riding that coattail for the longest time. And I've always been an advocate of getting uncomfortable and trying new things and figuring it out. I built a hell of a network through LinkedIn. And it really helped me, you know, what's the, what's the word for saying that? It really helped me make connections, you know, I made. I've gotten to, you know, a lot of the tops of companies. I've gotten to meet guys like you, guys like Elliot. You know, I've gotten to meet a lot of cool people. And the thing is, we have to learn is all the connections matter. All the connections do come through at some point.
And so never just get complacent, get comfortable. It's super easy to do. You know, when I was at the top, when I was winning a bunch on polls and everything, it was super easy for me to kind of just sit back and go, like, you know what? I'm doing a great job. You know, I, I don't need to do anything. And I think that complacency hurt a little bit because, you know, now it's like I'm digging myself back out, you know, I was a Lamborghini GT3 junior driver for about three years, so I really got to learn the inner workings of what a factory looks for. And that was a really cool experience. I'm really thankful Lamborghini gave me the opportunity to do it.
And it, it taught me that side of things. And then the last two years I've been exploring the business side of things. How are companies again, roi? How are companies gonna, you know, invest? You know, we're not, we're not talking play money anymore. Like a GT3 car, you're an IMSA, you're starting to get towards 6, $7 million, you know, so it is a big price tag. So you need to show them why that 6 or 7 million is worth it. And I went to the 24 Hours Daytona in January, and I actually wanted to go to that race and to be a fan, you know, my first time really going to that and being a fan, I really wanted to do it. And I just noticed the, the lack of activations that were there at that race. So the Monday right after, I just started hitting up a bunch of different companies. I was like, hey, there's a space that nobody's in right now. You know, it's a very limited space and there's tons of fans sitting there, there's tons of fans standing there, you know, and they're there for the whole 24 hour race. But if you really take in the whole weekend, they're there for close to 72 hours, you know, or even longer. So why aren't we activating and why aren't we trying to build an ROI with that? And a lot of companies took that as, man, that's really cool. Like, that's really cool that you studied that.
And so it's just, it's really, you know, I, I like telling a lot of people. It's, it's a low percentage driving, a high percentage race or business.
The better your business, the further you're gonna go.
[00:06:58] Mark Boudreau: Yeah, yeah.
[00:07:01] Tyler Cooke: So good.
[00:07:01] Mark Boudreau: No, I, I, I, you know, people have said it's 80 business, 20 driving.
[00:07:06] Tyler Cooke: Yep. Yeah, I mean, you know, make sure you're always physically fit. You know, I go to training every single day.
Obviously being at A wedding I can only run on the beach, which is not the worst thing in the world, but, you know, that. That does take a toll. But when I did the junior program with Lambo, they. They did a fitment fitness evaluation, and that was one of the hardest things I've ever done in my life. You know, they. They push your body to the breaking point of collapsing, almost. Wow. And then we had to go see a psychiatrist. They wanted to study, like, we're not really study, learn our thought process, learn how we process things. And I thought that was super cool. You know, we had to sit down in a room with two psychiatrists and they just asked us questions for an hour.
And I, like, I thought it was one of the coolest things ever because, you know, we.
We always focus on our physical side, but we also need to focus on, you know, big brain that's in our head or, you know, or big muscle that's in our head or brain, you know, so, like, I really love that that's starting to come more and more towards the surface, you know, Guys, coming up, you know, if you're running spec Miata MX5, you know, cars like that, you got, you know, one button on the steering wheel. If you get in tcr, you got more. Then when you get into, like, the GT3s, you know, all those cars, you have so many buttons in that car that's draining you every single lap because you're trying to understand what each thing does make that car faster. So then you realize, like, man, I need my mental capacity even higher, you know, and it's. It's a. It's a really cool thing to learn.
[00:08:34] Mark Boudreau: Yeah. Yeah. No, you're right. And, you know, you hear a lot of that where people say, you know, you need to add, Exercise your brain just as much as you need to exercise your muscles. And that's something that a lot of people don't really think about.
So you mentioned that you're looking in. You've been looking into the business side of motorsport.
What kind of things that. What kind of things are you working on? And I know you mentioned LinkedIn, and obviously I'm a huge fan as well. That's how we connected.
You post some great stuff on LinkedIn, so just wanted to, you know, if people wanted to follow you or connect with you, where would they do that?
[00:09:14] Tyler Cooke: Yeah, I mean, my. My Instagram, you know, is not the most exciting thing in the world because I put a lot of my effort in on LinkedIn.
And you know what I. What I always try to tell Drivers is, it's, it's less about you, more about them.
Don't tell a company, hey, I can put you on this part of the car for this amount of money.
They don't, they, they just really don't care about that. You know, they want to see what am I going to get out of this and what are you going to help with my business. And so more or less, like, I'll reach out to these companies and go like, hey, have you thought about doing this, this, this, this and this with a partnership? Yes, we can put your logo on the car, we can do this. But I want to get you into the fans. Like, I pretty much want to get your product into the hand of fans, generate an roi, generate more income for you guys and show you guys, you know, what, what can be done, you know, in the realm of motorsports, especially sports car racing. Like I said before, sports car racing is still very untouched when it comes to companies, and companies are just very unaware about it. You know, I had a meeting with a protein company that Rick Ross is a part of, and we had this whole meeting and they really had no idea about anything with sports car racing. They were just kind of, you know, what is sports car racing? And I had to really dive down into this. And then I showed them. You know, you see the Mercedes and Porsche battling, you know, and GT3, and they're like, holy crap. These look like the street cars, but they're like the cool race cars. And like, this is so much more like relatable.
[00:10:47] Mark Boudreau: Yeah.
[00:10:47] Tyler Cooke: And I've started to show companies more of that and they're like, this is like the coolest form of racing we've ever seen. But nobody knows about it because it's not your nascar. It's not your Formula one. It's not, you know, your, your big Indy car. You know, Indy cars on the rise.
It's always been up there, but I think Indy car is getting bigger and I love it because Indy car racing is awesome. Like, such great racing now. But, yeah, you know, sports car racing is still very, relatively not known about, and it's just now starting to educate people. You know, if you're going down the formula car route, you know, you can obviously present IndyCar F1. You know, those are your big ones. Even formally, a lot of people already know about those. If you're going down the circle track route, your ultimate goal is probably going to be nascar, you know, so companies know about that. But like the sports car side, sports car drivers coming up, you know, it's really Just teaching people what sports car racing is and how many people are watching and how many people around the world are watching it. You know, Honestly, go to IMSA.com go all the way down to the bottom, go to competitors, and you can find all of IMSA's marketing materials. They present the numbers every single year about what, what each year did, what each race did demographically. Like, you actually can get the data there to actually present, you know, and I think if more people keep doing that, the sports car industry will start to get more notice, you know, obviously from companies, you know, and I'm looking forward to that because, like, it's. It is super cool. I see a great space here at a relatively lower. You know, I'd say buy in. I always say buy in, but I'd say a relatively low buy in compared to most series with a very good outreach. You know, I love that post I made with the Lambo and F1 car.
A lot of people took that well as holy crap. Like, this is really insightful, you know, it. And I just wanted to break that down on, you know, do I know that F1 car numbers are completely factual? Like, I know they're not completely factual. You know, we will never know what each company is paying, but it was just, we know F1 is a very expensive car, like, sport to be in, and sports car racing is probably, I'd say, you know, a six of that, something like that, with a very close outreach. That's what I was just trying to show people. And when also comes to drivers, like, I had some backlash on that post, you know, and don't be afraid to get maybe negative comments because, you know, I, I've heard from some good people, like, if you get negative comments, that means that it was engaging, you know, positive and negative, like, and it was like, welcome the negative comments.
And I, I think that is, yeah, I'm pumped. I got some negative comments. I was like, I got like another one yesterday and I just started smiling and I was like, all right, we got another negative comment. Let's keep going. But, you know, you, you want to have a little bit of conflict because that's what keep, like F1 had conflict, you know, 15 years ago, 10 years ago, before it really started to blow up and look what's done now. It's a great, thriving series.
[00:13:44] Mark Boudreau: Yeah, and the thing too about LinkedIn is, you know, even negative comments for the most part tend to be on point. Like, they're talking about the content of what you posted as opposed to going off on some kind of a rant like, you know, other social media, you know, people tend to be more business oriented and focused more on actually talking about the topic as opposed to, you know, spewing out their opinion about whatever it is. So I've always said the people that you engage with on LinkedIn are there for, you know, the right reason. They're there to talk about business, the business of motorsport. And you know, I agree. And yeah, you're not, you're not the first that has said LinkedIn is a really important platform to focus on, to network with as far as sports car racing.
Look, I love it.
I think it's the most from a fan perspective, it's the most fan friendly form of racing.
You know, it's inclusive. You can go into the, you know, you can literally go in and meet the drivers and you know, there's not that, that artificial barrier between the fan and the teams and it's, it's, you know, it's, in that respect, it is great.
I think the opportunities presented to drivers, there are, you know, more opportunities in sports car racing than arguably than in single seater. I always say never give up on your dream, whatever that might be, if that's F1 or IndyCar. But it's important to keep yourself open to any opportunities and often they come from the sports car end of things. So, you know, that's when you didn't
[00:15:30] Tyler Cooke: even look this weekend at Paul Ricard, like Lance strolls racing the Aston Martin. You know, Max Verstappen has his GT3 team there and you know, he even said he's like, I would love to go run GT World Challenge Europe. You know, he's going to run the 24 hours Nurburgring. So the interest is building the more guys that actually keep getting, you know, into the sport more. I do agree with you. You know, you look at sports car racing, you know, you have inside, you got escrow America over here. You know, two really big series. Esther America is doing a great job. You know, year after year they're getting better. You know, they're, they're really, you know, they're, they're kind of being becoming that second series you look, they had I think 19 or 20 GT3 cars at Sonoma and I'm like, that's really cool. When I talked to a team owner and he was like, the grid was packed. He's like, just full of people. He's like, I've never seen it like this. And I was like, that's really cool. And then you go to Europe, you got GT World Challenge Europe, you got GT Masters, you got dtm, you got, you know, Elms, you got GT World Challenge Asia. I mean, like you said, there's so many opportunities running sports car. And if you don't want to get into GT3, you got GT4 Europe, you got mission pilot, you got the GT4 series, natural America, which is amazing, A great, great series. I've heard the competition there is some of the hardest in the world.
[00:16:44] Mark Boudreau: Yeah.
[00:16:44] Tyler Cooke: And then, you know, if you want to get on the prototype side, it's essentially a formula car with fenders, you know, so there's a really cool avenue down there that if, you know, F1 is not going to be, you know, where you can get to start looking down LMP3, LMP2 hypercar, you know, because if you look that hypercar fields pretty much all either XF1 drivers or current F1 drivers. Yeah. You know, so it's a really, really hard field and sometimes people kind of get locked into, I want to go to F1 or I want to go to NASCAR. And, and you know, if that avenue is maybe not working completely correctly, like I, like I said, maybe think about like, okay, what's similar to that and what also get the same exposure, you know, And I, I think, I think there's like you said, definitely very, very many avenues to do in sports car racing that people get access and, you know, bring more companies in and, and things. And, you know, there's some guys that make a complete living just racing 24 hours, never drink. You know, they run the, they run NLS, they run Nurburgring, and that is their living. They love it. You know, there's some guys that, you know, bounce between five different championships or some guys that only run m sub, like there's so many different things. But also, don't be scared to go find the money for yourself because you think I'm gonna be, you know, a rich kid or a gentleman driver or something. Money has to come from somewhere to make the car go green, you know, and that's something, you know, I, I can't stress enough because unfortunately, gas costs money, tires cost money, oil costs money. Every little bit and piece of that car costs money. So if you can be in control of that destiny and you can be control of, like, I got this company that wants to fund the whole program.
You're not a rich kid. You're not a gentleman driver. You are somebody that put in the work to make that happen. And you get so much respect that way.
[00:18:34] Mark Boudreau: Yeah, no, absolutely.
And I will post a link to Tyler's LinkedIn profile in the show Notes. I'm also going to post some links to some of these series that we've been talking about in case people aren't aware of them before I let you go.
Final question.
What is your favorite racetrack? Could be current or historical.
[00:18:57] Tyler Cooke: Oh, man. I'm probably going to get some backlash on this, but, you know, ran a. A lot of the big ones. Oh, God. It's two of them. It's really two of them.
[00:19:06] Mark Boudreau: That's okay.
[00:19:08] Tyler Cooke: I'm gonna say my number one would be Porto Mile in Portugal.
[00:19:13] Mark Boudreau: Okay.
[00:19:14] Tyler Cooke: Absolutely love that place. I got the test, so I got the first ever BMW GT4 win in MT competition in 2018.
And then right after that, I had to fly to Portugal to test with the Phoenix Audi team. And I was actually text testing as Kelvin.
And I remember driving that track. I'm going through the last corner and it's pretty much flat and like a qualifying sim, or not qualifying sim, but a qualifying Mach run.
And I remember my lips, like started touching my ears from the sheer G load. And I was like, this is so cool.
I came in after three or four laps just smiling. And they're like, you have fun with the car? I was like, no, I had fun with the track. Car is great, but I had a lot of fun with this track. And I actually got to go back there in, what, 20, 22, and I got to win in the class at that race. But my second one would be actually Paul Ricard.
People really don't like to.
People have like a hate on for Paul Ricard because I think it's a boring track.
If you drive it, it's so cool.
You go through turn one, it's blind. Turn two is blind. Like, it's mostly all blind. It's a very technical track to drive, to be fast at. You can make lobster no problem, but to be faster and fine, like, you know, you have to put the. The car here over the curb. You have to maybe run like the sausage curbs over here and stuff like that is. Is very, very hard to learn at that track.
And, you know, you get to the end of the back straightaway and in qualifying, you know, mock runs, like, it's just a tap of the break. I think it's like 242km an hour. You're just turning in at the end of that straightaway and it's so cool. So, like, that would. If. If you can drive that track in real life, it'll probably change your perspective because I thought I Thought. I thought it very. I thought the similar thing before I ever drove it. I was like, it's just a bunch of lines. It's one big piece of pavement. And then I drove it and I was like, wow, this track is so cool. And I just. I absolutely loved it. And then I also learned about what those lines do. Those lines are designed to slow down the cars, you know, so the blue, what I got told is the blue has sand in it, the red has glass.
So it's designed so when you spin, when you hit the blue, it slows it down dramatically. Then the glass really tries to shear the tire and bring it. Bring the car to a stop. So I actually. I actually love learning technology of that track. I was like, this. This place is really cool.
[00:21:31] Mark Boudreau: Yeah. And when you look at it from an aerial view, it's very psychedelic with all those. Those. Those colors.
Yeah. And it's a historical.
[00:21:38] Tyler Cooke: See them. You can't even see them in the car, really. You can. Yeah. You can't really see, like, lines too well, you see maybe like one, but you don't see, like, that sea of line. So, like, I just remember my first laps there. I was like, wow, this track's hard. Like, this track's actually, you know, you come off the back straightaway and you have this long carousel that if you apex too early, you missed. You missed them being part of it. So you have to, like, learn to have patience. But then you also have to learn that, you know, you have a GT3 car right behind you that you're battling. And, you know, in that carousel, he could dive it down to the inside and dory off the tracks. You have to learn how to, you know, how to manage, you know, driving fast and also protecting. And I was like, this is. This is a really cool experience.
Super thankful to racer.
[00:22:22] Mark Boudreau: Very cool. Well, Tyler, I really appreciate you taking the time out to. Especially the fact that you're at a wedding in Mexico, finding a small spot to chat. Really appreciate you taking the time.
It's been. It's been great. And, you know, that's interesting. I. I believe you are the first person who I've asked that question who's mentioned Paul Ricard. So I will actually link to that as well.
That's it for this week. This is Mark from Motorsport Prospects reminding you to stay fast, stay focused, and keep chasing that checkered flag.
Thanks for listening to the Motorsport Prospects podcast. For insights, advice and the latest news racers can use, visit motorsportprospects.com.
