Kent Sports News spoke to Ryan Michalak who recently stepped up his sim racing team, G-Force Racing, from online competitions to karting.

Back in 1999 Ryan started his G-Force team with a school mate while competing in his first online competitions.

Running in a little know series called the Grand Prix Champions League Ryan’s G-Force team achieved four Team’s Championships, one Driver’s Championship and two Driver’s Vice Champion’s titles out of the four seasons it competed.

“Of course, I also tried karting myself, in those days but I found that indoor karting just didn’t excite me back in those days” recalls Ryan.

“I was very skinny and a 10 minute heat at a kart centre would leave me bruised and aching for a week. I couldn’t imagine that this was the sort of thing that attracted Senna, Schumacher and Alonso into the sport” he laughs.

Ryan continued intermittently in sim racing until things took a turn for the different in 2016.

“I was working on a Large project out in the Netherlands at the time and a colleague (and now good friend) of mine organised some weekly evening activities for us and one of them was karting on multiple occasions. Those racing evenings really rekindled my interest in karting” says Ryan.

Upon returning to the UK Ryan looked for an opportunity to go karting close to home and discovered Buckmore Park Kart Circuit, where famously Lewis Hamilton got discovered by McLaren’s Ron Dennis in 1996.

An initial practice session lead to another, and by the start of 2017 he was signed up to Buckmore Park’s Challenge Cup championship, in which he competed in 2017 and 2018.

Invitations to the Buckmore Park Driver of the Year event followed in both years, and he also competed in some races with Club73 in 2018 as well as doing initial tests with Club100. A class victory in the final 6 Hour Endurance Race at Buckmore Park in 2018 sealed off the season.

However, 2019 proved a difficult season for Ryan. “We were going through with the purchase of our first home, and a change of jobs also meant I had to realign my personal finances and change my daily routines. Both of these events meant racing had to take a back seat for a while”.

Ryan got invited by a team to take part in the 24 hours race at Buckmore Park in 2019, which was “an opportunity I could not possibly miss”, and he participated in a small number of endurances races through 2019.

“We came back in December to score another strong class win at the final 6 Hours race at Buckmore in 2019” says Ryan, with a smile on his face. “Doing this twice in a row feels great”.

2020, however, got off to a very turbulent start for the enthusiastic driver.
Arriving in New Zealand for a family holiday in February 2020 Ryan found out the team he was going tom race with in 2020 had to pull out of the season.

“Here I was, sat in a hotel bar in Auckland, New Zealand, dealing with the situation that overnight my racing seat kind of disappeared”.

Ryan was able to secure the vacated team slot for the championship but found himself with no team mates.

“It was all a bit hectic” he recalls. “I was way in New Zealand and would miss the first race of the season and somehow had to put up two or more drivers to make the grid. My initial thought was to find anybody willing for the February race, and with the second round of the championship not till late April I would have enough time to re-organised affairs for that”.

Ryan contacted his friend Charlie Monk to see if he could field the first race of the season.

“Charlie and I were wanting to race together for a while but our own personal trajectories took is in very different directions karting wise. So when I asked Charlie if he’d be willing to do this one race for me, he agreed to do the whole season with me. So all of the sudden I had a team again. We called it G-Force Racing”.

At the same time Ryan was talking to another friend of his, Jack David Sewell, owner of Kent Commercial & Residential Cleaning, about getting a pool of drivers established under some kind of motorsport brand.

“And so I made the suggestion to use the G-Force team idea to bring it all together. Club100, endurance karting, sim racing if we can build it up, all together under a common banner” says Ryan.

Ryan followed the first Club100 race of his team on the live timing on a laptop from a hotel bar in New Zealand.

“It felt ridiculous to be honest” says Ryan, rolling his eyes. “Here we are, my original sim racing team having its debut at Buckmore Park and I am at the other end of the world trying my best to keep up via live timing and WhatsApp”.

And then came COVID-19………..”Yes…..” say Ryan, sinking his head into his palms. “This virus is ruining what was meant to be a great racing season” he says but goes on to clarify “I think we need to view in proportion.

Certainly, it’s no good to us in motorsport, or sport in general, but this is a situation that is far bigger than sports. The challenges we face as a team are nothing compared to the economic and personal hardship some of those individuals affected all over the world face.  As much as I’d like to make an issue of not being able to go about racing at present, it really is an irrelevant issue to what is going on in the world.”

So, I put it to Ryan, what about any kind of planning for a remainder of a 2020 racing season?

“At present we don’t really have any confirmed races dates. The situation is changing and moving by the day and as such any diary entry is subject to change. I’d like to think we will be able to race in the second half of the year, but it’s not without our control to make that call. If it were to happen, we will face challenges in their own rights.

“We are all amateurs with professional jobs as our main source of income, so re-arranging annual leave, hotel bookings and family holidays around whatever plans might emerge for the remainder of 2020 might prove a challenge for many of us. But until we know what is happening in terms of lock downs and restrictions for the future, any kind of planning we can do is purely academic.”

Images courtesy of JDS Photography