Grassroots to me means being part of the process.
Not how much you spend, but what you do with it. Spend 100k on a viper gts and do track days and then make it better with your thoughts and actions in your shop? Cool!
Spend 2.5k on a vw and do the same? Cool!
Both grass roots.
Buy a 1.5m supercar and do 1 track day a year and complain there is something wrong because you can't keep up with an NB miata... not grassroots....
....Unless you take your angle grinder and welder and make it faster!
It can be tough to buy a dedicated race car these days, 4th Gen Civics and 1st gen Miatas are well over 30 years old now, and newer cars either hold their value or are too complex to work on and modify. But there are so many great options for racing your daily driver today. I'll toot my own horn, but the Elantra N can do family car duty all week, and then autocross or hit the track on the weekends. All without any mods, and for only $35K. The Civic Si does all that slightly slower, but for even less money. The GR86 trades some interior room for even more capability. The Miata is a real-ass sports car that you can drive to the track. If you can't afford a dedicated race car, you can still go racing.
And there are so many great options for racing too, autocrossing is under $50, TNiA is under $200, SCCA and Grid Life offer Time Attack and TIme Trial options that are not horribly expensive, and of course Lemons is a thing. Racing will never be cheap, but there are still options for the fiscally challenged IMHO.
Grassroots is only buying half of one wheel bearing at a time, reusing the old bearing race because it's $5 and you can use that money to buy a pizza and 2 liter of grape Big K at Kroger. Maybe that's actually just poverty, but that was 'grassroots' when I was in college and had one car and no money. Later it meant using secondhand Goodyear GSCS or Yoko A008 tires on my dedicated 'race car'. Now it means the parts I install are new or newer and usually evaluated by performance over cost rather than the other way round. Budgets grew or shrank and plans were sometimes changed, but through it all there was an investment of time, thought, and labor while working toward personal hopes and dreams. I think there has to be an element of "lying on your back on dirty concrete under a car at 2am, gasoline running down to your armpit, rust and dirt falling in your eyes, hoping to pass tech in the morning, and using your fingers to comb out the grease and dried antifreeze from your hair while working a corner the next day" in there somewhere. If you haven't used a galvanized shelf bracket to weld a VW Golf seat to its rusted out floor, what are you even doing?
Kreb (Forum Supporter) said:Grassroots is relative. If you bring a $100,000/yr effort to category where the top runners are spending five or ten times that, you're grassroots. But also, some GRM guys have been around long enough that they've climbed the economic ladder, yet still have a grassroots mentality and friend base that comes with it.
That's me. When I started autocrossing in the late 70's, I could barely afford entry fees much less new tires. We lived paycheck-to-paycheck as we grew our family, both of us working.
Was fortunate to grow up in the sport during the lucrative "golden years", where free tires were available to front-runners and contingencies could pay for travel expenses. Helped that my wife was very good, so we had 2x the earning power.
Decades later in life, professional success allowed for higher end vehicle choice, the ultimate expression being my 720. But I'm still grassroots at heart...and still love my Honda/Mazda sh*tboxes...and love nothing more than to run one at the front among a slew of factory hot rods.
I also still do almost all my own work, including building engines. Farming stuff out usually involves me learning new skills to fix others' mistakes.
In reply to Andy Hollis :
This.
IMHO it's less about the money than the attitude and outlook. We work on our own cars, learn new mechanical and fabrication skills when we need to, and buy tools instead of spending the money to have someone else work on our cars. We try to learn to be better drivers, as opposed to just throwing money at a car to make it faster. We start out racing any way we can, and as we go through life, some of us are fortunate enough to have more resources to dedicate.
When you see the guy with the big motorhome and nice car at the track, just remember there's a good chance that he started out working in a dirt driveway, and scraping spare change together to go racing.
I stopped by Andy's place for an F1 party a decade or so ago. This was before his McLaren era, but it was quite amusing that there was a fairly new Porsche sitting out in the driveway while the garage was full of torn-apart 90's Honda :)
Subjective I know, but "Built not bought" covers my interpretation of the "Grassroots lifestyle".
By definition it's "starts at the bottom of..."
Bottoms are different for many people.
My parents bought me a 1982 single wiper VW Scirroco back in the day and I drove/raced the crap out of it.
I had to pinch pennies to buy a 9yo Porsche in 2016 but, damn, it was my dream car at the time (and still probably is, though there are many). Now it is 17 years old and while I was at a friends house who is building a couple ratty drift cars I was able to toss him the keys and give him his first drive and his 9yo kids first ride in a Porsche. I paid $32k for that car and have driven it all over the place. Sure "bought not built" but it's been a heck of a ride. Drag raced, autoX-ed, track raced, mad #s driving across country during COVID when no one was getting pulled over and no one was on the road, in 8 years that car has lived a life with me.
My "built not bought" 53yo car will make that $32k look like a joke in comparison. I plan on grassrootsing my ass well over that sum for this build.
IMO-it's building from the bottom of you budget not comparing them, pushing your learning/abilities, helping others out and kicking their tires, needing help and having the network to not be scared to ask for it, ultimately it's about going out and doing it finding kind people and enjoying life.
If I am fixing it, and I am the one pushing it back on the trailer at the end of the day then it is grassroots. Dollar value is subjective to the racers income so don't put a number on it.
Grassroots Motorsports is racing in formats that are welcoming to the average Joe. No real sponsorships. Probably zero prize money. Most guys doing their own wrenching.
Grassroots cars are generally affordable, though not necessarily older.
It will mean different things to different people. I was a grassroots road racer, competing in a spec class in old BMWs with limited (at least then) suspension mods and no changes allowed to the engine. I really couldn't road race any cheaper, and it still drained my bank account as a middle-class-income guy. I'm sure some autocrossers would not consider $1200 weekends 'grassroots'.
Since I was a reader when GRM used staples for binding and they had a different title - I'm gonna throw my 2 cents in.
To me, grassroots means attainable and driven by the average, everyday individual.
To some - it's a car on its last legs being driven past it's envelope by a father of two kids wondering if he'll be able to continue hillclimbing if something breaks. (Personal experience).
To others it's a trust funded Corvette driver striving for her first Nationals win or if she should just try off-shore boat racing instead.
I think it's people using what they can to fulfill dreams without relying on corporate sponsorship.
Knowing we cannot lean on our own understanding- here is my Googled definition:
grassroots/grăs′roo͞ts″, -roo͝ts″/
noun plural
"a campaign that started at the grassroots."
In reply to kb58 :
I had (and still have) that same preconceived notion. Having been on the forum for about 20 years (and a subscriber even longer), this topic comes up regularly.
The editorial position largely seems to be "grassroots is what we say it is", but it seems to have migrated from being "do it yourself for cheap" to "do it yourself" to "make sure it gets done". That's a somewhat unfair generalization, but not entirely wrong.
Heavy focus does seem to have remained on actual motorsports participation, which is a redeeming factor.
I've been told the demographics for the magazine and for the forum are quite different.
I think grassroots stops when you start paying people to be staff at events. Paying people to wrench doesn't feel super grassroots either, but not everyone has those skills. Rolling up in a huge trailer with a paid crew seems really different even if its self funded.
Keith Tanner said:I've been told the demographics for the magazine and for the forum are quite different.
This!!!
I read somewhere that Grassroots means "at the local level". It is not a monetary definition or defined by some sort of monetary threshold. Monetarily "grassroots" is all-inclusive. You can have a grassroots organization that includes the poor and billionaires. It will still be a grassroots organization.
In my world, this is what "Grassroots Motorsports" is about. It is all-inclusive no matter what your financial situation is or the type of motorsports event it happens to be. You are welcome at GRM.
In reply to Keith Tanner :
Cool! I get to pick which demographic I want to be on on any given day. One of the perks of a subscription they don't advertise. ;-)
dean1484 said:In my world, this is what "Grassroots Motorsports" is about. It is all-inclusive no matter what your financial situation is or the type of motorsports event it happens to be. You are welcome at GRM.
Back in the 90s when I started reading GRM, there were basically three types of car magazines. You had the general ones (C&D, R&T, Motor Trend) which mostly focused on the new models coming out and doing comparisons of them, the ones that covered professional racing, and the ones that were aimed at people who wanted to go out and do stuff themselves, rather than just read about other people doing it. GRM was in the third category, along with Sport Compact Car and one or two others.
I always thought of Grassroots as being self-motivated and DIY, regardless of the cost. Of course, doing it yourself is often cheaper, but it's the spirit of figuring it out on your own.
Anyone can drop $3000 on new Hotchkiss suspension kit after a super-computer has already calculated the geometry for one type of racing, or you can pick up a book and learn how to engineer your own suspension for your own driving habits and then weld up your own. The former is not as fun for me, but I also have to consider the cost of buying a TIG welder, a mandrel bender, and all the jig fixtures. I would personally rather spend my $5000 on doing it myself and buying the equipment than to spend $3000 buying a pre-fabbed piece. I get to have the satisfaction of the process, the deep education of how to do it properly, and the satisfaction that I could turn it into a money-making thing when I'm done learning.
If the world goes to h@ll tomorrow, I now have a lot of skills that will be useful - skills that many suburbanites just don't need in today's world... until the zombie apocalypse. Then I will be the cool guy who does stuff.
In reply to Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) :
I want to be the guy that everybody needs to fix their E36 M3 during the apocalypse. I'll have electricity as long as there is wind, running water, or somebody willing to pedal.
In reply to wvumtnbkr :
Yes! I'll be the guy who can fix anything and knows which mushrooms you can eat (after a long process of trial and error in which many people will die or hallucinate about Ariana Grande)
Curtis73 (Forum Supporter) said:In reply to wvumtnbkr :
Yes! I'll be the guy who can fix anything and knows which mushrooms you can eat (after a long process of trial and error in which many people will die or hallucinate about Ariana Grande)
Don't you find it ironic that Ariana Grande is very petite?
This is what I think about whilst at labor.
In reply to seeker589 :
Yes, but Ariana Diminuta doesn't quite roll off the tongue.
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