Forget The Politics.

The Freedom 250 has come and gone. On August 22–23, the NTT INDYCAR Series ran the first race in its history through the streets of Washington, DC — down Pennsylvania and Independence Avenues, past the National Archives, the Washington Monument sitting in every wide shot, a reported 150,000 people on hand. Kyle Kirkwood won it.

The build-up on social media was divided, loudly. And to the luddite, the lens of politics completely distracted from the opportunity underneath it — the greatness of the thing itself. Race cars, at speed, threading the capital of the country that invented the modern spectator sport industry.

It took me back. In 1992, my world changed when I watched Nigel Mansell — a regular dude from Britain — win the Formula 1 World Championship. No internet yet; the story arrived through motorsports news, and every report told it the same way: nearly two decades of injuries, debt, and near-misses, then one flawless year when the car finally matched the driver. In a Williams, Nigel Mansell became my hero. He proved that belief and no-quit can manifest miracles.

Hold onto that sentence — the year the car finally matched the driver — because it's about to describe something much bigger than one man's season.

Fast-forward. Liberty Media completed its purchase of Formula 1 in 2017 and turned it into a grand spectacle — Cirque du Soleil at 200 mph. Celebrities wave the flag now. It is magnificent television, and it has lost the essence of the everyday-man sport that made a kid in 1992 believe. (Get in there, Lewis.) We've written about what that costs — and about where the racing stayed real.

But look at what's been building underneath the show, for a decade:

• Endurance racing growing globally, season after season — the disciplines where the machinery and the driver still carry the story.
• Karting growing by leaps and bounds — the widest on-ramp the sport has ever had.
• The industries around the sport expanding: more media, more money in, more ways to participate than to merely spectate.
• College racing crowned the first race winners in its history this year — at Road Atlanta, the circuit this championship calls home — giving motorsport the student doorway every great sport is built on.
• And now INDYCAR stretching its legs on the National Mall, in front of the Capitol, on a weekend the whole country was watching.

The whisper mill says NASCAR is thinking similarly. And we can confirm that at least one international series is planning creatively — you're reading its home page.

That's the Mansell sentence, scaled up. Racing spent decades as a driver without a car — all talent and belief, no infrastructure to match. What arrived this decade is the car: venues willing to close their streets, a media machine hungry for real stories, a generation on-ramping through karting and college paddocks, and capital that finally sees what sports investors have known for twenty years. One flawless era, coming, when the machine matches the sport.

Politics wasn't brought up on race day. The cars rolled, the flags — all of them — waved, and a reported 150,000 people watched racing machines at speed between the monuments. Exactly.

Sports, globally, is in its expansion phase — and racing is the greatest sport on earth entering its greatest expansion. We are blessed to be participatory in it. This championship is our answer to the moment: a world championship for GT3 and GT4, the fastest production-based cars on earth, with the nations on the grid and the owner-drivers who fund the sport racing alongside the pros.

Grab ahold of something. You won't want to miss out.

— Peter Saddington, Founder