Gridlife Has Been Sold: What the F=ma Acquisition Means for Grassroots Motorsport

The festival series that fused EDM stages with track days just found a new parent company. Here’s the full story — who bought it, what it means, and what’s coming in 2026.

What Is Gridlife? A Quick Primer

If you’ve never attended a Gridlife event, the concept is deliberately hard to categorize. It’s not just a race series. It’s not just a track day organization. And it’s definitely not just a music festival — though the lineups have featured names like Deadmau5, T-Pain, Big Boi, Lupe Fiasco, and Subtronics at full-scale stages beside the racing paddock.

Gridlife was founded in 2013 by Chris Stewart and Adam Jabaay. Stewart came from an advertising and creative direction background — he had worked as a senior art director for Harley-Davidson — and brought a distinctly un-corporate energy to the motorsport event space. The idea was to create weekends that felt like a cultural happening rather than a typical racing sanction: camping on the grounds, car shows, HPDE (High Performance Driver Education) sessions for beginners, wheel-to-wheel racing, time attack, drift exhibitions, and live music all happening simultaneously at iconic American road courses.

The format resonated. Gridlife grew from a regional Michigan circuit to a national touring festival, expanding rapidly to nine events across the country for 2025, visiting tracks from Road Atlanta in Georgia to WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca in California. Along the way, it cultivated a devoted community of drivers, enthusiasts, and car-culture fans who were increasingly priced out of or put off by more traditional sanctioning bodies.

It’s worth noting that HPDE is no longer part of the Gridlife festival weekends. In recent years the organization moved HPDE out of the main event format, shifting it to separate standalone events with a schedule to be announced independently. For a series that started by welcoming complete beginners onto the track with instructor oversight, that’s a meaningful shift in identity — and one that has generated real discussion about whether the on-ramp for new participants has narrowed.

The Deal: Who Is F=ma?

F=ma launched publicly on March 3, 2026, positioning itself as a company built to “unify car culture and motorsports into a scalable ecosystem.” The name is a deliberate nod to physics — Force equals mass times acceleration — and the company says the equation applies to what it’s building: combining mass (reach and scale) with acceleration (speed of growth) to generate force (impact).

Under the F=ma umbrella sit three distinct but complementary entities:

The result, as The Drive put it, is “a motorsports outfit, a motorsports media platform, and a motorsports branding agency all under the same proverbial roof.” The thesis is straightforward: events generate content, content drives awareness, awareness attracts sponsors, sponsors fund better events.

Who Is Running This Thing?

The F=ma leadership roster is worth examining, because it signals what kind of organization this is intended to be.

Chris Dyson — Chairman

Dyson is best known as a two-time American Le Mans Series champion and the son of IMSA Hall of Famer Rob Dyson. He brings genuine racing credibility to the chairman role — this isn’t a financier who stumbled into motorsport, but someone who grew up in it and understands what the community actually values.

James Schiefer — CEO

Schiefer was a founding partner of Torque.TV, billed at the time as the first automotive broadband TV network. Torque.TV was eventually acquired by The Enthusiast Network and evolved into what became MotorTrend on Demand. Schiefer therefore has direct experience in building automotive media platforms and taking them to scale — which maps neatly onto what F=ma is attempting with Gridlife and Racer combined.

Chris Stewart — President & Chief Creative Officer, Gridlife

Stewart, who co-founded Gridlife alongside Adam Jabaay in 2013, stays on in his creative leadership role. This is arguably the most important detail in the whole deal for longtime Gridlife participants. The person who built the culture of the organization is not being shown the door.

Michael Huyczyn — CEO, Gridlife

Huyczyn continues as Gridlife’s chief executive, maintaining operational continuity through the transition.

Adam Jabaay — Motorsports Director, Gridlife

Jabaay, Gridlife’s co-founder and the architect of its racing program, also remains in his role as Motorsports Director.

From an organizational standpoint, F=ma’s acquisition looks less like a takeover and more like a capital injection with infrastructure support. The people who built Gridlife are still running Gridlife. What changes is the resources and reach available to them.

Why Sell? What Does Gridlife Get Out of This?

According to Stewart, the practical answer is time and operational bandwidth. Running a nine-event national festival series is an enormous logistical undertaking. He and Jabaay had reached a point where the demands of day-to-day operations — staffing, logistics, venue negotiations, vendor management — were consuming the time and energy that used to go toward actually improving the Gridlife product.

Being part of F=ma is meant to solve that problem. With a parent company providing infrastructure and support, Stewart and Jabaay can refocus on what they’re best at: the creative vision, the culture, the event experience itself.

The Racer partnership in particular represents what Stewart called an “immediate accelerant” in terms of broadcast reach. Racer Network’s existing household distribution gives Gridlife access to a television and streaming audience it previously had to build from scratch, event by event, through its own social channels.

The 2026 Season: What’s Changing on the Calendar

One of the more concrete changes coming out of the transition is a significant restructuring of the 2026 race schedule. After expanding aggressively to nine events for 2025, Gridlife is pulling back to a focused six-event national tour.

The venues dropping off the calendar are Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, Road America, Autobahn Country Club, and Pittsburgh International Race Complex (Pitt Race). In their place — or rather, returning to the fold — is Watkins Glen International, which last hosted a Gridlife event in 2023 and is back for 2026 as a full festival weekend.

The six remaining venues are a strong lineup by any measure: Watkins Glen and Laguna Seca are two of the most storied circuits in American motorsport history. Road Atlanta is a perennial fan favorite. Lime Rock Park brings the series to the Northeast. GingerMan remains the Midwest home where Gridlife has deep roots. Carolina Motorsports Park anchors the Southeast.

The logic behind going smaller is quality over quantity. Nine events in a single year is a punishing pace for organizers, vendors, and participants alike. Six tightly executed weekends at premium venues gives F=ma and the Gridlife team more room to deliver the kind of experience the brand is known for.

The Community’s Reaction: Cautious Optimism Mixed with Real Concern

Not everyone in the Gridlife community has greeted the news with straightforward enthusiasm. The comments and forum discussions following the announcement surfaced some genuine concerns worth taking seriously.

The Cost Question

Entry fees for Gridlife events have reportedly tripled since 2020. That trajectory predates the F=ma acquisition, but the sale raises a natural question: does bringing a private equity-style ownership structure into the picture accelerate that trend? A brand with a corporate parent and television distribution deals has different financial incentives than a founder-operated passion project.

The Loss of HPDE

HPDE was the original on-ramp into Gridlife. Removing it from the festival weekends — regardless of whether standalone HPDE events eventually materialize — cuts off the most accessible entry point the organization had. For a lot of people, an HPDE session was how they first got on track, got hooked, and eventually became paying competitors. That feeder pipeline no longer runs through the festival itself.

Professionalization vs. Grassroots Culture

Part of what made Gridlife special in its early years was its rough edges — the sense that this was built by and for enthusiasts, not optimized for sponsor impressions. The community’s fear is that the arrival of F=ma, with its Porsche and Bridgestone clients and its MotorTrend-connected CEO, starts to sand those edges off in ways that change the event’s character.

Venue Losses

The removal of Road America, Mid-Ohio, Autobahn, and Pitt Race from the 2026 schedule is a genuine loss for participants in those regions. Road America in particular — a 4.1-mile natural terrain circuit in Wisconsin that is widely considered one of the finest road courses in North America — had developed a loyal Gridlife following at the Summer Apex event. Telling those competitors and spectators their local round is gone, at least for now, is not nothing.

The counterarguments are real too. Stewart has earned trust over more than a decade. The core team is intact. The format is not being gutted. And the prospect of Gridlife content appearing on Racer Network’s television platform could genuinely expand the audience for grassroots motorsport in a way that benefits everyone in the ecosystem — participants included.

The Bigger Picture: What F=ma Is Really Trying to Build

Step back from the Gridlife-specific details and the strategic ambition of F=ma becomes clearer. The automotive and motorsport media landscape has been consolidating for years. The Enthusiast Network collapsed. MotorTrend Group absorbed everything it could. Traditional print magazines have largely disappeared. What’s left is a fragmented landscape of YouTube channels, Instagram accounts, and digital publishers, none of whom have the organizational depth to own both the events and the media platforms that cover them.

F=ma is making a different bet. By combining an event series (Gridlife) with an established media brand (Racer) and an automotive marketing agency (The ID Agency), it creates a vertically integrated entity that controls the full value chain: it produces the events, covers them, and sells the marketing opportunities around them. That’s a model with real structural advantages if executed well.

Whether F=ma can scale that model without losing what made Gridlife worth acquiring in the first place — the culture, the community, the feeling that this is ours — is the question the next few seasons will answer.

The people who built Gridlife are still running Gridlife. That matters. But the community will be watching closely to see whether F=ma is an accelerant or a dilution. The answer will show up not in press releases, but in the paddock.