Building a Media-First Race Series from the Ground Up

We’ve spent the last 24 months building a new kind of sports property — one that reflects how sport should feel in 2026: fast, purpose-driven, highly entertaining, and ultimately unforgettable.

This is the story of where we came from, what we’ve built so far, and why we’re still here, even when the doors don’t open.

We’re grassroots organizers. We held our first race in a parking lot south of Giant’s Stadium in San Francisco: 24 racers, a handful of cones, and maybe that many fans. Halfway through course setup, we realized we didn’t have race numbers, so James ran to the grocery store and came back with paper plates, Sharpies, and safety pins. We had no permits, no money, just a desire to get rad and build community on bikes.

Over seven events on the streets of San Francisco, we scaled from a parking lot to 250 racers and 6,000 fans, earning street closures, police escorts, and brand partners.

But we hit the wall that many grassroots race organizers eventually find: growth doesn’t equal sustainability.

Revenue from athlete registration was real, but capped by format and volume. Charging for admission on public streets didn’t make sense since spectators couldn’t see the full race, and producing a high-quality broadcast was prohibitively expensive. Without consistent visibility, attracting paid partners was exponentially harder.

It became clear that the problem wasn’t execution, it was the structure we were executing within. Fixed gear street racing has hard limits on participation — safety and course density make that unavoidable. But what it lacks in scalable participation, it makes up for in something else: speed, spectacle, and an intensity perfectly suited to modern media.

That’s when Formula Fixed was born. A high-intensity, short-format series built for contemporary fans, modern media, and meaningful growth. We moved into venues with a front door and centralized race action where we could control the experience, sell tickets, amplify content, and deliver events that feel fully engineered.

In October 2024, we staged our third Short Track event, a format we’d been refining since 2021, and, for the first time, we were able to fully realize its potential. With support from non-endemic sponsors including Kraft Heinz, and alongside transmedia agency Elevate Pictures on event production and content capture, we optimized everything: production value, storytelling, and competition.

We brought in elite international athletes and built clear narrative arcs through “Top Contenders” and “Wildcard” campaigns that gave fans recognizable storylines to follow. Our athletes then carried those stories into the world through their own channels, extending reach organically.

The scale of the response removed any doubt. We sold out the venue in 30 days, delivered 8.1M digital impressions with zero ad spend, and demonstrated a repeatable production footprint, validating both the format and the model.

In 2025, we pressure-tested everything we’d built — taking the model on the road, piloting community marketing and creator-led content, and running multiple race formats as open pathways into what we were then calling our 2026 Pro Series. We also began working more closely with people who understood both sport and culture at an early stage.

Michael Spencer, former VP of Olympic & Action Sports at Wasserman, saw Formula Fixed up close in September at our San Francisco open qualifying event — part of the pathway we’re building to select athletes and keep the community connected to the property. He immediately recognized something familiar in fixed gear racing — the kind of raw, unrefined energy that defined the early days of modern action sports. He leaned in early, offering perspective on how participation and elite competition could coexist, and pushed us to focus rather than overextend.

That dialogue helped crystallize what we’d been learning on the ground. By the end of the year, the conclusion was obvious: focus wins. We streamlined the series around a single race format, laying the foundation for what is now the Short Track World Series, committed to always-on content as the foundation, and aligned the organization around one priority — audience acquisition as the engine for sustainable revenue. Michael joined as our Head of Commercial to help shape what comes next.

We started this without fame, funding, or shortcuts, and created momentum by earning trust along the way.

We’re builders who’ve proven the model, and we know exactly what it takes to scale it.

If you believe modern sports are media companies first — we should talk.

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