“Away From The Track”
With motorsport ceasing to exist for the time being, just how am I keeping sane?
With motorsport virtually non-existent for the foreseeable future, I thought this week would be as good a time as any to chat about my life away from racing: what I enjoy, what I would normally get up to (with emphasis on normally, considering we can’t leave the house right now), and what I’ve been doing to pass the time during lockdown.
First and foremost, I enjoy sport. If it’s not participating in karting or watching a variety of motorsport, then it’s football, golf or cricket. Whilst I enjoy watching football and used to play as a child, cricket is my main love (outside of motorsport, of course). I started playing when I was around 10, and I continue to thoroughly enjoy it. In fact, comparisons between racing and cricket are closer than you think, as both are team sports, yet utterly reliant on individual performances. After all, you only need 1 batsman to make a big score in order to win a cricket match, just like the best driver could potentially carry a mediocre car to a win. At the end of the day, though, you still need 11 cricketers to field a side, just like you still need a team of mechanics and engineers to build a race-winning car.
Golf, on the other hand, I don’t really view as a sport. I’m not the biggest fan of watching golf, I’d much rather play it, but I see it more of a social activity than a sport. Close to where I live there is a Topgolf centre, which is a great place for both tour Pro’s and golf virgins to gather and enjoy themselves, due to the fact you don’t actually have to be good at golf to gain a respectable Topgolf score. Personally, I’m not good at golf but I wouldn’t say I’m particularly bad at it either, it’s just a fun change of pace compared to the fast, aggressive world of motorsport. I even completed a bit of chipping-practice in the back garden earlier this week, without killing any neighbours at that!
Moving completely away from sport, I recently have started to thoroughly enjoy learning some graphic design. Over the past couple of weeks, I have started to teach myself the nuances of the industry-leading Adobe Creative Cloud products, including Illustrator, After Effects and Photoshop (although alternative production software is available and most likely just as good, if not better. *Definitely Not Sponsored*). Viewers of the #RacingGrind Instagram profile will have noticed the incorporation of added branding on my recent posts, all of which has been created myself. I have also been experimenting with logo animation as part of my research into potentially producing video content in the future, and I have spent this past weekend putting a lot of time into designing my first initial design for next years’ #RacingGrind race suit.
With my day job in accountancy, it’s not exactly the perfect profession for getting creative. In fact, “getting creative” generally finds accountants in trouble, so it’s strongly discouraged! As a result, finding an outlet for my creative juices is a must, and digital production is something I’ve always been interested in. Now that this #RacingGrind is slowly establishing itself as not “just a New Year’s resolution”, it’s the perfect canvas for me to draw on, edit and animate in order to gain these new skills, which will hopefully have the added benefit of creating more polished, professional content for you all to enjoy, including helmet, race suit and car livery designs. After all, who doesn’t love an aesthetically pleasing colour-scheme on a racing car.
In short, that was a little snippet at what I like to get up to when I’m not working on my #RacingGrind (even though half of it is still connected to the brand…). In my opinion it’s great to have hobbies, as they provide a form of escapism from the real world, and all of the stress and responsibilities that are associated with it. I would assume that if you’re reading this article of mine, you’re probably either a motorsport fan, a car fan or both, but what else interests you? What other hobbies do you like to partake in? Let me know by leaving a comment down below!
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Living The Racing Grind 
Away from the track, I thought I’d see whether I could improve the performance of my racing snail. Thinking about the aerodynamics, I removed his shell but the result just made him more sluggish…
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