The Glorious Highs And Painful Lows Of Motorsport, As Told By Gradient Racing's Andris Laivins

Fairytale weekends are rare in motorsport, but during the 2022 Petit Le Mans IMSA weekend at Road Atlanta, Gradient Racing had just that kind of weekend. An unidentified electrical fault prevented the GTD team from qualifying, which meant that the team started from the very back of the grid. Before the race, the team tore apart the entire car, found the issue, and repaired it before the green flag. Thankfully, the 10-hour duration of the event was long enough that Gradient Racing picked up one place after another and ultimately took the class victory.

As I shadowed the team during the 2023 IMSA finale, I heard that story time and again; this event would mark one year since the whirlwind season conclusion, the weekend that seemed too good to be true. It wasn’t until I spoke to team owner Andris Laivins after qualifying that I learned what happened next: Gradient Racing almost fell apart.

“We thought we had deals locked down for the season — which is far and away the biggest part of our business,” Laivins said. “That’s how I pay my employees. And we came into that last race with a fairly straightforward deal; everything was signed off, everyone was excited.

“Then, between October 15th and 30th, the entire deal evaporated. We went from a multi-million-dollar budget to, literally, zero dollars in the space of two weeks.”

That evaporation occurred as IMSA was finalizing its 2023 entries. The series knew it would be oversubscribed heading into the coming year, but teams with longevity — like Gradient Racing — were given priority in retaining a competitive slot. But without the funds to secure that slot, Laivins had to inform IMSA that his team might be backing down.

“A lot of people put a lot of effort into making hundreds of phone calls to track down leads,” Laivins said in an hourlong interview with Jalopnik. Even driver Katherine Legge was on the phone, hoping to find the money to continue the program she’d signed up to join. In his two decades of motorsport involvement, Laivins said October 2022 was his worst month, hands down.

The money came. The Acura NSX GT3 Evo22 hit the track with J.G. Wentworth sponsorship. But the 2023 season was far from the rags-to-riches storyline that the team had hoped for.

Full disclosure: Gradient Racing invited me to the 2023 running of Petit Le Mans to shadow the team; I’ve been dying to do so for a while in order to learn more about a team local to me.

Photo: Jalopnik / Elizabeth Blackstock

When I told various people what I was at Road Atlanta to do, I ultimately heard Gradient Racing described in various different ways. It’s the “scrappy” team. The “budget” team. The little team that could. I also heard ample praise. Three different people told me that if they could work with any team on the IMSA grid, it would be Gradient. One person asked if I’d be willing to say hello to their favorite people on the team — then listed off the entire at-track staff. This is, after all, the team that rescued a kitten at Road Atlanta during the throes of its chaotic 2022 weekend; few team owners would worry about a lost kitten while their car was in shambles, but Laivins didn’t hesitate to cancel his flights to drive this kitten home.

Gradient Racing was founded in 2019 after Laivins parted ways with CJ Wilson Racing to form his own company based in Texas. Formally trained in studio art, Laivins found that his passion for working with his hands translated well into work as a metal fabricator, which saw him transition into part-time work at a race team. Next came a fabrication shop in Austin and a partnership with Texas Rangers pitcher Wilson, where Laivins helped the group grow beyond its MX-5 Cup roots.

Where most race team owners are gregarious and charismatic masters of the PR spin, Laivins is far more subdued and soft spoken. He’s the kind of boss who runs a tight ship with well-earned respect, not with the loudness of his voice or the brashness of his personality.

“The business of race teams is just atrocious,” he told me. “I would legitimately really enjoy everything I do every day if I didn’t have to run the business. I hate trying to find money; it’s the opposite of my personality.”

Photo: Jalopnik / Elizabeth Blackstock

And motorsport is a money game, especially in this modern era. Laivins told me that, five years ago, IMSA was still a serious endeavor, but the rapid growth in technology and competition has created an atmosphere even more cutthroat than before. Everything costs more money, because everyone is investing more money into finding success.

“This is an extremely tiny and very weird marketplace that our business operates in, and it doesn’t operate under any normal rules of capitalism or commerce,” he said. “It operates on these totally unhinged factors. In any normal market for something, there’s an array of customers and products to be sold, and as a business, you’re trying to approach a massive market of people that will buy your product.

“In what we do — in this paddock, at this level of racing — is like, most of them aren’t even running a real business. It’s just that somebody owns the team and can spend their own money to run it. So you end up with this really small number of actual businesses that are pursuing actual deals, customers, sponsors, or whatever. So the normal rules you’d expect a business like this to operate by start falling away, because the market is so tiny. There are eight of us pursuing the five viable deals that will exist next year.

“Then all these factors go into it that don’t really follow logic — like someone who doesn’t want to pay for a Lamborghini race team because they just hate Lamborghinis. As a team owner, you’re like, oh, I only own a Lamborghini; that’s the one gigantic, extraordinarily expensive asset that I have to run my business off of, and these guys are like, no, I just don’t like them. Now, out of those five viable deals, you’re down to four.”

Navigating the stresses of viable deals and interested parties is hard enough in a normal year, but in 2022, Gradient Racing found itself going through the same struggle a second time, after the season had already concluded — and after what should have been an against-all-odds win in the season finale.

“Figuring out how to operate at this level in a year-to-year nature is nerve-wracking and unpleasant,” Laivins said of 2022’s sponsor scare. “I was weeks from laying everybody off, and I couldn’t stop it. We make some money on other projects, but I was like, I just don’t know if I can emotionally hang on.

“We were extraordinarily lucky that we chased down enough leads to end up in the wonderful situation for this year, but it’s also difficult to not have almost a degree of PTSD from it. In a day-to-day sense, you have to put [the future] out of mind, because we’ve got a job to do. But it’s constantly hanging over the heads of people in my position: Next season is coming, and I’m responsible for the livelihoods of all the people on this team. It’s so much pressure.”

Photo: Jalopnik / Elizabeth Blackstock

The 2023 season came to fruition, even if it ended in the disappointment of car failure for Gradient Racing at Petit Le Mans. The team had not only survived a tumultuous year, but it was also able to announce its 2024 lineup well before the conclusion of 2023: Katherine Legge and Sheena Monk will remain as the team’s full-season competitors, while Tatiana Calderón will join the team for five Michelin Endurance Cup races and Stevan McAleer will join for the Rolex 24 at Daytona. Acura will provide its NSX GT3 Evo22 for yet another season, and J.G. Wentworth is back as a title sponsor.

But because Laivins was so candid about the financial struggles of a team like Gradient, I ended my interview with perhaps the biggest question of them all: Why stay in racing?

“It’s kind of a character flaw, but I just like doing difficult stuff,” Laivins said.

At the end of our interview, Katherine Legge had joined us in the Gradient Racing hauler, and she added, “I’ve asked myself this question hundreds of times, but there’s just no quit in either of us. It’s just not in my DNA to say, ‘Okay, I give up, I’ll go do something else.’ I think, to our detriment.”

“Oh, for sure to our detriment,” Laivins added.

Photo: Jalopnik / Elizabeth Blackstock

But beyond the frustrations of business and the thrill of competition, Laivins actually pinned down something far more intangible as his reasons for remaining in motorsport: The pride he feels in running a cohesive and admirable team. He started by mentioning his pride in the crew’s ability to enact fast pit stops, then praised Gradient’s dedicated crew that all work beautifully together without needing to be told what to do.

“Race teams are known for turnover. Year-to-year hiring and firing,” he said. “Our average turnover over the last 10 years is, maybe, one person a year. But this year, I wouldn’t trade a single person on this team.”

Legge chimed in again: “I’ve been in a lot of race teams over the past 20 years, and the gel that holds this team together is unlike anything else you’ll see in any paddock. There’s no politics. There’s no bitching. It’s one, united team, and that’s unheard of.”

And despite everything, Laivins smiled. “That’s it. That’s what keeps me here.”