From Mud Holes to Motorsports: Brockton Packard’s Journey Through Racing, iRacing, and Everything In Between

Brockton Packard - Team Manager / Driver for Niner eSports

I come from a military family with no real history in motorsport apart from the recreational quad bikes that we owned, however my love for the sport was sparked from a young age my mom would sit me Infront of the TV on Sundays for the NASCAR races because it was the only thing that could get me to sleep, and still to this day the rhythm of the cars going hundreds of miles an hour, inches apart can put me to sleep. That however is not how i treat the sport today. From a young age i have always wanted to take the cars apart and put them back together, and I always wanted to find a way to go fast. Whether it be bicycles quads R/C cars Go-karts, riding in real race cars or the seat of a simulator ive always been addicted to speed and how to get more out of something. I am also the team lead for the iRacing team at Niner Esports which is the university of north Carolina at charlottes esports organization. I have also been part of a underfunded NASCAR truck team Reaume Brothers Racing (RBR) and was able to experience first hand what really goes on in making a team no matter how small or how large able to succeed on and off the track.

Contact: Brockton Packard at Visit Online!

            

In this episode of Break/Fix, Brockton Packard shares his journey from a young NASCAR fan to leading the iRacing team for Niner eSports. Coming from a military family with no motorsports background, Brockton’s love for racing was sparked as a child watching NASCAR races on TV. He reflects on early mechanical experiences with his dad, attending racing events, and volunteer work, which solidified his passion for motorsports. Brockton discusses his involvement with Reaume Brothers Racing (RBR) NASCAR Truck team and his extensive race experiences, including the challenges of iRacing and managing his team. He outlines his multi-faceted plans in motorsports, including mechanical engineering, communications, and potentially professional racing. The episode also delves into the importance of versatility, sim racing’s rise, the reality of eSports in motorsports, and Brockton’s future with Jordan Anderson Racing.

• The who/what/where/when/how of Brock? Expand on the Family-Life part from the intro. How did you get into cars? What made you into a Petrol-head? Chevy, Ford, MOPAR or other…
• So let’s talk about racing, you’ve dabbled in various ways, be it Karting, R/C, and iRacing – all of which are very different. Where do you see yourself taking the next step as a driver? Or do you even want to? What are some barriers to entry? What are some interesting alternatives?
• Let’s talk about your experience as part of the RBR team. How did you get into that?
  What were some of your responsibilities? How long did you participate in the team? What did you learn from the experience?
• University Life: You’re studying Mechanical Engineering. How is that going? Thoughts on programs like Formula SAE? Are you aware of Formula BAJA?
• There’s actually a debate as to whether or not SimRacing is even considered eSports – let’s face it many eSports aren’t even sports, (The 2023 Top 10 are: League of Legends, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Fortnite, Call of Duty, Overwatch, Valorant, Rainbow Six Siege, Rocket League, Hearthstone – no where on this list is iRacing – why?
• If someone isn’t already into racing, SimRacing might be viewed as “just another video game” – How would you convince someone to become part of this eSport?
• You co-host The Pressbox Motorsports Podcast – what’s it about, what do you talk about? Frequency of release, why should people tune in, where can you find it? Upcoming #spoilers?

Crew Chief Brad: [00:00:00] Break Fix Podcast is all about capturing the living history of people from all over the autos sphere, from wrench, turners, and racers to artists, authors, designers, and everything in between. Our goal is to inspire a new generation of Petrolhead that wonder how did they get that job or become that person.

The road to success is paved by all of us because everyone has a story.

Mountain Man Dan: Like I’ve always said, you gotta start ’em young.

Crew Chief Eric: You’re right. Mountain man, Dan and our guest tonight is a prime example of that exact sentiment.

Mountain Man Dan: Much like myself, he comes from a military family background with no real history and motor sports apart from the recreational ATVs that they owned. His love for the sport was sparked at a young age when his mom would sit him in front of the TV on Sundays for NASCAR races ’cause it was the only thing that could get him to fall asleep.

Crew Chief Eric: Fast forward many years and Brockton Packard finds himself racing go-karts. He’s the team lead for iRacing at Niner eSports, part of the [00:01:00] University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s eSports organization. He’s been part of an underfunded NASCAR truck team, Raum Brothers racing and co-hosts, the Press Box Motorsports podcast, and he’s here tonight to share his journey and thoughts on the world of motorsports for other aspiring enthusiasts.

So welcome to Break Fix Brock.

Brockton Packard: Hey guys, it’s good to be here and, um, excited to have a great show tonight

Crew Chief Eric: and like all good break fix stories. Everybody has a superhero origin. So let’s dive deeper into your Petrolhead origin story. Tell us about the who, what, where and when of Brock expand on the family life part of our introduction.

How did you get into cars and what made you into a petrol hood?

Brockton Packard: I grew up in Southern Central Florida around Daytona, Miami, all those dig motor sports locations. The NASCAR season would start and end in Florida. We’d always go around those kind of races. We had Sebring, U S A International, which you iRacing fans out there are very familiar with through the rookie street stocks programs.

Like Dan was [00:02:00] saying in the intro, my mom would put me down on Sunday afternoon in front of the TV and I’d watch the cars go around. The V eights had a certain sound that my brain would just shut me off. For four or five years probably. That’s how I’d be able to fall asleep over the weekends. And then eventually I’d start watching those races, collecting the die cast, getting to know who was my favorites and who were not my favorites, and then kind of formed my own opinion throughout that.

In the motor sports world, like was also mentioned, we went to what was called the mud hole in Florida. It was about a couple hundred acres of just Florida swamp. Everybody would run their Jeeps, their trucks, their motorcycles, all that stuff through the woods, and we’d go through that, just rip through it hours and hours and hours day after day.

So that’s kind of where it started. And then working with my dad on his Jeeps, he had old eighties and nineties Jeeps. His seal of approval was if it was a manual transmission and if it had the stamp on it, that would be his best case scenario for his Jeeps. But we’d [00:03:00] work a lot on those because they were old Jeeps in Florida, so there’s rust and stuff would break and we, we weren’t nice to ’em, but that’s when I kind of got my first like mechanical hands-on experience.

Mountain Man Dan: Having lived in the Southeast, I know that working on the Jeeps a lot and while I was in Southeast my share of Offroading and there’s a lot of sand mixture in the mud down there and it’s really hard on a lot of components such as your bearings and stuff. So I know there’s a lot of upkeep to be able to go play in the mud down there.

Brockton Packard: Yeah. And. That Jeep was not the, uh, finest running Jeep in the world by any means. There was one day that we had just finished working on it, getting a couple parts and pieces in there, and my dad drove it down the road and I went inside for a couple minutes and all of a sudden we heard this big pop. We walked outside and the muffler was skidding down the road.

He blew the whole muffler and the the exhaust off of it. That we just like put on there. So there were lots of breaking and fixing moments with those Jeeps and that kind of progressed throughout my life.

Crew Chief Eric: So in all of our stories, there’s usually a common thread, right? Even if we were like [00:04:00] you, or we were placed in front of the TV and exposed to it, or out there turned wrenches in the garage.

There’s always that one time, that first time when a car or a truck or something got your attention and it was out of the ordinary because you were so used to just seeing Jeeps or just seeing whatever it was. What was that one vehicle that really got your attention?

Brockton Packard: We were in the epicenter of.

American Motor Sports in Florida, at least at the time, we were part of a racing church group that would go to Sebring for the Porsche B M W, Audi Owners Club, and we’d do a thing called Kids Racing for Life. We’d go down to Sebring, it’d be a week and a half-ish, couple weeks maybe, and it’d be essentially a make-a-wish.

For racing, there’d be these kids there and we’d set ’em up in Porsches, Ferraris, BMWs, Audis, all of this kind of stuff. And I think it was at that moment, was one of those moments that just sparked something inside me that racing was what I wanted to do. I always liked racing. I always liked nascar, but [00:05:00] being able to go around Sebring in a Porsche or something like that is just a different.

Experience That’s hard to explain to somebody who hasn’t been in a race car before. And it was funny because we had the hand signals, you know the the go faster, the go slower, the thumbs up, thumbs down kind of thing. ’cause you didn’t have radios and I was the only kid that just kept going. Thumbs up, thumbs up, thumbs up every lap.

’cause I just wanted to go faster, wanted to feel the G-forces going around the corners. And the sea brings such a fun track. The bumps, the corners. It’s not a lot of elevation, but it’s so fun. So I think that was by far. One moment that really sticks out in my head, maybe another moment that relates more of why I am a NASCAR kid.

My first Daytona 500 was the 50th anniversary 500 that we went to, and just the atmosphere and the crowd and the, the smell, the noise, it, it kept pulling me back in, over and over and over again.

Mountain Man Dan: There’s definitely something about the smell of race, fuel in the air that just gets you going.

Brockton Packard: My American ethanol and Goodyear tires.

You can’t get much better than that,

Crew Chief Eric: which actually leads to a great pit stop [00:06:00] question, right, Dan?

Mountain Man Dan: Yeah. So being into motorsports and stuff like are you Chevy Ford, Mopar? What is your preference when it comes to manufacturer?

Brockton Packard: You know, the red and blue flames and that neon yellow 24 on the side of Jeff Gordon’s car always drew me to the Chevrolet side.

Of course, I have a soft spot for the Jeep because of my father, but I love myself some Chevy Camaros and Corvettes. They look mean to me. They sound mean. They always run well and uh, it’s never a bad combination, I suppose

Mountain Man Dan: being a GM guy, there’s common ground there. So you’re in good company.

Crew Chief Eric: Yeah. We’ll leave the square bodies for another episode.

All right guys. All jokes aside, let’s talk about racing. In the introduction, we talked about how you dabbled in it in various ways, carting remote control cars, and obviously iRacing, which we’re gonna talk about a little bit more here as we go along, all of which are very, very different. Where do you see yourself with this experience taking a next step as a driver, or do you even wanna be a driver?

What are some of the [00:07:00] barriers to the entry and what are some interesting alternatives that you’ve explored?

Brockton Packard: Driving has always been a number one priority for me. I love the feel and the kind of senses you get from driving a race car, whether it be virtually from above on a driver’s stand with an RC car or in a car.

That’s definitely what I want in the future, but the sport is very money driven and very uh, opportunity centric. My mom, I, I love her a lot, but she always made me have plans, plan A, B, C, and b. Plan A was always to drive a race car. That was number one. Plan would always want to do that. Plan B was to work on it in some shape or form, which we’ll get into a little bit later with some of the R V R stuff.

And Plan C was to be a, a spotter. That’s something that in I racing, you’re able to do. You’re able to spot and crew chief and strategize and all of these different things and I found a love for it. Actually pretty late on. I’ve only been high racing for about five years now, and that’s when I got my first real sense of spotting, being able to call the runs out, call high, low, middle, [00:08:00] et cetera.

Being able to do that kind of thing, seeing what was gonna happen before it happened, and also being able to do a little bit of math in there with fuel mileage and stuff like that. That was always something that I knew I was good at, but I didn’t know how to put it into motion. With iRacing, I was able to find that and then my Plan D would be, uh, broadcasting.

I do a lot of broadcasting with L SRT V with their main sim racing series. I help out with the Press Box Motorsports podcast. I’m very media forward so I can talk to people. My mom’s a communications major. I can talk your head off all night long. Where I see myself taking the next step as a driver is I’ve gotta get in a real car.

As much as you can learn from sim racing, that’s not gonna cover everything. I don’t know how a race transmission shifts. I don’t know how the clutch feels. I don’t know how all those things work inside the car, so I need to get in a car eventually. Hopefully that opportunity will rise soon. Like I said, the barriers right now are definitely the, the money involved, and I, I don’t wanna use that as an [00:09:00] excuse because it’s just part of the game.

It is what it is and we all accept that when we try to do this sport.

Crew Chief Eric: So which discipline do you see yourself starting in? Do you see yourself going down a path of dirt, oval, asphalt, round rounds? Are you thinking sports car? Are you thinking spec Miata? There’s a lot of different gateways into motorsport, whether it be oval track or road course.

What are you thinking?

Brockton Packard: You know, if you asked me this question a year and a half ago, my answer would be very straightforward and very simple. I’d go into the asphalt oval. The late models, limited lates, pro stocks, that kind of stuff. The short track feel. I like that. It’s fun racing and it would eventually lead into what I want to do, but recently through a a team that has partnered with niner eSports, it’s called Beaver Block.

We’ve run the Daytona 24, the Bathurst 12, and will be running the Sebring 12 here in a couple months. I’ve kind of shifted gears into that sports car kind of Miata realm, and I’ve found a new passion for that and it’s fun [00:10:00] because, You’re not having to worry about everybody around you. You gotta worry about your race and the different teams and stuff like that.

So it’s not as cut and dry as I would’ve hoped, but I’d be okay with running a Miata or something in the IMSA realm. The endurance racing is a fun challenge for me because NASCAR has our long races, the Coke 600, Daytona 500, but 12 hour races where you’re running six or more hours is just a. Different level of challenging.

I’m one that likes to go for the more challenging events. So I don’t know. That’s a good question and unfortunately I don’t really have an answer for it.

Crew Chief Eric: Let’s take that a little bit further. What are your thoughts on the big races like the Rolex 24 or even Lamonts?

Brockton Packard: Oh yeah, I would love to run those. I did my first virtual Daytona 24.

This year, and that was just a different experience. I’ve never run my first lapse in a race three hours into a race already. That was just such a foreign field to me to get in the car that [00:11:00] already had damage. The field was already spread out, and I did 26 or 27 practice hours before that race. About five or 600 laps to get prepared mentally and physically for that race.

And we streamed that whole thing and we went through the paces and we finished 10th in our class. So we ran the B M W hybrid, that new B M W, and we finished 11th overall because we had a bit of a struggle. It was just such a fun experience because I didn’t take it as we had to win. I knew we weren’t going to, I took it as a learning experience, and then next year we’re gonna win.

Mountain Man Dan: When you were asked like, which discipline or direction you’d like to go, you opened a a key aspect there. Motor sports is such a wide spectrum and so many young people like yourself initially you think one thing’s what you want, but as you’ve come to experience other things, it’s opened your eyes like, Hey, I also like this.

That’s a big thing that I try to promote with kids, like, don’t pigeonhole yourself into one discipline or one thing that you like because that makes the whole motor sports world rather cliquey. I think as [00:12:00] a whole, motorsports we need to work together to get experience out there for people who’ve never been into it and everything.

And then a big thing I wanna give your mom kudos for is the way she had, you have multiple plans. So many people don’t realize without successful planning, you’re gonna set yourself up for failure. But you’ve had not just one backup at three backup options, which allow you to still be involved with motor sports, which is a great path forward for you.

Brockton Packard: Yeah, there’s always. A lot to motor sports and people always think it’s either you’re driving the car, you’re spotting the car, or you’re crew chiefing, and that there’s nothing else in between, which is kind of why I went into the mechanical engineering realm and all this kind of stuff.

Crew Chief Eric: You both bring up very valid points.

One that’s overarching here is that a lot of people fall victim to chasing just one dream. They have this dream, I wanna be a pro driver, I wanna be this. I wanna be that. Life is full of twists and turns and every pun and cliche that you can come up with along that journey. But what’s important is that you’re already recognizing there’s alternatives along that that you may or may not be [00:13:00] more interested in.

And that leads into what Dan was saying about motorsports is people don’t realize that there are sub-disciplines inside of the greater sanctioning bodies. Let’s just look at Formula One or looking at W R C or Sports Car and Endurance Racing. You can start to just dissect that. I’m a big Rally fan. But when I talk rally, what am I talking about?

I’m talking about, you know, group A, group B. Mm-hmm. That type of stuff, versus T one raid or Baja. And you know, again, there’s so many other things you can get into that you don’t have to hyperfocus on just one of them. So the doors are always open, and I’m glad you’re situationally where as we say, you know, in coaching, your eyes are up, you’re looking ahead and you’re thinking ahead.

If this doesn’t pan out, what’s next? But you’ve already dabbled a little bit in the racing world, right, Dan?

Mountain Man Dan: Yeah, so let’s talk about your experience as part of the R B R team. Like how did you get into it? What were some of your responsibilities with them and how long did you participate with the team?

Brockton Packard: Getting involved with them is kind of a funny story. It was 2021 my freshman year of [00:14:00] college. I was a band kid in high school and I did a a, a year of band in college and I just happened to get covid on our first game week. For our, our home opener for football. So I was stuck in a quarantine room, kind of just scrolling through Twitter and Instagram and stuff, and I saw a post pop up from R B R saying interns wanted and how to apply.

So I called my mom and said, Hey, you think I should go for this? It’s not paid. It’s experience only, but it’s experienced. She told me to go for it, so I filled out the information and I think within two or three days they called me back to have a phone interview and then they had me up at the shop a month later.

I was on board for that, and that was right around. November, so it was kind of the end of the season, so we just kind of cleaned the shop when I was first there. And then beginning of 2022, everything kind of started to ramp up. We had the fad Moffitt deal with the 43 s t P, the Richard Petty [00:15:00] colors on our truck, and then everything kind of snowballed.

I had just about every responsibility you could think of from going to Food Lion, the local. Grocery store to buy Gatorades and sodas for the race weekend to sweeping the shop, to ripping stuff off the truck when they didn’t come back in one piece. Lots of cleaning though. Something that you have to kind of get through your head is, everything’s important no matter what you do.

That was hard for me at first because I was like, man, I want to build stuff. I want to do things. I want to go, and I had to remember that I’m a 19 year old kid that has no experience on a race team, so I need to chill out and learn from everything. We went to Dinos, we did chassis pull downs. I learned so much and I was only there for six or seven months.

From being an interior guy to them taking me to Texas Motor Speedway for the summer race there, having my family and girlfriend there during that race, my first race on a crew, that was just another worldly experience. You know, you always have those [00:16:00] dreams of doing what you wanna do and then it happens and you’re like, holy crap.

I’m here, I’m doing this, I’m living out a dream. So just being able to do everything essentially on that race team has fulfilled so many bucket list items, but has also helped me continue my career.

Mountain Man Dan: I got a feeling it’s created many more bucket list items as well.

Crew Chief Eric: Plans. E, F, G, right? Yeah.

Brockton Packard: There’s a, there’s a few more backups now.

Mountain Man Dan: Tell me about your experience there in the pits during the race. Like how was that for you? For someone who’s never seen it, only seen it from tv, like explain that to people and the thrill that there was with that.

Brockton Packard: That was a wild weekend. So the truck race was on Friday, so we flew out Thursday at midnight.

From Charlotte and landed in Dallas at about three, four o’clock. So it was late. We were all tired as all get out and we fell asleep. Woke up at like seven, 8:00 AM went down to the track and walked through those garages. We all see those Bob Ris tweets where it’s, you know, sea of mechanics and engineers walking [00:17:00] through the front gates.

And I was like, okay. This is literally every crew chief and everybody who’s important, all in one little gaggle around the garage. We all walked in, we went to our holler, unloaded all the pit equipment first, and then we unloaded our two trucks, the 43 and 33 for that weekend. Got everything kind of set up.

Getting ready for tech. Tech was wild. I’ve never actually gone through tech before and it was just, you know, a long line with a bunch of people and you just kinda sat there and people would walk around, talk to you, say hi, and then you had to push the truck up like. 25 degree incline to get it up on the second inspection.

But like all good things, we failed the first time. We failed tech inspection the first time for a few different reasons, which we expected. You know, if your car doesn’t pass the first or second time, you got a little bit of an issue. But if you failed the first time, you know it’s something good, you got something going on.

’cause if you’re not cheating, you’re not winning. We pushed through tech and then we kind of just chilled for a little bit. Texas Modus Speedway is a bit of [00:18:00] a monster for the cruise because going from the garage to pit road, there’s a hill. We don’t turn the cars on for anything unless it’s on track, so you can’t just drive the car up the hill.

We had to push that thing up 20 feet, the hill, and it’s just a steady, kind all the way up. So they’re not the heaviest things in the world as fast as they go. A brick and a half for sure. So we went through practice. Unfortunately, our 33 truck wrecked in his first lap of practice, and then our 43 truck had an unimproved adjustment that got disqualified.

I think I’m not a hundred percent sure on that. So basically as soon as we were done with practice, we were all thrashing, welding, beaten body panels, straight rebuilding, basically the whole rear end of that race car to have at least one car in the race. We’re all running on two, three hours of sleep, maybe a little more if you slept on the plane.

It’s Texas during the summer, so it’s 110 degrees out. We’re all sweating. We’re just destroyed by the end of this thing. But we finally get it fixed. We get it [00:19:00] going, and we run the race, and I think we finished like 33rd or something, but it was such a sigh of relief when the car rolled off for the first time and we saw.

Everybody just go by checking the speed stuff. There’s so many things you miss on TV and there’s so many things you miss when you’re at the track. Being behind the scenes, having a crew shirt on, having those credentials, you see so much and it’s something that I never want to forget and I want to continue to do.

Mountain Man Dan: From your time with R B R, what would you say was one of the biggest things you learned from that experience?

Brockton Packard: Just the never give up attitude of that whole team. They’re an underfunded team. They had seven full-time employees when I was interning there, and they had eight interns, so the interns outmatched everybody who actually worked there.

Since then, that’s kind of changed and they’ve gone through some ups and downs. I’ve learned a couple things that I won’t say on air because there are a couple things I like to keep to myself.

Crew Chief Eric: See, you know, he is a car guy because once we figure out what that little thing is, we’re not gonna share it with anybody.

Yeah. Until we’ve beaten him six [00:20:00] ways from Sunday to the next race, then it all gets exposed. Right.

Brockton Packard: There’s a few things that I’ve learned here and there a few things of what not to do. A few things of what to do, like team dynamic. Always be close to your employees and even if they’re below you can’t act like they’re below you.

Having that family atmosphere is just so important because I. I woke up on Saturday morning and I could not stand up, and I was like, how the heck did I get through it? And it was just the positive reinforcement from everybody. Like, get up and go do your job and do it right and get rewarded type things.

They were awesome guys, and I, I love every single one of them to death because they’re the ones that gave me my first shot and never gonna forget that.

Crew Chief Eric: Somewhere in the mix of all this, based on your time with R B R and you had aspirations of being in nascar, now you’re choosing maybe plan. C. D, or E, somewhere along those lines.

You’ve also changed the courses that you’ve taken there at the University of Charlotte. So let’s talk about your university life a little bit. You mentioned that you’re in mechanical engineering, so how’s [00:21:00] that going? Is that still plan C?

Brockton Packard: Yeah, right now it’s still plan C. I’m gonna beat the horse to death on Plan A until it doesn’t go anymore.

But you know, having that engineering degree, and I’m also going to dual enroll as a communications student as well, be an engineer that can talk to people. That’s a very important thing, especially in the NASCAR and motorsports world. Being able to communicate what you wanna do and being able to. Also have the know-how to do it is something that is insurmountable when it comes to any motor sports, but especially nascar.

Mountain Man Dan: So what’s the good and the bad of the ME E program?

Brockton Packard: It’s a hard program. Not a lot of people get in it. It’s one of the highest contested programs at U N C C because we’re all here for the same reason. 20% of NASCAR engineers, NASCAR crew, and NASCAR crew chiefs. Come from U N C C. If you have a degree from here, you’re most likely going into a motor sports program.

Having that good G P A getting through the classes, you gotta [00:22:00] be pretty darn good at math. It’s pretty math heavy. I think I get all the way up to calculus four or something like that. It’s kind of ridiculous. There’s math that looks more like English sometimes, so having that competitive attitude, not taking a failure as a failure, but a learning experience, and then.

Finding ways to make a really hard degree a little bit easier is definitely advice and the good and bad.

Mountain Man Dan: Well, I’m sure especially with NASCAR there in North Carolina, that’s like the heart of where NASCAR began, so I’m sure that’s why everybody wants to be involved in that flocks to that areas.

Crew Chief Eric: Mooresville is known as nascar. U Ss a, right?

Brockton Packard: Yeah. Motorsports, U Ss a Mooresville, Concord. Even Statesville. There’s shops all over the place in North Carolina. It’s like you can’t go. More than 20 miles without seeing a, a little interstate sign with a Motorsports facility somewhere. I mean, you’ve got Hendrick Motorsports, track House, and Rush Fenway Klowski, all within about five or 10 miles of the U N C C campus.

Charlotte Motor Speedway’s five miles. Then you go to [00:23:00] Mooresville, junior Motorsports, Joe Gibbs, RBR R’s in Mooresville as well. Further out in Welcome North Carolina. You’ve got your RRCs, your Petty G m s. Wood Brothers is in Mooresville too. So there’s a whole bunch of teams, both Truck, Xfinity Cup, even late models and legends.

They’re all over the place here.

Mountain Man Dan: I grew up watching a lot of Monster Truck stuff and I know Dennis Anderson has hit his shop for the Grave Digger down there in North Carolina. Is that anywhere near Charlotte?

Brockton Packard: It’s about six hours from here. It’s funny you bring that up ’cause I’ve got a couple Monster Jam stories as well.

Growing up in Florida. They would go to Raymond James Stadium, it would always rain. The best mud shows of the year would happen in Tampa and year after year after year for my birthday. It would always happen around the same time. So we’d go watch the Monster Jam show and then one year. For some reason we came up to North Carolina and we went to their shop up in, I think it’s Kitty Hawk, and we walked in and this is, I don’t know, 2010, maybe 2009, and there’s a smaller version of Ryan [00:24:00] and Kristen Anderson and Adam Anderson all.

Out front running this RC car all around and we walk in and Dennis is just sitting there and we had lunch with all of them. It was just one of those weird meeting your hero moments because I, I absolutely loved the grave digger truck and I continue to follow that, but I’m more of a son of a digger now.

I like that blue paint scheme. That blue paint scheme’s got a special place in my heart. But no, the black and green wrecking machine bad to the bone all the way through gotta be some of the best moments. And there was a point in time where I wanted to be a monster truck driver, and then I realized those hits are pretty hard, so it might not be the best case for me.

Crew Chief Eric: So that is not a plan on the list of plans.

Brockton Packard: That is not a plan. It would be a cool experience, but definitely not something that I’m going to actively pursue.

Mountain Man Dan: So what are your thoughts on programs like Formula S A e

Brockton Packard: I was part of Formula s a e last year and a little bit of this year. I love those guys too.

Great hands-on experience, building more open wheel type [00:25:00] cars, but there’s still some things that definitely transfer over and it’s a huge resume builder saying that you were part of a S A E program, being able to. Continue with that program, be a team lead, even a driver. It gives you so much more notoriety than somebody with a piece of paper saying they know how to do math.

Kind of broadening your horizons throughout college, finding things that you might not think can connect to the world that you wanna be in. You wouldn’t think an open wheel race car would connect to a NASCAR team, but. Building that race car. They now know you have fabrication skills, the mechanical engineering needed for it, and the communications and team working skills to be able to work with the team and also help build a race car.

Mountain Man Dan: Are you aware of formula Baja?

Brockton Packard: I am aware. Unfortunately, U N C C doesn’t have a formula Baja. Right now they used to, it seems like every meeting we have, somebody calls out, bring back Baja, so it might come back. I’m not sure, but I do know of it and I’ve watched some wild YouTube videos of it too. [00:26:00]

Mountain Man Dan: So what types of motorsports organizations or clubs are you involved with currently?

Brockton Packard: Right now it’s a little bit of that s a E program and then. Majority focus is managing the iRacing team for the Niner eSports program that we have here.

Mountain Man Dan: Being in Charlotte have, have you been to the NASCAR Hall of Fame?

Brockton Packard: Oh yeah. It seems like I’m there every other month. I love their simulators. I love the history of it, and every time somebody’s visiting here, I always wanna take ’em there.

It’s like my Disney World. It’s that feel that you’re surrounded by history and it’s also kind of a goal. You know, not a lot of people get to go into the NASCAR Hall of Fame and be inducted and it’s always that Shoot for the stars and you’ll hit the moon type deal. Say you’re going into the Hall of Fame, maybe you might end up in a seat.

You never know, but I. I always like to tell myself walking through the doors one day I’ll be there for a different reason, but for now, I, I enjoy it as a tourist and a motorsports connoisseur.

Crew Chief Eric: Well, it’s time we switch gears and we need to talk about one of your other favorite topics, which is [00:27:00] sim racing.

Thanks to Covid Sim racing in all its different forms, quickly became 10 times more popular than it ever had been, and it still seems to be on the rise. So let’s get some of your thoughts.

Brockton Packard: That kind of explosion in 2020 and 2021 was a weird. Shift in the iRacing world, we were always big and we always had our big events.

You know, the Koch series, which used to be the peak series and the NASCAR realm of iRacing always had big prize pools and stuff like that. But once they did the Pro Invitational and nationally televised it, All of these cup drivers, indie car drivers, all these guys were getting on the sim. It really made it less of a game for the general public and made it known that this isn’t something you just mess around with on a Sunday night because you think you can.

This is something that people use and people are able to do as a tool, and it gives you that experience without actually having to do anything. Personally, iRacing is still the best [00:28:00] sim out there. The quality of their updates and things like that. Second to none in my book. I like how the physics work, how it feels, how it drives, what I can feel through the steering wheel and pedals.

I like their NASCAR program and their road course stuff as well. But I know there’s a couple things that we don’t have. We don’t have rain, we don’t have flat spotting tires. We know those are coming and we know that they’ll be top class once they get here. There’s a whole bunch of different avenues to go, but I try to stay away from things like Ran Ismo or Forza, and I know that might hurt a little bit for some people, but I don’t like that arcade feel anymore.

I like being able to feel the car and understand the car and not just slamming the joystick left and right or not being able to feel through the steering wheel for me. iRacing is definitely still number one on my list. We’re still. Skyrocketing in players and new accounts, rejoining accounts, and laps turned.

I think we turned the 5000000000th lap on iRacing a couple months ago, and that number is [00:29:00] just gonna continue to rise. With our most recent update. We had the, I think a Reno Cleo. A Formula Ford 1600 and then the new late model stock car just came down, so I know there’s gonna be a lot of people running it at the point of recording.

Crew Chief Eric: Having been in motorsports for a long time and coming up through the video game generation myself. Pretty much born with a controller in my hand. I’ve seen the evolution of video games, and we’ve had other people on the show to talk about that and where the future is, and they’re like, all right, old man screaming at the clouds, you know, what do you talk about?

I’m like, look, I’ve been here since the beginning. I think the biggest complaints, those of us that have experienced on track with sim racing say, is, It doesn’t translate driving with your eyes, despite even the best, most expensive rig doesn’t feel like being in the car. You don’t have the G-force, you don’t have the lateral forces.

You don’t have any of this kind of stuff. And you see some of these extremely complicated rigs where they’re bouncing up and down and doing all this gyroscopic stuff and you’re like, cars [00:30:00] don’t do that. They just, they don’t,

Mountain Man Dan: Eric, I know how technically minded you are and having the amount of experience you have in cars, like I do it myself and I’m not near as experienced on track as you are, but I’ll notice playing certain simulators or games, it’s like, yeah, that doesn’t feel like it would in real life.

So I wonder if a lot of the young guys your age, Brock, that haven’t had much seat time in real cars aren’t able to pick up on that and what you guys consider to be more legit. I’m curious if you would get more seat time if you would start to be like, That’s not actually how this happens.

Brockton Packard: That’s kind of how it would work.

If I had actual experience behind the wheel of a car, I could feel what the car is supposed to feel like. And like I was saying earlier, I don’t have experience behind the wheel of a real race car. I have go-kart experience, but we don’t have go-karts, so I can’t say. Yeah, that’s exactly like the go-kart.

I’m driving a cup cart. I don’t know what that feels like. I know what it looks like. It feels like. I know what that independent rear suspension should do based off of working on it, but I don’t know what it actually does. So I’m sure that there’s [00:31:00] a difference in the real versus sim, and I’m sure that with more real world time behind the wheel of a race car, any race car, I’d be able to pick up on those differences, whether subtle or drastic, and go, Hey, that’s not at all what that feels like or, Yeah, that’s pretty similar.

With more time behind the wheel, I’d maybe lose my rose colored lenses, but right now it’s the best thing since sliced bread. ’cause I don’t know any better.

Crew Chief Eric: But it brings up a real life question. I’m sure you’ve raced Seabring many times. I racing, but you’ve been at Sebring in a race car. How does it really compare?

Brockton Packard: Memories are a little fuzzy, but I do remember a lot of the bumps and a lot of the corners and a lot of stuff like that. Unfortunately, iRacing doesn’t have a street spec, Porsche nine 11 that I can just rip around there, but it does a pretty darn good job. Yeah, the graphics of some of the peripherals aren’t great.

And the people look like they’re from a Nintendo 64 game. The drivability of the [00:32:00] track, the aggressiveness of those curbs that are there, they’re pretty spot on. In my opinion. Sunset is the Bumpiest corner in the world in real life, and it’s the Bumpiest corner in I racing too. Most of my experience at Sebring is in a hypercar or a hybrid, so it’s a little bit of a different world just in that sense.

Personally, I was able to jump in sim and know my lines and know my breaking points and know things like that just based on that experience I had, you know, 10, 15 years ago.

Crew Chief Eric: The upside is when it comes to training guys that have been on simulators, you know where the turns go, so I don’t have to tell you that the next turn at v i R is a left to be like, wait, it’s a left.

It’s very different when you’re training people that haven’t had the lapse, but the one thing. I’ve experienced with people that have come from simulators, they learn quickly, but when they get out of the car, they’re like, that’s nothing like what I expected. That’s usually the response I get from my students that have never really driven on track before.

Brockton Packard: I try not to take everything [00:33:00] literal when I’m driving the race car, I try to know the line in a little bit of the tendency with the physics engine, but I know it’s not real and I know that air moves how air wants to move, and it’s not something that. We can code to move how it should because it’s not always the same.

So I think learning the tracks that I’ve never driven before, like I’m in Charlotte, I’ve never lived in Virginia, so I have no idea what Virginia looks like. And I don’t know what V R R looks like. But I ran a hybrid race at V I R a month ago, so I know what the track looks like and I know how to drive it, and I know that I should be set up on the wide side coming and turned one so I can get a good run into turn.

Two. It’s knowing the feel of the track so you can go on there and not have that. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh. I’m driving a race car on a racetrack, driving a race car. Don’t mess up. Don’t mess up. You can be confident in having the mental stability so you can work on the physical.

Crew Chief Eric: There’s a give and take even in real life, you know?

Absolutely. I wish I could do what I do in the sim world, but you can’t. Right. Some of it is, it feels like cheating physics and whatnot. That [00:34:00] actually begs the question too, about the discipline of motorsport you’re focused on in the sim world, and I think it’s an overarching conversation about the most popular.

Disciplines inside of iRacing and that I still think is asphalt oval. Right?

Brockton Packard: Absolutely. The NASCAR and the short track community in iRacing is one of the biggest in any form of motor sport because it is so limited everywhere else. You’ve got the NASCAR heat games in the NASCAR ignition games that are coming out, which are widely.

Dislike. I hate to say it because I know people spend time and money and work on those as their blood, sweat, and tears, but they’re not what they used to be. And people are starting to see that and starting to search for something to really figure out what they want. If they want to go into a sports car realm or a dirt realm, or stay in the asphalt realm.

So I think they come to iRacing, they see that we’ve got almost every generation of stock car from the 1987. For [00:35:00] Thunderbird Buick and Chevy Impala, or it’s the Monte Carlo, excuse me. And then you’ve got the old cots, the gen sixes, and now the new next gens with the Xfinity Series, the Cup Series and the Trek series.

And then you’ve got all of your short track stuff, your legends cars, your silver crown cars, street stocks. We’ve got all those different. Professions of oval racing, people start to go to that because, oh, it’s the car I run in real life. At the track I run in real life. Let me go work on that. I know there’s a few guys that are going to Southern national that are running southern national with this new late model car because they can’t get practice time at the actual track.

There’s a lot of exclusivity with the oval racing side of it because we can’t really go anywhere else. A c C doesn’t have any oval stuff. There’s no outlet for us. So we all come here and we all have fun and bash and wreck and flip and all that kind stuff, but we also take it very seriously. The money’s good in here.

If you can get [00:36:00] to the top 40 in the NASCAR side, you can join the Coke series, which has a hundred thousand dollars prize pool at the end of the season, plus you get a. Big trophy at the end of it too, so that’s pretty good. It all comes down to how much time are you willing to spend on it, and how much time do you have to spend on it, because it takes a lot to get to that point, and it takes a lot of effort to get good enough to get to there.

Mountain Man Dan: For people that are looking to get into it, is there a used market out there? Would you tell them to potentially go buy something used or, or do you recommend buy a new right off the bat?

Brockton Packard: Especially if you haven’t done it before? So iRacing can be a monthly, yearly, bimonthly try monthly subscription if you’re gonna try iRacing.

You buy the $13 monthly subscription for one month. You go out to your retro gaming store or eBay or something and you find a cheap wheel that has some force feedback with pedals, and you slap that sucker on your desk and you download Ira saying, You got a 50 to $60 piece right there and you understand what you like [00:37:00] about it, what you don’t like about it, and then figure out if that’s something you want to continue doing and continue working on throughout your, I guess, career we can call it.

But I wouldn’t go full bore and just dump a bunch of money into it. Money doesn’t necessarily buy performance and buys comfort in this realm. Of course, there’s things that will help you. A direct drive wheel helps, and the vibrating pedals help being able to catch things that you wouldn’t be able to do.

Through your head and headset and through looking at the screen, but it’s not something you need right off the bat. That’s something you need after you’ve perfected your racecraft, your lines and kind of understand the race engine that you are using.

Crew Chief Eric: If you don’t get totally frustrated and cancel your subscription before that point.

Yes, exactly. There’s another side to this. It’s kind of an interesting side. When you look at eSports as a whole, sort of, as a, either a profession or even as a sport itself, there’s an actual debate as to whether or not sim racing is even considered an eSport. Because motor sports, a lot of times is not considered a [00:38:00] sport.

So when you look at the list of the top 10 in 2023, eSports, I’ll read off the titles here. None of these, in my opinion, are sports at all. We’ve got things like League of Legends, go to two Counterstrike, Fortnite, call of Duty, Overwatch, Valant, rainbow Six, rocket League, and Hearthstone. Nowhere on that list.

Is iRacing. Why?

Brockton Packard: You know, it’s such an interesting question because just in our experience at Niner eSports, our iRacing program is our youngest program. We didn’t have an iRacing program up until November, so this is all a very new program for them, and it was a new world that they didn’t know about.

Most of that is just look at your mainstream media. It’s Call of Duty, Valant League of Legends. Those are your more widespread known titles. There’s skill involved with it, but it’s less of a learning curve and more of a point and shoot, or there’s strategies that everybody knows. I racing or sim racing in general is something that takes time to [00:39:00] understand and time to learn, rather than picking up a controller and playing through a couple levels and then knowing what to do.

I racing and sim racing in general is a hundred percent in eSport. We’ve got some of the bigger competitions. We’ve got some of the bigger traction when it comes to what we’re aligned with. But I will say, I don’t know if you guys saw this, so they came out with this E Olympics and there’s nowhere on there.

Is any of those 10 games? There’s no League of Legends, no Call of Duty, no Overwatch, no Valant. In those E Olympics. Well, why is that? Because they’re doing all these sports titles. Of course, they have to choose Grand Primo as the SIM racing representative, which I was a grand tri kid growing up, raced a lot of that, and I love the titles, but they’re not as good as a set of Corsa or.

I racing. So they could have probably done something with iRacing or a set of Corsa, but we’re represented in the e Olympics, which, who knows how that’s gonna be? So I think we’re getting more and more recognition [00:40:00] and representation. Covid helped, wasn’t a great point in our history, but it definitely helped a lot in the sim racing and the eSports world in general.

So hopefully one day we’ll be up there. But I think there’s just such a saturation of those 10 games. You can say, call of Duty and everybody’s played a Call of Duty game. You can talk about that with a bunch of people. So I think it’s just there’s so much saturation of those. Titles out there that it’s hard for other titles like iRacing or a set of Corsa to kind of catch up.

Crew Chief Eric: So you mentioned something earlier about getting ready for these races, and we had this conversation back in season one when we had Tucker Boner, who most people may know and recognized from Twitch as Jericho. He was also on chasing the crown on Amazon Prime. And so we discussed this with him and he said, you know, going into eSports and doing this professionally, there’s a lot of.

Actual conditioning and training that has to occur. So what do you do to physically prepare for some of these races?

Brockton Packard: I mean, a lot of people will say that there’s [00:41:00] 90% mental and a 10% physical attribute to sim racing because you are staring at a screen knowing that there’s no physical thing that’s going to happen to you.

But you know that if you do one wrong move, your entire race is over. Physically, we just run laps constantly. I’ll use, for example, our Daytona 24. Attempt that we did for about a month and a half. I did nothing but the Daytona Road course in that B M W V eight hybrid. That was the only thing I ran for a month and a half on iRacing, putting in laps and laps and laps, understanding the car, understanding the track, understanding how to deal with traffic, both getting past and passing slower cars.

Physical side of it is just muscle memory. When you’re driving a race that long, or any race, you don’t wanna second guess yourself. When you fly into the bus stop or when you go around turn one at Bristol, you don’t wanna second guess yourself. That should be second nature. You want to be able to think about what the person in front of you is gonna do, what the person behind you is gonna do, where are you on the track, that kind of thing.

[00:42:00] So physically it’s. Learning the track, learning the car, being comfortable enough that you can put yourself in some sticky situations. Kind of that mental aspect is just putting yourself in those mentally strenuous places. When you’re three wide, on the bottom in Talladega, or three wide in the middle at Talladega, you’ve gotta put yourself in some really crappy positions and you’ve gotta make a lot of mistakes.

To be able to trust yourself enough to go three wide, go four wide, go around the outside, do random moves that would help you win races and stuff like that. And that’s something that comes with time. I’m not even going to lie to you guys. I’m not there yet. I second guess myself all the time because I’ve done some bonehead moves and wrecked a bunch of people.

There’s always that doubt. You’ve kind of gotta quiet those inner voices of doubt and be able to lock in and just focus solely on your car and understand that you can only control your race. So most of it’s a mental training, I guess reaction times. [00:43:00] Just throw a ball around every once in a while. I don’t know it.

It’s sim racing.

Crew Chief Eric: Well that’s funny you say that. ’cause back in our day, us old guys here, Dan and I remember, you know the land parties and we would get our case of balls guana, remember that stuff? So there’s a whole nutrition aspect. Back to this too. And there’s a lot of things you have to look at in terms of repetitive stress conditions, fatigue, you know, mental duress, things like that.

And so what do you do again, on that physical side? How do you change your diet? Do you work out, you know, how do you get prepped for these longer races?

Brockton Packard: I try to work out every other couple of days. I’m not a huge gym rat. I’m five foot four and 125 pounds, so there’s not much of me to go around in the physical side of the world.

Go to the gym, lift some weights. Your arms are gonna be just dead by the time you’re done with a couple hours of racing. For our Daytona 24, I ran the second most out of our six drivers, and I ran four and a half hours. I [00:44:00] think by the end of that, my legs were shot, my arms were shot, and I didn’t have everything turned up.

I had everything kind of turned down to where I could be comfortable for that long. So just putting yourself in an uncomfortable position, like holding a. 10 pound dumbbell in front of your face for five, 10 minutes. Just having that endurance, not necessarily raw strength, but the endurance, getting as much sleep as you can.

The team that we ran with, their team captain and I stayed up basically 12 hours each for that. We didn’t take care of ourselves as well as we should have, but being able to just push through the tiredness, not make those mistakes, and just. Be able to understand what your body is telling you and what you can do, because if you push yourself too hard, you’re gonna start making mistakes and you’re gonna cost not only yourself, but the team, an opportunity

Crew Chief Eric: monster or Red Bull,

Brockton Packard: neither.

Actually, I’m not a energy drink guy. I try to stay away from the caffeine just because my body decides that it’s gonna go on a huge spike. Like five minutes and then it just plummets within 10 or [00:45:00] 15. So it doesn’t work for me. I try to just stay hydrated. Gatorade, right now we’re drinking the body armors.

Those are pretty good, but I can’t drink a lot of them. Basically two bottles of water and a Gatorade for when I’m not in the car. And then I’ll have a, a water bottle with a hole poked in it when I’m driving.

Crew Chief Eric: If we wanted to get somebody convinced to come over to SIM racing, to get away from what we call the Sim Cs, like Forza and Grant Smo and some of the other games, how would you convince someone to become part of eSports?

How would you tell them that it’s just not another video game?

Brockton Packard: I wouldn’t say a darn thing. I’d put ’em in front of the wheel and tell ’em to. Try and drive it. That was the fun thing for me. We announced the iRacing team to the Niner eSports programs and the U N C C, and then we had a LAN event two or three weeks after, and I brought my sim ring and my computer and all of that.

I brought everything there. I ran laps and people said, oh, I could do that. And I said, really? Go right ahead. And every person that said, I could do that, couldn’t do it. Proving somebody that it’s more than [00:46:00] just an arcade game, that it’s harder than you think. The guys that go, oh, I played Forza and I played Grand Tribo, that’s great, but you haven’t run a simulator yet, so come on down, sit in the sim and experience it.

If it’s something that you laugh at or have fun with, then you’re hooked from there. Explaining it is such a hard thing to do when somebody already has it in their head that it’s just a video game, that they don’t understand that these are broadcasted events, that there’s leagues, that there’s cash prizes involved with this.

They have to do it themselves. They have to try it, and I’m not saying going out and spending that money or maybe spend a small amount of money for it by yourself. The Daytona and the arc of car, if you’re a NASCAR person and run that. Those are great cars to run on that track. 13 bucks, run it and see if you like it.

If you’re in the Charlotte area, go to the Hall of Fame race, iRacing at the Hall of Fame. They give you that opportunity. It shows you what iRacing can be. You can’t explain it because it’s something that is so skewed in the [00:47:00] minds of people that don’t know about it. It’s just fake news basically. When somebody who hasn’t tried it talks about it, so.

Go ahead and try it first. See what you can do with it. See if you like it, and if not, then it’s not for you. But if you do like it, then you found yourself a fun little sim to run on.

Mountain Man Dan: When we spoke to you originally and you sent over the link for the Twitch stream that you guys had for the race just prior to that, I went on watched it and with the exception of the graphics being obviously, you know, very video game, it was seriously like sitting in front of the tv.

Watching a NASCAR race on a Sunday with the commentating, with watching the different views from the different cars and stuff. I was very impressed with how well that was done.

Brockton Packard: Everybody on iRacing tries to treat it as more than just a game. If you say it’s just a video game, bro, on the iRacing chats, people will start light you up because it’s not a video game.

Never say it’s a video game to somebody who is a hardcore I racer. ’cause you will never speak to them again because it [00:48:00] is not a video game, it’s a simulator. As a generalization, it is a video game. It’s something that you play on a PC with video game materials, but it’s a tool to help simulations and stuff like that.

But we try to keep it as professional as we can, especially on the broadcasts and things like that. So having that professionalism, that TV feel like you’re watching a late model stock race on a Wednesday night. That’s what we’re trying to do.

Mountain Man Dan: So for the podcast that you co-host, uh, press Box Motorsport Podcast, what’s it about?

How often do you guys release it? Why should people tune into it? And are there any upcoming spoilers?

Brockton Packard: The Press Box Motorsports Podcast is a podcast that is hosted by Charles Wooten and I from L S R tv. We mostly talk about the sim racing world and we dabble a little bit in the real racing. People should tune in to see the news and the.

Different leagues and events that not only L S RT V is hosting, but also iRacing itself, myself, being not only a team manager [00:49:00] but also a racer will, you’ll get inside scoops on different types of leagues that my team is running in. And then also some special guests. I think our next guest, uh, is a Coke series driver, so a professional driver who got his first win on Daytona, so be on the lookout for that one.

He is also a team member of the Niner eSports program as well. So we do a thing or two about the real world stuff, but it’s mainly a sim racing podcast.

Mountain Man Dan: Well, speaking of which, what is next for Brock?

Brockton Packard: Yeah, so it, it’s funny you guys ask that because I’m actually going up to the Jordan Anderson racing shop up in Statesville, which we’ve been in talks for a few weeks now, and most likely working with them, working with their 31 Xfinity program.

Which is another reason why Chevy’s, my favorite manufacturer, being able to work with them. I’ll, I’ll take more of an engineer role, higher data, keeping everything sorted at the shop, uh, making sure everybody knows their inventory and things like that. And then working closely with their crew chief for the [00:50:00] 31 on Race notes setups throughout the weekend.

Crew Chief Eric: Well. Brock, it’s come to that point in the show where we’ve run out of plans and we need to know if you have any shout outs, promotions, or anything else you’d like to share that we didn’t cover.

Brockton Packard: Yeah, of course. I’ve got a shout out my mom and dad for always supporting me and getting me to where I am now.

You can find me at Brockton P on Instagram. On Twitter, it’s Brockton Packard, and then on Twitch, it’s Brockton P 24 for all the weekly racing and stuff that we do. Follow Niner eSports on Twitter, Instagram. Facebook watch NASCAR on Sundays, Fridays, and Saturdays.

Mountain Man Dan: If you want to keep up with Brock and all of his progress, be sure to follow him, as you mentioned on social media at Brockton P on Instagram, or at Brockton Packard on Twitter.

Tune into his podcast, the Press Box Motorsports podcast everywhere. You listen to all your podcasts or chat with him on the GTM Discord server and tune into his races via live streams at Twitch tv slash. Brockton P [00:51:00] 24.

Crew Chief Eric: Brock, I can’t thank you enough for coming on Break Fixx, having a healthy debate about sim racing and eSports, but also sharing your plans for your future with us.

They’re very well thought out and we wish you the best of luck. And I hope one day you look back like Hannibal from the A team with the cigar and your mouth and say,

Mountain Man Dan: I love ’em when a plan comes together.

Brockton Packard: Hey, man, it’s, it’s been a great time and I’m so thankful for you guys having me on here and yeah, it was super fun, guys.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s the plan, and he’s sticking to it. Yeah,

Brockton Packard: man, I, I got a plan for everything.

Crew Chief Eric: That’s right listeners. If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to check out our Patreon for a follow on pit stop mini episode. So check that out on www.patreon.com/gt motorsports and get access to all sorts of behind the scenes content from this episode and more.

Crew Chief Brad: If you [00:52:00] like what you’ve heard and want to learn more about G T M, be sure to check us out on www.gt motorsports.org.

You can also find us on Instagram at grantor Motorsports. Also, if you want to get involved or have suggestions for future shows, you can call or text us at (202) 630-1770 or send us an email at crew chief@gtmotorsports.org. We’d love to hear from you.

Crew Chief Eric: Hey everybody, crew Chief Eric here. We really hope you enjoyed this episode of Break Fix, and we wanted to remind you that G T M remains a no annual fees organization, and our goal is to continue to bring you quality episodes like this one at no charge.

As a loyal listener, please consider subscribing to our Patreon for bonus and behind the scenes content, extra goodies and G T M swag. For as little as $2 and 50 cents a month, you can keep our developers, writers, editors, casters, and other volunteers fed on their strict diet of fig Newton’s, gummy bears, and monster.[00:53:00]

Consider signing up for Patreon today at www.patreon.com/gt motorsports. And remember, without fans, supporters, and members like you, none of this would be possible.

Skip ahead if you must… Here’s the highlights from this episode you might be most interested in and their corresponding time stamps.

• 00:00 Guest Introduction: Brockton Packard
• 01:40 Brockton’s Early Motorsports Influences
• 02:46 Hands-On Experience with Jeeps
• 04:20 First Encounters with Racing
• 06:40 Choosing a Path in Motorsports
• 13:54 Internship with RBR Team
• 20:54 University Life and Future Plans
• 23:17 Monster Truck Memories
• 26:00 Motorsports Involvement and NASCAR Hall of Fame
• 26:55 The Rise of Sim Racing During COVID-19
• 27:58 iRacing: The Ultimate Sim Racing Experience
• 29:37 Real vs. Sim: The Driving Experience
• 34:11 The Popularity of Asphalt Oval Racing in iRacing
• 36:21 Getting Started with iRacing
• 37:45 Sim Racing as an eSport
• 40:54 Physical and Mental Preparation for Sim Racing
• 45:16 Convincing Others to Try Sim Racing
• 48:25 The Press Box Motorsports Podcast
• 49:25 Future Plans and Shoutouts
• 51:40 Conclusion and Listener Engagement

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Follow Brock’s races on Twitch

If you want to keep up with Brock and all his progress be sure to follow him on social @Brocktonp on instagram and @Brocktonpackard on twitter. Tune into his podcast: The Pressbox Motorsports Podcast everywhere you listen and you can even chat with him on our GTM Discord Server and tune-into his races via livestreams on Twitch at twitch.tv/Brocktonp24