In 2010 I packed up my life in Australia and went backpacking, like lots of Australians do. But being a car guy mine was a little different.
Instead of running with the bulls i went driving with them. Instead of going to churches and museums. I went to racetracks and car factories.
I wanted to drive around the world, chase racetracks, and stand in the middle of car meets I had only ever read about.
For a while I lived it. I also slept in my car more nights than I can count. What I did not know then was that the real project was not the trip. It was the idea the trip would hand me, and it would take me the next fifteen years and two failures to finally get it right.
Back When the Internet Was Useless
People forget how hard this used to be. In 2010 Instagram had only just launched, and a Google search was basically a list of blue links and a prayer.
Finding a car meet in a city you had never been to was proper detective work. You had to know which forum to join, which Facebook page to follow, or the name of the one guy who quietly organised everything. Miss any of those and the event may as well not exist.
I burned hours I did not have hunting for track days and gatherings. Sitting in a car park in a strange country, phone nearly dead, trying to work out if anything was happening that weekend, I kept thinking the same thing. There has to be a better way than this.
https://web.archive.org/
One Calendar to Rule Them All
The fix was almost too simple. One calendar. Every meet, every track day, every event, all in one place, so nobody else had to waste the hours I just had.
That was the spark, and Drivesome was born. The name came from a simple feeling, that driving is awesome, but people kept telling me it did not explain what the site actually did.
So I renamed it Find Grip. A car events calendar, plain and honest about the job it was doing. It worked, and I was proud of it, even as I typed in event after event from the front seat of my car somewhere on the other side of the planet.
Australia Crushes the Dreamers
Then the money ran out. It always does. I headed back to Australia and went straight into car audio work, telling myself I could keep the site alive on the side.
I was wrong. Australia has a way of grinding the dreamers down. There was no cash for the kind of cars I loved, and I was a one-man band up against billion-dollar corporations with real budgets.
Find Grip slowly ran out of fuel and coasted to a stop. First death. I told myself that was that.
https://web.archive.org/
https://web.archive.org/
Two More False Starts
It was not that. I still needed to be near cars, even without a cool one in the garage or the time to drive it. So I brought the Drivesome name back, this time as a news and blog project, quick and fun, cars served up in bite-sized hits.
There was one small problem. I cannot really write, and I certainly cannot spell. That version took its natural course, which is a polite way of saying it faded out too.
The itch never left, though. Social media was booming and still somehow useless for real car people. Instagram was pretty pictures with zero context, no way to find out what wheels were even on the car you were staring at. Forums were the opposite, deep and clever but split into a hundred brand tribes, and I loved all cars, not just one badge. I started building again, broke, not a developer, paying for help I could not afford, until once more I had to let it go.
A Little Boy and a Toy Car
Then my son arrived, and everything shifted. I watched his eyes light up the first time he got a toy car, and something in me cracked wide open.
It threw me straight back to being a kid myself, elbow deep in an engine next to my dad, learning what a spanner and a bit of patience could do. That was the feeling I had been chasing this whole time, and I wanted it back.
Not just for me. For him, and for everyone who fell in love with cars because of a person, a moment, or a machine that made their heart race.
Then Everything Clicked
So I started again, but this time I did it properly. I planned. I prepared. I taught myself how to build a genuinely good site instead of guessing my way through it.
And right as I was about to launch to the world, the ground shifted under me in the best possible way. Suddenly the gap between what I could picture and what I could actually build closed almost overnight. Everything I knew, plus tools I never had before, and the thing in my head finally became a thing on the screen.
It turned out better than I ever imagined. After sleeping in cars, going broke, and burying this dream twice, Drivesome is finally the platform I set out to build back in 2010. Same obsession, same mission, just a lot more scars and a much better plan.
Welcome to Drivesome. It took me long enough.
