In November we showed up to a building that was way nicer than where we usually park the trailer.
The venue was The Pinery at the Hill. The dress code was, for me, "the cleanest button-up I could find with no engine oil on the cuffs." The event was called Spark the Springs — a competition where Colorado Springs businesses pitched for a $50,000 grant in front of judges who fund actual companies for a living.
I'll save you the suspense: we won.
LeadFoot Racing is now the inaugural winner of the Spark the Springs grant. And honestly? That sentence still feels strange to type. So I want to walk through what happened, why a race team was in that room in the first place, and what this win actually changes.
The #121 set up at The Pinery for Spark the Springs night.
Why a race team was pitching against businesses
A reasonable question.
Spark the Springs isn't a racing event. It's a Colorado Springs business competition — the kind of room where you usually find founders of breweries, software startups, family-run shops, manufacturers. The kind of room where people talk about EBITDA without irony.
We belong in that room because — and I'll say this plainly — LeadFoot Racing is a business.
We're a race team, sure. We run NASA Spec Miata. We're at most of the major Rocky Mountain rounds. But the rest of the time we're operating like every other small business in this city: invoicing sponsors, building products, running an email list, signing contracts, paying taxes, keeping the lights on. The car is the visible piece. The business is the engine.
When a friend pointed us at Spark the Springs, my first reaction was honestly to laugh it off. We're a race team — we pitch sponsors, not grant judges. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. The grant criteria weren't "be a software startup." They were "show us a real business doing real work in this community."
That's a category we belong in.
What the night actually looked like
We didn't go in cold. We trailered the #121 Spec Miata out to The Pinery, set it up under the porte-cochère, and brought our sim rig so anyone in attendance could climb in and put themselves behind the wheel.
The venue. Not our usual paddock.
That decision mattered. A lot of pitches at events like this are slide decks and confident voices. Ours was a $25K race car parked twenty feet from the judges and a working sim that let people feel what we do. Hard to scroll past.
The sim rig was a magnet. Everyone wanted three laps before they'd talk.
People rotated through all night. Some of them had never been within ten feet of a real race car. A few of them are now on our newsletter. One of them, by the end of the night, was telling me about a sponsor lead I should chase down.
That's the part I want to underline: the room treated us like a real business, because we showed up like one.
What the grant actually changes
A $50,000 grant doesn't make a race team rich. Anyone who's bought a set of slicks and a fresh brake pad set knows where that money goes.
What it changes is everything we can plan around for the next twelve months:
- Operating budget for a full NASA Rocky Mountain season — without scraping at the end of every month
- Investment into the parts of the business that compound — the website, the email list, the products, the training tools we're building for other racers
- A real safety net — so a blown motor or a contact-incident at HPR doesn't end the season
And maybe more important than the dollars: a credibility line we didn't have before.
When I sit down with a potential sponsor now, "inaugural winner of a $50,000 competitive business grant" is in the deck. Not because it impresses racers — it impresses sponsors. It tells the finance director at a company we're pitching that we've already been vetted by people whose job is to vet businesses.
That's a different conversation than "please give a race team some money."
What this doesn't change
We're still the same team. Same shop, same crew, same cars, same approach.
We're still going to lose races we should win, and win races we had no business winning. We're still going to spend Saturday nights at HPR debating tire pressures with the same passion as a Tuesday evening at the kitchen table. We're still going to send these posts out, run the newsletter, build the products, and treat every sponsor like the first one ever said yes to us.
What this grant proves — to us, to our sponsors, to anyone watching — is that the LeadFoot Racing approach is being noticed by people outside racing. That a small race team building like a real business is a thing that can win in a room full of breweries and software founders.
We didn't win because we have the fastest car. We won because we made a real case for what a modern grassroots race team can be.
To Spark the Springs, and to everyone who showed up
Thank you. Truly.
To the judges who looked at a Spec Miata under a chandelier and didn't laugh us out of the room. To the attendees who climbed into the sim and let us tell our story. To the Pinery for hosting an event where a race car was welcome. To every sponsor who showed up before this grant existed and believed in what we were building — we wouldn't have been there to win without you.
We've got a lot of work ahead. A full 2026 season. New products launching. A second car in the paddock. A growing newsletter. Plenty of ways to spend this grant and plenty of ways to embarrass it.
Watch us.
Do you believe?
