Tiburon’s Memo Gidley has finally, after decades of trying, found a home that his racing career can count on.
Ever since 1999, his first year in big time pro racing driving a Reynard Indy car for Walker Racing in what was then the CART championship, Gidley has been essentially a journeyman driver.
In Indy cars, Grand American sports cars, the American Le Mans Series, and the IMSA WeatherTech Sportscar Championship, Gidley competed only sporadically, limited not by talent but a lack of big sponsorship dollars.
But those days are over. Gidley will race this weekend at Sonoma Raceway in two races for the SRO GT America championship, starting out Saturday at 1 PM on top of the points charts. He’ll drive the TKO Motorsports No. 101 Pinenut Ranch Radical Northwest Mercedes AMG GT3 for team owner Dave Traitel during the Fanatec GT World Challenge America weekend. Sunday’s race gets the green flag at 8:55 AM.
The opening round of the championship came March 3 at St. Petersburg, Fla., on the undercard for the season opening NTT IndyCar Series. Gidley led much of the race on the airport/street course but finished second, craftily defending that spot by getting good exits out of corners and making his Merc very wide in the braking zones.
Gidley followed that up with a win that Sunday claimed essentially at the first corner with a daring outside pass. Multiple caution periods meant there were only eight minutes of green flag racing in the 40-minute race.
“It’s not something you can really plan on, but it’s like, ‘OK, I think I can make this happen’ going into the corner, and oooh, the car is so on edge,” Gidley said of his risky maneuver. “I wasn’t quite sure if I was going to pull it off because I was carrying a little more speed than I thought going in there. But it was just enough to stay on the track and keep second place behind me.”
In the waning moments when the race finally went green for good, his skills of defending well but racing clean came through again.
The two drivers with whom Gidley shared the podium both days, Jason Daskalos and James Sofronas, are just three and 10 points behind him respectively with 16 of the 18 races to go to settle it all.
Gidley secured the ride not with suitcases of sponsorship dollars, but on the strength of a friendship that has its roots in Gidley’s darkest time: the long recovery from a massive accident at the Daytona 24 Hours in 2014 that crumpled his legs, broke vertebrae in his back, and broke an arm, leaving him bedridden with one usable limb for many months.
Traitel saw that accident as it happened.
“How I met Memo is by a television. What I mean by that is my friend Buzz Curad called me one Saturday morning — he calls me ‘Mr. Straight-line’ because I’m a drag racing guy and he’s a road racing guy,” Traitel said.
Curad told him to turn on the Daytona 24-Hour race and Traitel did, his first real exposure to that side of the sport. Then he saw Memo’s accident.
“I’m watching it very intently, watching the cars go round and whatnot, and I saw this horrific accident. And I called my friend Buzz back and said, ‘I hope everybody’s OK. That was a hell of a wreck.’”
Fast forward a year and a half. Traitel wanted to try racing wickedly fast go-karts, and he connected with Marty Moran of Trackmagic, the brand of karts Gidley has driven for decades.
Traitel asked for some help in learning the craft, and Moran sent Gidley, who showed up in essentially a partial body cast with metal braces.
The bond they created with Memo as driving coach also made Traitel aware that his friend wasn’t getting much traction trying to pry his way back into the sport.
“Memo was hurting. He was doing everything he could to get back into the seat because this is his life. This is Memo,” Traitel said. “So the karting is so much fun and we’re having a great time. So me being a businessman I’m thinking, ‘Gosh, I’d really like to get Memo involved in racing again,’ because I’ve noticed that all the teams out there weren’t contacting him.
“So I decided, ‘Hey Mem, lets get a little race car. I want to put my name on the side and promote our product.’ We build high-performance suspension components for race cars,” Traitel said.
For Gidley, the gratitude runs deep.
“I met Dave when I was two years into my three-year recovery, so I wasn’t able to drive (a race car) at that point,” Gidley recalled. “But I was go-karting with him and we became friends. And as soon as I was cleared to drive, he said, ‘Hey OK, I’ve got something for you to drive.’ I showed up at the track and there was a Porsche GT3R, an awesome GT car.
“So he put me back into a car initially, got me back onto the track,” Gidley said.
He got a few rides here and there, most notably an LMP3 drive with AL Autosport in some races of the IMSA Prototype Challenge series last year.
After that series finished up, Traitel had a Bentley Continental GT3 and put Memo in it for the HSR Classic at Daytona Nov. 6. With support from Flying Lizard Racing based at Sonoma Raceway, Gidley finished 6th.
This weekend Traitel will make his pro-racing debut in that car while Gidley will be further up the grid in the Mercedes trying to hold onto the points lead.
The relationship that the pair have fostered brings an unusual dynamic, one where the friendship rises above the team owner roll when needed. If Gidley isn’t going as fast as he feels he ought to, Traitel is there to keep Gidley’s buoyant nature intact.
“As a race car driver, you’re always looking for tenths of a second. You always want to be faster than you are,” Gidley said. “When you’re not making headway, you’ve got to keep your spirits up.”
A driver can’t always think that way when the helmet first comes off.
“And then Dave comes up, and regardless of lap times or anything else, he says, ‘You know Memes, I just really like watching you drive out on the racetrack,’” Gidley said. And that moment meant a lot to him. “It wasn’t like, ‘Hey, how were your lap times?’ or ‘It’s alright. We’ll get ‘em.’
“How can you be disappointed in what you’re doing when someone says something like that?” Gidley said. “Dave has turned into a heck of a friend, and someone I’ll be around for ever and ever,”
This weekend’s Fanatec GT World Challenge America powered by AWS at Sonoma Raceway also includes races each day for GT World Challenge, TC America, Pirelli GT4 America, and Toyota GR Cup. Gates open each day at 8 AM with tickets each day at $30 and a weekend pass at $50. Kids 12 and under are free.
