Chris Stewart can't help laughing as he describes the improbable way he met his Gridlife co-founder, Adam Jabaay. "I was at a Jimmy Eat World concert," Stewart tells Car and Driver. "As I left the concert, I saw a white EF hatch in the parking lot. I left a note on it saying, 'If you need any parts, let me know,' and that was Adam." More than a decade after that chance encounter, Stewart and Jabaay have sold Gridlife — the grassroots motorsports series they launched in 2013 that fuses car culture, racing, and live music.
Stewart is relaxed and enthusiastic as he retraces the path from meeting Jabaay, to organizing the West Michigan Honda Meet at a local circuit in South Haven, Michigan, to eventually deciding to start Gridlife as a way to unite their respective social circles at the racetrack. The concept, he explains, was partly born out of a lifelong obsession with concert culture — specifically more than 100 Phish and Grateful Dead shows.
"If I take all the ingredients that brought me to the idea of Gridlife — I'm into car culture, I'm into tracking cars, and I'm super into music," he says. "I'm big into the festival side of music, I'm really into the band Phish, and I'm 200- or 250-plus shows into that band. And then it was, 'Wouldn't it be cool if we got all our different car communities together to the racetrack?'"
That's precisely what they did. The inaugural Gridlife event in 2014 drew hundreds of HPDE and Time Attack participants along with more than two dozen drifters, all sharing the venue with spectators and music fans there for the live performances. Years later, Stewart and Jabaay have sold Gridlife to F=ma, a new company that brings together the ID Agency and Racer Magazine.
Despite its growth — Gridlife now holds events at Road Atlanta, Laguna Seca, and Watkins Glen — the series has retained the same tight-knit core staff who built it from the beginning. That history matters to Stewart as he reassures longtime followers that the series is in the right hands.
"We've had a few different inquiries about acquisitions or partnerings or those types of things over the years," Stewart says. "But this conversation was different because it came with a different intention." Describing F=ma's approach, he added: "It's all the right people with all the right intentions."
Fears that new ownership would strip the series down to maximize short-term revenue are unfounded, according to Stewart. His first encounter with F=ma CEO James Schiefer took place at the 2025 Gridlife Midwest Fest, and it was supposed to be a brief visit — Schiefer expected to arrive at lunch and leave early afternoon. "He left at 2:00 a.m.," Stewart says. That, as far as Stewart is concerned, says everything about Schiefer's feel for what Gridlife is.
"Serendipity is the word, because the intentions all the way through this group are the right ones. We're not entering an organization that's going to try to utilize us to sell wheels or spark plugs or mufflers, right? We're joining an organization that, with Racer, ID Agency, and Gridlife, promotes community and culture."
Major expansion isn't on the immediate agenda under the new ownership structure. "[Gridlife] is community, right? So from our perspective, this gives us the opportunity to take a measured approach to things that we struggled with before."
The immediate priority is fortifying Gridlife's signature events — Stewart wants every Gridlife stop to carry the same energy as the Midwest Festival. Once that foundation is solid, he'd like to restore programs like HPDE, which faded as the small team had to focus its limited bandwidth on a growing event calendar.
Expansion can happen, Stewart says, but only when it can be done properly. When asked about adding new venues, his instinct wasn't to name tracks he personally wants to visit — it was to identify regions of the country that Gridlife doesn't yet reach. That puts places like Circuit of the Americas in Texas on the radar, even if Stewart isn't certain Gridlife is ready for a venue of that scale. "Our question at the end of the day is always, 'What does the community need?'"
