I’m John DiCostanzo, and I’m thrilled to bring racing simulator technology and game immersion with Apex Racing Lab, the Triangle’s first sim racing studio! You can read all about what the sim racing experience entails here, but here is how I got my start in racing, which has led to starting this business.
Like most of my generation, I was fascinated by motorsports and video games. The technology we have today was just a dream in someone’s head, and so the motorsports industry almost exclusively meant driving an actual racecar.
After attending a racing school, I was hooked. One of my keepsake helmets, autographed by a famous racecar driver, sits behind my desk in my home office. But racing is a super expensive hobby, and so it wasn’t until 2015 when I could buy my first supercar – a Dodge Viper, which is when my interest in racing started to become a reality.
Two years later, in 2017, I begin tracking my car. Not for competition driving, but for HPDE (high performance driving education), where you race against your own stopwatch for personal bests. I loved that, though there are other cars on the track, I wasn’t racing them.