Forest Park resident Adam Garza, a student at Triton College in River Grove, turned his passion for motorsport racing simulation into a recent internship representing esports and eNASCAR across the country. A lifelong NASCAR fan, Garza hopes to someday take his online racing to actual racetracks.
Garza is a 21-year-old Mass Communication and Multimedia student at Triton College and will continue his communications studies at the University of Illinois Chicago come January. He got into racing simulations after graduating high school and, from May to October this year, completed an internship where he attended NASCAR races and shared his personal experience with eNASCAR and iRacing.
iRacing is NASCAR’s official simulation racing partner — a subscription-based, online tool that professional drivers use to practice on real-world tracks.
“If you’re a sim racer, you race on iRacing. That’s just the stereotype,” Garza said. “I raced against real-life drivers that I became friends with.”
After his first year-and-a-half using iRacing, Garza was in the top 15 of about 180,000 of the platform’s users. His initial success garnered attention from the Kansas City Pioneers, a gaming and esports organization, which recruited Garza to drive the Coca Cola car to try and qualify for this year’s eNASCAR Coca Cola iRacing series…