Punks, skateboarders, and drivers: Brian Scotto and RACER join forces

Over the past six months, F=ma has been working hard at assembling a super team that is taking shape into something closer to a multimedia car-culture collective than a traditional media company — pulling RACER, GRIDLIFE, and ID Agency under one roof alongside a new in-house creative studio helmed by a legend not only in motorsport but also in car culture and the wider creative landscape.

Each piece brings a different piece of the puzzle: RACER's editorial depth and motorsport credibility, GRIDLIFE's grassroots motorsports and festival world, ID Agency's commercial and brand-partnership muscle, and now, with the addition of Hoonigan co-founder Brian Scotto's creative studio 321 Action Action, a dedicated engine for original ideas that don't fit neatly into any one lane.

321 Action Action

The bet is that keeping these groups independent but interconnected — able to hand a project to whichever team is best suited to execute it — creates something none of them could pull off alone: a proper network of people where any good idea about cars, no matter how wild it is, can actually get made. This is a massive move that comes at the peaks of multiple decades-long creative paths intersecting at what feels like just the right time. 

Brian Scotto’s 321 Action Action 

Our new pal Brian Scotto has spent over two decades building massive cultural juggernauts that nobody asked for. Gymkhana is one such colossus. He and Ken Block and friends had some crazy ideas and started making them happen. Through sheer determination with a dash of desperation, they turned their new genre of driving films into one of the most-watched automotive franchises on the internet, a proper cultural steamroller – all without, by his own account, ever really consciously deciding to become a filmmaker.

So when Scotto announced he was joining forces with RACER and the broader F=ma family, quarterbacking his creative studio, the obvious question was: why leave something that you already built and start over?

His answer, delivered over a pleasantly long phone call from the Toronto International Film Festival – where a feature he worked as Second Unit Director on all of the driving scenes, with actor Sung Kang, had just premiered – highlighted a tight set of themes that helped me understand not only his vision for 321 Action Action but for the wider vision for RACER and the future of presenting car culture in general.

It's worth noting that 321 Action Action will continue operating under its own brand while becoming F=ma's dedicated creative production studio, supporting storytelling initiatives across RACER, GRIDLIFE, The ID Agency and commercial partners. Scotto also joins the F=ma Executive Team while remaining Chief Executive Officer and Chief Creative Officer of 321 Action Action.

Make the thing you want to see

If you’ve watched enough of Scotto’s films, podcasts, interviews, or read his articles, you know he is a doer. And in his long career of doing, he’s made a habit of going where most aren’t. Trailblazing like this often comes with timing issues because his pursuits are born from passion and urge rather than market conditions and other such killers of innovation. 

With another of his car culture Titans, Hoonigan, Scotto describes the early years as a kind of forced improvisation: a bunch of guys with "no other option than for this to work," 16-hour days, and a brand new niche with no real financial proof of concept yet.

"We were psychopaths," he says, without much romance about it. Scotto, along with the legendary Ken Block, got to work on making the things they wanted to see happen a reality. And it worked – eventually. The world wasn’t asking for it because the world didn’t even know what it was. Gymkhana was something new against the pretty uncertain backdrop of 2008. Scotto is adamant that they could never have pulled that off twice. By 2016, the Hoonigan outfit had ramped up to a lifestyle and media brand churning out hit online content daily.

It was a proper, in-the-moment capturing of car culture In Bloom. Dedication and desperation drove Hoonigan despite everything. It was DIY. It was loud, imperfect, smoky, raucous, sketchy, and brilliant. It was punk rock, and the internet loved it.

Timing is important but not always necessary 

Timing is in play again, all these years later. However, this time, timing is what pulled him toward his partnership with RACER and the broader F=ma brand. Scotto's read on the current media landscape is blunt: YouTube, in the form that built his career, has probably already had its best years. Not because it's dying – "YouTube is absolutely crushing," he says – but because the algorithm has gotten too good at its job.

This isn’t a critique. It’s an observation from someone with years in the game. In the platform's early days, he points out, almost anything could work: a six-minute action film with cars in it, a video of a cat falling into a sink, an hour-long film-school project, whatever. Today's YouTube funnels viewers toward a narrower, more predictable diet, rewarded by Shorts, hooks in the first six seconds, and relentless upload cadence. "You can't just be a filmmaker on YouTube," Scotto says. "You have to be a YouTuber on YouTube." 

321 Action Action

“I think where we have an opportunity here with RACER is to work with creators who will continue to make their YouTube stuff, who will continue to do their stuff on Instagram because that is the lifeblood of their audience, and, like, that makes sense. But we're going to give them an opportunity to go make that thing that doesn't work. On YouTube or Instagram or TikTok or, you know, Twitch or whatever it is. We're going to go help them make that program that they couldn't, you know, that they wouldn't be able to put together for a lot of reasons, maybe algorithmically, it wouldn't work.”

Back to the basics

Underneath the business strategy sits something more personal, and it's where Scotto gets most animated: a punk-rock and skateboarding upbringing he credits with almost everything about how he works. Raised in and shaped by New York's DIY punk scene, BMX culture, and golden-era skate videos, Scotto traces his entire creative instinct – the belief that you can simply figure things out, that raw and real beats polished and staged – directly back to that world. 

"I grew up in New York around punk shows, a lot of DIY stuff, warehouses and lofts in Brooklyn. There was a real DIY, hustler culture – you could just figure out how to do things, whether legal or not. I actually failed out of college because I was spending all my time trying to make a full DIY car zine, which came directly from reading zines like Maximum Rocknroll as a kid, plus graffiti and skateboarding. Those three things – graffiti, punk, skateboarding – taught me storytelling, because skateboard brands were incredible at building their own brand identity."

321 Action Action

"Moments are captured, not manufactured," was Hoonigan's unofficial mantra, he says, a line giving perfect shape to that ethos. It's also tied to complicated feelings about car culture's recent mainstreaming. We traded notes on the reflexive skepticism that comes with watching something once-underground get absorbed by luxury brands and blockbuster franchises. Scotto doesn't pretend the shift isn't good business – "every kid knows what a Nissan Skyline GT-R is now," he notes, something unthinkable in his own childhood. In fact, the move to join up with the F=ma crew is a direct response to that drive to affect the car scene, to be within the culture and have a hand in shaping it as it shifts.

Sometimes “new” means “old” 

By this point, if I’ve done my job at all here, it should go without saying that we are very excited to announce this crashing of worlds, the collision between legacy media brands and the burgeoning new world of modern car culture peeking above the horizon as it shifts and shakes and rumbles and bangs. Scotto and his creative team will usher in a new era for RACER and the larger F=ma gang. Creation and ideas are the offering. Not a forced corporate move, not people in suits signing deals in a boardroom; this is a proper shot at joining forces with another like-minded storyteller and car nut. 

The goal remains steady and rooted underneath all of this: Find and tell the best stories, executed at our highest capabilities, to die-hard racing fans and the newly car-curious and anyone and everyone in between.