Can I Drive a NASCAR?
The Scariest Things I've Ever Tried to Do
I’ve spent most of my career trying to understand the worlds that shape sports. The culture. The systems. The unwritten rules that most people never see unless they’re born into them. But every once in a while, a story forces you to step into a world you have no business being in.
This video was one of those moments.
The premise was simple: Can I Drive a NASCAR?
The reality, it turns out, was so much more layered than that.
Earlier this year, I launched my YouTube channel with a video where I attempted to hit off of an MLB pitcher — my friend Adam Ottavino, who spent 15 years playing at the highest level of baseball. I didn’t want that to be the end of my journey trying to put myself in the shoes of professional athletes, and so I started to sketch out a series called The Hardest Thing in Sports. The goal isn’t to prove a power ranking or crown a winner. It’s to explore what difficulty actually means inside different sports: physically, mentally, culturally.
Then in June, I got an email from NASCAR asking me if I wanted to come down and watch a race. I was intrigued, but when I mentioned it to my fiancé, she immediately said: Why don’t you try to drive the car instead? It felt like the natural next chapter after the Ottavino video — a chance to enter a world I admittedly knew very little about.
To my surprise, NASCAR said yes right away. And when I began searching for a driver willing to walk me through this universe and indulge all my ignorant questions, I somehow ended up connected to one of the greatest race car drivers ever: seven-time NASCAR Cup Series champion Jimmie Johnson. His team, Legacy Motor Club, didn’t just agree to keep me alive in the car, but opened their entire operation to me. The hauler. The garage. The simulator. The pit box. Everything. I was stunned.
NASCAR occupies a strange space in American culture. The outside world reduces it to left turns, loud engines, and stereotypes. The inside world knows it’s one of the most technical, unforgiving, culturally rich environments in sports. Interviewing Jimmie and watching how a team actually functions felt like the perfect entry point for this new series. Jimmie doesn’t just have the résumé — he has the emotional vocabulary to talk about fear, identity, and belonging in a way that few athletes are willing to.
I don’t want to spoil the video by getting into what I learned on the track or in the car. What I do want to give you is a window into the production process, because making this piece ended up being far more personally transformative than I expected.
Many of my friends assumed the scariest part was the speed. They’re not entirely wrong. Nothing prepares you for the moment you have to put your foot down and trust that you — and the car — won’t end up in the wall going over 100 miles per hour.
But honestly, a huge part of the fear came from the production itself.
This is easily the most ambitious project I’ve taken on since launching the channel. It was the first time I’ve ever done a multi-day shoot as:
the subject
the director
the producer
and the editor
And I was doing all of that while trying to learn how to drive stick shift for the first time. There were moments where I genuinely didn’t know which part of my brain to prioritize — the part that needed to stay alive in the car, or the part that needed to pay attention to framing, continuity, and sound.
In many ways, this project is one of the earliest manifestations of what I hoped to tackle when I launched my YouTube channel independently, turning down several journalism jobs in the process. I wanted to make things that were big, ambitious, handmade and personal — journalism that blended reporting with lived experience. Things that required me to grow in the process of making them.
This video was all of that, and I hope you enjoy it. I’m already having conversations with athletes across sports who will make up future episodes of this series, and I can’t wait to share more with you.
What I’m Enjoying Lately
I’ve been wanting to do something a little extra for everyone who follows me on Substack, so with every newsletter where I share my latest YouTube video, I also wanted to share some of what I’ve been watching and reading lately. My friends and family know me as a massive homebody, and in turn, I spend a lot of time consuming things.
I wanted to create a space where I could share some of that with you. If you’re enjoying anything in particular, please let me know.
Sentimental Value, directed by Joachim Trier:
I’d never seen a Joachim Trier movie before, so I walked in basically blind. I quickly found myself disarmed by how deeply the film understands the emotional physics of family. What struck me is that Trier doesn’t treat family relationships as puzzles to be solved or traumas to be neatly resolved, but as tender, messy, contradictory spaces filled with people who are trying, failing, and often hurting each other without meaning to.
There’s a specific emotional texture Trier nails: the feeling of being at the age where you can finally see your parents clearly — as real people. I loved how naturalistic the direction was, the way he threads emotional notes together that I don’t see often in American movies. One of my favorite movies of the year.
Pinwheel, Saturday Night Live
I always love when comedians host SNL because it usually means the cast and crew take bigger swings than in an average episode. This sketch is an amazing showcase for new cast member Jeremy Culhane.
Pop Star Academy (Netflix) & The Rise of Katseye
I recently blew through Pop Star Academy on Netflix in the wake of Katseye’s breakout and their now-iconic GAP ad. As a close observer of the K-Pop industry and a fan of BTS, I’ve been fascinated by HYBE’s attempts to become a global music powerhouse. Katseye may be their most ambitious project ever — an attempt to build an English-language group using the framework that made K-Pop the global phenomenon it’s become.
You can see HYBE experimenting in real time: blending K-Pop discipline with Western sensibilities, mixing languages, aesthetics, and creative processes to build something that isn’t just a rerun of BTS or Blackpink. And while there are realities in this pursuit that shouldn’t be romanticized, Pop Star Academy pulls back the curtain on the care, craft, ambition, and infrastructure it takes to build a group designed to compete on a global stage. It treats training not as exploitation, but as apprenticeship — something closer to conservatory culture (à la Whiplash in its extremes) than the Western caricature of K-Pop as “manufactured idols.”
Thanks for reading and for being here. I’m excited for what’s coming next.
Joon