I've always liked cars ... at various times my garage has held two Camaros, a Firebird, a BMW, a 300Z and an Austin Healey ... but prior to 2000 was only a mild motorsports fan.
That year a friend gave me a diecast stock car painted up for Mountain Dew (nectar of the gods) and told me to watch the race on Sunday to see the real thing. So I watched. And I watched again the next week. And again the next week, and went out and bought the NASCAR 4 racing simulation for the PC. I soon discovered multiplayer online racing, and then leagues.
Oval racing interests gave way to road racing, and sim interests followed into sports cars, open wheelers and off roaders as well. I've tried nearly all of the sims that have been released in this time. Gotta love having a computer full of hot rods and race cars :-)
In 2005 I started hashing out the idea of Race2Play with Tim McArthur. We incorporated in 2006, and launched the R2P beta later that year. Race2Play literally is our notion of the ideal online racing organization.