Race car driver living the dream Series documenting Damon Surzyshyn's transition into professional racing to air on CBS Sports Network By: Taylor Allen Posted: 7:00 PM CST Thursday, Jan. 28, 2021

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This article was published 27/01/2021 (1331 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Making the jump from amateur to professional race car driving is no walk in the park.

Now imagine doing so while producing and starring in a reality series. Throw a global pandemic in the mix and Winnipegger Damon Surzyshyn’s life is made for TV.

It turns out CBS Sports Network would agree, as next month it will be airing Going Pro SRO America, a series produced by Surzyshyn’s local production company, Nomad Digital, that has spent the past two years documenting his transition into professional racing. 

Surzyshyn, 43, raced for the Subaru Motorsport USA team competing on racetracks all over the United States in the Stefan Ratel Organization (SRO) TC America Series — an American professional racing series for production-based race cars.

“It’s absolutely a dream come true,” Surzyshyn told the Free Press on Thursday.

“To take your personal passion and combine it with your professional passion and then end up with something on CBS at the end of the day, it’s very, very fulfilling… When we got the CBS deal, it was awesome. It’s like being on cloud nine right now.”

Surzyshyn honed his skills on the track and as a documentary filmmaker in Gimli in amateur ice and road racing. He created a docuseries in 2018 called Grassroots Racing where he produced 30 episodes on what goes on behind the scenes in local racing. It started as a YouTube series and eventually got picked up by MAVTV Motorsports Network and several American stations.

Surzyshyn saw the potential to take things a step further, so, he reached out to some SRO America teams to see if they’d be interested in partnering with him to make a TV show.

The Subaru Motorsport USA team was on board, so they added Surzyshyn to the squad and he brought a camera crew from Manitoba to film his rookie season in 2019. Last February, he had a verbal deal with Motor Trend, a channel owned by Discovery Inc., to air the show. A month later, as Surzyshyn had begun filming a second season, the effects of COVID-19 were being felt worldwide and Motor Trend backed out. Luckily for Surzyshyn, the countless hours of filming didn’t go to waste as CBS Sports Network stepped up to the plate.

As much as Surzyshyn has enjoyed going pro, he’d be the first to tell you it hasn’t been an easy ride.

“I can say the guys who aren’t producing a TV show, when they’re out of the car they’re looking at their data. Their team might have a coach and they’re going through and looking at the data and going like ‘OK, I got to break a bit later here’ and really going through the details…You have to spend a lot of time, especially in your first season when you’re learning all the tracks, to figure it all out,” said Surzyshyn, who raced in a handful of races at the pro level before fully committing for the show.

“But when the guys who aren’t producing a TV show are working on that, I’m making sure we’re getting enough coverage, focusing on our story points, shooting some footage, it was too much to take on, really. The first season was so hard.”

For Surzyshyn, one of the hardest parts was racing on tracks he’s never been to before in places such as California, Florida, Portland, Wisconsin, New York and Las Vegas. Despite everything on his plate, he usually found himself in the middle of the pack in these races, which usually feature around 18 cars.

Heading into the 2020 campaign, he felt a lot more comfortable behind the wheel and navigating the show, but then the pandemic hit. He was in Florida in March as lockdown started and he hurried back home before the borders closed. Production, and racing, were on pause until July when he headed to the states for a race in Virginia.

“Once travelling started again, I was actually nervous about travelling the first time,” he said.

“But when I did, it was like ‘Oh, the plane is empty. The airport is empty. The hotel is empty. The rental car place is empty. The track has no spectators and everybody is wearing masks. OK, this is totally fine.’ I felt safer there than I did at home… The SRO is a European series, so they take this kind of stuff pretty seriously. As a European organization, you’d expect them to. They’re more in line with how Canada runs things and maybe a little less in line with how the U.S. was running things last year.”

With the late start to the season, the schedule was condensed. Surzyshyn, who has twin three-year-old girls, Rachel and Claire, with his wife Heather, would be down south for four or so days then return home to Winnipeg for two to three weeks before heading out for the next race.

“I spent the entire summer in quarantine. I would come back and be in quarantine, be out of quarantine for four or five days, then travel again and come back and quarantine,” Surzyshyn said.

“There were stretches where for six or eight weeks I was constantly in quarantine. It was challenging, but I don’t think it was any more challenging than what a lot of people were dealing with.”

He had some car troubles in 2020 that kept him off the podium, but Surzyshyn is hoping for better results this season. He isn’t sure what his schedule will look like in 2021 or if travel restrictions will slow him down, but the current plan is to return to film a third season. This year, he’ll be moving up a tier and racing for Forbush Performance, where he will be riding in the recently released Toyota GR Supra GT4.

But if the wheels do fall off, at least it’ll make things extra interesting for viewers at home.

“It does (make for good TV). I keep telling myself that I can’t really lose here,” he said.

“If the racing’s good, the racing’s good and that’s a good story. If the racing’s bad, it’s good for TV. That’s one of the perks of doing a show about racing as no matter what happens, it’s good somewhere.”

taylor.allen@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @TaylorAllen31

Taylor Allen
Reporter

Eighteen years old and still in high school, Taylor got his start with the Free Press on June 1, 2011. Well, sort of...

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