Marek Zmysłowski Blog

Polish Endurance GT4 Champions. I still can’t believe it. 

This weekend the fifth and final round of the Polish Racing Car Championship wrapped up, and together with Rataj Racing we won the Polish Championship title in the GT4 class.

Two years ago I was in a very different place. I was so deep into work that I was burning out again. Stress was eating me alive, and it wasn’t just hurting my business. It was affecting the kind of husband, son and brother I was. My performance coach told me straight: go back to your passion. That’s when I realized it had been motorsport my whole life. I’d just never done anything about it.

I met Michał and told him: I want to drive. But not just for the sake of fun driving. Teach me how to win.

It turns out racing isn’t just about driving fast. I had to work on my conditioning and heart rate, the same way you’d train for a marathon. I had to learn precision, analysis and attention to detail, because races are won or lost by a tenth of a second. Those were exactly my biggest weaknesses. In business I always acted on gut and intuition and never cared much for details or data. Intuition is great, but to perform at the highest level you have to combine it with analysis. The track taught me that, and I already see how it’s changed me as an entrepreneur.

I also found something I’d been missing: relationships. I’d become pretty isolated. Here I found a real motorsport family I spend amazing time with and laugh with constantly. I’ve met incredibly positive, smart people who are doing great things in life. Old friendships came back. Close relationships and business ones, with people of real quality.

The motivation to work on myself spilled into everything else. I quit stimulants, I’m healthier, and I handle stress far better. And then there’s the adrenaline. Fighting wheel to wheel, total focus, that flow state where there’s no time to think and everything happens automatically. And that feeling when you win.

This is a team sport, exactly like business. A great driver won’t achieve anything without a properly set-up car, and a great car won’t win with a bad driver. When you’re doing 270 km/h and about to brake into a corner, you have to trust your mechanics 100% that the brakes are there, and the wheels won’t come off.

Thank you to the whole Rataj Racing team and our mechanics for a car I could trust in every corner. Thank you to everyone who supported us at the track and brought homemade cake , and thank you to the other drivers and teams for the great battles.

Find true love, find passion, find God. Trust that everything else will follow, and it will.