JG Pasterjak
Staff Bio: JG Pasterjak
Hi. It’s me.
We were supposed to write these staff bios, but honestly if you want to know anything about me just find me at an event and ask. Once that happens, you’ll find me oversharing and find yourself questioning your decision making in short order.
If you want a laundry list, I guess I could say I’m a Florida native (even though my feet don’t accept flip-flops for some reason) who probably fell in love with motorsports at the St. Pete GP when I was like 14. My folks would drop me off downtown during race weekend—the jury is still out as to whether or not they knew there was a race going on or just wanted to leave me in another part of town for a while—and I would ogle at the 800-horsepower, tube-frame Trans Am machinery while killing my unprotected hearing with sweet V8 rumble and stunting my developing brain cells with race gas fumes. That was pretty much when I knew I wanted to be on track at some point.
Unfortunately, actually getting on track was expensive and hard. But another cool thing we had in St. Pete was this awesome independent bookstore, and they had a really sweet selection of indie magazines, including one called AutoX. It was…raw.
It was basically a glorified ‘zine, and the spider of its feel and content deeply drilled into my punk-rock brain and laid eggs all over the place. The entire spirit of the magazine was built on the ethos of “If someone tells that you can’t go racing, tell them to go screw.” And it was also clearly being produced by people who had been told by the world that you can’t just MAKE a magazine and had replied similarly.
AutoX, which would become Grassroots Motorsports a couple years later, shaped my worldview of both motorsport and media as things that were overly gatekept by folks who didn’t want to share their toys, and I knew I had to be a part of both.
In early 1990, I met Tim and Margie Suddard at an event and informed them I’d be coming to work for them. They informed me they weren’t really hiring, but that wasn’t really my concern. At the end of my spring semester in 1990, I left St. Pete and moved into a sketchy apartment in Daytona, and if you’ve been reading for any length of time, you pretty much know the rest of the story.
As for what I do, well, we’re a small company, so like most of us I wear multiple hats of various hue. My masthead title may say stuff like “Art Director,” or “Production Manager,” but I’m certainly no artist. Our designer Sarah has more raw design talent than I’ll ever even aspire to, but I’m definitely the guy you want to see when you want to make sure your magazine gets made on time and the printer has no issues with it. I’ve also been known to write a story from time to time, build a project car or two, provide driving and data services for our track testing, and whatever else needs doing to ensure that the media we produce is as fun and engaging as I hope it looks.
When I’m not doing magazine stuff—which, if we’re being honest, is most of the time—I’m doing other stuff. My wife is cool, and you’d like her. She’s a teacher and I have no idea how she manages to do that without bursting a vein in her forehead.
I’m fortunate enough to have a little bit of land—enough for a small pond but not quite enough for a shooting car—that we’ve filled with mostly feathered creatures. Currently a dozen Muscovy ducks, two Canadian geese, six white ibis and countless tinier feathered friends call our yard home and toilet. The feather fun continues inside, too, with five parrots who enjoy their own whole-ass room and multiple large aviaries around the property.
So, yeah, that’s pretty much it. Well, I’m sure there’s more, but you can come find me for that stuff.
