On April 16, motorsports media platform RACER will host the inaugural RACER Creator Summit in downtown Long Beach, California, one day ahead of the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach. The invitation-only event will bring together automotive and motorsports creators, brand executives, and media leaders for a half-day of panels and networking focused on what is reshaping how racing culture reaches audiences.

Taro Koki, who joined RACER as President of its Creator Network in August 2024, is the architect of the initiative. A co-founder of GTChannel, an automotive creator network that reached more than two billion video views on YouTube before being acquired by SEEEN, a company listed on the London Stock Exchange, Taro came to RACER with a clear read on the divide between legacy publishers and the Creator Economy. 

“Instead of thinking about this change as competition or a threat, what I felt like we had to do was embrace this,” he says. “We have to essentially, put simply, be friends with creators.”

The Summit is the second move in a sequence. In November 2024, RACER hosted its first Creator Awards at the LA Auto Show, recognizing automotive content creators across categories and drawing roughly 250 attendees. The event generated millions of impressions across creator-driven social media. 

“The awards were a big risk for us,” Taro says. “I had to go sell a dream to our sponsors, to the LA Auto Show, to the creators that risked their reputation. If it failed, it would have been all on me.” It didn’t fail. RACER’s president, Paul Pfanner, pulled Taro aside afterward and told him: “You changed RACER today.”

Legacy Media’s Creator Problem Is an Identity Problem

The tension Taro describes is not unique to RACER. Across publishing, broadcasting, and trade media, legacy brands have struggled to position themselves relative to independent creators who serve the same audiences without the overhead.

“You’ve seen many magazines go away, and many traditional media companies fail because they were great at the beginning with online video, but the second wave of social media, they just couldn’t keep up,” Taro says. RACER survived, he argues, because of its vertical focus on motorsports. But survival is not the same as relevance.

His diagnosis: legacy brands default to seeing creators as competition when the more useful frame is collaboration. “I follow a lot of creators. I’m a creator myself, and I don’t feel like any one of my peers is competition or a threat anymore,” he says. 

The question RACER faced was how to make that stance credible to creators who had no particular reason to trust a 35-year-old print magazine.

The Awards Were a Proof of Concept, Not Just a Party

The Creator Awards were designed to solve a specific problem: how does a legacy brand enter the creator conversation without buying its way in through ad deals or sponsored content? Taro’s answer was recognition, offered without commercial strings attached.

“As a legacy brand, the one thing we can do is use that legacy position to hand out awards saying, ‘We understand you, we acknowledge you, we see that you’re doing really cool things,'” he explains. “There’s no business involved. It’s really an acknowledgment.”

The event also included a brief panel discussion featuring automotive creator Larry Chen and Diego Rodriguez, a former chief product officer at Intuit who teaches at Harvard. 

A post-event survey confirmed the hypothesis: recognition landed, but so did something less expected. Panel programming and in-person networking ranked second and third in what attendees valued most. “People didn’t want to leave,” Taro says. “They were coming to me, ‘Where are we going after?’ It’s like, ‘I gotta get my staff out of here.’”

The Summit’s Goals: Access, Learning, Opportunity

The RACER Creator Summit expands on that format. Taro describes its purpose in terms of what creators typically can’t get from digital channels alone.

“We want people to be able to have access to the people that they see on the screen every day,” he says. “Whether it’s a fellow creator you want to learn from, or you’re a creator doing content around a certain car and you’d love to talk to someone from Honda.” 

Honda Racing’s SVP is scheduled to appear on a panel alongside Jim Liaw, General Manager of the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach.

The programming opens with a fireside conversation between Taro and Nii A. Ahene, founder of Net Influencer, intended to give the automotive-focused audience a broader view of where the Creator Economy is heading. “Our world is all about automotive brands and automotive marketers. I want someone to bring a 30,000-foot view of what’s going on in the Creator Economy, not just auto,” Taro says. 

From there, the agenda narrows: a panel on what actually works when brands, creators, and media collaborate; a keynote from Larry Chen on his journey from automotive photographer to full-time creator; and a Motorsport 2.0 panel focused on how racing is changing for new audiences. Panels are hosted by working automotive creators, not executives.

Creator TV: The Third Step in the Sequence

Taro describes RACER’s creator strategy as a three-stage progression. Stage one was the awards: get into the conversation, demonstrate that RACER recognizes and respects creators. Stage two is the Summit: create an environment where relationships and opportunities form without RACER needing to broker every transaction. Stage three is more commercial.

“Once we identify the creators we want to work with, and the ones who feel they want to work with us, we can start really building the business for them and for us together,” he says. The immediate application is getting creator shows onto RACER Network, the company’s streaming app and connected TV channel.

Taro notes a shift he finds telling: a growing number of creators want to get onto television, even as television’s audience migrates online. “If you just want to upload a YouTube show or put a reel up on Instagram, anyone can do that. There’s no filter. But to be on a streaming app, you have to go through some process,” he says. “The good ones rise to the top.”

For RACER, that filter is a distribution opportunity. For creators, it is a credential.

The Holding Company That Broadens the Play

RACER’s expansion into the Creator Economy is now supported by a broader corporate structure. Earlier in 2026, the company became part of F=ma, a holding group that also includes the ID Agency and GRIDLIFE. 

The ID Agency is an automotive marketing and PR firm whose clients include Hot Wheels (Mattel), Firestone, Formula Drift, and Brembo. GRIDLIFE is a grassroots motorsport and music festival brand that runs roughly six events annually.

“We’re excited to be in the same family with the ID Agency because it broadens our ability,” Taro says. The practical implications include cross-promotion, shared creator relationships, and the possibility of RACER activations at GRIDLIFE events, which Taro describes as “motorsports with Burning Man,” where attendees race during the day and attend concerts at night.

Victor Carrillo, co-founder of the ID Agency, is scheduled to speak at the Summit.

What Comes After Long Beach

Taro’s ambition for the Summit is specific. He wants attendees to leave with at least one idea they hadn’t considered before. “When you encounter something like, have you ever heard of Creator TV? Oh, I never thought about having my stuff on TV. That would stick,” he says. “That would be something valuable they can bring home.”

The broader arc Taro is building toward is a version of motorsports media that does not force a choice between legacy credibility and digital reach. That requires RACER to become genuinely useful to creators, not just celebratory of them. “If you’re only serving yourself, it’s not going to be sustainable,” he says. “If you just create this environment where people can learn and build opportunities and access, you’re providing something that can’t be measured. But you’re providing real value to the ecosystem.”

The RACER Creator Awards will return in November 2026, this time in a full theater at the LA Auto Show. The Summit, now bookmarking the spring, gives the annual cycle a shape. Whether that shape holds depends on whether Long Beach delivers what the awards suggested is possible: a room that does not want to empty.

To find out more or request an invitation, contact: summit@racer.com.