From sails to speedways, Tiburon man born to race
- Shayne Jones
- Oct 5, 2021
- 6 min read
Updated: Mar 22
Memo Gidley says growing up on a sailboat shaped him into the prize-winning racecar driver he is today.
Though oil and water don’t normally mix, the 51-year-old Tiburon resident spent most of his young life sailing up and down the Pacific Coast learning how to care for and drive his family’s floating home, and he eventually translated those skills into his passion for speed on the racetrack.
Currently, Gidley owns and operates his own sailing charter company, Sailing Memo Boat Charters, while also building his career as a professional racecar driver, this season taking the wheel of a Bentley Continental GT3 for TKO Motorsports/Flying Lizard in the inaugural GT America series, which started at Sonoma Raceway in March.
The two sports keep him busy: Last week, he took to the water to compete in the grueling Doublehanded Farallones Race — a 60-mile sprint from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Farallon Islands and back — then hopped on a plane to Florida to sweep the two-day, two-race competition at the 3.74-mile, 17-turn Sebring International Raceway. They were his first wins of the season.
Gidley got an early start. Hours after his birth in La Paz, Mexico, his parents strapped him into their 54-foot Alden cutter, the “Yo-Ho-Ho,” and set sail for the San Francisco Bay. Upon their arrival in Sausalito, his late father, Cass Gidley, anchored the boat, which would be Gidley’s part-time home until he graduated from San Rafael High School in 1987. Cass was a commercial fisherman, and he taught young Gidley how to sail.
When he wasn’t with his dad, Gidley would spend time with his mother in San Rafael, who worked as a writer and journalist. Although his family didn’t live together, he said his days were never spent alone.
“We were always doing things together,” Gidley says.
As he grew up, Gidley spent a lot of his time riding dirt bikes with his friends, including at Blackie’s Pasture on the weekends. Gidley got so into the sport that when he was 10 years old he bought his own motocross bike; he paid $500 scrounged up from painting boats and doing other odd jobs, and his dad chipped in another $500.
“I was dreaming of making that a career,” Gidley says.
Once he graduated high school, Gidley enrolled at the College of Marin, where he spent three years unsuccessfully trying to find a way he could turn his love for racing into a full-time job.
Gidley’s luck shifted when his uncle took him to his first IndyCar race at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca in Salinas.
“You see the size, the people, the teams … and you realize that this is a professional deal,” Gidley says. “But then you ask, ‘How do I get into this?’”
As he was leaving the track, Gidley picked up a brochure for a mechanic training position at the Jim Russell Racing School in Monterey, where he could work for free on entry-level race cars and then, once a month, race against the other aspiring drivers. Gidley says he returned home, sold everything he had; three months later, he had relocated to Monterey and enrolled at the school.
At the racing school, Gidley found himself drawing on the skills he had picked up in childhood. Though growing up on a sailboat wasn’t glamorous, he says, it helped him develop a staunch work ethic and determination that made him stand out in the racing world. While he and the other mechanics at the school were waiting in line to fuel their cars, Gidley would clean his car’s wheels and find other tasks to keep him busy. That caught the instructors’ attention, he says, and he was quickly promoted to a sales position at the school. Gidley continued to practice his racing skills, and although he didn’t have any prior racing knowledge or experience, he won his first race and ultimately went on to win the Jim Russell Championship.
Gidley moved back to the Bay Area to take his racing career to the next level. An instructor at the Jim Russell School roped Gidley into Track Magic go-kart racing. That caught the attention of Thrasher magazine co-founder Fausto Vitello, who began paying Gidley to race go-karts. As he climbed the ranks, Levi Strauss heir Peggy Haas funded his team’s $1 million car at the Toyota Atlantic Championship in 1997 and 1998, Gidley says.
“I’ve just been fortunate to meet the right people,” he says, noting it takes a lot of money just to break into the sport. An entry-level racing budget can be as high as $250,000, not including traveling and living expenses.
“That’s like asking a kid in Little League to come up with $250,000 just so they can start showing what they can do,” Gidley says.
Once Gidley started winning more, he racked up sponsorships and contracts that helped him fund his races. He says although the sponsors were paying him to perform well, he never really felt the added pressure that many professional athletes do.
“The competitiveness was already inside of me,” Gidley says. “To me it was just natural.”
He’s now racing grand-touring cars — a combination of performance and luxury designed for both speed and distance — in the GT America series, where the winner is the first car across the finish after 40 minutes of driving. He started the season sharing the wheel of McLaren 570S GT4 with Motorsport USA, then returned in August with Flying Lizard Motorsports, which partnered with TKO to field the Gidley-driven Bentley.
Throughout his career, Gidley has raced in the Champ Car World Series, the IndyCar Racing league series, Grand-Am Road Racing and IMSA, to name a few.
In 2014, he suffered serious injuries when his car, traveling more than 130 mph, smashed into a car that had lost power and had come to a near stop near the track during a race at the Daytona International Speedway. Gidley suffered 12 broken bones and would endure nine surgeries over the course of three years and several more years of physical rehabilitation before he could even complete simple tasks, like sitting in a chair, he says.
However, Gidley says he believes he’s better for having suffered through the accident, as it taught him to be that much more resilient. He says his experience can serve as a potential inspiration for others to get back up when they fall down and continue doing what they love.
Gidley says he has no plans to stop racing. Although he says he wishes it could be a full-time gig, rides are sporadic and so are sponsorships, so he supplements his driving with his boat-charter company.
Gidley notes he got back on the water several years ago when his good friend bought a sailboat.
“Everything started coming back to me,” he says.
About seven years ago Gidley decided to buy his own boat, a 35-foot semi-custom New Zealand racer and cruiser named Basic Instinct. He obtained his commercial captain’s license and started Sailing Memo, which offers multi-hour boat trips around the San Francisco Bay. In doing so, he’s carrying on his father’s sailing legacy; in 1960, Cass Gidley founded the first sailboat rental school in Sausalito in what was later named the Cass Gidley Marina. The marina still houses the Sausalito Community Boating Center, a nonprofit that provides affordable access to boats and the water and aims to preserve maritime heritage through education and skill-building. Gidley says the organization is dear to his heart.
He says he’s grateful he’s been able to turn both of his passions into careers — something he tries to impart to his teenage daughter. He says he tells her that if she really loves something, she’s going to stand out and will be successful because her dedication will shine through. Gidley says that’s a lesson he’s learned on the water and the racetrack.
The most important thing to him, he says, is spending each day doing what he loves.
“If you don’t like what you’re doing, just go do something else,” Gidley says.
Executive Editor Kevin Hessel contributed to this report. Reach Belvedere and public-safety reporter Shayne Jones at 415-944-4627.