Welcome to Turning Fortune
All my adult life, I have struggled mightily — probably way too much, really — with the question, “What do you do?” I have always just been so resistant to answering it in the careerist, class-conscious terms that it is so typically meant.
I have so many answers to that question that I find delightful — even in those rare intervals when it has described my J-O-B — but it’s so frequently perplexing or embarrassing to give those answers. Because honestly, my answer-of-answers to that question is, “Whatever keeps me up all night with furious passion, no matter what anyone else thinks of it,” and for whatever constellation of reasons, it seems like most people don’t want to hear that answer.
That furious passion has led me all over the place, reading and writing and wandering around various realms, trying to get to the bottom of them. Finally, as I entered that male-midlife phase where everybody says this exact thing will happen, it led me to motorsport. And that was the place where I first felt surrounded by people who do whatever their furious passion keeps them up at night doing, no matter what anyone else thinks of it, because it keeps all of them — and now also me — up all night doing this.
Practically, “what I do” is some form of journalism. Always has been. That is the methodology by which I participate in the ecosystems of the things that inspire my furious passion. By now, I have learned how to get up to speed quite quickly on new things using journalistic tools. Even so, I immediately clocked the incredible vastness of motor racing, despite it all having taken place in barely 100 years. This is part of what drew me in; I love an intellectual challenge.
My moment of drawing into motorsport was in the spring of 2024. Finally, all the near-miss interests I’ve had — cars, planes and trains as a kid, rock music as a youth, technology, politics, massive festivals (and their operations and logistics, including countless drives of hundreds of miles across flat tarmac with no one else in sight), and most of all just the creative and spiritual urge that drives human beings to do crazy things together — coalesced into one blinding moment of inspiration, and I asked my internet friend, Luke, if he would be so kind as to “pill me” — in the vernacular of the sewers where we hung out online in those days — on motorsports.
And pill me he did.
As I spent month after month drawing ever deeper into the caverns of motor racing lore in which Luke had — through the influence of his father — spent his whole life, Luke was my continual guide. He showed me the parts he loved, explained why, had me watch race after race, encouraging me when I did get it and redirecting me when I didn’t. As my confidence grew along with my situational awareness, as I watched races both in real-time and from history, I checked in with Luke constantly, making sure I was taking away what I was meant to.
After a while, I developed opinions, particular passions, favorite cars and drivers and tracks and engine configurations, and I began to spread my wings a little bit. Luke and I met on social media, in scenes convened around very different subjects, and together we sought out places where we could grow our sphere of motorsports connections online, meet more people like us. We first struck gold on Bluesky, and by now quite a little scene has formed. However long that app lasts, it no longer matters so much, because we’ve met enough of the people — probably all of whom are reading this on the day of its publication — that this familial love of racing has crossed the bridge into the real world.
Naturally, we had to go racing. Once again, I let Luke be my guide, and we settled on the 63rd running of the Rolex 24 at Daytona in 2025 as our first in-person race meeting. In fact, it was the first time Luke and I had met in person, let alone met the online racing friends we had just gathered around us in the preceding year. And now we go to races together all the time, making ever more motorsports culture and collective memory.
From very early on in our shared racing life, Luke and I knew we wanted to do some kind of project together. In my case, a project almost always means a website, but I needed that time to dig in and learn what kind of website the racing world would want from me. As the 2025 racing year went on, I realized more and more clearly that the story of me learning the story of racing from Luke might make for an ideal meta-story about how racing — lineage-driven thing that it is — is sustained and passed on through the twists, turns, and tight corners of — if we’re being honest here — the heart of modern economic, geographic, and political history. And, ideally, that will make Turning Fortune an ideal vehicle — pun flagrantly intended — for motor racing’s continued transmission into the future.
So that, in essence, is what Turning Fortune is. Thank you for joining us. Please have a wander about the News, Lore, and Journals sections and get a sense of what they are, and if you want a little more biography on us, visit About.
You can subscribe to our posts via RSS (primary feed links in the footer, and all topics have feeds as well), and we will also send a monthly-ish newsletter that will not simply duplicate or summarize website content but will be an actual letter, from me, maybe sometimes from Luke, about random stuff, like an email should be.
We are @jon.turningfortune.com and @luke.turningfortune.com on Bluesky, and we hang out there and post with people about cars and racing alllllllllllllllll day. At least I do; Luke seems to be a lot more virtuous than I am in the paying-attention-to-mundane-life department. You can also follow @turningfortune.com, which will be more or less a summary of website contents for those who will not use RSS for some reason.
Our Instagram and Threads accounts are pretty much obligatory and will hopefully someday be totally unnecessary, but they do exist. YouTube, however, will absolutely be a creative outlet meriting serious effort from us. We have a little bit of low-grade experimentation up there already, and we will gradually be figuring out how to do more, so do please very much subscribe to the Turning Fortune YouTube channel.
And if you’ll be in Daytona for the 64th Rolex 24, we’ll both get there in approximately 48 hours at press time. If you see us, please flag us down, because we have tons of little race cars and Turning Fortune stickers to disgorge into your backpack.
I should hasten to add, this website is the handiwork of my colleagues, design partner Ashley McQuaid and engineering partner Phil Giammattei, at the Tiger Pajamas Web Site Company, where We’ll Make a Good Web Site for You™. It says so right in our jingle. I am their publishing partner, you see, and so to an extent there actually is a straightforward answer to “what do I do?”, it’s “make websites like the one you are reading now.” If you are interested in one, please let us know.