When racecar driver Sara Choi needs a mechanic or a social media consultant, she turns to ChatGPT - Sports Business Journal

Sara Choi, a trailblazing professional drift racer, competes across a variety of motorsports series, often jumping into new cars, new circuits and new terrains. Without the support of a dedicated professional team, Choi turns to what she’d call her “assistant mechanic” for advice: ChatGPT.

Prior to a race in Montana earlier this year, for example, she logged onto the AI platform and sought insight on how to handle an early ’90s Italian rally car.

I’m a Hawaii girl, and I am used to rain.

I’m competing this weekend in Montana in an ice race with a Lancia Delta Integrale.

Since it’s 4WD, how should I approach drifting it on ice and what is the right technique compared to a RWD drift car?

ChatGPT asked what kind of ice would be present, and even though Choi wasn’t equipped to answer that, she said the feedback was super helpful even though “everyone was spinning out on the track like crazy, no matter how pro they were.”

Choi hasn’t latched onto a single series because of her varying professional interests, which also includes fashion and content creation; she has started her own apparel line, Badseki, and has more than 565,000 followers on Instagram. (She said Japan’s Formula D, a drifting series, might be the best fit if she does latch on with one series.)

Choi said the timing of her professional career taking off coincided with the advent of ChatGPT, calling her usage of the tool a “core memory,” especially while building an Acura Integra. She came to a juncture where she needed help building a proposal deck for potential sponsors for that project, so she again turned to ChatGPT, asking, “How do I position myself, builder or designer? How do I leverage this long term?”

Because of her varied racing entries, Choi doesn’t have the luxury of driving the same car or working with the same pit crew, putting her at the mercy of organizers to lend her a vehicle that sometimes requires a last-minute tune up.

At other times, she asked ChatGPT for counsel on comparing drivetrains or even fixing her alignment, writing in dense technical language, “I’m running 12 kg/mm front, 10 kg/mm rear, and ~9° caster. I’m getting inconsistent alignment under load and snapping on transition. What else should I be checking for?”

While ChatGPT has a reputation for being a cheery supporter of user’s ideas, Choi trained it to eliminate the sycophantic responses based on a TikTok video she watched.

“I copied and pasted that whole [TikTok] prompt,” she said. “When I do ask Chat stuff, he would be like, ‘No fluff answer, let me be direct.’”

For every race, Choi gets assigned a pit crew, meaning her business manager is her only steady presence. But he isn’t fully versed in racing, so when it comes to the intricacies of motorsports, she again turns to ChatGPT.

“NASCAR invited me to Daytona [next] weekend,” she wrote in ChatGPT. “Obviously it’s a very different audience and sport. As a pro drifter, what type of reels makes sense for me to create over the weekend?”

You can see one such amusing result below -- and follow her account to see where AI takes her next.