If you’re a GM racing fan, you’ve heard of Andy Pilgrim. If not, you’ve come to the right place. A veteran to racing — all kinds of racing — Pilgrim now drives the No. 8 CTS-V.R for Cadillac Racing in the Pirelli World Challenge Series, with teammate Johnny O’Connell manning the No. 3 car. But unlike most motorsport personalities, Pilgrim does more than just drive. The Boca Raton, Florida resident is also a business owner and philanthropist who works on making the roads America uses safer every day by educating drivers beyond what they would normally learn in a normal driving school. And somewhere in between all of that, he finds time for sleep, and golf (sometimes).
Just how did Andy Pilgrim evolve from computer programming youth living in Nottingham, England to everything he is today? Here’s the story…
Humble Beginnings And Hustle
It all began when Pilgrim was in school on a scholarship Nottingham, which he actually walked away from because he was offered an IT job before the conclusion of his degree. Pilgrim claims to get bored easily, and at the same time wanted to make money. So it took minimal contemplation to quit school, and start his IT career at 20 years of age, earning one of the eight jobs that hundreds of people applied for.
Realizing that Pilgrim was still in college, his new employer offered to save a spot for him until he finished his degree, but Pilgrim promptly stated that he would be able to start Monday.
As for Pilgrim’s motivation to earn money over getting a degree… it was none other than racing. But not car racing; motorcycle racing. And making a decent paycheck meant that he could fund that expensive aspiration. At the time, Pilgrim owned and raced a Kawasaki 500 H1, AKA “The Widowmaker” — a 12-second bike with a 20-second body.
Eventually, the IT job allowed him to apply for a contracted computer programming job in the United States with General Motors two-and-a-half years later. As a 23-year-old, Pilgrim was an IT professional, residing in Pontiac, Michigan — a pretty rough city, as our Michigan-based readers well know. Despite the dangers, Pilgrim walked to work, and said he had no issues or misfortunes that people may come to expect from a city with such high crime and unemployment rates.
Regardless of “being the guy with the funny accent,” he was totally accepted by everyone in the neighborhood. It could have been partially because nobody told him of the possible dangers from living in Pontiac beforehand.
“Pre-conceived notions can stop you from doing a lot of things. I guess I don’t have that. I’ll check it out myself and figure it out,” says Pilgrim.
In 1989, at 33-years-old, Pilgrim began his own IT consulting company titled Electronic Computer Services, Inc. – something he still owns and runs to this day — and again with the goal to help further fund his racing career. To point, Pilgrim realizes that starting a business to help run something else is probably not something they’ll teach in the Stanford Business School, but since he never went to classes there, that’s exactly what his company was for in his eyes. 24 years later, the company has bloomed, yet Andy doesn’t let his now-established racing career from keeping him from knowing what’s going on within the company.