One year ago, in March of 2020, a small team of people came together for a project with big ambitions. Something which today is bigger than we would have ever imagined.
Hey, I’m Luciano, the founder, and owner of ASN Media. This is not the type of article you’re used to reading around here on ASN Motorsports, but I want to take this occasion to celebrate the first anniversary of something that changed the path of ASN (for good) forever.
I have a strong passion for motorsports, and I always wanted to develop that passion into something I could share with others. And I decided that the right way of doing it was through the production of content (news and entertainment). And so I started.
I created ASN on October 12 of 2019, on the weekend of the Japanese Grand Prix. It was a simple Instagram account, and the content I started to post was rather generic. Random stats and a few results from the races – but it was a good starting point, and people showed their support to the initiative, gaining a few hundred followers in the first weeks.
As the project was developing, I started to go more towards the news-type of publications; covering the worlds of Formula 1 and Formula E were, by then, the regular trends of the account. And it continued like that for five more months, until March of 2020, when I made the best decision I could have done in the history of this organization:
I had decided to start a magazine.
A magazine, you ask? How is a simple guy going to pull that off? Well, fear not; I proposed the idea to my friend, Sundaram Ramaswami, and he was on board since day 1. Sundaram shared the same passion for motorsports as I do and shared the same content ideas I had, so it was a perfect match.
But a project this big needed more people. Two guys were not enough to write, edit, design, and publish a full-sized motorsports magazine. To fix that, we published a story on our Instagram pages asking for writers for a project (and, if I’m honest with you, we did not have any expectations).
And to our surprise, people showed interest in the idea. Soon we started receiving messages from guys interested in participating in the project, and that’s when three of our current writers joined: Tristen Digby, Davide Bini, and Max Dymel. Together with Sundaram, we started discussing the idea further; what are we going to cover? how many issues are going to be released? how is the magazine going to be named?
Soon enough, we had all the answers; the magazine, named the ASN Pole Position Magazine, would cover the world of Formula 1 and its support series, launching once a month.
And so we started to work. Assignments were made, articles were edited, the magazine was designed, and by April our first issue was released.
And well, look, it wasn’t the best magazine you would ever read; it was the first experience for all of us into the world of editorial, so you were going to find big chunks of text in a really simply-formatted PDF.
But as time passed, we progressed and improved the magazine. We continued adding people to the team, with Will Knight, Kael Parkinson, and Anton Hreskiv arriving throughout our journey.
We released 5 more issues, making it a total of 6 in a 7-month period. Our last issue was published in December after a decision was made to stop the production of the magazine as it required a lot of time and effort, and that on top of the ASN Motorsports Instagram account, which by then was still our main focus.
And as the magazine ended, a new chapter opened; we had decided to start our own website, which would allow us to cover the news from the world of Motorsports in a more fast, professional, and engaging way.
We started working on articles based on other sources; we were a no-one into the world of media and were just starting to build our way into what we are today.
Over time, our audience started to grow and so did our efforts and seriousness into the website project; soon enough we moved from our original platform (Medium) to our own website here, on asnmp.com. And with this move, we set big ambitions: to be a player in the world of motorsports media.
Soon enough, good news started to arrive; as ASN continued to grow its presence, it achieved official accreditation for multiple of the series we cover – Formula 1, Formula E, NASCAR, Extreme E, WEC, and the Dakar.
And in light of the big news, the team needed to expand once again; over time, we welcomed Leon Kerninger, Thibault Brun, Zach Arnold, Michael Branco, and Troy Swenor to the project.
And that’s how ASN made it to what it is today; we’re growing in big numbers each day and our coverage improves article by article.
But the real highlight I want to make is about the people behind this project.
The atmosphere inside our team is like a family. We were all shy at first, but with time we all started to talk and became great friends, creating strong bonds and sharing the same passion for motorsports.
And to see such a great team of people working on something I created is something that, up to this day, I still can’t believe. The passion and dedication people from ASN show every single day is something that inspires all of us to continue doing what we’re doing and is what drives our growth.
And all of that is possible thanks to you, our readers, for supporting what we do; if it wasn’t for you, we would not be here doing what we’re doing. You are what fuels our commitment to delivering high-quality content from the world of motorsports.
And we will continue to do so for many years to come.
