Fast Company
Pete Olson (CAS'94, GSM'97) tears around the Chinese speedway
By Kelly Cunningham
Pete Olson ready for action.Photograph courtesy of Pete Olson
In the mid-nineties, Pete Olson's fellow M.B.A. candidates at the Graduate School of Management, when not working their tails off to earn course credits and crucial business contacts, were letting off steam by clubbing and shooting pool on Lansdowne Street. Olson joined them regularly; he had, after all, the same stresses, not to mention a demanding internship at Prudential Securities. But unlike his classmates, Olson was slipping away just as often to Riverside Kawasaki, a motorcycle shop in Somerville, to talk 500cc Superbikes - fueling a passion that would eventually lead to his career as a professional race car driver.
"Some of the guys [at Riverside] raced up at the New Hampshire international Speedway," says Olson (CAS'94, GSM'97), who had been riding his motorcycle on city streets for fun and transportation. "That's how it all started."
But Olson's penchant for fast things on wheels emerged long before he traveled to BU from his family's home in Chevy Chase, Maryland. First it was a BMX bike, then a skateboard. He cites a particular photo as evidence: "I was six years old, with a cast on my wrist and a motocross T-shirt in the backyard. It was a sign of things to come." And as he entered high school, he exhibited no indication that he would slow down. "I spent my weekends teaching myself auto mechanics so that I could tune my car and modify it," he says. "I racked up seventeen speeding tickets before I was in college. You don't even want to know what my insurance premiums were."
Olson finished his M.B.A. and began working full-time as an auditor for the Securities and Exchange Commission in Boston. He continued to race bikes, placing third in his first pro race, in 1998. The following year, he took a break from money and motorcycles and traveled to Taiwan to teach kindergarten. But the racing life continued to beckon. After one year, he moved to Los Angeles, where he began racing sprint and shifter karts, then entered racing school, where he drove a Formula car for the very first time. "Within my first few minutes on a skidpad, I felt totally at ease sliding the car around the course, like it was an extension of me, an extension of my body," he says. "If there was the slightest doubt in my mind before then of what I wanted to do with my life, that moment erased it."
In 2003, Olson caught a piece of news that once again set his wheels in motion. "Formula Renault, a premier racing series in Europe, was now in China," he recalls, "and growing incredibly in popularity. I decided to move back to Taiwan in January 2004 so I could compete." While the cars Olson had been racing reach speeds of up to 150 miles per hour, Formula Renault put him up to 170. He wasn't phased.
His second weekend in, Olson won a race at the Shanghai International Formula One Circuit track. He calls it his greatest racing moment.
Olson continues to make a strong showing in Formula Renault, having won a number of first-place trophies and regularly placing in the top five. Despite two major crashes in the past year, he plans on long a career behind the wheel. "I don't know how I could live without it," he says. "It's some kind of inner drive, the feeling of 'Why stop here?' I want to keep improving, keep moving up." He has his sites set on Formula One, which he calls "any Formula car driver's ultimate dream, aside from Indy 500."
Despite this forward momentum, no experience on the track has matched his first victory in Shanghai. "Looking up from the car in the pit lane, seeing 40,000 people in the main stands and the TV cameras and so on, flashbulbs popping, the marching band - it really hit me how far I had come," he recalls. "As if I ever could have imagined that day when I was fourteen or fifteen, out racing my friends around our hometown BMX track half a world away."