‘It’s my life’: Anthony Martella describes his journey as a Canadian teen racing driver

You feel the anxiety, you feel the pressure, but then once you start strapping up, putting your earplugs in, putting your helmet on, get into the car, for me that loudness and that pressure kind of fades away, and it's all you. My name is Anthony Martella, I'm a USF 2000 driver, racing in the ladder system towards IndyCar. I love everything about racing. I'm obsessed with it, it's my life, it's my dream to be in IndyCar, it's my life journey, and I'll do whatever it takes to get there. So this is my USF 2000 car. Shows my name, sponsors and everything on it. A cool feature that I like to show everybody is obviously the steering wheel. So we got our our shifter pads. This is upshift, this is downshift. We have a track map here. My racing background actually started from my grandfather. He never raced but was a big big IndyCar and Formula One fan and that kind of passed on to my father. My dad ended up doing some regional racing with his car and I remember washing my dad's car and doing the same thing as my grandfather did with my dad so I'm honored to carry my family name throughout the motorsports ladder and hopefully that's something that I get to pass on to my my kid when I'm older and my grandchildren. The first time I got into a go-kart it didn't start off to me as like it's something that I want to do for the rest of my life soon as you know I started getting older and getting more mature winning more races that I kind of realize you know maybe maybe I have something to prove to myself and to the planet and that's when we took it really serious you know as much as it's really hard I've done a lot of work why give up or why stop what I love this so much right advice that I give to kids is not even about racing it's just about if you love something go all-in and do it if you're good at something and you truly believe that you can be great at something just keep pushing forward and on those bad days, remember why you're doing it.