Memo Gidley will be at Sonoma Raceway this Sunday with helmet in hand, looking for a ride just like his formative days in racing. While Gidley does have a ride in SRO’s GT America series lined up, the 2023 champ is set for only a partial schedule in the No. 3 SKI Autosport Audi R8 GT3.

Gidley’s first SRO race in the car that Johnny O’Connell took to the series title last season doesn’t start until the third SRO GT World Challenge America event weekend at Circuit of the Americas near Austin, on April 25-27.

So if the Tiburon resident wants a shot at another title, it would be nice to have some points before the fifth race of the campaign.

Hanging around paddocks looking for a team that might need his services is nothing new for Gidley. In his heyday in the CART Champ Car series, Memo was known as “Super Sub.” That reputation has allowed him to drive almost anything on a road course, from Indy cars to sports prototypes to production-based sedans, during his career of nearly 30 years.

Never having big sponsors to fuel his rise in the professional ranks, Gidley has spent much of his career as a carpetbagger racer, always at the ready. His ascent has always been through talent and tenacity.

His racing career started through being trained as a mechanic for the Jim Russell Racing School, then based at Laguna Seca. Mechanics got to race, too, in the USAC Formula Russell Series, and Gidley won the title — and with it a free ride for the following season when he won again.

Through his first rungs up the IndyCar racing ladder, Gidley often slept in his truck or on the hotel floor with his crew to save money.

A couple of years later Gidley was signed with Lynx Racing, owned by Peggy Haas of Ross. Haas formed Lynx to promote talented, struggling racers, so Memo didn’t have to bring his own money. Gidley finished second in the Toyota Formula Atlantic series for Haas twice, and that got his career in the CART Champ Car series rolling.

After two partial seasons in CART driving for four different teams, Gidley was on the radar if a driver was needed with a moment’s notice. And Gidley made sure he was ready. 2001 started with him floating around the paddock at races, and living in the Indianapolis area where most of the teams have always been based.

He was coaching young Graham Rahal in karting, and Graham’s father, Indy 500 and CART champion Bobby Rahal, asked Gidley what the tab was.

“I said, ‘Listen I don’t want to be paid for it. I just want you to make me a seat for your Lola and then I want you guys to carry it around on your transporter so just in case somebody needs a driver for that type of car that I could just hop in and be ready to go,’” Gidley recalled of his gutsy request. A form-fitted seat could make Gidley the fastest option if perhaps another driver couldn’t answer the call for the green flag.

“So I think that surprised him a lot, it was pretty forward,” Gidley continued about his request with Rahal. “That was just kind of how I did everything, just trying to always be ready to go.”

Then early in 2001 the call came.

“I was in the gym working out and I got a call from the 317 area code and it was from Mike Hull, who is the Chip Ganassi Racing team manager,” Gidley said. His life changed the next day.

Gidley scored three podiums in filling the Ganassi seat for the rest of the year, including missing out at victory by a couple of feet at the Cleveland airport circuit.

“I led the most laps in that race but had to stop right at the end to get a splash of fuel. And we got beat across the line by Dario Franchitti by 2-tenths of a second,” Gidley said.

But a different kind of satisfaction was to follow later in the year.

“And then I also finished on the podium at the Laguna Seca, which was really cool because I remember the podium was up high and looking down at the Jim Russell mechanic shops where I started, and also the track I went to my first race at,” he said.

Gidley’s partial season this year actually will have him driving in more than SRO races for Kent and Melissa Hussey and SKI Autosport. Gidley will drive in other series and in other cars, too. Last weekend he swept a qualifying race and three points races in the International GT Series, a smaller, mostly amateur race series compared with SRO which has races all over the world in regions determined by continents.

Oddly enough the Audi R8 is old enough to race in historic racing, and Gidley will drive it and other older cars in HSR vintage race weekends along with other cars in the Hussey’s fleet. They own a Ferrari 458 GT, a Corvette-based Callaway LM GT, and a trio of Cadillacs including the only ATSV-R GT3 ever built for international competition.

Is it any wonder that the SKI in SKI Autosport stands for “Spending our Kids’ Inheritance”?

If Gidley is to race during the SRO GT World Challenge America Powered by AWS weekend, it will be in the GT America race starting at 9:25 a.m. on Sunday. The GT World Challenge America race is scheduled for 3 p.m. Sunday.

Before then, Gidley be racing elsewhere … on water.

Gidley leads the points in a sailing championship waged on the San Francisco Bay with his boat “Basic Instinct” in the Single-handed Sailing Society series. It’s a shorthanded challenge with only two people on the boat. On Saturday, Gidley was steering while 15-year-old Eliot Schiffman scurried about in front of him, tending sails and leaning over the side as ballast weight.

The young Novato resident has a rather unique athletic skillset. Apart from sailing with Gidley’s regular crew for over a year, Schiffman also competes with Cal-Star Elite Cheer. Both require balance, coordinated movements, and agility. But only one requires throwing girls into the air.

Gidley has made the most out of his dual skillsets as well. Both car and sailboat racing share a demand for precision and feel, then doing what controlling inputs are needed in the moment to find the optimum line without shaving off speed.

“You know it’s all about the 10ths of a second on the race track, and in sailing it’s all about tenths of a knot,” Gidley said. “I say it’s like if on the race car we could change everything on the setup actually while we’re driving, because that’s what we do. We’re changing everything constantly while we’re sailing.”