Gabe Newell's Son Just Made His Le Mans Debut in the Family Aston Martin
Gray Newell didn't start racing until he was 23, after giving up on a video game studio. This June he lined up at Le Mans in a factory Aston Martin GT3 for the team his father built to fund children's hospital research — and finished third in class.
Gray Newell's path to a Le Mans grid slot didn't run through karting as a kid or a family racing dynasty. Born in Seattle in October 1997, the eldest son of Valve co-founder Gabe Newell spent his twenties trying to build a video game studio — he co-founded an indie developer called Naetyr Games, working on an MMO shooter called Fury. That project didn't take off. Racing, which he didn't start doing seriously until 2021 at age 23, did.
The team he joined already had his family's name on it, but not in the way people assume. The Heart of Racing was founded in 2014 by British driver Ian James, developer Yahn Bernier, and Gabe Newell — not as a vanity project, but as a fundraising vehicle. Every race the team runs supports Seattle Children's Hospital, a mission that traces back further still, to a charitable program called Team Seattle that Gabe Newell backed as far back as 1997. The elder Newell has been racing under that banner himself for years; his son's arrival on the roster in 2021 put both Newells in the same paddock.
Gray Newell didn't skip any steps to get there. He spent 2021 through 2024 working up through GT4 America in a Heart of Racing Aston Martin Vantage AMR GT4, finishing 13th in points as a rookie and climbing to 2nd by 2024, first alongside Ian James and later with Roman De Angelis. He ran a parallel program in GT America across the same stretch. In 2025 he moved to full-time GT3 competition in GT World Challenge America, pairing with three-time Le Mans winner Darren Turner in the No. 24 Vantage GT3 Evo — a season that produced his first real podiums, back-to-back at Virginia International Raceway, with a Sunday drive Newell later called the best of his career: "confidently my best drive that I've had of my career in terms of really meeting the car." He finished 4th in the championship.
By then, Heart of Racing wasn't a scrappy independent outfit anymore. Aston Martin brought the team on as a factory partner in 2020, and the results since have been real: an IMSA GTD championship in 2022, a class win at the 2023 Rolex 24 at Daytona that beat the GTD Pro class winner outright, the team's first LMGT3 win in the FIA World Endurance Championship at Lone Star Le Mans in 2024, and a starring role fielding Aston Martin's revived Valkyrie AMR-LMH Hypercar program.
Gray Newell's own WEC debut came this June, in the No. 23 Aston Martin Vantage AMR GT3 Evo, sharing the car with Jonny Adam and Eduardo Barrichello in the LMGT3 class at the 24 Hours of Le Mans. He completed 335 laps and brought the car home third in class — a genuinely credible result for a rookie at the hardest race on the calendar, in a car built by the team his father started so that racing could pay for something other than itself.
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