Motor racing tech nerd Jason Gomersall’s accelerator foot is getting itchy but his data centre empire is going into overdrive
A biological bug, not a computer virus, is putting Jason Gomersall and his company’s expanding network of data centres to the test but he is a race-ready IT entrepreneur who thrives in the fast lane.
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UNCONSCIOUS and trapped in his driver’s seat, self-confessed tech nerd Jason Gomersall was in the process of a major reboot of his rattled brain.
Moments earlier his car had been T-boned in a high-speed impact and all systems inside his head were temporarily down.
As he was being cut from the wreckage and beginning to regain consciousness, somebody asked him if he knew where he was.
“I actually thought I was on the beach with the kids, laughing and having a great time,” Gomersall recalls.
Reboot incomplete, data still loading.
Far from getting some sand between his toes, the founder and CEO of iseek – a Brisbane-based cloud storage, data centre and connectivity provider – was at Winton Motor Raceway, about 600km from a beach.
Putting the pedal to the metal on the first lap of his first race of the weekend, his car had been suddenly spun around and broadsided.
Not surprisingly, Gomersall has no memory of the moment of impact.
Thanks, however, to 16 seconds of race cam footage – subtitled “How do you like your T-bone?” – taken from the car that collided with him and uploaded to YouTube, he can fill in the body-jarring blank.
“They red-flagged the race, brought out the blue tarps and everyone’s thinking I’m brown bread,” he says. “But actually I was absolutely fine. I had a little bruise on my ankle. It all looked far more dramatic than it really was.”
Gomersall’s need for speed is not only limited to burning rubber at weekends but also is integral to his professional life as an ahead-of-the-game IT entrepreneur.
In the driver’s seat at iseek, he needs to keep pace with rapidly changing digital technology and, as it turns out, sudden surges in demand due to the occasional pandemic.
The company provides infrastructure that hosts the technology needed to cater for the ever-increasing appetite for more data, larger data and faster network speeds by government, government-owned organisations and ASX-listed Top 200 companies.
Unlike the cars Gomersall races, iseek’s expanding network of data centres in Brisbane, Sydney and Townsville can boast an unblemished crash record.
“I know I’ve had more than my fair share of crashes in racing cars,” Gomersall says. “But, believe me, the ramifications of a data centre crash would be much greater and …” pausing, he superstitiously looks for some wood to touch and then continues, “it has never happened.”
Ironically, it is the spread of a biological bug – the coronavirus COVID-19 – not a computer virus that is now putting iseek’s systems to the test. With workplaces locking down and implementing work-from-home strategies, data centre capacities must be ramped up.
“Our track record is good,” Gomersall says. “These places are designed to sustain failures with back-up systems on top of back-up systems on top of back-up systems. I liken it to an Airbus A380, which has four engines but can fly on two.”
Gomersall started iseek in 1998 after selling out of two successful Optus mobile franchisee stores.
“The early days of the mobile phone industry were very entrepreneurial and innovative,” he says. “I really enjoyed that and carved out a niche there, but when I went into the franchise system I basically became a shopkeeper.
“That didn’t really excite me that much and I’d been keeping one eye on the internet, which was only just evolving back then.”
The 48-year-old father-of-two initially established iseek as an ISP (internet service provider) offering higher speed connections to the corporate sector. With no commercial data centres in Brisbane at the time he built his own to set up a point of presence – or access point to the internet – for the business, which has become one of Queensland’s biggest IT success stories and this year is gearing up to go public with the launch of an IPO.
“We put in 30 computer racks but only needed about 10, the idea being that we might be able to sell the additional rack space to some corporate customers, and that’s where it started,” Gomersall says.
Looking for a “circuit breaker” on his days off as the company grew, he buckled himself into his first race car fulfilling an adrenaline-fuelled boyhood dream.
“I tried golf – I absolutely hated it,” he says. “I’d play a shot and by the time I’d walked to the ball for the next shot I was thinking about work and other things. It didn’t draw me in enough.
“The thing with motorsport is it just draws you in and you can’t think about anything else. That’s what I love about it. All your brain power is going into the car and what it’s doing, what it needs and how to improve it.
“I’m a bit of a late starter. I didn’t get into it until I was about 30 but I’d always wanted to do it.”
Growing up in Rockhampton, he religiously watched the Australian Touring Car Championship (the predecessor of the Supercars Championship) on TV with his dad, a devout “Holden man”.
“That was my earliest influence – watching Peter Brock and Dick Johnson,” he says. “It does get in your blood.”
Without any racing experience – not even a lap in a go-kart – Gomersall hopped into an open-wheeler in the entry-level Formula Vee class in 2003.
“My biggest fear when I went to my first race meet wasn’t the speed or crashing but that I actually wouldn’t enjoy it as much as I was expecting and hoping,” he says.
“But even though I ran last and second-last most of the weekend I just loved it and was hooked.”
Gomersall moved quickly into a “tin top”, pulling into the V8 Utes Racing Series in a Ford before buying his dream car – a Holden Torana A9X, like his hero Brock drove in the late 19 70s – to race in Touring Car Masters.
“I remember when I first went into the V8 Utes I rang dad and told him I was going to race in the V8 Utes and I’d bought a Ford,” Gomersall recalls. “I might as well have told him I was joining ISIS. He wasn’t impressed at all. He was far more impressed when I got the Torana.”
He has been clocked gunning his beloved A9X at 282km/h – “only about 5km/h or 6km/h slower than a Supercar” – down Conrod Straight, the fastest section of Bathurst’s famed Mount Panorama circuit.
Among his other racing highlights are a victory at the 2010 Bathurst 12-Hour endurance race and winning the Touring Car Masters Pro-Am championship in 2016.
Last year, Gomersall became a co-owner of Matt Stone Racing – a Gold Coast-based outfit set up by the son of Jimmy Stone, one half of the renowned Stone Brothers Racing team. It has allowed him to bring his expertise in technology, data acquisition and storage to his passion.
“There’s actually a lot of synergies between the two,” Gomersall says. “Data is an integral part of a racing team.
“Year on year, when you go racing, you learn more about each track and each car. We’re recording that information for future use and it’s absolutely imperative to the race team. This is a very expensive sport and your success is built on the data you’ve acquired. It’s part of the intellectual property of your team and if you were to lose that data that would be pretty catastrophic.”
Gomersall has no plans to slow down – neither in his day job taking iseek to the next level of expansion nor on any of the 15 weekends a year he dons his racing helmet.
No doubt with the postponement of the next three Supercar events due to the coronavirus outbreak his accelerator foot will be getting a bit itchy.
Last season, Gomersall made the leap to the Super3 Series – the third tier of V8 Supercars racing – finishing an impressive fourth against a mix of “gentlemen drivers” and motorsport young guns.
He muses that after one race the collective age of the three drivers on the podium – all too young to drink the celebratory champagne – was equal to his own age.
“You’re racing against potential Supercar champions of the future,” he says. “That’s pretty cool and a humbling experience. There’s no faking it out there.”
Gomersall concedes he has left his run a bit late for a tilt at the “main game” Supercars Championship.
“At 48 I’d be the oldest rookie ever,” he laughs. “The days of Brock and Johnson racing into their mid-50s are well over. Everything has stepped up.”
But there is still a chance of the Gomersall name being engraved on the Supercars championship trophy.
“My 13-year-old son has recently got into go-karts. He loves it and just wants to go racing every day.”
Luckily for his dad, Ben Gomersall didn’t take up golf.
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