Racing Aurora’s Sanjay Pattis On Building A Race-Winning Motorsports

“My mind, my heart, my soul was always in motorsports.”

There is a particular kind of optimism that motorsport demands. It is not the polished confidence of a corporate boardroom, nor the romantic idealism often associated with the high thrills of racing. It is something grittier, almost reckless, even. Something that drives the willingness to keep going, even despite setbacks, limitations, and the possibility that an entire season can unravel in a single corner.

For Sanjay Pattis, that optimism laid the groundwork for realising a dream, and has also served as the foundation of one of Malaysia’s most compelling motorsport stories: Racing Aurora.

In Pursuit of Purpose

About two decades ago, Pattis was a racer himself. He competed behind the wheel until the realities of funding forced him away from the cockpit, later joining his family’s construction business while remaining loosely tethered to motorsport. Eventually, that pull became impossible to ignore and, after 16 years with the family business, Pattis established a sports management company that led to him managing campaigns for Aston Martin Racing Asia.

“It gave me that feeling where I woke up every morning with a purpose,” Pattis says. “The last time I felt that was when I was racing. So, that’s how I knew what I really wanted to do.” It was an experience that ultimately clarified his next move.

Enter Racing Aurora

In late 2023, Racing Aurora was officially formed, with Pattis as team principal. Within seven months, it entered its debut race in the 2024 The Super Series (TSS)—Southeast Asia’s biggest GT series—as a Mercedes team, racing with the AMG GT4.

“It was not necessarily the quickest car on paper, but in the pace of sprint race racing, tyre management and consistency mattered more than outright pace,” Pattis says. “We believed the Mercedes would go the distance.”

What Racing Aurora has achieved since then is remarkable, not simply because of results but also because of the speed at which those results arrived. Competing in the GT4 category, the Malaysian outfit quickly established itself as a genuine contender, securing podium finishes and victories against far more established teams with higher financial backing—even when, from the outset, Racing Aurora operated with modest resources.

“The team’s 2024 campaign was one of the lowest-budget operations on the grid,” Pattis recalls. “Yet, we became the first Malaysian GT4 team to win on debut, and later finished third overall in the championship.”

The next year, however, was when the team’s vigour was truly put to the test. The 2025 season became a test of resilience as much as speed, with early races being plagued by setbacks and substantial bills. In one particularly bruising race weekend, another competitor collided with the team’s car on the opening lap, causing roughly RM200,000 in damage. Overnight, the team’s mechanics rebuilt the car well enough for Sunday’s race.

Despite this setback, with the deft hands of drivers Daniel Bilski and 21-year-old Hayden Haikal, Racing Aurora clawed all the way from starting at the back of the grid to a second-place finish.

Then came Sepang.

Ahead of its second home round, the team suffered a catastrophic technical issue that threatened to end the weekend before it had begun.

“I got a phone call from my team manager, saying that we had a technical problem and we needed to withdraw the car, and I said, ‘No, we can’t. It’s our home race. Our partners will be there, there’s a showcase,” Pattis remembers. “So, we had an emergency meeting on Wednesday night, and we then spoke to the organisers to ask if we were allowed to put in another car, if we could find a car. They said, ‘Yes, you can, but you have to put the car in before Friday.’ So, thank our lucky stars, there was a Porsche available that was kept in Malaysia. It was a full-fledged race car, but it was not race-ready, so at 10 in the morning, we went to view the car. At 11:45 pm, the car was wheeled to our garage, and our engineers worked on it for more than 12 hours to make it race-ready.

“Friday morning, the car went up,” Pattis continues. “It was a car that none of our drivers had driven. Even our engineers were still looking at the manual before the race. It’s definitely something I do not want to relive.”
The result, however, was almost improbable: fourth place in the first race, followed by victory in the second race on Sunday. Racing Aurora then went on to place third and second in the next two races, ultimately leading to the team’s Second Runner-up placement in the 2025 championship.

That ability to not just overcome adversity but also to transform it into momentum served as a testament to the team behind Racing Aurora and that persistent, unyielding drive that has become central to the team’s identity. It was this spirit that attracted the kind of brands that the team partners with today and shares Sanjay’s vision for Racing Aurora, including Grizpower, its first ever partner; UMobile as a major partner; IWC Schaffhausen as official timekeeper; and Transwater, among many others.

Chasing Aurorae

As Racing Aurora prepares for its 2026 chapter, Pattis emphasises a focus on bolstering the team itself. From Thai mechanics to European engineers as well as a rotating cast of specialists brought together by a shared commitment to performance, each component of the team is responsible for lending that audacious optimism and drive to succeed. It’s a philosophy that will become even more important as Racing Aurora steps into the GT3 category in the TSS The Super Series.

“It’s the highest category of racing in terms of GT cars, so it’s a whole different ballgame,” Pattis says. “But at least we get to carry over some experience from our past TSS series and, hopefully next year and the years beyond, we can go on to other series as well.”

Long term, his ambitions stretch well beyond race weekends. Like all top-level motorsport operations, Racing Aurora collects enormous amounts of technical data during competition—data used to refine technologies eventually filtered into road cars. For Pattis, this is an opportunity for Southeast Asia to become more deeply involved in that ecosystem, particularly in research, development, and parts manufacturing.

“The big picture is that I would like Racing Aurora to reach a point where we manufacture parts,” he states. “We want manufacturers like, say, Mercedes, to appoint us as one of the teams to run research and development in this region, and, from there, to develop parts. It’s an industry that is very untapped in this part of the world—in Southeast Asia—but it’s something that we would like to contribute to and grow.”

For now, though, the team’s greatest strength remains far simpler: belief. In an industry where financial realities often overpower passion, Racing Aurora continues to move forward through the collective conviction of the people around it—mechanics working through the night, engineers learning unfamiliar cars hours before a race, partners willing to take unconventional risks, and a founder who trusted his instincts enough to start over in pursuit of purpose.

“It’s not an easy journey, nor is it supposed to be easy. For something to grow, you’ll have to go through the hard part first,” Pattis says. “The key thing is having good people around you who believe in your vision. I think that is the key to much in life, in fact. It’s something I’m very thankful for to have with Racing Aurora.”

Racing Aurora