Booked my first actual race weekend at 19 and honestly didn't think I'd get here

Started at 26 here, so a few years ahead of you on the same question. Never sat in a kart til two years ago when a buddy dragged me to a rental night and I was hooked. I did it backwards from you though. I went straight to owning a cheap car instead of renting a seat. Found an old Miata for about the price of a used appliance, put a roll bar and some brake pads in it, and started doing track nights with a local club. Running my own car means wrenching until midnight at the track and hauling a trailer, which is its own kind of education, but it made me a better driver than I expected because you learn what the car is acutally telling you when something starts to go wrong.

One thing I'd add to your plan: get a transponder or use a buddy's phone lap timer from day one. Seat time feels great, but nothing fixed my consistency like seeing lap after lap on paper and chasing tenths. Also budget for fuel and entry fees doubling what the org quote says, because there's always one more session you want to buy. Two years in I'm mid-pack in a novice-friendly club series and having the time of my life. You've got a decade on me, so the answer to your original question is pretty obvious.

Rallycross was my way in at 30, and nobody in my circle ever talks about it as a first step. My local club runs events on a dirt lot next to the county fairgrounds and entry is 40 bucks if you allready have a car. I ran my first season in a worn-out Subaru wagon with street tires and a helmet borrowed from a friend. Dirt taught me things asphalt never did, mostly how to catch a slide without lifting, and the damage risk is basicly zero compared to wall contact on a road course. I also want to be honest about the money side of shared endurance seats, since I priced one out last spring before going the rallycross route. The seat fee looks cheap until you add the transponder rental, the fuel contribution, the license they require, and the hotel for a weekend. It still pencil out better than owning a car for some people, but budget the whole weekend, not just the seat.

One more thing on your sim hours, they carry over more than most track folks admit. My buddy who put serious hours into a wheel and pedals before his first event was lapping within a second of me by the second session. Between that and what you learned in autocross, you are walking onto that grid with more than you think.

Crewed for a shared-seat endurance team for two seasons before I ever bought a seat myself, and the thing that separates the good renters from the slow ones is how they treat the handoff. Our best driver change went from sloppy to under 40 seconds once we started rehearsing it in the paddock on Friday night, belts, radio, everthing. Ask your team how they run pit stops before race day so you know your window. Also, in a four hour race the middle stints are where the traffic gets nasty, so use your practice session learning where people are faster and slower than you, not just chasing your own lap time.

Ran two shared-seat enduros last year and the surprise for me was how diferent my second stint was from the first. Spent the whole first one being too careful with the car and giving up time everywhere. Between stints I wrote down three things it was doing, mostly under braking, and went back out with an actual plan. Night and day. So bring a notepad, not just for lap times but for what the car and the traffic are telling you. Also the drivers meeting stuff about letting faster classes by cleanly sounds boring until you realize it saves you more seconds than any setup change will.