IndyCar works on a new car<\/a>.<\/p>\nAnd Smith is also \u201cthe keeper of the rule book,\u201d working across different departments to make sure all the rules are updated and relevant. The only living rulebook, Smith said, lives with her.<\/p>\n
\u201cBasically, everything that goes into a race that has to be communicated to teams \u2014 whether it\u2019s operations manuals, practice groups, qualifying groups, official results, any type of schedule, any type of communication that they need or want \u2014 I am gathering that internally,\u201d Smith said, \u201cwhether it be from our operations department or engineering department or transportation.\u201d<\/p>\n
By the time Smith gets done explaining her job, what she does at IndyCar, she needs to take a breath.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a lot, for sure, but it helps that Smith, a Bay Area native, is gregarious and a proud extrovert.<\/p>\n
And she\u2019s done pretty much everything across the motorsports world.<\/p>\n
Smith didn\u2019t grow up a motorsports fan, however. Her weekends were dominated by San Francisco 49ers football rather than NASCAR races.<\/p>\n
But an event coordinator job landed her at Laguna Seca, Monterey County, when it was still Mazda Raceway. Smith managed the volunteers and was in charge of all the food and beverages on site. She also helped VIP guests, and eventually volunteers, with \u201chot laps,\u201d or rides around the track.<\/p>\n
She put on dozens of helmets. She buckled countless five-point harnesses. She unbuckled them. Down to the last rider.<\/p>\n
And then she found herself strapped into a Ferrari 458.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t like rollercoasters,\u201d she warned her driver.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is going to be fun,\u201d he promised her.<\/p>\n
And, much to her surprise, even traveling 154 mph down the straight, it was.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnce I got out of the car, I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know the top speed of every car that came to our track,\u201d Smith said. \u201cI wanted to know how much it weighed. I wanted to know \u2026 when there\u2019s different cars running at the same time, how do you make them equal?<\/p>\n
\u201cI was so interested in all the tiny details,\u201d Smith added. \u201cIt was like a whole new world opened up.\u201d<\/p>\n
That was 2011. Since then, Smith has worked in a variety of roles in the motorsports industry, from handling travel and accommodations for the staff and teams of what was then Andretti Autosports to serving as an assistant team manager for Bryan Herta Autosport, where she managed and led his first Pikes Peak International Hill Climb effort.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been on the promoter side of the race tracks,\u201d Smith said, \u201csold the tickets, managed the marketing team.\u201d<\/p>\n
And then IndyCar came calling.<\/p>\n
For Smith, despite her vast experience, working for IndyCar itself \u2014 rather than individual teams \u2014 was a new challenge.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is an aspect of our industry that I\u2019ve never seen,\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n
It certainly helped, she said, coming into her role at IndyCar in February 2024, that she already had so many established relationships with people in the paddock. She\u2019s worked to build the trust of team managers, who come to her for information, help, or just a hello or a welfare check.<\/p>\n
Smith, who now lives in Indianapolis, always wants to learn new things \u2014 even as she\u2019s sitting in race control, an admittedly daunting job. That first year, she said, she had a pit in her stomach, afraid of doing something wrong just because the stakes were so high.<\/p>\n
But by last year, she was more comfortable. It wasn\u2019t long before she started to think, \u201cHow can I make things better?\u201d<\/p>\n
So as the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach gets underway on Sunday, Smith will be in race control, viewing the race from a completely different perspective:<\/p>\n
Collecting the data, transmitting messages \u2014 and thinking ahead to what\u2019s next.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In the midst of a high-speed, high-stakes IndyCar race, two drivers collide \u2014 scattering debris over the track.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":273005,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[7,131,28942,133,132,137,14396,100,136],"class_list":["post-273004","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-long-beach","tag-california","tag-long-beach","tag-long-beach-grand-prix","tag-long-beach-headlines","tag-long-beach-news","tag-los-angeles-county","tag-motorsports","tag-news","tag-top-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273004","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=273004"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/273004\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/273005"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=273004"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=273004"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=273004"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}