Race director Kyle Novak (white shirt) monitors practice at the Long Beach Grand Prix from IndyCar Race Control. (Photo: Jeff Gluck)
Each week, I ask a member of the motorsports community to shed some light on their career path and explain how they reached their current role. This week: Verizon IndyCar Series race director Kyle Novak, who is in his first season on the job. This interview was recorded as a podcast, but is transcribed for those who prefer to read.
Can you tell us a little about your role now so we can understand how you got to this point?
Sure. So I’m the race director for the Verizon IndyCar Series, which means you handle all aspects of the on-track operations of any event. We have a great staff that handles the details of every single department. I manage that staff in the room. It’s a pretty big undertaking, but we have great people that help us get it done.
Was racing on your radar? Was this a goal of yours when you were growing up or anything like that?
No. I always knew I wanted to work in the sports industry and had a calling in motorsports growing up. My dad and I are big car guys — muscle car guys. We both drag race when we can on the weekends; we have a small two-car hobby operation when I’m not at the racetrack for IndyCar that we’re racing on the weekends.
You still do that?
We still do. We have two cars that we take a lot of pride in. It’s a lot of work, but it still keeps me close to kind of the grassroots side. We have a lot of fun with it.
But growing up in that atmosphere, always being a huge NASCAR fan, huge IndyCar fan, even more recently Formula One, anything with four wheels has been a big part of my life. So never really intended it, but I’m glad it worked out that way for sure.
How did you get your start? What were you doing in college that started to put you on this path?
I did my undergraduate work at Bowling Green State University; I was a sports management major there. As part of my major program there, you had to do two internships, and of the two internships that I did, one was with the football program. And (now Ohio State coach) Urban Meyer was the coach there. He was in his second year of his two-year tenure at Bowling Green.
After that — and this is the gateway drug into racing — was working for IMG Motorsports when they still promoted the Cleveland Grand Prix. It was an event that’s very near and dear to me, a very special event. But that got me into the racetrack/race operations side of things. And it spooled eventually into where we are today.
Before we continue more into the racing part of it, tell me a little about what it was like to work for Urban Meyer. I mean obviously, he wasn’t the star coach that he is today, but I’m sure the makings of one were there. What did you learn from him?
It was very special. When you go through life and you come across people, there’s probably a few that are mentors. He was one of those people. When he was there, he was really on nobody’s radar screen, but you’d just tell he had that presence.
I’m a taller guy, I’m a bigger guy, and I have to have thick skin to deal with a lot of these drivers and team managers who are some of the sharpest people I’ve ever met. But there’s not a whole lot of people I’ve ever met who intimidated me or if they looked at me in the eye put that fear of, “You’d better do a good job,” and he’s one of those guys — maybe the only guy besides maybe my parents. Just a very intense, clear guy that can just get every last ounce of energy out of anyone. And that’s a tribute to his success as well.
Have you taken any of those leadership things along with you at different stops throughout your career? Or are they two different things?
Two different things. Keep in mind when Urban got to Bowling Green, the program was in shambles. Bowling Green, being a small, mid-major school but with a proud football tradition, especially in the state of Ohio, it was in shambles. The biggest thing he instilled in his players and all of his staff is that of accountability.
And I remember one of the coolest stories is one of the players, a wide receiver in a drill or something significant in practice, dropped a pass. (He said) “Oh my bad, Coach, my bad.” I remember him jumping that player saying, “My bad? Of course it’s your bad. Everyone saw it was your bad. Just catch the ball, you don’t have to say it.” It was this issue of excuses leading to accountability, it was something that always stuck with me for my career and something I’ve always taken with me.
So you said you got the racing bug, or at least even more from that side once you did the Cleveland Grand Prix stuff. What was your next step after that in Cleveland?
Cleveland led to more track construction. So I actually did that event from ’03 until Champ Car was absorbed into IndyCar I think in ’08. During that time I had the opportunity to work on the Denver event — the Grand Prix of Denver — consult on a couple more street courses. I did three races in 2006, and that kind of led to me meeting so many people and a few people who I still work with today in race control. I met them in my racetrack construction operations capacity, and that kind of started helping me meet people on the sanctioning body side.
That led me to an opportunity to be series manager for the Volkswagen Jetta TDI Cup, and that got me onto the series management side.
With the racetrack construction thing you were talking about, is it like somebody gives you a design and they’re saying, “Go make this happen, go put the walls here and fences here?” And you’re trying to figure it out?
The firm I worked for, we actually did the design work, too. We did it all, soup to nuts, so to speak. But what was cool about the race operations side was, now as race director — especially coming to a street course like Long Beach — you really have a really ground-up understanding of what it takes to put the event together and the challenges that the promoter has. And there are many: the event’s cost, down to how the cabling runs, which might affect how your race control is laid out.
So it all comes together, and that fundamental knowledge I’ve learned on the racetrack construction side really gave me a good foundation for now being on the sanctioning body side when running the race. It’s really a holistic view of the whole event from the ground up.
What was your path moving up the ladder once you ended up on the sanctioning body side of things? How did you go from level to level?
I’m actually a lawyer. So after the TDI Cup stuff, times being what they were in 2008, 2009, I thought it was time to pursue a personal goal and find some more growth. So I got a law degree.
After all that, you got a law degree?
Yeah, a law degree. I passed the bar in Michigan. I went to Ohio Northern University for law school. Kind of practiced solo for a while and always stayed in touch with a lot of my good friends.
A good friend of mine from IMSA who I stayed in touch with came calling and said, “We have the Lamborghini Super Trofeo race director race job open.” It was halfway though the 2015 season. He said, “Are you interested?” I went out to VIR (Virginia International Raceway) for the race and really was just blown away by impressive IMSA’s race operations were.
The next race at COTA (Circuit of the Americas in Austin), I’m the race director for Lamborghini Super Trofeo. And that was a really cool season for me because I’m a rookie race director, but IMSA hosted the Lamborghini Super Trofeo World Finals in Sebring. So it was a smorgasbord of racing with eight races including the world championship shootout on the last day. That was a good way for a rookie race director like myself to get acclimated quickly to a high level of sports car racing.
So you were doing that, and then how did this opportunity present itself?
I worked up through the IMSA race director ladder, so to speak. The following year, had the opportunity to do Porsche GT3 Cup USA, and IMSA also sanctions a Canadian counterpart to the series and there’s some joint events. I did that for two years, ’16 and ’17.
In ’17, in addition to those two series, I was the race director for Continental Tire Sports Car Challenge. So I had a very full plate in 2017. But some of our IndyCar staff works with IMSA as well, especially in race control — it’s just such a small community. So I had the opportunity to come in contact with (IndyCar president) Jay Frye though my travels at some of the joint IMSA/IndyCar events, just stayed in touch and here we are now.
What’s the key to being a good race director? What do you have to do right?
Two things I takeaway are one, you have to trust your staff. You have to trust everything they do, because there is no way any one person can manage these sessions as complex as our technology is now, and as layered as our approach is now with video replay and all that stuff. So you have to trust your people and they have to trust you, especially when it’s a pressure cooker in there during in some races.
And the other thing is when you interact with the drivers and teams, you have to listen and you have to be open to their feedback and you have to take care of them in the sense the perspective they have is incredibly meaningful.
The very impressive thing about the IndyCar paddock — and I’m still blown away by this — is how lucid our drivers are. There was always the urban legend they could see a quarter at the apex, and you’d laugh about that, but now I believe it. They come to me with, “Kyle, did the wall at Turn 3 move six inches left or right?” Well yeah, it did. They can see this sometimes without being prompted. The level of what they see and how they can think about it, communicate it — even during a session — I’m just blown away by it.
That raises our game, because you can’t let anything fall through the cracks or assume that they won’t see it or know about it. They do, and it’s very impressive.
Let’s say someone is reading this and they’re like, “Man, that’d be so cool to be a race director of a series and get to call these races.” How would somebody get their start? What would you recommend?
Talk to everyone. Reach out. Email people. Go find the officials. So many of our fans, they’re here obviously for the drivers, and that’s the show. The show is the drivers and we never pretend we’re the show and fans come to see us. We prefer for everyone to not know who we are; it’s like an umpire, you’re doing a good job if you don’t know who the umpire is.
But you’ve gotta meet people. The key to any industry, especially in motorsports, is who you know. One of my really good friends who works for IMSA started out by just saying, “Hey, I think race operations is for me, can I come to a race?” And that was truly his gateway into where he is now, and he’s a very successful young race operations guy. That’s all it really takes, (saying) “I want to get involved.”
It is such a small industry that we’re always happy to see young people, anybody that’s interested in what we do, because it’s an unsung side of the business — maybe in a good way — but we really appreciate anyone that has an interest in that. That’s what I recommend anyone doing.
Each week, I ask someone in the racing industry about their career path and journey to where they are today. In this edition of the series, I speak with Joe Gibbs Racing president Dave Alpern. This was recorded as a podcast, but is also transcribed for those who prefer to read.
How did this begin for you? How did this whole thing start?
I grew up outside of D.C. in Northern Virginia. J.D. Gibbs and I have been best friends since seventh grade; we went to intermediate school and high school together. We went off to different colleges, and J.D. was kind of on the five-and-a-half year plan, and I got done a little bit early. I was on the four-and-a-half year plan.
So his dad was starting this race team when we were getting out of college, and I got out first. They needed cheap labor, so I was an unpaid intern, believe it or not.
I actually started college as an electrical engineering major until I realized I was really bad at math and science, which are two key components to being an engineer. My dad was an engineer, but I hadn’t bothered to take a personality profile which would have said, “You’re gonna be a horrible engineer.” So that lasted a year. I got my degree in communications to be a broadcast journalist. My dream when I was in high school and college was to be a SportsCenter anchor. Obviously, I failed at that as well.
So I finished college right as Coach was starting a NASCAR team, and he asked if I would help for six months. I said, “Man, that’ll look great on my resume. It’ll be great experience.” I just had this hunch. Everything Coach does turns to gold, so I’m gonna hitch my wagon to him for my first gig.
I literally moved to Charlotte, and then me and J.D. and another guy, Todd Meredith, we were all three recent college graduates. We lived in an apartment together and we went to work at this startup race team. We had 15 employees and we had no idea what we were doing. And when I say that, I’m talking about (doing everything from) putting stickers on cars to booking hotel rooms.
I speak to college students a lot and I tell them: Forget cell phones. This is pre-email! You weren’t emailing people.
They didn’t even have anywhere to put me. So they literally emptied out a broom closet and had to run an extension cord in there for a lamp because there were no plugs in the broom closet, and I had like a little elementary school desk — that’s all they had room for — and a chair and a lamp and a phone. But who was I gonna call? I had nobody to call. Maybe a hotel on occasion. And that’s kind of how it started; that’s about as unglamorous as you can think.
Not only did you not have any experience, but did you have any idea about NASCAR?
I had an uncle who I grew up with, my uncle Jimmy, he passed away many years ago. But he used to take me to Dover and Richmond. We would go to those races when I was growing up, and I was a No. 88 Darrell Waltrip fan when I was little; he was in the Gatorade car, and I had T-shirts and stuff from that. But I wasn’t what you would call a big fan, I was just aware of NASCAR. We would spend more time wandering around the grandstands and the area around the track than we did watching the race.
I had some familiarity with it, but I was by no means a NASCAR fan, nor did I one day say, “Hey, I want to work in NASCAR.” For me, it was more about the who than the what. In other words, I was teaming up with the Gibbs family. They could have been selling coat hangers and it wouldn’t have mattered to me. I believe in what they’re about and I wanted to be with them. The fact that it ended up being in NASCAR is kind of a bonus. That’s a lot more fun than coat hangers. But I’m glad that that’s the business they were in, but I had no aspirations to do that at all.
Dave Alpern (second from right) poses with his family and the Gibbs family after Carl Edwards’ victory in the 2015 Coca-Cola 600.
If that’s the case, it sounds like everything had to be self-taught and learning by experience. How did it evolve from starting out and not knowing anything to getting to where you are at this point?
I have no idea. (Laughs) We have a sign in our lobby that talks about how we want everything that happens in our company to be evident that there’s direct intervention of God, and I would say our whole history is that way.
I’ll never forget sitting at our first championship in 2000 when Bobby Labonte won and we’re sitting at the table and it’s J.D. and his wife and Todd and his wife and me and some others, and we kind of literally looked around and go, “This is a miracle. We just beat the best teams in the world and won a championship. Are you kidding me? If people only knew we had no idea what we were doing!” Now, I’m speaking for me; fortunately, we had a lot of people who did know what they were doing back in those days, with (Jimmy) Makar and Coach.
But honestly, when we were small, you kind of had to do everything. Now, as we get bigger, we have 600 people. We brought in Chris Helein, as an example, many years ago to run all of our communications and our PR and he came with Joe from the Redskins. But for 15 years prior to him, we didn’t have anyone in that department.
I was in licensing — Joe called me “the T-shirt guy.” For many years I was the T-shirt guy, and that was what we did. Now we’ve got J.J. (Damato) who’s an expert and who came from the NHL and NASCAR. But I literally have done every job in the front office, so for me now, it enables me to relate to those people, to remember what it was like when we didn’t have a department.
Most of my counterparts (presidents of other race teams) do not come from a marketing background. Some of them were attorneys, some of them come from the competition side. Most of them are smarter than me in a lot of areas, but I view the world in NASCAR from a sponsor (perspective) and a fan’s eyes because that’s how I (came up).
I mentioned there was Todd Meredith and there was myself and there was J.D. Todd was our chief operating officer, and probably 95 percent of his job was internally focused inside the company — operations, people. For me, for 20 years, 95 percent of my job was externally focused. So in other words, I was sponsors, media, the community, my counterparts, tracks. And then J.D. kind of hovered between the two of us.
So for me, in the last three or four years as I’ve expanded my role (as J.D. Gibbs fell ill), what’s been the biggest change has been focusing inside the building and going to competition meetings and worrying (about performance). That’s probably the hardest part, because I’m wired to where when I come to the racetrack, my tendency is I’m immediately wanting to go talk to other people or sponsors. I went to dinner with Marcus (Smith) the other night. I’m thinking of the people in the ecosystem of racing, because that’s how I was brought up.
But that’s a long way of saying having done almost every job in the front office on the business side, I think it has equipped me to relate to every single person because I know what it’s like — whether it’s booking hotel rooms or running the show cars or doing the social media.
There could be jobs where the employees think, “The boss is not in touch with what we are doing.” And the employees are resentful like, “This guy, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He hasn’t been in this role.” But since you’ve been in all those roles, you’re coming from it like, “I’m asking you to do something that I’ve actually done.”
They do say on the competition side, that I don’t know what I’m talking about. (Laughs) I’m sure they do. I just kind of sit there and go, “Let’s make sure we go fast.” OK, thanks. “Keep pushing the accelerator. Keep going fast.”
Over the years I’ve learned — and this comes from Coach — everything we do is predicated on one thing, and that’s winning and going fast. So when we make decisions, literally, I can tell you over the years, particularly in the early days, the question was always, “Is this gonna make us go faster?” So if it was a financial decision or a capital purchase, you would ask the question: “Does this make us go fast?” And if it doesn’t, we probably weren’t going to do it.
We didn’t have a sign out front of our building for over 10 years because it was going to be too expensive and it didn’t make us go fast. So we said, “Let’s just use the money on something else.” We’re in the competition business, so at its core, you can be great at everything, but if you’re not leading laps and winning races, you’re not going to be around.
So Joe’s philosophy from the beginning was to pick the best people and go fast, and everything else kind of just takes care of itself. As important as social media and marketing and everything is, ultimately, all these people want to win. They want to run up front, and if you’re not doing that, you’re not gonna get the best drivers, you’re not gonna get the best people, you’re not gonna get the best sponsors. We feel like we’re in this business to do well and to lead laps. That’s what we focus on, and that comes from Joe on down — and he’s the single most competitive human that I’ve ever met, and so we do everything we do to win.
Dave Alpern speaks during the 2015 NASCAR Media Tour. (Nigel Kinrade)
You mentioned that your role has expanded to the competition side, and I assume that coincided with J.D. having to step aside. How difficult has that been for you to not only take on those extra responsibilities, but you’re seeing your best friend go through this and you’re trying to pick up the slack and do him proud at the same time?
It’s probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever experienced in my life. My whole career, I was in a really good position because when you work for a small family business, there’s some comfort in that. If you work for a big public company, there’s a lot of politics and there’s climbing the corporate ladder and worrying (about the next step). For many years, I kind of had the comfort of knowing, “Hey, I work for a family business. I’m as high up the rung as I’m ever gonna get,” and there was comfort in that. I was very happy and comfortable with my role, sort of just really being there as almost like a chief of staff for J.D. and for Coach.
Candidly, I had many years where I thought, “Gosh, is there something else for me someday? I’ve been doing this for a long time, I’m very comfortable in this role, I feel like I’ve done everything there is to do.” And I had no idea that God was preparing me for something that I never in a million years would have fathomed.
So when J.D. got sick, I began to do a lot of helping take up some of the slack for him when he was having treatment. It was very unnatural for me at the beginning, partly because this is supposed to be my best friend’s role — not my role — and I’m not a Gibbs.
If I was honest with you, I would say that I’m still not totally comfortable (with the title). I remember when I got named president. So many people were congratulating me and stuff. It meant a lot to me that people were congratulating me, but they didn’t realize, deep down I would much rather still be the T-shirt guy or be the whatever, because I want my best friend to have this role and I miss going to the racetrack with him.
So yeah, this whole thing has been very difficult and I have confidence, as I see from his family, that as hard as things are, I do believe everything happens for a reason. I believe that everything filters through the Lord’s hands and so I have to trust as much as I don’t like this, God’s been faithful to this company. I said at the beginning, our company is literally a miracle the way that we’ve year after year, you see how things have happened that would not have happened apart from the intervention of the Lord. And so as much as I wish this wasn’t how things were supposed to go, it has, and we’re just trying to do our best amidst it.
Joe has been incredible. J.D.’s wife and his kids, I mean, they’re literally an amazing family. They are so strong. Like I said, J.D. is the toughest guy I know, and he’s fighting it and he’s battling it. But it’s still going to the racetrack, especially here, we normally stay up in (Interstate Batteries chairman) Norm (Miller’s) condo, and J.D. always stayed there with me. I miss having him at the racetrack. So it has been a tough journey. I feel very grateful to have been in a position to be able to help the family out.
The last thing I’ll say is, you asked about thinking about J.D. Honestly, when I make every decision that I make, I think, “Alright, how would J.D. approach this? What would J.D. do?” And I hope I’m treating things not really the way I want to do it, because it’s not my company. I may have a fancy title, but ultimately I’m just a steward of somebody else’s company and I’m trying to do a good job. I’m trying to do what J.D. would do in a decision.
I always joked J.D.’s “excited” and “depressed” are about an inch apart. He was the most steady guy, and so he didn’t get emotional. And this (job) is one big crisis. There’s like 10 crises a day and you gotta just stay measured. I try to think about that, channel my J.D. “Alright, Dave, don’t get too excited. You gotta be smart here, you gotta be calm.”
J.D. would make the decision that’s best for the people. He wouldn’t get emotional, he’d never make decisions based on emotion, he would do the right thing. I think we’ve made the best out of the situation and I’m watching J.D. fight, so that’s all he can do is fight and keep trying to win and do things the right way.
Dave Alpern and his family (courtesy of Dave Alpern).
Does that sort of take it to another level for you as far as your determination and your passion to help the company succeed? Because you’ve been put in this role where you’re, it’s not only the company, it’s your friends.
I go to work every day working for a family that I love. Yes, that’s a huge part of it. I’m not sure if I’d still be doing it if it was just a nameless, faceless (business). This isn’t a job to me; my whole family has been raised (in NASCAR).
I have twin boys who are 21 — they’re at Chapel Hill — and I have a senior in high school, and I have a picture over my desk and it’s 22 straight years, from the same spot on the porch of a house that we rent in Daytona. Every year in my sons’ lives, and it’s them growing up, sitting on my lap in the same spot. Of course they’re not on my lap anymore, but it’s one of my prized possessions. They told me it doesn’t matter where we work or what we do in our whole life, we’re taking off and we’re going down for that picture. And if the guy sells the house, we told him, “You better tell the new people there’s gonna be a family coming on the porch taking a picture.”
That’s just an example of these traditions that I have in my family that we do. My family came with me to the California race, and J.D.’s boys came and Melissa, his wife, and we all went to Disneyland the day before Fontana. It’s who you’re doing it with is the thing, and it’s not just now the Gibbs, it’s the people that work for us that have become friends, and you love their families.
J.D. used to say that all the time — what he thought about most when he woke up and when he went to bed was the families that are depending on us to make good decisions. Now it’s 600 of them. So you talk about 600, that’s not just 600 people, that’s thousands of people, because it’s spouses, parents, kids, neighbors, aunts, uncles.
When you make a decision, sometimes people might criticize a decision and what I want to tell them is, “We care. We love that you’re passionate about it. But just think about us, because we’ve got to make good decisions. The last thing we want to do is do something that’s not smart for all those people.” So I love working with a family that I know cares. I can see it; I’m in the meetings when Joe is laboring over, “How do I make the right decision?”
I can tell you that every Monday for 26 years, we have a little group that gets together and prays for the whole company every week. Joe Gibbs leads it, and he’s praying for people by name at the company. If you’ve got something going on with your family or whatever. And I think to myself, “Where else am I gonna go where people care like that?” I would hate to be at a company where you’re just some number, you’re nameless, faceless.
But we really have a family. Again, it’s a 600-family family, which is a lot different than it was in the early days, but as best we can, that culture has stayed there where Joe really cares about the people. Again, we want to win, we want to take care of our people, and it is a special place. It’s a stressful place a lot — it’s a stressful business — but it’s a great, special place to be a part of, and I’m grateful that I’m a part of it.
This is the latest in a weekly feature called “How I Got Here,” where I ask people in NASCAR about the journeys to their current jobs. Each interview is recorded as a podcast but is also transcribed on JeffGluck.com. Up next: Kristine Curley, communications coordinator for Toyota Racing.
Before we trace your career path, what is your current role with Toyota? What do you do?
I help coordinate all our social media — with help from our partners — across a bunch of series. Not just NASCAR, but also NHRA, Formula Drift, POWRi, some of the lower series, ARCA. So there’s a lot, and it’s a lot to coordinate all that.
Then I also kind of serve as a liaison, because I’m on the marketing side now with corporate communications and the PR, make sure we’re all working in lockstep. I always say social media has a marketing and a PR presence, and it’s melding those two and making sure they’re all working together. So we’ve got a great team, and I’m super proud working with some people that I’ve known in the garage for a long time. So that makes things easy. Relationships are 100 percent key in this sport, as you know.
You mentioned that you’ve known people in the garage for a long time…
Are you saying I’m old, Jeff?
No, you mentioned that! But that’s a good place to start, because you were already very established by the time I got to know you and came into this career. So I really don’t know that much of your background or how you got to NASCAR in the first place.
It’s a tangled web of a story.
Well let’s get into it. How did the web begin?
So I graduated from the University of Kansas — Rock Chalk — with a journalism degree. My sisters always say, “You were lucky. You knew exactly what you wanted to do when you went to college.” And I did. I was in was the magazine sequence, which back then, was not really a sequence in journalism school. We were one of the first universities that had it. I really wanted to do broadcast journalism.
I graduated from KU, and then I wasn’t ready to go into the real world, as I like to say, so I went to be a ski bum for a year. Well that year turned into three and a half years. And so while I was there working five jobs — including adjusting people’s ski boots in the ski shop and working in a restaurant at night — I figured I’d better keep my skill sharp with writing.
That’s one thing I will say: Writing is important. I don’t care what you’re doing, you have to write, and you have to be able to communicate. And so I think that is the best advice I’d give everyone: Read and write and keep your writing as sharp as you can. Because whether it’s social media or whether you’re writing a press release or whether you’re writing talking points for someone, you have to know how to speak.
So anyway, I went to work in the ski resort town in Crested Butte and I thought, “I’d better do something so that at the end of this, when I’m looking for a job, I’ve got something to show for it.” So I basically started the sports page of the local little Crested Butte paper. We used to have the extreme skiing competition there, so I’d do that and I’d find little things to cover.
Then I fancied myself a columnist. I’ll never forget, (former Florida State football/basketball star) Charlie Ward was coming out (of college) and trying to decide what sport he wanted to play. So I wrote that he should be a football player. And I remember my dad was like, “What in the world? Why would he be a football player?” That was my first taste of writing a column and having someone not agree with me — my father! Is there anyone that’s gonna bring you down to earth than your dad or your mom?
(Being in Crested Butte) had forced me to get out there and hustle and do things. I also got some odd jobs writing for like the Chamber of Commerce and things like that, so at the end of the day, when I went to the real world, I had something. So I went back to the real world and I wanted to get into television.
Wait, so you just said, “I want to go back and I’m just gonna try and go to a TV station?”
Right, exactly.
That sounds tough.
And I didn’t have a broadcast degree, I had a magazine degree. So I went back to Kansas City where I’m from, and I’m like, “I guess I better start calling around to the TV stations.” I didn’t have a tape, didn’t have anything. So I called around to the TV stations and got ahold of a gentleman in the sports department at a place where at that time they were the number one TV station. And (former quarterback) Len Dawson was the head sports guy.
Anyway, the producer there (John Crumley) was just the most amazing man. To this day, he is still one of my mentors. I don’t remember what I said to him, but I basically talked my way into the sports department and basically said, “I’ll carry cable for free.” And in the meantime, I was also writing for the Kansas City Star — very poorly, I will say — but the gentleman who was there (Tom Ibarra) was also a mentor of mine and to this day we still talk.
And you had your clips from Crested Butte? You just said, “Hey, let me do some stuff, I’m from here?”
Correct. They didn’t have a position. Again, talked my way into it. Covered (future UCLA star) JaRon Rush; I would cover local high school sports. I’d go in and write my stories. And in the meantime, I wanted to break into television, so again, talked my way into the sports department there. I would go cover the games, go get sound afterwards, so I’d have to go into the locker rooms.
So you just had a microphone and camera or something and they’re like, “Hey, go get us stuff?”
So for the Chiefs games, I would go and we’d cover the game and I would write down time codes like, “Touchdown at this time,” and then we’d go get sound in the locker rooms. Same with college sports. Sometimes we didn’t have a camera to go cover it.
I remember that Tim Duncan, who is one of my favorite basketball players, they were playing at Mizzou, and no one would get a camera. There was this old cameraman who no one got along with. Well, I loved him. He was the nicest guy. I said, “Hey, listen, I know you’re off. We don’t have a camera, but it’s Tim Duncan. Can you go? Let’s cover it, and we’ll get sound.” He’s like, “Yeah.”
So we go up to the game and Tim was a superstar then at Wake Forest. The only reason you went to the game was to get sound from Tim Duncan, right? Well, we’re waiting around, waiting around — and in college, you weren’t allowed to go in the locker rooms. So I’m like, “Where is everyone? Why am I the only one standing out here?” Finally I looked at my photographer. I’m like, “Do you think he’s in the locker room and everyone’s in there getting him?” He’s like, “Well, it looks like it.” I’m like, “I don’t know what to do.”
I was scared to death. Am I just gonna walk in? What if I do — will I get in trouble? But I’m like, “If he’s in there and I don’t get the sound, then that’s on me.” So I said, “Alright, we’re going in. I’ll go in first and if someone stops me, we’ll just be like, ‘I’m so sorry. We thought everyone was in here.'”
Sure enough, everyone was in there. So I was like, “Gosh darn it.” At this point there’s a mob (of media around Duncan). Well, I was so mad that I wormed my way to the front, got down in front of Tim on one knee. I remember I was balancing because I had to get down low enough, I remember he looked down at me and laughed, but I just looked up at him and asked questions, got my microphone in there, got the sound and we left. I was petrified, you know what I mean? But I was just like, “You’ve gotta carry yourself, you’ve got to know what you’re doing,” and at the end of the day we got sound.
Back during that time — not to make it sound like it was ancient times — but werewomen in the locker room as accepted as they are now? Did you have any obstacles that way?
I wouldn’t say there were obstacles. Actually, one of the other anchors at the station was a woman and she was one of the first ones. But whenever I got those opportunities, I looked at it this way: Someone gave me a chance, and the last thing I’m gonna do is make them look bad by giving me this chance. So for my friend John Crumley at the station, the only thing that would make me feel worse about what I was doing is if I disappointed him. And so I knew that I had to go carry myself in that locker room in a certain way. I was there to get sound, and it’s intimidating.
I remember Jason Whitlock at that time a columnist for the Kansas City Star, and he’s like, “Why do you walk in these locker rooms (with) your nose always in the air?” And I said, “Exactly. I have to walk in here like I belong, I have to conduct myself professionally, I have to get my sound and I’m getting out of here.” It’s not a very friendly place to come, and it is intimidating, but at the end of the day, I have a job to do and I’m gonna do it the best that I can and do it professionally.
At the end of the day, the guy who is the head publicist for the Chiefs was on my resume. He was one of those guys that was really hard to get to know, but at the end of the day, making those right relationships and Bob Moore was certainly someone to this day who helped open some doors by just having his name on my resume.
How did you go from that point to the PR side and into racing?
That’s an interesting question. So I’m at the TV station and at this point I’m just gonna say, I wasn’t gonna make it on the air. I should have gone to broadcast school. I was at a crossroads.
I was producing, and one of the things that I really enjoyed was producing a live football show that aired right before Monday Night Football for us. I was actually nominated for a local Emmy for it.
I remember one of the shows, I had to sit in the booth — and I am deaf in one ear. So when you’re in the booth, you have to have your headphones on so you can hear back … to the station and still be talking to your people on air. Well I couldn’t, because I can’t hear out of one ear, so I’d have to switch (the headset) over to talk to people. But I loved it. You had to come up with stories.
All of that led me to do a better job as a PR person. (In the racing world) I always looked at things from a producer side when (TV people) would come to me for story ideas. Like I would know, “You know what, if we got this, this is gonna be a good sound bite” or “This is good B-roll,” because I really enjoy producing. I like coming up with the stories.
People make fun of me, but I love to watch pregame. Like last week, we were at our (Kansas) alumni association watch party and they didn’t have the pregame sound up. I was like, “Can we turn the sound up?” Because I love to see the stories. That’s what gets you excited about sports — you can identify with the athletes.
I was at a crossroads, and so it was like, “Do you want to go be a producer?” I was working at the ABC affiliate, which is obviously associated with ESPN, and my mentor’s like, “Do you really wanna do that?” I’m like, “I don’t know.”
So I took a little one-year break, and that one-year break…I kind of got lucky, let’s put it that way. I decided I didn’t want to do television producing as a career, so I was still kind of looking around. In the meantime, one of our friends owned a company, which to this day is brilliant. She managed a bunch of non-profits — because if you work for a non-profit, you usually are short-staffed. But she’d come up with this model where you would move people around from the different charities to help with the other charities’ events.
So they wouldn’t have to go big on staff.
Correct. And so the charity that I was in charge of, I wrote grants and I did the newsletter and PR and all that stuff, was the ALS Association. And the ALS Association in Kansas City was one Kansas City athlete’s charity of choice.
Think back — who is probably the biggest athlete to come out of Kansas City?
I’m blanking.
George Brett.
Oh, duh. Now that I think of George Brett, I think of ALS stuff too. That connection sounds familiar.
Anyway, it just so happened to be the year he got elected to the Hall of Fame (1999). And when he did, the city wanted to do something for him and he had said, “I want it to benefit a charity.”
So we did a week of events that were amazing. One of the big events was a roast of George with (former Dodgers manager) Tommy Lasorda, Larry King and Bo Jackson. Chris Berman and Bob Costas were the emcees.
It wasn’t my event to run, but I helped. And one of the things I did was help Berman and Costas with their script and the setup of how we were gonna do it. And I was like, “You know what? I really like working with athletes and talent.” I came out of that and I said, “Now I know what I think I should do.”
So that’s when it hit you. You were like, “I really enjoy the star part of this and helping them do something.”
Right. And I’ve been lucky to meet a lot of people, but at the end of the day, they’re just people like us and we all have a job to do. But I really enjoy it because of all of that experience.
So I was like, “OK, what am I gonna do?” Enter my mentor at the TV station, and the assistant news director he was friends with had gone to one of the big advertisement firms in Kansas City. One of their new clients was Sprint, and they were getting in racing.
I remember I was in the middle of all of this stuff with George Brett. I had an interview, I remember he asked me, “Can you handle death?”
(Gets choked up and pauses to collect herself.)
And I was like, “Yeah. This sounds exciting.”
In the interview, they asked you, “Can you handle death?”
Yeah, and I didn’t know what he meant by that. He’s like, “Can you travel and all that stuff” and I said, “Love to travel.” I didn’t quite get what he meant. And so I started working with Adam Petty. (Speaking through tears) And let’s just say I grew up a lot in the year that I worked with him. (Editor’s note: Petty was killed in a 2000 crash at New Hampshire at the age of 19.)
But what I learned is how this sport is a family. And so after Adam passed, I decided I wanted to stay in the sport just because of the people. Like if you’re not happy and you don’t work with good people, it’s not fun. So I made a decision that I wanted to stay in the sport, and there are amazing people. Again, relationships are 100 percent key.
Adam Petty and Kristine Curley (photo courtesy of Kristine Curley).
Was that a hard decision for you, or was it sort of obvious at the time to stay in the sport?
A little bit. Kyle (Petty) finished out the year in Adam’s car, and so Kyle asked — I helped finish out the year with Kyle in the car. I think after that is when I was like, “What do I want to do?” And so an opportunity presented itself to stay in the sport, and I decided it was time for a change. I’d have to move to Charlotte for it, and I thought, “I’m gonna just try it. And if I don’t like it or it’s too hard, then I’ll get out of it.”
Seventeen years later of working with drivers, and it was good and I’ve worked with some amazing drivers.
Then I went to work with Bill Elliott and Ray Evernham.
That was immediately after the Pettys?
Yep. One of the things I was always intrigued with my father was a lawyer, and law always intrigued me. In fact, in journalism school, (law) was a weed-out class. It was a class everyone had trouble with. And I remember, one of my friends, she was straight A’s and had the hardest time with it, and I loved that class. Didn’t even really had to study for it. Like my mind just thought that way.
And I remember Cindy Elliott (Bill’s wife and Chase’s mom) was talking about, “Our sport needs some good agents.” And she was like, “Maybe we should send you to law school.” I told her that (recently) and she laughed, like, “Did I really say that?” I’m like, “Yes.” And to this day, I’m like, “Why didn’t I (become an agent)?” That is my one regret. My path certainly would have been different. But I didn’t do it, I stayed in PR and did that for a long long time.
So you were doing Bill Elliott’s stuff. How did it come to be that Jimmie Johnson was next?
So Bill retired. And I will say, working with Ray Evernham back then helped me prepare for the next step (with Chad Knaus). But anyway, yes, after that, Bill retired and again, it was, “Do I wanna stay in the sport?” A friend of mine who was doing Jimmie’s PR for the first two years was going to come off the road and work for Jimmie. He said, “We think you’d be great.”
I met with people from Lowe’s who become another mentor for me — the person who hired me. And I said, “Listen, here’s the deal: You can look at my resume, but at the end of the day, 90 percent of this job in this sport is through the relationship you have with the drivers. And they have to trust you that when you go to them and say, ‘I need you to do this AM radio station,’ or ‘I need you to do this’ that there’s a reason for it, and there’s a reason something’s on the schedule. That you vetted through it and talked through it and you give them the tools that you need to succeed on it.”
So I said, “Alright, give it a try, we’ll see.” This was a point in time where I was either gonna stay in the sport for a while or I’m gonna go try something else. So ended up staying with Jimmie for 10 years, and then went to work with Clint Bowyer, two totally (different personalities). (Laughs) But again I had to learn how each of them are very different.
And Bill was very different. An interesting thing — Bill back in the day would much rather do an interview one-on-one.
Instead of a big group session?
Correct. I think he’s just more comfortable that way. And he’d very much rather sit and talk like that. That’s just more his style. I think big groups were not his thing. Other drivers would just prefer to just get everyone there together, except for if it’s a special one-on-one request, but again, it’s knowing that and understanding what it is that is gonna set them up to succeed that’ll get you a good interview.
Can you just give us a sense of what it was like during the Jimmie years? You were there for his whole rise in some ways and were there for like six of the championships. So that had to be an unreal time in your life, experiencing all this and seeing all of it first-hand of what’s gonna go down as a legendary period in NASCAR history, I imagine.
Yeah, it was great. I will say this, and I don’t mean this to sound ungrateful. Winning is great; winning is absolutely why we are in sports. But I will say I would go back and work with Adam where I never won a race in a heartbeat. I’ve told Jimmie that, and he knows that. Because winning is important, but it’s the people that you work with who are important, and I’ve been lucky to work with some of the best, and I don’t know how I lucked into that.
Each of them to this day — Kyle Petty is still a dear friend, Jimmie is a dear friend, Clint is a dear friend. You can tell I’m a crier, but I shed a few tears for him (winning at Martinsville). Martin winning last year, amazing, both him and Sherry (Pollex).
Again, when you are surrounded and get to work with good people, what more could you ask for, right? And those people take a vested interest and care about you.
I always tell my family, if something ever happened and I needed to get home, it might not be the driver I work with, but there’s someone there in that garage that would get me on their plane and get me home. And I think that’s the thing that keeps people (in the sport).
It’s a grind. This sport is a grind, and it will tear you down and it will wear you down sometimes. But it’s also a family. Sometimes we’re a little dysfunctional, but at the end of the day, we care about people and we want to make sure that those people are taken care of.
So yes, it was certainly amazing to be able to win championships, and I’ve been lucky to win a few. You meet a lot of people, so that’s amazing. But again, I don’t mean to sound like it’s not a big deal, but I only have one picture hanging up of me with an athlete. And it was with Buck O’Neil, the old Negro Leagues player who passed away a few years ago. He was just an amazing, cool guy. And of all the people that I’ve been lucky enough to meet, and there have been a few, he’s the only one that I have a picture of myself with hanging up. Now if I met Willie Nelson, that picture might be up too.
Kristine Curley and Buck O’Neil (courtesy of Kristine Curley).
So you talked about how other women might be listening to this and hoping to maybe do what you’ve done someday. It’s quite a path that you’ve had and so many people you’ve gotten to meet, like you’ve said. What’s some of your top advice that you’d give to somebody who’s just trying to make it on their own path?
My biggest advice is, you have to be professional and you have to carry yourself sometimes or carry yourself to a higher standard maybe than is expected. And that’s OK, right? One of the things, I was sitting next to a co-worker the other day and he heard me speaking to someone, and I got off the phone and he gave one of the nicest compliments anyone could ever give me. He’s like, “I want my daughters to meet you, because the way you talked to that person, I could tell that they were being disrespectful to you, but the way you held your ground and the way you spoke back to him, I want my daughters to feel empowered that they can do that, too.”
And of course, anyone that’s listening to this knows I cry, so of course I cried at work. I’m like, “Well thank you. There is no higher compliment that you could give me as a woman than to say that.”
But it’s hard. It’s not easy. Back when I was doing stuff at the TV station, I was covering the Chiefs, and we’d be out sometimes — my friends and I — and some of the Chiefs players would be out. My friends would be like, “Let’s go over and say hi.” I’m like, “No, because they’re out on their personal time and they don’t need to see me and I don’t need to see them because when I go into that locker room, they need to know I’m there doing business.” And sometimes that’s not fun, sometimes you want to go.
In my head, I always had to keep things very scheduled, very professional. Like for Jimmie, there’s always so many things we had to do, right? Sometimes we had to be down to the minute, like, “You’ve got seven minutes (for an interview)” — but at least I’m giving you seven minutes, right? I’d come to you: “What are your questions? What do we need to prepare them for so when we get into the interview, you’re getting what you want and Jimmie or whatever driver it is are expressing their true selves?” So again, it’s setting everyone up to succeed.
Thank you so much for being willing to do this.
I don’t think I’m worthy of a podcast, but if there’s one little girl or high school, college, whatever someone who’s struggling — just don’t give up. Keep calling, keep after it, be professional when you do it. But all it was was me picking up the phone and asking someone to give me a chance.
This is the latest in a weekly feature called “How I Got Here,” where I ask people in NASCAR about the journeys to their current jobs. Each interview is recorded as a podcast but is also transcribed on JeffGluck.com. Up next: Mike Zizzo, vice president of communications at Texas Motor Speedway.
First of all, what do you do here at Texas so we can understand how you got to this point?
I handle all the media relations, so that entails any driver events that we do, setting up credentials for media, working with the marketing team on certain initiatives we have there, and then being on the executive team here at TMS. We get to do advances with drivers. We have Daniel Suarez this year, we had a special guest in Jared Leto earlier this (month), which was really cool. And we’ll have Kevin Harvick in the fall. So a lot of media events and such. It’s basically just managing the media and making sure when they come and visit us that we get the coverage that we’re looking for as well as accommodating them as guests for the weekend.
How long have you been here working at the track now?
Feels like 50 years. (Laughs) No, I joined in ’05 after I left NASCAR, so I’m starting Year 13.
Obviously you didn’t just magically plop down here in Texas and start your career here, so where did this whole thing begin for you?
I was a scribe just like you back in the day. I graduated from Florida Southern College in Lakeland. I wanted to be a sports writer, and I was fortunate enough to land at a major paper at the Orlando Sentinel. Just like any young scribe, I started out on the agate desk and did a lot of box scores before I got my break.
People were calling in with their high school football scores and you were taking the stats on the phone?
That was the worst thing ever when we had to do it. We got a call-in and you’re like, “Oh, no stats, please.” And then you got to move up and you actually got to cover a game, which was awesome. But I worked at the Lakeland Ledger when I was at Florida Southern, so I got a lot of game type experience and live experience, which was great. That helped me at the Sentinel, and I covered everything from the Jacksonville Jaguars’ first year to the Tampa Bay Lightning to the Citrus Bowl to a lot of preps. So it was a great experience for me, and that actually led into racing, which was actually odd for me.
So did you cover much racing to that point. How did the move to go into racing get on your radar?
They put it on my radar. I was living in Cocoa Beach and I was covering Brevard County preps and some college sports and pro sports like spring training, and then I got the call. They’re like, “Congratulations, you’re our new auto racing writer.” I grew up in New England and my dad loved cars, but he never went to any races or anything. And they’re like, “You’re the auto racing writer.”
I’m like, “What? I don’t know anything about auto racing, I grew up in New York. The only thing I saw going around in circles is horses, like at Belmont.” And they’re like, “Well, you better learn it.”
I swear, I was so panicked because it was one of those sports I’ve never really followed. I did a little bit … growing up as a kid, I loved Mario Andretti because he’s Italian and I was rooting for him in the Indy 500. And then in NASCAR, (I knew) Richard Petty and all that, but I never really followed it enough that I could cover it.
So when they told me that, I was panicked and like, “What am I gonna do?” and my good friend in Cocoa Beach, Mark Tate, he grew up in Hickory (N.C.), grew up with the Jarretts, so he was over the moon that I was gonna cover NASCAR. I said, “You’re gonna be my mentor.” So I’ll never forget, I was so panicked that we went up to Daytona during testing and I said, “We’re gonna go around the garage and you’re gonna help me here.” And he was explaining everything.
It was awesome, and he knew a bunch of the guys that were on the crews, they were like, “Hey, Mark Tate!” and it put me at an ease. It was a great training period for me, especially at testing because it’s more laid back and not a lot of reporters there where I can ask that stupid question, and it was really cool.
We asked Jack Roush of all people about testing and trying to get that extra tenth of a second on a car, and he started telling us about this matrix system they did — they changed the springs with the shocks and they all these different changes to find the ultimate. So I’m thinking, “Everyone knows about the matrix system.” So who do I find of all people, the novice, I’m like, “Hey, that’s Hut Stricklin. I’m gonna ask Stricklin about the matrix system, if they use it on their team.” So Mark and I walk up to Hut, and we’re talking to him about racing and the system and I ask him and I say, “Jack Roush is talking about this matrix system. What do you know about it?” And he goes,”May-what?” And all of a sudden his crew guy goes, “Hut, get in the car.”
What year was this when you started on the racing beat?
1992 was my first race at Atlanta. which was Richard Petty’s last race, Jeff Gordon’s first race, and my first race. So it was ’92 I believe, right?
That’s the other part of the story. People talk about Petty and Gordon, but they don’t say Mike Zizzo’s first race.
I’m way down on that list. But I also went with Mark Tate, he went with me to that race and I’ll never forget on that one, he said, “Before we ever get going, we’re gonna go to Turn 1. We’re gonna stand in Turn 1 outside the fence so you can realize what these guys do for a living.” And I was blown away and I said, “Wow, this is incredible.”
And if you recall that race, (Alan) Kulwicki wins the championship, Davey Allison gets in a wreck, Ernie Irvan’s involved, Bill Elliott, he stays out and gets the laps and he gets more points — there were so many storylines. I’m like, “This is awesome.” There’s so many great storylines and in fact, I got on the front page of the Orlando Sentinel for Richard Petty’s last race. So it was just an incredible experience, that first one. And then to be inside the community and see how accommodating they were and the drivers, it won me over immediately.
How many years did you cover racing before you went to the dark side of PR, as the journalists say?
I went to CART, which is IndyCar, in 1996. So I didn’t cover it a ton, but enough where I was pretty well-versed on both IndyCar and NASCAR. I got a call from IndyCar and they were looking for a news manager. Basically, they were looking for a former sportswriter who could write releases and such.
I didn’t know if I wanted to go that way or not. It was back in the day when newspapers were flourishing, and I loved what I did because I got to cover such a variety of sports from the World Cup to the Citrus Bowl to all kinds of major events, so it was a great experience. And then they said, “Well, with CART, you can travel the world. We go to Australia and Japan and Brazil.” And that kind of won me over.
Mike Zizzo during his days doing PR for CART. (Courtesy photo)
That would be a very attractive opportunity to take advantage of. So you got to do that. What was that experience like?
Absolutely incredible. Not only being part of a sanctioning body and seeing the inner workings of a sanctioning body, but traveling to different venues all across the world was just fabulous — meeting people, understanding cultures, like in Japan. Having a great time with drivers in Australia, Surfer’s Paradise. We have so many stories with Dario (Franchitti) and Greg Moore and all those guys.
It was just such a cool experience because you went to places I would probably never vacation to at times. For instance, I went to Tokyo. I would probably never vacation there, but I had an incredible experience. Going to down to Rio for Brazil, another place I would probably never vacation or think about. Australia, definitely. I want to go back there; I was so fortunate to go six, seven times, but I’ll go another 10 times. It’s a beautiful country.
And then even Canada. Living in the United States, I’ve never dreamed of going on vacation to say Toronto, Vancouver, Montreal — we hit all those cities and they’re absolutely fabulous. I tell all my friends, if you want to do a quick trip, go to Toronto in the summer, go to Vancouver, go to Montreal. They’re fabulous cities. So I was very fortunate to realize all the different countries and cultures and enjoy it.
Unlike some of the people we had that travelled with us who are like, “Where’s the McDonald’s?” I’m like, “No, we’re in Tokyo, I’m gonna try sushi, I’m gonna try some specialty items.” When we were in Australia, same thing — and they’d be looking for American food.
Why did you go from CART to NASCAR, then?
I loved CART, I loved open wheel, and that was during the split, so at times it was difficult. But probably the most difficult thing for me was we lost a number of drivers during that period — one in particular, Greg Moore, who I was extremely close with.
At Fontana.
Yes. And then also Alex Zanardi, another driver who I was very close with, lost his legs in Germany, which was over the course of 9/11, which was very difficult on me. I thought I was going to leave the sport then. I had so many friends in it that drove cars that every time we raced, it was just very difficult for me to watch it and hope we got through the race.
So that took a toll on you. It started to weigh on you, the danger aspect of it and it took an emotional toll?
Big time. I’ll never forget the whole 9/11 situation. We went over to Germany and if you recall, everyone in the United States, all the sports decided not to run at all or have any games (the week after 9/11). And we had to make a decision at the facility we were at. That entire region in Germany put their money in, and they told us, “If you don’t run here, you’ll bankrupt the region.” So we had that weighing on us as well.
Plus we already had everyone over there in Germany, so we’re like, “Why don’t we run and honor those victims of 9/11?” And we still got some criticism, but we thought it was the right thing and eventually we renamed the name of the race and we were all dealing with that as Americans.
We were scared. We got over to Germany and we landed, and we’re in our room and we’re exhausted and we all took a nap. Steve Shunck, who worked with us, calls me and he says, “Turn on the TV.” I said, “I have it on, there’s some movie on where a plane just hit the Twin Towers.” I couldn’t understand it. You couldn’t fathom that that was actually happening. He goes, ”No, that’s happening right now.” I’m like, “Oh, is it a private plane?” He’s like, “No, it’s terrorists.” And I’m like, “Oh my God.”
So after that reality hit, we’re like, “We’re stuck outside the United States.” And then we see CNN on the ticker it says, “The CART contingent in Germany is the largest American contingent outside the United States right now.” So now we’re all worried — is something gonna happen to us? Are we ever gonna get home? So we’ve got that weighing on us.
And then we have this great race and (the Germans) did fabulous tributes to us. People over there were just amazing how heartfelt they were about talking to us about the situation and how sorry they were and thanking us for running that race. We were a couple of laps away from (finishing) that race, and then Alex Tagliani and Alex Zanardi got into it. As soon as (Tagliani) hit him, I was like, “Oh my God, this is bad.” And he lost his legs.
They saved his life and Dr. (Steve) Olvey called me, he says, “You need to come now, we’re getting on the helicopter.” So I went with Alex’s wife and then Ashley Judd was on that helicopter, too. I followed behind the main one, and we got to the hospital and they landed us on the pad. We had to go down (into the building) and we saw the stair where they took him down, and there was just blood everywhere.
And then we get down there and all the drivers are there — they got there as quick as they could — all his buddies, Tony (Kanaan) and Dario and Max (Papis) and Jimmy Vasser. We didn’t think he was gonna make it. We were so scared and we’re like, “God, please just let him make it.”
And then when we found out he was gonna make it, we need a little brevity in that room and we’re like, “Man, is he gonna be pissed when he finds out he lost his legs in that deal.”
So his wife was in there, and she came out, she’s like, “He’s doing alright.” And when we finally got to see him. He’s like, “I’m just glad to see my wife.” And he just had a child. He’s like, “I can do whatever I want without legs.”
And he has been a huge inspiration to me ever since then because the way he handled that situation was absolutely amazing, and he’ll joke about it. I’ll never forget when I called him afterward, I said, “Hey, I just wanted to check in on how you’re doing, all that.” He goes, “I have a dilemma.” I said, “What’s wrong, Alex?” He’s like, “I have to get fitted for new legs. I’m like you — I’m Italian, I’m short. I can actually be over six feet now. But then I’m gonna have to get new clothes.”
So that’s the way he handled it. I’ll never forget from that day, he said, “I will play soccer with my son, I will go swimming with my son, I will do everything with my son and family that I’ve always wanted to do — with or without legs.” And he did.
That’s unbelievable. Wow. So how soon after that did you say, “You know what, I gotta do something else. I can’t be so involved in CART.”
I thought I was gonna quit then. I decided to just stick it out because I just loved the sport, and then Jim Hunter called me at NASCAR. Actually a head hunter called first, and then Hunter called me, and he said, “Hey, why don’t you come visit with me?” NASCAR was extremely successful like it is today, actually even moreso back then. And I met him on a Saturday, I drove up from Cocoa Beach and we talked for like three hours. It was an absolutely amazing conversation. I’m like, “I would love to work with this man.”
I’m not sure how many people they have in the Integrated Marketing Communications department now — I’m guessing at least 30 or something like that. How many people were on the PR staff when you went to NASCAR?
We didn’t have a fancy name either, we were just the PR team. We probably had, I’d say eight or 10 people — and that was with assistants and everything, so it was very streamlined. It had Hunter, it had a director, managers and coordinators, and that was it, and assistants. We all worked together really well. We got a lot done.
What I liked about it back then with Herb Branham and Kate Davis and everyone was we were extremely tight with the drivers, because we did so much with them. We worked with them on a daily basis.
I was fortunate enough that Hunter wanted me to handle the competition side of PR because of what I did in IndyCar. So he moved me up to the R&D Center and I got a lot more integrated on the competition side, which was a lot of fun, and dealing with Mike Helton. Also the R&D team with Gary Nelson and everything. So it was very educational to me.
Kate Davis and Mike Zizzo pose with Jeff Gordon. (Courtesy photo)
What did you learn from the CART stuff that applied to the NASCAR stuff that you could take there?
I guess the biggest one would have been crisis management (in the aftermath of serious accidents), unfortunately. Hunter quizzed me a lot about how we handled things, how we changed some of our processes in terms of crisis management. Because every time we had one, I got very involved in it because I knew we had to make changes ever since my first year when we lost Jeff Krosnoff. I saw a lot of things we didn’t do right. But it’s a crisis, so that happens.
So we talked a lot about crisis management, and I learned a lot on the NASCAR side about how integrated they were with each department to take one item and make it as big as possible, like the Chase back then — the “Chase for the Championship.” We would have meetings and they would integrate all the departments and say, “What are you gonna do to make this big?” whether it was marketing or PR. That was very educational for me about seeing a big company take something and raise it to a higher level.
So you’re living in Florida. Now you’ve worked for a newspaper, you’ve worked for CART, you’ve worked for NASCAR itself. Why Texas Motor Speedway?
I had no plans to leave NASCAR. I loved it, I loved working for Hunter. I loved the sanctioning body, it was a lot of fun. I felt very privileged to work there. And Eddie Gossage calls me and he says, “I’ve got an opening down here. I want you to come down.” I said, “I don’t have an interest, I’m happy here.” I’d only been to Texas for the race. He’s like, “Why don’t you come down and just talk to me?” I said alright.
So I came down, we had lunch, he took me out to the facility. Even though I’d been there, when it’s empty, it was massive. I was like, “Wow.” And we talked and had a great conversation. I’ll never forget he said, “You’ll be working for me.” And I said, “We’ll see about that.” He says, “I can give you something NASCAR can’t.” He goes, “It’s not money, it’s not this, it’s not that — I can give you time off.”
I had gotten to that point with NASCAR where I was doing 28 to 30 races because Hunter’s back was going out, so Mike Helton liked me to be that No. 2 guy on the competition side. So as much as I loved it, I started to feel the burnout a little bit. And I called Eddie the next week, just like he said, and here I am.
But the backstory on that was that CART incident at Texas.
Which is what?
This would have been 2001. So we came down here, the first CART event at Texas, a big deal. And you know Eddie makes everything big, and it was gonna be exciting. We did the premiere of Driven — not a great movie, but it was part of the week — and we didn’t run the race.
The G forces were so high on the drivers that the drivers were passing out. It got extremely dangerous. Mauricio Gugelmin hit the wall in Turn 2 here and wound up in Turn 4. It was crazy. There were going like 236, 238 miles an hour on a mile-and-a-half track.
So the G forces were taking such a toll, even on the CART drivers who were used to high G forces, that they just could not get around the track?
Correct. You’re not supposed to do sustainable Gs at more than four to six seconds, I think. And I’m trying to remember back then, but on a 22-second lap they had, 18 seconds of sustained Gs. Michael Andretti talked about it feeling like he had a 100-pound weight on his lap the entire lap. Max Papis was talking about he didn’t know if he was on the frontstretch or the backstretch. We had another driver black out for a little bit. And it was scary.
But then we had to do the press conferences (to announce the cancellation). Eddie wanted to do one and we were gonna do our own.
Like dueling press conferences?
Yeah, and it almost turned into a duel between me and him because we’re trying to protect our brand. And we did two separate press conferences, which I didn’t want. We took our stance, he took their stance and that occurred and we left here and that was a disaster.
Then I went to NASCAR, and what’s the first race I go to? Hunter sends me to Texas. And I said, “Jim, you know what happened at CART?” He goes, “Oh, I know. And you’re going there.” And I said, “Oh, hell.”
So there was a lot of bad blood with Eddie?
I thought so. I’m like, “I’m gonna go in, I’m gonna take my beating from him.” And we had the safety meeting, and he was in there and he said, “Can I grab you for a second?” And after this meeting, I said, “Oh, I’m gonna get berated and he’s gonna tell me to pack up and leave the track.” Although Hunter had said, “If you get that from him, you’re staying.”
So he pulled me aside and he said, “Hey, I hope there’s no hard feelings. I realize what you were doing, and I hope you knew what I was doing.” I said, “Yeah, we were both protecting our brands. I appreciated how you protected your brand and I had to do the same. That’s our lifeblood. You can’t compromise on that, and I don’t expect you to do so either.”
And that conversation, I don’t know if it led to him making that call where he said, “Hey, I want Ziz to work for me.”
That had to help the respect level you guys still share today, and you’ve been able to work together obviously really well. I don’t know how many other lengthy PR guy/track president combos are out there, but I imagine that you’re probably the longest.
Probably. Although he says I’m day-to-day all the time. And I believe it.
So you’ve made a home here. Is this is where you see yourself ending your career? What else do you want to accomplish in your career?
I love it here, got married here. My wife’s from Fort Worth, and we’ve got two great kids that love living in Texas. I still miss Florida, but I love Texas. I see myself staying here.
Really, over the years, I like to help people. So I think as time goes on, if I have the opportunity, I’d like to do something where I can help make an impact on a community. I deal with the “Speeding to Read” program at Texas Motor Speedway with literacy and elementary school kids, which is dear to my heart just because of the impact you can make with just a little work. Seeing the kids’ faces and all that, so whether it’s on the charity side, whether it’s with education, it’s just something dear to my heart. I just love the look you see on someone’s face when you can help them, whether it’s with education or just a charitable good deed.
Speaking of helping people, you get some people who want career advice from you and say, “Hey Ziz, how do I get to where you’re at? I’d love to work at a track someday.” If somebody’s reading this and is interested in that kind of career path, how would they go about getting started these days?
I thought journalism was a great route for me and I think journalism to this day is still very important to what I do in terms of writing press releases, strategic writing, script writing, all that type of writing, as you know as well. It’s very important to write intelligently and also creatively.
I’d say internships would probably be the one I think is most beneficial. When I look at resumes, I look at what they’re done in terms of internships. Because I know when I was in college, I was a good student, I was a B student. But when I worked at the Lakeland Ledger, I learned so much more. It wasn’t about the inverted pyramid while writing a story, it was about deadlines and hustling your butt off and getting that story to them in nine minutes or whatever that was, and you’re in a panic mode, but you have to learn that.
I think internships give you a great perspective on a racetrack, how things are run. And you also get some mentorship if you have someone that works at a racetrack or with a baseball team, and they want to spend some time with their interns. I think you can learn a lot.
Mike Zizzo and longtime friend Tony Kanaan. (Courtesy photo)
This is the latest in a weekly feature called “How I Got Here,” where I ask people in NASCAR about the journeys to their current jobs. Each interview is recorded as a podcast but is also transcribed on JeffGluck.com. Up next: Lauren Edwards, founder and CEO of Reine Digital.
Can you explain what you do and what Reine Digital does?
So Reine Digital, I founded it at the beginning of 2017, and it is a social and digital consulting agency. I work with a lot of athletes, and especially drivers in our sport and media personalities in our sport. And then I have a couple other small clients on that are more business- and brand-focused, but we really focus on kind of the athletes and personalities.
So Jimmie Johnson is among your clients?
Yes. Jimmie was my first client. I originally worked with Jimmie for five years, helping him with his social and digital and then kind of stepped out on my own and he signed on as a client. Steve Letarte is another client, which has been so much fun. It’s a very different side of things, kind of getting into the broadcast side of things as opposed to a driver.
And then I have a couple other people I’m kind of just starting to work with this year, which is really exciting and new and I’m very thrilled. I’ve actually randomly gotten into wineries and distilleries, kind of the alcohol side of things, which is very different and the laws are crazy — it’s nothing like sports — but it’s been really fun.
Let’s talk about how you got to this point. So you went to William & Mary. Was racing ever on the radar for you?
No. So I went to William & Mary because I wanted to do international economic development.
That’s different than this.
You probably couldn’t get more different of a career path. So I went there to study international relations and economics as a double major. I took both those majors and I was feeling great.
I grew up right outside of Philadelphia. So (former Pocono track president) Brandon Igdalsky’s mom, Looie, lived not far from where we lived and my parents were friends with her. I’ve been really close with that whole (Mattioli) family for years. And so when I was in college, I went up to do a marketing internship with them (at Pocono), just because I felt like it would look better on a resume than being a lifeguard or a waitress or something like that that all my friends were doing.
I was like, “OK, I’m gonna go do this and at least just check the boxes, get some marketing experience.” And I fell in love with it. I was like, “This is amazing. I love it. It’s fun, it’s exciting, I’m good at it.” And so my junior year, I went back to William & Mary and added a marketing degree so I could get into sports.
Some people go to an internship based on the path they want to follow. You did the internship thinking it might help your resume, but then being inspired by that led you down a completely different road?
One hundred percent. My entire high school career and the beginning of my college career was 100 percent focused on government, international politics, economics, that route. And I’m still passionate about that and I love it — and my friends will tease me because I read these really nerdy books about world politics and economies. But for me, just working in it, just being there in the summer and kind of experiencing what the sport was like, I just knew, “OK, now I have a passion for this and I want to do it.”
So what happened next? What was your next step?
When I graduated college, started applying for jobs and there was a position at Octagon (sports marketing agency) that was available. It was actually on the DLP account, back in the day when DLP was on the 96 car. So I took that position.
Hall of Fame Racing!
Yes, Hall of Fame Racing, absolutely. Yeah, that was a really fun account and it was crazy to come into the sport and kind of be with a team, with a car, kind of be with a sponsor, and so I did that for six months. And then that team went away and stopped racing, and so I moved over to the Sprint account.
When I was first on the Sprint account, I was doing more customer relations or customer experience kind of things with Sprint and Sprint customers at the track. And then they literally sent out an email, pretty much company-wide to everyone at Octagon, and they were like, “Does anyone have experience in social media? Miss Sprint Cup needs to be on social media.”
What year was this?
That would have been the end of 2008, beginning of 2009.
So it was pretty early on in the Twitter days.
Very, very early on. And that’s kind of why they sent the email. There were a lot of very smart, amazing people at Octagon — just not a lot of people knew a lot about social media. I mean, Facebook really only started in 2003, 2004, like kind of gaining traction. So I basically was like, “I’ve been stalking people on Facebook for years, I got this.” I kind of fell into it that way and started a lot of the social side of things with Miss Sprint Cup, and just loved it and enjoyed it. It was just kind of my niche that I fell into.
It’s not like you had a bunch of Twitter experience — because nobody did. So you were sort of learning on the go?
One hundred percent learning on the go. It was a lot of on-the-job training. As new platforms would come…it was “Oh my God, is this gonna be the next big app? Is this gonna be the next big social media platform?” So there was a lot of research in the beginning days of what made sense and how things should be.
I remember the very first time Miss Sprint Cup ever tagged someone in a tweet using the @ symbol and it was this big to-do with our clients and we had to have this big meeting about it. And now I mean, it’s just commonplace, that’s what you do. But I distinctly remember the first time we did it, we tagged Juan Pablo Montoya. He had done something, said something in the media and we tagged it, just kind of like a cute little, “Oh hey,” and it turned into this huge thing of, “Can we do this? Is that allowed?”
Lauren Edwards, right, poses with Monica Palumbo during her days working with the Miss Sprint Cup account. (Courtesy Lauren Edwards)
We all look back now and say, “Well Facebook’s big, Twitter’s big, Instagram’s big,” but you didn’t know back then. I remember when Google Plus came along and things like that, people were like, “This is gonna be huge,” and it was a total flop. So is it all trial and error that you sort of taught yourself all these methods with all these various platforms?
So I think one of the things that kinds of helps me is I do love learning, so I’m constantly reading and kind of researching and listening to what people are talking about. For me, I mostly look at the data. So we did dabble in Google Plus when I worked for Jimmie, we had done some things for Google Plus. And while it was a really great platform, it really was awesome, we didn’t see the same numbers that we saw everywhere else even though worldwide.
I’m just a big numbers person. So John Lewensten works with Jimmie, kind of manages everything day-to-day Johnson-related, and when I first started working with Jimmie, John told me, “Yeah, we can just get off Facebook. Facebook is dead, we don’t need it. We can just get rid of it.” And I was like, “No, that’s a terrible idea. Facebook is not dead.”
It’s funny, because you just don’t know. It seems like the trends are going a certain way and we’re used to like MySpace dying and things like that, and against all odds, some of these have stuck around.
Totally. For me, I look at each platform differently, so I look at Facebook and I see Facebook is such a strong click-through platform. So regardless of where your followers fall across, almost all my clients’ click-throughs tends to be higher on Facebook than anywhere else. A lot of that has to do with more people use Facebook on desktop than Twitter or Instagram. So you’re more likely to click-through on a desktop than you are a mobile phone.
It’s changed a little bit since Apple has created the ability to go back to the app that you were on. When they didn’t have that ability, we saw significantly less click-through from any mobile-based thing. I’m getting nerdy on you, but I’m a big numbers person; I’m constantly looking at the data to see what’s working and where our strategy needs to go.
That’s fascinating. So when you were with Miss Sprint Cup, when you’re working on that stuff, why did you feel like trying to work for Jimmie was the next step for you?
Jimmie got a lot of pressure to get on social media and realized very quickly that it was gonna need a full effort between that and building his own website and things like that. And while I loved Octagon and I loved the Miss Sprint Cup program, I just felt like I needed the next step, to do something different, to take something more on. And I liked the idea of working directly with an athlete. With Miss Sprint Cup, she was more of a spokesperson for Sprint and it was more kind of brand-related. I liked the idea of building someone’s personal brand and still working with partners through them.
So that’s really what a lot of my job with Jimmie was, was kind of working with him on the personal brand side of things and opening up these platforms to him and coming up with cool ways to utilize them. And on the flip side, working with all of our partners and everyone that related to the car, his personal sponsors, those kinds of things, and making sure that everyone is super happy and sees the return on the investment that they’re getting from him.
How much of the lessons you learned doing the Miss Sprint Cup stuff applied to the Jimmie stuff? Were you having to re-teach yourself different methods or different ways of conveying social messages, or did a lot of it transfer over?
The big thing, and where I’ve really kind of found my niche in the NASCAR world with Reine Digital, is it’s very different when you’re not the one posting. So a lot of people are running team accounts or brand accounts or things like that within our sport, and they are the voice of the brand; they’re just sending the message that they want.
For me, I’m not the one sending the messages — it’s someone else. And I’m trying to help guide them and say, “I noticed you’re not posting a lot of this; we need to see more of this on your channels,” and things like that. It’s just a different kind of conversation you’re having as opposed to just picking up your phone and being like, “OK, I know I need to send this today.”
At some point, you get to the point where you want to start your own thing. That had to be a big leap — having started my own thing myself, I know that’s very scary. What was the process like to go out on your own? Was there a lot of thought, or was it a clear vision to you that you wanted to do it? How did that evolve?
It was a lot of conversation. Jimmie was the one that encouraged me to do it. He called me from a gondola in Aspen one day and he was like, “I’m on the gondola, and I really think this is the direction you need to go in life.” And we had talked about it with Jimmie a little bit before. Jimmie definitely saw the value and what I could bring to working with individuals, and he had me work with some of his friends, just kind of helping them with their social media throughout the years that I had been with him. And then we just kind of came to this point where we were like, “OK, this can work. This can really be something.”
I was completely terrified. I am very much a behind-the-scenes person. I kind of love my job because I am not out there, and so the hardest thing for me was kind of realizing that in order to be very successful in this business, I have to do a little bit of promotion and kind of put myself out there because I am my business. So that’s been the hardest part of it I think, which is crazy, but for me, that was definitely the hardest part.
But yeah, I think having Jimmie’s support, there’s no way I could even explain how much that means knowing that he has the faith in me that I can do it. I’m like, “OK, well then yes. Of course I can.”
Lauren Edwards poses with Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus after Johnson’s seventh championship.
It’s not like you were breaking it to him and you’re going to leave. Where if he wants to keep the business with you, he’s gonna have to do this. It’s more like him saying, “You’re doing a great job, I have faith in you, I believe you can deliver for other people aside from just me, go do this.” That’s quite a phone call to receive.
At the time I was 29, and I was kind of at that point where it’s like, OK, I need more. I want more. I’m just craving more involvement in other things. I think everyone hits those points a couple times in their career where they’re just like, “Where am I going, what’s my trajectory? What do I have that I feel like I rock and I own?” So that’s kind of how the conversation started. It wasn’t totally out of the blue where Jimmie didn’t just call me up.
I never wanted to leave him, but I was also like, “I know I need more for my own self-fulfillment,” and that was kind of the path that we went down. So it was a really quick process. He called me in January, and by the middle of February, I had the business up and running. So it was fast.
Being on your own now and not only doing all the social stuff you’re doing but being a business owner and having to worry about that, has that all been self-taught?
One hundred percent. I’m sure you can commiserate when it comes to things like accounting that I’ve never had to do before. Like, I don’t know this. So luckily, there have been some really amazing people that have kind of given me some advice and some guidance and kind of helped along the way, and so that’s been awesome. But yeah, it’s completely self-taught.
Luckily, I’m so passionate about what I do and I’m so passionate about the clients that I have and the work that I’m doing with them that it kind of keeps me going. But yeah, as far as running a business, it definitely was never something I had seen in my future — it’s not something I studied, it’s not something I knew a lot about, so I was just learning as I go.
It’s not like you have to go to school and get the degree to learn how to run a small business or something like that. It sounds like if you have the passion and you have the drive to do it, that stuff can sort of make up for it.
One hundred percent. I think finding good people who can give you some advice and can help you along the way, I think that’s really important. I think if I didn’t have the support system that I have with my husband, Jon Edwards, who works with Jeff (Gordon), and John Lewensten, and kind of those people who really give me some support and advice, I would have been lost.
And then a little trial by error, I mean, there are decisions I make and I look back and I’m like, “I don’t know that I should have made that decision,” but at the time, I made the decision based on the facts that I have.
For me, the most important thing is that all of my clients are really happy — and they are — so that matters the most to me. And it’s something that I’m like, “OK, well, the other stuff, we’ll figure it out.” I’m not the only person that started a small business, but I want to be the best in my space in this small business because that’s the only way I’m gonna grow.
Let’s say somebody’s reading this and they’re like, “Wow, that’s a really cool job, I’m good at social media, I feel like I could help people with social media.” Where would they start? What path would you recommend they go down?
It’s crazy because the social media world has changed so much in the past five to eight years. There weren’t jobs for social media really 10 years ago, and now there’s tons. I’m still really involved in the William & Mary alumni system and still work with students there, and I tell people that are looking to get into sports: Working for agencies is great. There’s so many agencies in our sport, and the great thing with agencies is that you get to experience a lot, so typically when you’re working on an account, you’ll have your specific role, but you can always help out other people on the account. So I think that’s really beneficial and you learn so much.
I also think with the way teams are growing and the way teams are managing social media, those are positions that are opening up more frequently than we’ve ever seen before. I think there’s a lot of opportunity there.
I would say the best thing to do is personally, even beyond like where to start, is to become really well-rounded. I think I excel in the strategy side of things and kind of how you best take the content that you have and distribute it, but that doesn’t mean that I can’t not be good at capturing content. So taking photos, taking videos, editing videos, doing graphics, things like that. Yes, that’s not my strong point, but it’s something I really worked to teach myself so that I’m well-rounded for whatever need a client may have.
A couple times on these “How I Got Here” podcasts, people have mentioned agencies. For people who don’t know, can you explain what agencies are and what they do for somebody that has no idea about marketing or anything like that?
Absolutely. So agencies are a fantastic way to get into the sport because basically what they do is they work with a lot of the brands that are in our sport and do a lot of the brand activation. So there are some major brands that want to get involved in NASCAR, that want to be a part of it, but there’s really not anyone on their business team and their marketing team that knows intimate details about our sport. So it’s easier for them to go hire an agency that has a ton of that knowledge and can really help them get the most out of their sponsorship dollars.
There’s small agencies, there’s large agencies, it kind of runs the gamut, but they’re really valuable because it’s a lot of people that are super knowledgable about the sport and can help the brands who want to be involved but may not know anything about it.
Now your agency right now is social media specific, so somebody could hire you looking, “We have a weakness here, we need to pick this up,” and you would help them with that strategy or help guide them in that way, right?
Absolutely. So a lot of the bigger agencies do tend to have every part of the business in NASCAR that you can imagine, so they do everything from displays to signage to activation to hosting and all of that. For me, my agency is much more focused on kind of the social and digital side of things, so anything related to your online presence is kind of where I would fall. And then there are some other agencies that are more focused on just display units and agencies that are focused on hosting and things like that.
So it all kind of depends on where your personal interests lie, but I always recommend people kind of start out at an agency. I also think it’s really important in our sport for people to understand the brand side of things and the sponsor side of things before maybe going to a team or working for NASCAR, doing some other role in the sport, because as we all know, our sport is so heavily sponsor-driven and it’s such an important part of our sport that I think intimately understanding that is important before taking on other roles.
Where do you go from here? You’ve already accomplished a lot and come very far and made a name for yourself in the sport. Where do you see it going?
That kind of changes a little bit day by day as my business continues to grow. For me, I would like to really grow into a smaller agency that really focuses heavily on the social and digital side of things. I don’t foresee this growing into kind of a one-stop shop agency side of things.
I look at a lot of the athletes in our sport and I do a lot of research on athletes in other sports and media personalities, celebrities and I think we do an awesome job in so many ways, and then there are other things we fall short on. And that’s true of any sport, but for me, that’s what I’m passionate about, is saying, “OK, let’s get a lot of our drivers up to speed and let’s help them be the best that they can be,” because these guys are cool and they’re fun and they’re awesome, and we don’t always see that on social. That’s really a passion for me, so continuing to kind of sign drivers, work with sponsors in our sport, work with a lot of industry members and continue to grow into a well-respected small agency.
This is the latest in a weekly feature called “How I Got Here,” where I ask people in NASCAR about the journeys to their current jobs. Each interview is recorded as a podcast but is also transcribed on JeffGluck.com. Up next: Zane Stoddard, NASCAR’s vice president of entertainment marketing and content development.
Before we get into how you got to this point, what do you do now on a daily basis? What are some of your goals now?
We are responsible for all things entertainment-related. We develop content; we are one of the groups within NASCAR that develops content as part of our company’s broader content strategy. So we develop TV, film, digital projects. We work on strategic partnerships with studios like Disney and Pixar in Cars 3 last year.
And then lastly, we work with talent — so we program the performers for some of the pre-race concerts across our tracks as well as getting the celebrities out to our events, which is something that we work hard on and hope that we can sample our sport for these guys, particularly when we’re in the L.A. market.
So right now, we’re sitting in a suite where I understand later today, you’re going to be entertaining the celebrities right here. You have some big names coming out. How important is it for you guys to show the sport to different people who don’t normally see it?
We think it’s very important. Our product is so great, so it’s really just a matter of giving people an opportunity to be exposed to it and sample it. I have not experienced having somebody out who didn’t flip out and think this is one of the coolest experiences they’ve had, so it’s really fun to get them out. And once again, when we’re in Southern California and many of them live here, it’s a little easier than some other markets to get them out. So we think it’s a good thing for NASCAR, along with all the other great things that our company does in marketing, is to get these influential people out, have them leveraging their social media to talk about their experience at our events.
Zane Stoddard of NASCAR. (Zack DeZon/Getty Images)
So how did you get to this point? How did you get to the point where you’re showing up at a NASCAR race and hosting celebrities and you have an IMDB page because you were the executive producer of Logan Lucky and all those sort of things. How did you get to this point?
I have no idea. (Laughs) So I grew up in California. I didn’t happen to be exposed to NASCAR, but I was certainly aware of it. I’ve been a sports fan, every sport under the sun since I was a kid, which I think many people are that work in NASCAR. I had the fortune out of college for working for an NBA team, then Nike, then the NBA league office itself for almost a decade. And so, hadn’t had the exposure to (NASCAR), but being in the sports business, I knew that it was a big, great business, so I had respect for it from arm’s length. And through relationships, the opportunity became available and I jumped at it, and it’s been awesome ever since.
When you get out of college, there’s many people that say, “Hey, I want to work in sports.” It’s not that easy, though. So how were you able to make that first opportunity, that first door open for yourself with the NBA?
I think everybody who’s in sports would agree it could happen 100 different ways. I think the tried and true is through relationships, making sure that you are interacting with people who have the ability to give you opportunities in the space.
Like many people in sports, I worked for free. I started out with the L.A. Clippers in the sponsorship group over there, working for free, hustling up and down the stairs at the L.A. Sports Arena way back when. And then just being in that position gave me the opportunity to develop those relationships deeper and then when the position became full-time, I was the guy that happened to be sitting there and already trained by them.
So developing those relationships and working for free is something that — there’s not many people who will turn down the opportunity to have someone who’ll work for free for you, so I’m a big advocate of that.
So you go from there to Nike, and then when you were at the NBA, you did a lot of the entertainment stuff — similar to what you’re doing with NASCAR. How did you end up on the entertainment side suddenly for a huge sports league like that?
I think just growing up out here and having so many friends who went into the (entertainment) business, not the least of which is my wife, who grew up in the business and has been in the business for 30 years or so. I had a certain level of exposure to how it worked. The process for me was I was really in a more traditional category of the sports business, which is sponsorship, and then went into some level of marketing and promotions while at Nike.
But being in Southern California, it was around the time when product placement and “entertainment marketing” started to become relatively important to brands. It was something the brands were looking at. I started transitioning on my own. I was working with sponsorship, but I still started to develop some relationships with bands and then some productions and started to develop or generate some opportunities with Nike to be in movies, to be in music videos and some of those things.
So when I went to the NBA, I was there all of six months in the consumer products group (in New York), which is your traditional line of marketing within sports. And with the help of some others, I proposed that we open an L.A. office. They had moved me out from Southern California. I was there six months, I literally just found an apartment and started proposing an L.A. office in the entertainment marketing division.
And just the timing was good because, as I said, brands were starting to check out entertainment to promote themselves and so David Stern signed off on it and sent me back out to L.A. I literally had just gotten my stuff off the moving van, put it back on the moving van, and moved back out to L.A. and opened a small office out there and did that for a decade.
At that time, it became full-time, the entertainment marketing opportunity, and it was new, so I could try some new things and kind of figure out through mistakes and what worked and refine it.
Certainly the media landscape is changing, as everybody knows, so you’re constantly changing things like any category of business. But when I got to NASCAR, I was able to apply some of those learnings even though the sport is a little different, the cadence of the season and ability to shoot at the track and things like that are different from sport to sport, but the application within entertainment is the same.
How do you first have successes with celebrities or movies? Do you contact 100 celebrities and if you get five to say, “Yeah, we’ll come to the race,” that’s a success? How does that even begin to work?
(Unlike) other forms of marketing, generally speaking, we don’t spend money, and so we can’t just buy a billboard and expect the billboard to be out. There is a heavy element of speculation in it, so to be speculative we do have to develop a certain number of TV projects, for example, in order to get one to hit. And we do have to invite a lot of celebrities in order to get a certain number to come, and that’s part of the drill.
We have a great group out here, it’s by far not just me. We have gotten very strategic about it so we can at least reduce some of the fat. Entertainment marketing can be a lot of spending a lot of money, there are a lot of brands out there that spend money to get a suite at a hotel to give a bunch of swag to celebrities. We don’t do that. We try to do things that are as quantifiable as possible. You have to be able to translate it to something that is quantifiable and address the strategic direction of the business, and so we try to be as sophisticated about it as possible. I think we do a fairly good job of that.
You’ve had a lot of success recently from Cars 3 and Logan Lucky. It seems like there’s a lot of projects in the pipeline from what I’ve read from Adam Stern’s tweets and things like that. How do you guys define success in your role? What is a good day for you guys?
A good day is generating opportunities that meet our strategic needs. Just by the nature of what we do, we’re leveraging other people’s platforms, so inherently, the things that NASCAR does in entertainment is gonna get in front of new audiences. So any time we can get in front of new audiences and then even more defined, some of the younger and multicultural audiences that we’re going after, is a win for us. Within that, underneath all that, we have certain goals based on metrics that we go after. So we try to be as targeted and surgical as we can with what we do.
If somebody wanted to follow your career path and is like, “Wow, this sounds really cool, I love sports, I love NASCAR. I’d love to sort of spread the gospel and get involved in TV projects or movie projects and have celebrities come.” What advice would you give them? Where would they even start?
There’s so many companies now that invest in entertainment marketing. They either have an entertainment marketing person, or they have a group that does it, particularly the major Fortune 500 brands like Coca-Cola — they have folks who are dedicated to entertainment marketing.
When I was starting, it was quite niche. Nowadays, there is a career path for entertainment marketing. The agencies have groups or divisions that represent brands in entertainment marketing and will develop programs for the brands they represent in entertainment marketing. Obviously there’s some of the sports properties that are dedicated to it, as I mentioned, most of the major consumer brands are committed to entertainment marketing, so they have groups that do that.
We will often sort of joke that we’ll get the fill in the blank, the (reality show) Housewives out to a race. And understandably, you might have some people in the halls (of NASCAR) grumble, “Why are we doing stuff with the Housewives?” And I always say, “We don’t really care about the Housewives, we’re going after their audience.” Because it’s Bravo and it’s millennials and it’s a relatively progressive audience.
This is the latest in a weekly feature called “How I Got Here,” where I ask people in NASCAR about the journeys to their current jobs. Each interview is recorded as a podcast but is also transcribed on JeffGluck.com. Up next: Greg Stumpff, founder of helmet painting company Off Axis Paint.
You design helmets for a variety of drivers. Who are some of the drivers you’ve worked with?
Well, Martin Truex Jr., Cup champion. We got him a couple years ago. Honestly the whole Truex family, we do them. Justin Allgaier has been with me for a long time. Ryan Reed. Joey Logano was part of it for awhile.
We do 30 to 40 drivers between the three series now. And we’re very personal, so it’s a lot of personality and things to remember about certain individuals. Because when I do these, I don’t want to just throw a sponsor on the helmet. I want to make it something the driver loves and is part of them. They don’t really get a whole lot of say in the firesuits or the cars or anything else, so the helmet is kind of the one thing these drivers can be part of. So I try to make it very personal. That’s why I’m at the track a lot of times, because it’s cool to see your friends run and to see your stuff on the track.
I visited your shop, and you have a nice, big place where you make the helmets, and you guys even pull all-nighters to make these helmets sometimes.
A lot of times. It’s right there in North Carolina, in Mooresville, and it’s right next to a bunch of race shops. When things happen very quickly, which they do in NASCAR a lot — “Oh, we need this sponsor on a helmet by Friday” — we can usually pull that off. And there’s not a lot of shops that can do that, so that’s kind of our blessing and our curse, I guess. It’s a lot of long nights, but we can crank out helmets in our shops because I have a great group of guys who love doing what they do. As long as I keep the work coming in, they’ll probably stay with me.
Your success didn’t just happen suddenly. How did you get your start?
It’s kind of weird, you know? It’s not really one of those occupations where you take a test in high school and it says, “You’re going to be a doctor” or “You’re going to be a veterinarian.” Helmet painter is not really on the list. So honestly, I didn’t really know it was a job until early in high school, when I started looking at designers like Troy Lee. Even then, I didn’t know there was a career path. Those guys were so big and it was so far out of reach, (I thought) there’s no way I could ever make it that far.
This is when you were in Missouri?
Yeah, I was in Missouri. Dirt central. That’s why I’m good friends with Allgaier and Tyler Reddick, because I come from the same dirt background.
Out of high school, I worked on a dirt Late Model team. I traveled all over the country. Like every dirt track — you name it, I’ve probably been to it and scraped that mud off the car. There was a lot of downtime when you travel like that, so I started taking some helmets home on the weekdays and I’d them back on the weekends and make a little side money. I was like, “Alright, this is not bad.” Then I started realizing sponsors will actually pay to get this stuff done; it’s not just the drivers.
I literally got on Facebook — Twitter hadn’t really taken over yet — and I just started messaging every driver on there. I got one hit: J.J. Yeley. And he said, “Hey man, I want you to paint my helmet. I’m in Talladega.” We were actually there racing a dirt race, so I went over and met him. I was like, “Wow, this is a Cup guy. I’m big time now.” And he was like a start-and-park back in the day, you know? But I was just pumped to even see my driver’s name on TV.
So you essentially didn’t have any contacts at all and were starting completely from scratch?
Zero. I was going to websites and looking through every roster of K&N, ARCA, Trucks, Cup and finding their website, finding their Facebook. Back in the day, a lot of drivers ran their own personal Facebook because the (social media) PR hadn’t taken off yet. So I would get messages back like, “Hey man, I’ve already got a guy who paints my stuff” and Yeley was the first one who actually messaged me back and said, “I want you to paint my stuff.”
And your offer was, “I’ll just do it free for exposure” or what?
Free, or paying for materials. I wasn’t asking for a lot. “Give me credentials into the racetrack so I can meet more people.” Then I met my buddy Skip Flores — he changes tires on (Ryan) Blaney’s car. He was working at Stewart-Haas and running the Field Fillers (group of racing friends who raced karts) back then. So that’s how I got in with (Corey) LaJoie and (Brandon) McReynolds and all of that group back in the day.
They were like, “Why aren’t you in North Carolina?” I looked into it, and there’s no real helmet painters in Concord or Mooresville or anything like that. I’m like, “That’s not a bad idea. There’s nothing holding me back in Missouri. The dirt program, I don’t really want to scrape mud off Late Models my whole life.” I love dirt racing, but it’s not really a great career path for a worker. So I put all of my stuff in a U-Haul, moved 15 hours out to the East Coast and never really looked back.
Painters demonstrate some of the process at Off Axis Paint. (Courtesy photo)
So where did you live once you arrived? Where did you work?
A friend of mine had a bedroom with a couch, basically, and she said, “I’ll charge you $100 a month to live there.” I said, “That’s perfect. I’m never going to be there if I have a shop.” I met a hauler driver and he’s like, “I’ve got a storage unit and it’s a pretty good size. I’ve got some cars in there. Just move some stuff around and you can paint.” So I had no paint booth or anything — just a box of paint, and I made it work. And it was in Troutman, so it wasn’t even close to Mooresville.
I didn’t know anyone there, so it was pretty easy to work all hours of the night. I was going to these race shops and acting bigger than I was. Like they had no idea I was working out of a storage unit, spraying with plastic hanging around a little box.
But I kept on doing stuff. People loved my work and the more I traveled to the track, the more people I met. I kept getting bigger shops, adding more people on (to help paint). I would start getting way too overwhelmingly busy — kind of like we are now. I never really put out, “Hey, we’re hiring” or “bring an application,” but I just found these guys along the way. And it’s actually worked better that way, because they’re coming to me and wanting to do the job.
We’re a very tight group of guys. I get paint shops asking all the time, “How does your shop work? You have the perfect formula.” Honestly, it’s just because I have the best guys in the world working for me.
There’s a great chemistry, it sounds like.
So a lot of helmet painters — not to name any names — you see one guy at the forefront of the business but there might be two to 10 guys back at the shop painting all these helmets. They don’t get the recognition I think they need. So my guys, they do a helmet from start to finish. It never gets passed around. One guy will start it and finish it, and then he’ll put his signature on the back.
Say John Hunter Nemechek or Matt Crafton comes in. Well, the same guy paints his helmets every time. So you actually get a bond with the driver. That’s something we do because we’re in North Carolina. People don’t just email back and forth, they can physically stop in and talk to us, and it makes our job a lot easier.
You give your guys a lot of responsibility and are building them up. You’re not threatened by the possibility they might want to start their own thing?
Honestly, it’s a lot more work to start a helmet shop than people might realize. There are certain state laws you have to abide by with the paint, and paint is just expensive by itself. To have all the best equipment and any tool you need at your fingertips like at our shop, that’s key. If they were to go out and start by themselves, it would be a lot of work to try and come up to our level, I guess.
I’m not stopping anybody that wants to do that, but with the guys and how we work with our chemistry, I don’t think anybody would want to do that. Hopefully it doesn’t happen.
I’ve always wondered about people moving to North Carolina and starting a shop down the street or something, but that’s why I’m so personal with everyone. Loyalty is a big thing with these younger drivers, and if I can keep them from K&N to Trucks, all the way to Cup, then that would be really cool to see them go through the ranks like that.
A painter works on a helmet in the Off Axis Paint shop.
It sounds like you’ve learned a lot about the personal touch. What else learned from being a business owner and a boss?
I feel like I’m still learning. I never went to college for business or anything like that. I have a lot of good mentors on the corporate side with money and invoices and how to do certain things, talk to certain people. I’m really lucky to know the owner of Bass Pro (Johnny Morris) because he’s from my hometown, so he gives me a lot of tips. He built his business from a bait shop in the back of a liquor store to the empire it is now.
So when you have guys like that in your corner, or somebody like Sam Bass, who talks to me quite a bit on the art side of it, you can’t really go wrong. You’ve got all-star people who are a dial away on your phone.
I’ve learned a lot. Made a lot of mistakes. But those guys help me to say, “I made this mistake 20 years ago. Don’t make it.”
So you can’t be afraid to ask for help or humble yourself in that way, I suppose?
Not at all. I call Sam quite often to go to lunch with him and say, “Let me run this by you.” He’s kind of in a position now where he’s not doing as much artwork and he can take the time to help us out. I think he sees a lot of himself in us — starting out and really being passionate about artwork. It’s not just a business to me where we’re making money painting helmets. I really enjoy watching Tyler Reddick beat Elliott Sadler at the line in Daytona and going to victory lane. Like it’s the coolest thing in the world to see your friends win races and have your helmets on.
So you’ve said the shop is basically a family with the drivers. How much have those tight-knit relationships played into your success?
I’d say that’s 100 percent of it. It’s not just doing good artwork, it’s the personality side of it. I joke around and say we have a KBM/TRD day care, because all those kids will come in there. They either go to the go-kart track or come to Off Axis. Which is cool with me, because I enjoy hanging out with those kids.
There’s not a lot of people in this garage who can probably walk into any hauler they want to and sit down and have a conversation with anybody without going through a PR person or whatever. So that’s really cool. I just feel like they respect me as somebody they can talk to.
Honestly, I get the most text messages after races of (drivers) wanting other drivers’ numbers, because they know I kind of know everyone and I won’t be afraid to give it out. It’s either “I want to congratulate that person” or “I’m angry at that person,” so I kind of learn from that and stay out of any drama I can.
What advice would you give others who have seen what you’ve accomplished and want to be the next you?
Just come work at Off Axis. We’ve got plenty of helmets to paint. If you’re good, come on over.
Honestly, keep doing it every day. I go back to my old high school a lot and talk to art kids there, and they think it’s the coolest thing in the world when I bring in a helmet and say, “This thing won Daytona and it’s been on TV.” They think, “There’s no way I can get to that level,” but I was in the same spot as them — barely graduating high school and not knowing what I was going to do with my life after leaving that place.
So anybody young, just pick up an air brush or markers or a pottery wheel — whatever you’re into — and just put your head down and keep doing it. Don’t worry about what other people say — like “Oh, you suck.” I still don’t think I’m that good, but I wasn’t good at all when I first started. So that’s just from working long hours and perfecting your craft. It’s like any of these drivers: They didn’t start out in NASCAR, they started out in go-karts. As long as you’re moving forward and getting better every day, I think you can do pretty much whatever you want to do.
For creative types, what’s the most important element about the job?
In NASCAR, it’s deadlines. That’s the biggest thing. We have never missed a deadline, and I’ve been in North Carolina almost six years now. You might have two days to get a 40-hour helmet done, but as long as you make that deadline, you are gold to any of these teams. Having the shop right there in North Carolina and not having to ship stuff back and forth, if you can get it done quick and have it look good, that’s the biggest thing.
Don’t be lazy. There’s a lot of helmet painters who give us a bad name and say, “Oh, you don’t wake up until noon and start your day late and that’s why you work until 2 a.m.” No. We start the day at 8:30 or 9 every morning and we leave when we’re done. We don’t just clock out at 5 and say we’ll do it tomorrow.
In NASCAR, it never stops. People think we have three months off for the offseason, but honestly that’s when we work the hardest. Before Homestead is even over, we’re already starting Daytona stuff.
Any final words or advice for people reading?
Just hard work, man. As long as you work hard and are passionate about what you’re doing, then you’ll make any goal you can put out there for yourself.
