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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.