Paretta Autosport, Force Indy out to prove underrepresented 'deserve to be' at Indy 500

INDIANAPOLIS — Beth Paretta and Rod Reid bring their upstart American open-wheel racing teams to the Indianapolis Motor Speedway this month with a reputation to make and a point to prove.

Paretta is on the board of directors for the Motorsports Hall of Fame and was once a member of title-winning, high-performance programs. Reid, less of a national figure but a stalwart of Indianapolis racing and communities, has run a youth motorsports program (NXG Racers) at the Racing Capital of the World for 15 years that has introduced the sport and STEM education to thousands of local kids.

Both aspired to step into the limelight and run high-level race teams of their own, and they will make their IMS debuts over the next two weeks doing just that. But you wouldn’t be chided if you sat in IMS’s front-stretch grandstands, saw “Paretta Autosport” and “Force Indy” or their crews and didn’t immediately pull out your phone for further research.

Paretta told IndyStar last month her team is lining up to be 75% female – unheard of for the sport. And entering this weekend’s GMR Grand Prix, three of Force Indy’s four crew members are Black men who, until this year, had never worked in high-level motorsports.

Conduct your research and you’ll almost certainly see a name you immediately recognize: Roger Penske, IndyCar and IMS owner, motorsports legend. That well-meaning fan looking over your shoulder may tell you, “Oh, Paretta Autosport and Force Indy? Those are Roger’s teams. It’s his fifth Indy 500 car and his program running in U.S. F2000. They’re Penske’s diversity efforts.”

Paretta and Reid? They’d kindly tell that well-meaning fan they’re wrong, and if they were sitting next to you, they’d happily explain to you how this all works.

'Everyone in motorsports gets their opportunity from someone'

The Race for Equality and Change initiative, started nearly a year ago by Penske Entertainment Corp., was initially a promise to bring diversity to the IndyCar series and IMS. The program has sparked a new U.S. F2000 team, run by Reid, and IndyCar’s latest Indy 500 one-off program, Paretta Autosport. Both aspire to be so much more and both will do so while empowering people who were, until a few months ago, outside of IndyCar or the motorsports world altogether.

For decades, women and Black drivers, crew members, mechanics, engineers and team owners have been under-represented in IndyCar. But after the death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer and the protests racial inequality around the country, IndyCar joined businesses and organizations around the country and looked inward.

Paretta Autosport, like so many upstart IndyCar programs, will receive technical support from one of the series’ strongholds, Team Penske. Force Indy, through complicated and unique partnerships, will also use Penske resources to get up to speed.

That support, both say, is not the reason they exist today.

“We probably still would have gotten here,” said Paretta, who previously put together a team, Grace Autosport, for the 2016 Indy 500 but ultimately pulled out. “In all fairness, we would have, but we wouldn’t have been as supported as this.

“And would there be worse things to be (than Penske’s fifth car)? Of course. And yes, on open test days, qualifying weekends and practice days, we’re feeding back information to those other four cars, so there’s value on both sides. But who’s paying all the bills? That’s me.”

Reid shared a similar sentiment.

“They just make an assumption, ‘Hey, how can you run a team on your own?’ Well, give me the resources,” Reid told IndyStar last month. “We wouldn’t have been able to convince Roger Penske to provide us those, that support, that mentorship, if he didn’t think we were qualified to do it. But I can tell you right now, Roger Penske is not in U.S. F2000. He is major league. He has no reason to do this, other than, I think, he genuinely wants to see folks like us and efforts like us succeed.”

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To do so, Team Penske members and officials have provided a unique mentorship and infrastructure program to help both teams get off the ground. That has included loaning team veterans to serve in one-on-one mentorship roles, providing ateam’s worth of individuals to act as a support staff, training members of Paretta’s pit crew in the wee hours of weekday mornings to perfect pitstops and housing both operations in two of its North Carolina hubs.

Indy-area race fans can begin to see the race results from that work May 14-15 for Force Indy, followed shortly by practice and qualifying for the Indy 500 for the Paretta Autosport the week after. It will be those results that decide whether the teams deserved that boost, Paretta and Reid said.

“Everyone in motorsports,” Reid said, “gets their opportunity from someone.”

'It's surreal'

Paretta was sitting in a nearly-empty room among the garages of IMS last month as engines whirred loudly. It’s Indy 500 Test Day Eve, and the typically stoic team principal is doing her best to contain herexcitement.

“I think the magnitude of everything hits me in waves,” Paretta said in an exclusive sit-down with IndyStar. “For instance, the other day, I got the garage assignment for the Open Test, and I look at the map of where all the teams are set up, and it’s Foyt, Andretti, Penske, Ganassi … Paretta.

“It’s those moments where you realize that this is it. We made it, and it’s sure amazing company to be in.”

For Paretta, it led to the Foyt Suite where she sits, beaming with joy as she discusses the behind-the-scenes, roundabout ways she managed to construct a race team that’s three-quarter female.

The paths of four of her new members whom IndyStar spoke to for this story were remarkably different.

Lauren Sullivan was working for Team Penske before the January announcement on the NASCAR side doing wind tunnel testing. Paretta’s newest support engineer was approached by team management and asked if she was interested in being loaned to the IndyCar side; not as a mentor, but a mentee in a new role.

“My first thoughts were, ‘I’ll probably just look at some data here and there, and that’ll be it,’” she said. “And then I can claim I was part of it. I didn’t realize I’d be at the open test and working at the race with a legit position.

"It's surreal."

More on Paretta Autosport:

• Simona de Silvestro to drive Indy 500 for Paretta in Penske's latest diversity effort

• Insider: Penske's support of Paretta Autosport isn't 'diversity for diversity's sake'

Madison Conrad previously worked on the engines that Team Penske uses in NASCAR, and a friend alerted the New Mexico native of the search for talent this winter. She went from engines to the inside-rear tire changer and a mechanic when needed.

Mallorie Muller was six years removed from official training for a NASCAR pit crew and mother to a four-year-old when her old coach called her out-of-the-blue to let her know she’d thrown Muller's name into the hat to be considered.

What surprised her most, though, was that she would be considered ‘qualified.’

“When I initially looked into it in IndyCar (after pit school), there were only opportunities for mechanics to pit, and because I didn’t have that mechanical background, I kind of let it go,” she said. “When I started at the NASCAR school, I was one of just a handful of women that had been through the program ever, and the other reason I didn’t pursue it much further was I just didn’t see any representation.

“I let the dream slide because I didn’t see myself in a role outside of just that school.”

It’s for precisely that reason Paretta opted for what she called a “NASCAR model” of molding her pit crew; the place on her team where she could most easily bring new, raw talent into the paddock. In NASCAR, those over-the-wall members often fly-in race day and boast athleticism over car acumen.

Eventually, Paretta said, the mechanical part of the job would be instilled. For now, she needed eager bodies and minds to mold, like Amanda Frayer – who joined the team without any car-related experience.

“I’m friends with someone that works for Team Penske, and he gave me a call and told me about this awesome opportunity,” said Frayer, a former college field hockey athlete. “He said, ‘I know you’re athletic and competitive. This is something you’d be interested in.'”

'Tell them about racing!'

Weeks later, Frayer found herself working over a dummy tire at 4:30 a.m. in the Paretta Autosport shop in Mooresville, N.C., much too early to be as sweaty and agitated as she was.

Her first pitstop practice this spring, in an attempt to build the team into live-stop level as quickly as possible, started fairly simply ... and altogether too complicated.

“They said, ‘You’re just gonna pick up this big tire with one arm and put it on there.’ I was like, ‘Well, how am I gonna do that?’” Frayer remembered. “They coached us step-by-step, every little tactic, and then you just pick one thing to work on each day, and you start to nail it.”

Except that didn’t come soon enough for Frayer’s competitiveness. So before the 5 a.m. practices Monday-Thursday and group workouts that followed, she would get settled 30 minutes early in hopes of catching up to those that had been doing this for a while ... or ever.

“I just sat there, just over-and-over, hanging the tire onto the hub,” she said. “Until I felt like I got it.

I still do that.”

Not only does that point to her competitive fire, but a mantra that Paretta has been telling the women on the team for weeks: "You deserve to be here."

The makeup of Paretta Autosport wasn’t exactly scientific. Some Paretta hand-picked from her previous work in NASCAR. Nearly all the rest was word-of-mouth. It was out of necessity.

After the announcement in January, Paretta didn’t have time to leaf through her inbox, LinkedIn messages and Twitter DMs. She had to rely on her inner circle to recommend someone, even to handle social media or serve as a team photographer. Time was running out, and so much of it was coordinating with the driver of the No. 16 Chevy, Simona De Silvestro.

And when they came highly-endorsed, she hired women.

“It was cool to see we had a lot of men that wanted to be part of the team and wanted to help out,” she said. “That’s good to see, but they wanted roles I was already filling with women who were competent and capable.”

The men you’ll see during qualifying and – hopefully on race day – are those on loan from Team Penske’s other IndyCar programs to guide an apprentice of sorts who, in the near-future, hopes to fill that role and turn the “female-forward” team into an all-women program.

“There just aren’t enough women right now to fulfill an entire roster at the core level, so the only way you’re going to get there is by finding those girls that have the potential, having them work on a year-to-year plan until they’re really brought up to speed,” Paretta said.

Now, when Frayer goes out to eat with friends, she’s the talk of the table.

“At first, they’re like, ‘How in the world did you get into this?’” she said. “But one of my friends, Sam, he’s like my ultimate hype-man, and if we’re hanging out and someone brings it up, he says, ‘Tell them about racing!’”

A dream reborn through Roger Penske

The lives of the young men of Force Indy are much, much quieter. Dinners out with friends are replaced with early mornings, long nights and Facetime calls home.

Because the trio of full-time Black men Reid selected for his team (outside of driver Myles Rowe) – Nadeem Ali, Stuart Kelly and Derrick Morris -- had to pack up and move to the small town of Concord, N.C., for a year this past winter. Soon, a new shop in Indianapolis will be the base for the two Indiana natives and the Purdue grad.

But after the team was announced in December, finding a temporary home in Team Penske’s Heritage Center made sense. There, just off a road nearing middle-of-nowhere territory, sits a white stone building with that classic red trim on the exterior and memorabilia hung on the walls inside. A couple of mystery cars with sheets draped over them are scattered through the garage around the red, black and light blue livery of the Force Indy No. 99 machine.

This spring, Team Penske veteran Jon Bouslog, who joined the fold in late-1986 as a mechanic for Danny Sullivan’s car, oversaw the three men fast at work. Each has a mechanical background and all three landed their positions through relationships with Reid developed over the past 15 years.

Morris went through the NXG program more than a decade ago, then went to the University of Northwestern Ohio, where he studied high-performance motorsports, graduated and rejoined NXG in an official capacity. His path mirrored Kelly's, who was part of the first NXG class in 2006, graduated from IUPUI and worked alongside Reid while running a drift car team out of his home and selling parts to merchants online.

Up until this winter, both held comfortable, exciting jobs doing something just short of what they wanted to do long-term. Both aspired to make it big in motorsports – first as a driver, then in anything they could find. But until Reid called just months ago, that seemed far-fetched.

Kelly worked for a company called Separators that made industrial centrifuges. Morris was working for the City of Indianapolis repairing police cars when his mentor rang.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I still can’t believe it. I’m here today, and we’re about to go off to our first race. I’m literally living out my dreams.

“I was living with my girlfriend, and I just took this leap of faith – just something inside my heart and soul that told me this opportunity was too great to pass up on.”

More on Force Indy:

• Penske announces Force Indy, new USF2000 team hiring Black men and women

• Roger Penske: 'In 2023 & ’24, we want (a Black driver) qualifying for Indy 500'

Like Paretta, Reid handpicked those he knew well. He met Ali teaching a program for the Minority Engineering Program, hit it off with him and stayed in touch until Ali’s graduation in May of 2020.

“Otherwise, it’s like a needle in a haystack to try and find Black and Brown talent,” Reid said.

Because of their knowledge of how a car works, Bouslog had just one veteran Team Penske member join the team temporarily, though he also made various members in different fields on the IndyCar side available.

“Our job for them was to fill in the blanks with some experience and maximize the efficiency of teaching and of the execution of the program in the time that we had,” Bouslog said. “At times, was the team a little over-staffed for a U.S. F2000 team? Yeah, probably, but it’s all a means to an end.”

Added Reid: “It’s not like they’re just ‘doing stuff’ for us. It’s really, you know, showing, ‘Hey, this is how you want to race. These are the things you want to do,’ and it’s really helped us develop our playbook.”

By fall, the hope is Reid can establish a home base in the Speedway area, near where most IndyCar teams are located. The next step, he said, is adding a second car. He may need to add another position or two, or even just a couple of people that work on the weekends at the track. At that point, if Rowe and the team perform, they hope to begin working their way up the Road to Indy Ladder.

With a driver who hasn’t raced seriously on a consistent basis in several years, they hold realistic expectations. Force Indy is 14th in the standings with a sixth-place finish in Barber Race 2 and eighth in St. Pete Race 1. Tenth-place at the end of the year would be satisfactory, Reid said, even as his brain is telling him “win-at-all-cost.”

Team Penske, of course, didn’t win until its fourth year of USAC races. And despite his indescribably-busy schedule in recent months, Penske’s done his best to try to instill that patience into perhaps the most green members of the Ladder series. Kelly said he felt comfortable cold-calling the billionaire, while Morris reflected on a special coin Penske gave him in their first meeting.

“He told me a story about when he first started, and his dad gave him a coin. It says ‘Effort Equals Results’ and ever since, he’s just always kept it in his own wallet,” Morris said. “He gave every one of us one of those replica coins as a good-luck charm.

“He’s literally changed my life. My dreams? I thought they were dead, and here I am. I feel like I’ve been born again.”

Build a longer table

Bouslog is talking about the programs’ future when he catches and corrects himself. What the newest members of Force Indy and Paretta Autosport show other ambitious motorsports-focused professionals, he hopes, isn’t just that doors will always be open, but that they’re there to be opened.

“You don’t have to be a bodybuilder to change an IndyCar tire,” he said. “Sometimes when people look at these cars, they think, ‘Oh my god, what kind of scientist does it take to work this thing?’ And in reality, you can teach anybody to do it if they have a good level of responsibility and attention to detail and focus. Anybody can do it.”

He hopes their stories show those who question their own abilities that someone who looks like them made it work in the right situation. Maybe they can, too.

Both programs’ drivers, Rowe and de Silvestro, said they didn’t struggle despite a lack of representation in their idealized professions growing up. But to them, with their skillsets, perhaps it was a bit easier to push until they made the connection that landed them the chance to get noticed. For those working on their cars, it was much, much easier to settle – if not toss aside a pursuit of motorsports altogether – before this gift came along.

“Sometimes, you have to keep pushing, and maybe a door doesn’t open the first time you knock, and you have to knock again,” Paretta said. “Why not me? Why not now? There may not be enough women to make this a full team, but if we don’t start here this way, we’re never going to get there. Even having two women on the team, or three, it’s all progress.”

But, though Paretta tries to escape it, there's always this tiny dark cloud of negativity, almost exclusively on the internet, that she knows lives over these entries. It will remain until those pressure-packed days of May come and go with a passing grade. “Racing is the great equalizer,” she said. “Your results show for itself.”

Any program even tangentially related to the Penske name carries added weight, but so does one that makes a concerted effort to hire people others might view as “unqualified.”

Paretta addresses that notion and has a laugh with it: “What did you do when you started your IndyCar team, sir?”

But then she gets serious. Paretta Autosport and Force Indy exist, in part, to represent groups in motorsports that have been overlooked at best, and actively ignored at worst. They ruffle feathers because they exist. But if this all felt familiar, how would change ever be achieved?

“Diversity is top-of-mind in corporate America right now, and many people wonder why it needs to be done,” Paretta said. “If it wasn’t spoken up about, everything would have stayed the way it was. And oftentimes, the people who are most uncomfortable are the people who think it will negatively affect them.

“If you think somebody is getting a job because of the way they were born and it might have taken away a job from someone else who was deserving, well now you know how we feel. That’s what we’ve been dealing with for centuries. I don’t want to take away your seat at the table. We want to build a longer table. We just want to work next to you.”

Email IndyStar motor sports reporter Nathan Brown at nlbrown@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter: @By_NathanBrown.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: IndyCar teams Paretta Autosport, Force Indy take diversity to Indy 500