John Riordan: Irish driver on track to be an Indy hit
MOVING ON UP: James Roe has joined Andretti Motorsport. Pic Motorsport Ireland. Fotoware
It's impossible to avoid being impressed by James Roe, the 24-year-old Naas racecar driver whose dream of breaking America draws closer next weekend.
After an intensive winter, dominated by multiple physical and commercial targets, he flies out of his Indianapolis homebase today, hopping through two-day stays in Nashville and Miami before finally darting back across Florida to St Petersburg where the 2023 IndyCar Series starts on Sunday week.
A newly branded second tier of competition, a feeder league named Indy NXT, will be the ambitious Kildare man’s driving seat to bigger and better things after he was recruited by the iconic Andretti Autosport late last year.
The mission is simple: if Roe can impress on the track and pull in enough support outside of the car to keep the whole show on the road, promotion to the IndyCar Series is on the cards.
Andretti Autosport has four drivers competing in Indy NXT and Roe is one of three newcomers including Jamie Chadwick, the first full-time female competitor at this level in 13 years. One of last year’s team members, Christian Rasmussen, stepped up to IndyCar for 2023.
Growing up in a family steeped in motorsport, Roe’s father, James Sr, and uncle, Michael, were instrumental in guiding him towards this huge opportunity, potentially earning a seat at the top table of the game in the US. It boasts a similar stature to Formula 1 but famously - or infamously - surpasses its European cousin when it comes to measuring maximum speeds reached. Close to 400,000 people attend the Indy500 on the last weekend of every May, the highest attended one-day event on the planet.
Uncle Michael raced IndyCar in 1985 and his nephew was inspired a generation later to emulate him. Michael and James Sr promised the 14-year-old that they would maintain, manage, engineer and coach him and his burning ambition on the one condition that the young teenager proved that desire by going out and earning the money to buy his first car by himself.
Before turning 15, he had amassed €6,000, working after school, summer jobs and Christmas jobs. “Anything I could do, buying and selling stuff,” he told me Wednesday by phone as he enjoyed a cup of Barry’s Tea (“a taste of home!”) from his base north of Indianapolis.
“I would just do it all, scrapping cars, anything I could do to get money. So straightaway, you build up a commercially savvy head and growing up in a family business environment with my dad's repair shop (Roe Autocraft, just outside Naas), I built up an understanding that there's no such thing as a nine-to-five very early in your life. I've always been a bit of a wheeler-dealer.”
I’m almost embarrassed to bring up the hit Netflix series Drive To Survive which has had such a huge impact on Formula 1 but Roe is happy to indulge. Not only does it have a positive knock-on effect for IndyCar but he also credits it for educating the viewer on the 95% of the time spent outside of the car. As Roe puts it, this isn’t just driving round and around of a Sunday.
The entrepreneurial spirit nurtured in him in Naas has made him a natural for the go-get-it endeavour required of him since moving to the US as a post-Leaving Cert 18-year-old, landing in Chicago O'Hare with “two bags and a bucketload of ambition”.
He joined a team in Wisconsin and spent the first two weeks sleeping in their truck outside their workshop. This was the middle of winter and there was no option now but to get growing and start winning.
And start building business contacts, too. Until recently, he operated without a manager. It’s got too busy now, the momentum has built to a point where it’s no longer possible. But that five or so years of hustle has stood to him, a communicator beyond his years with a clear vision of how the future needs to map out.
I stumbled across Roe not through the brilliant interview he did on Off the Ball at the start of January but rather through a social media post thrown out into the ether by a friend, Sam Dennigan, who expertly generated my interest with a photo of him and Roe at the exclusive Manhattan Car Club over the past weekend. “Big things coming,” Dennigan teased.
The Dubliner has built up a global plant-based food brand, Strong Roots, pouring healthy items into our supermarket freezers and our busy lives. I’ve disclosed him as a friend and this is admittedly a little bit of product placement thanks to the achievements of the talented driver chosen by Dennigan as a company ambassador. But their connection also tells a deeper story about how difficult it must be to succeed as a solo sportsperson.
Next weekend, Roe will debut No. 29 with the Strong Roots logo on the rear area of his car and also on the upper sleeve of his suit, a process that took almost three years to put together.
“I met him the week before the pandemic,” Dennigan told me Wednesday before I got connected with Roe. “I was blown away by him. He had done his homework, he knew I was into cars, and he just came across as so talented and determined.
“We kept in touch and I was ready to reach back out last year. He’s the perfect ambassador, a great role model for young men in particular. He has unique dietary needs and a strict nutritional schedule so it all made perfect sense.”
In a sport where a wayward kilo or two can mean the loss of a crucial tenth of a second, Roe is happy to rave later that day about the latest of his successful commercial partnerships, right in time for the new season.
It helps that they clicked. “We got along like a house on fire from the get-go,” recalls Roe. “We both have so much ambition, we both have had the American dream to come over here and kick ass. So there's a lot of resemblance there.”
Roe also manifested his move to Andretti when a summer meeting last year with JF Thormonn, Executive Vice President and COO at the team, led eventually to the young pretender practically demanding a spot for 2023.
Andretti Autosport is an iconic brand in its own right with multiple IndyCar Series championships and Indianapolis 500 races while also sending teams and drivers out to compete in several other series, maybe even soon to include Formula 1.
The family patriarch, Mario Andretti, is an icon in his own right, one of only three racecar drivers to win races in Formula One, IndyCar, the World Sportscar Championship, and NASCAR. The son of Italian immigrants that found a home in Pennsylvania in the 1950s, his successes in IndyCar preceded a move to Formula One where he won the 1978 World Championship. Both his sons, Michael and Jeff followed in his footsteps, with Michael now the Andretti Autosport chief while a third generation of Andrettis, Marco, has also got behind the wheel competitively.
Mario will be there next weekend to support Roe and his fellow drivers, as will Roe’s parents, flying over from Kildare, and his cousin who will come in from London.
“Mario has such a passion for the sport still and he’s 80 something years of age,” Roe says of the legendary speedster, “Last year, he drove a Formula 1 car around the circuit for a demo at the US Grand Prix. He's still showing up at these racetracks today throughout North America getting in behind the wheel. He's not cruising around either. He's still got it.”
At the paddock in St Petersburg, Mario Andretti will take his usual seat in the team’s hospitality section, sipping on his coffee and enjoying his croissant while autograph hunters stop by. The early morning curtain raiser will drop the flag on Roe’s long-held plan to follow in the great man’s tailwind. It will be the first race of a busy Spring schedule of racing, competing against so many other drivers consumed by the same dream.
“[IndyCar] is where I want to be, that's where I am determined to get to,” he tells me before emphasising that his mind is on the task at hand.
“Naturally, like anything, timing is very important in all of this. The right seat has to open up. If I'm doing the business on the track and the business off track and the right seat opens up in IndyCar… obviously you don't just jump into any seat for the sake of it.
“The right environment has to present itself to where you say I can go there and perform because it's at another level altogether. If that's the case, then absolutely we will be there. But I'm not even thinking about it. Not right now.”
@JohnWRiordan
