Motorsports Education and Careers in Racing

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Congratulations on making the decision to learn more about getting a motorsports education and pursuing a career in racing!

You are entering a field that is in high demand – racing is an exciting industry that is constantly changing and growing, giving you a great chance at training for and finding a job in motorsports!

Every job and training opportunity is different – please explore the site to learn more about launching a motorsports education and career in racing!

The Racing Tool that Pays Dividends…

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All of us racing people know that video is a powerful tool – we will sit and watch racing videos for hours no end. That’s why it should be no surprise that a video camera is a great racing investment: a mini video camera! Yes, they are pretty sweet in general, but have you thought about what a Flip or Playsports could do for your racing program?

With a bit of practice, you can use a video camera to produce racing content that takes your program to the next level. From producing racing recaps and insider-content for your team’s website to creating video-sponsor pitches to raise money for the season, video is the newest and most compelling media tool on the web right now. Give your fans a tour of your hauler or race shop, post an interview with your driver and crew, or pitch a sponsor on the benefits of partnering with your race team with the touch of a button. Video can be used by an race team, even Formula SAE  clubs!

So you’re convinced – video is the way to go. Now which camera should you buy? Below are recommendations for only a few of the many choices out there.

1. Flip Video in HD

This is the video camera that I use to shoot racing videos. At $189, it’s a great value for a video that can handle the quick pace of racing on and off the track, along with 2 hours of memory available. The video quality is very good and it comes with software built-in to create movies of your own. Available at Amazon for $189.

2. Kodak PlaySport ZX3

On sale for under $100, this camera is one of the highest rated and most affordable options on the market. The advantages include the small size and ruggedness of the build. The camera is also waterproof, although it’s up to you how relevant that is to your race team! The video quality is fair to good – excellent if you consider the price – and you can take still shots with the camera as well. Available at Amazon for $89 (sale price – regularly $149).

That’s only a few of the many cameras that are available. To browse a full selection, check out Amazon’s extensive Camera and Video Section.

If you’re really into racing videos, you’ve certainly seen some shot from a place on the car. If you’re not familiar with how that’s done, you need to learn about the GoPro Hero cameras. The Motorsports Hero is a rugged camera that can be mounted pretty much anywhere on your car.

Not only can you use this video for sponsorship and fan videos, you can position this camera in different places on the car to observe how your setup is working , from watching the amount of shock travel, birdcage positioning and much more. And with a protective case, you never have to worry about it getting broken by a rock or dirt clump. It’s also protected in the event of a wreck, although it probably won’t survive a high impact direct hit.

At $199, the GoPro is definitely a great investment for anyone serious about their racing program. Available at Amazon.

 

Motorsports Engineering: Critical Components That Ensure Driver Safety

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Today, we’re sharing a video on racing safety – an extremely important, and constantly evolving, aspect of motorsports. If you’re interested in motorsports engineering or careers in racing, knowledge of the safety technology used in the sport is crucial. And, experience with technology and motorsports engineering is crucial to understanding and developing racing safety equipment.

Here’s a great video from Aric Almirola, driver of the No. 88 Chevrolet, and other members of the JR Motorsports team talking about racing safety and the motorsports engineering it takes to develop those crucial components:

What do you think the most important piece of safety equipment is to drivers today? How has motorsports engineering helped to develop that?

Attention Gearheads: Magazine Sale!

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If you love racing and mechanics, you will love the sale that Amazon is running magazines this month! Now through September 30, you can get three great magazines on sale for a year subscription for only $7 each: Popular Mechanics, Road and Track and Popular Science. They also offer Cycle World for $7 if you’re into bikes.

Road and Track MagazineCheck them out here!

Sample Job Description: Public Relations Coordinator

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Here’s an actual job description for a position at a major super speedway in the U.S. Even if you’re not ready to begin applying for jobs, it’s never too early to start crafting the perfect motorsports resume and knowing what your future dream job requires can help you to sift through the many internships, projects and jobs that will be available to you in the future!

We’ve highlighted some of the interesting parts of this job description in red so that we can make notes on it below.

JOB DESCRIPTION

XX Superspeedway is currently seeking a highly motivated individual to join the Public Relations department as a Coordinator. This position works closely with the Sr. Manager of Public Relations to promote XX Superspeedway through various platforms and facilitate media coverage during event weekends and track functions. Photographer and/or videographer experience is a plus.

RESPONSIBILITIES

  • Answer inquiries and obtain information for the general public and media
  • Assist Senior Manager of Public & Community Relations with press releases, press kits and fact sheets
  • Assist with media events at the facility and outside the facility
  • Oversee credential requests until temporary staff begins and then oversee credentials office during events
  • Manage Driver/Owner Motorhome Lot
  • Manage development and printing of media guide
  • Assist with development of souvenir program
  • Assist with Media Center and Press Box operations during event weekends
  • Manage Public Address staff and event announcements
  • Manage development and printing of event weekend printed materials (tickets, parking passes, etc)
  • Assist the department and track with special events, off site promotions and other activities
  • Photograph media events and promotions
  • Maintain photo archives and fulfill all photo requests
  • Maintain media archives and pull reports from Cision monitoring software
  • Assist with loading photo galleries and press releases to website
  • Manage charitable donation requests including distribution of complementary tickets
  • Produce monthly employee newsletter
  • Other duties as assigned by the Senior Manager Public and Community Relations

QUALIFICATIONS

  • Bachelor’s degree (B.A.) and 1-2 years related experience in public relations, journalism or broadcast media
  • Must be proficient in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Adobe. Also requires proficiency in audio and video editing software, Internet-based website administrative tool and Photoshop
  • Ideal candidate must have impeccable writing skills, the ability to manage multiple tasks in an extremely fast-paced environment, be extremely organized and have an eye for detail.

Must be able to work weekends and extended hours.

You’ll notice that we highlighted a pretty fair amount of the Job Description. Most of those duties and requirements are typical of any public relations job, and some are typical of a sports public relations job.

Proficiency in Microsoft programs and Adobe is going to be expected for any position, but you’ll see many jobs in the future that deal with public relations, community relations, marketing or front office will encourage applicants to be familiar with video and photo functions. Working weekends and evenings is typical of many public relations jobs, especially in sports. As you probably know, working race day and the day before is going to be expected, so you’ll want to know that you’ll be giving up many weekends with a career in racing.

Dealing with the public, it is public relations after all, assisting media personally and creating publications and materials that help the media tell your story, and assisting with community relations will be expected in any public relations position. In sports or any high profile industry, interfacing with the public will take a lot more of your time than in other careers.

If you’re interested in a career in racing, it’s helpful to see what future employers expect of you. Hope you enjoyed this sample motorsports job description!

Careers in Racing Part Two: Creating the Perfect Motorsports Résumé

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This is the second in a series of posts about Careers in Racing and how to achieve your dream of working in the motorsports industry. Whether you’re interested in being a racecar driver, working in NASCAR garage or being in the front office, you can use the information from our Careers in Racing series to get you there!

One of the first and most obvious things you’ll need to do when applying for a racing job is create a resume. You probably already have one for internships, college application or real-world job, but I bet you haven’t thought about creating one online.

Having a web resume is one of the best ways of setting yourself apart from other applicants, and it will actually make it significantly easier to customize your resume when you go to apply for jobs. It also gives potential employers a way to get more in-depth information about you all in one place, and gives them a better feel for who you are beyond what you can put on paper. It also leaves you open to the possibility of getting noticed before jobs are even advertised or available – creating a pull effect instead of pushing your resume out to potential employers.

Creating your own website that will serve as a digital resume is surprisingly easy, cheap and painless. It should be simple, direct, well-edited and up-to-date, and you don’t need graphic design skills or loads of content. You’ll need three things to do this – a domain name, a web hosting company and a WordPress blog. Then, you’ll need to pick a WordPress theme and populate with content.

Check out the easy steps below for how to set it all up:

Step One – Purchasing a Domain Name and Web Host Services: We’re only going to cover one way of doing this because what we’ll describe is the easiest, cheapest and fastest way to go. Our web host, BlueHost.com is a one-stop shop for hosting services, domain names and WordPress setup, covered in the next step. Hosting with BlueHost is extremely reasonable at $6.95 per month, paid for annually with one payment of $83.40. Most companies will charge you upwards of $10 per month, and you don’t get all the bells and whistles like you do with BlueHost. If you are willing to commit to two years with BlueHost, which I definitely recommend, you’ll pay only $5.95 a month with one payment of $142.80.

Your domain name, if possible, should be your fullname.com. While it’s important for most websites to have a .com name to show up in search engines, it won’t be that important in this case because you won’t be trying to rank for keywords. If you can’t get your full name, try adding something fun and simple like iamfullname.com or thisisfullname.com. Signing up for BlueHost has another immediate advantage – your domain name will be free! You’ll save yourself a little chunk of change by hosting through BlueHost here, too.

Step Two – Install WordPress: Like I said earlier, I will be covering how to complete these steps if you host through BlueHost because of the ease and simplicity of the process.

Once you login into your Control Panel, you’ll see a box labeled SimpleScripts Installations (see photo). One of the options will be WordPress – select that. Choose “Install WordPress” and then you’ll have a few options. Choose the stable version of WordPress, which should be selected already. The next option you should also leave at the default – your domain name with the ‘www’. The only Advanced Option you should change is the user name and password. Otherwise, the install will randomly generate a password for you, which isn’t as easy to remember. Then, agree to the Terms and Conditions and you’re ready to go! The install will be complete in a matter of a few minutes at the most.

Step Three – Configure WordPress: It’s really up to you how much you want to customize your site. I strongly believe that simplicity is key because your site won’t look outdated as it ages, and you won’t have to re-design it multiple times. It will also appeal to more people if it is not design heavy.

Three things you’ll want to do is change the name of your ‘blog’ under Settings: General. I also suggest turning off comments under Settings: Discussion. Under Themes, you’ll want to select a simple, basic theme without a heavy graphic presence. One that I like in particular is Elegant Grunge – you can check out a sample site with this theme on the website for Kristin Swartzlander, a racing social media and marketing consultant.

I also suggest creating a page under Pages labeled Home. Then, under Settings: Reading, select “Static Page: Home” for the Front Page Displays option. That way, you won’t have a blog for your front page that dates the content. You’ll have a simple welcome, like on KristinSwartzlander.com, and the opportunity to host a blog, if that’s what you want, on another page.

Step Four – Add Résumé Content: Depending on how in-depth you want to get, you can add one additional page or multiple. To start out, you can copy and paste your current résumé onto a Bio or Résumé page, removing any personal information you don’t feel comfortable with sharing.

Simply including a list of completed school projects, updates on your Formula SAE team, job or internship experience and similar information will be plenty for viewers to keep up with on your site, and it’s a great way to add a personal level to what used to be a regular, one-dimensional résumé.

As always, please be sure to share only your basic information and not your address or phone number with the world for your personal safety.

Once you’ve created your personal website, feel free to share it in the comments section! And, of course, if you have questions please post below as well.

Careers in Racing Video: Kansas Speedway Q&A

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Before we post the second article in our Careers in Racing Series next Wednesday, check out this video of a press conference Q&A at Kansas Speedway with David Stremme, Brian Vickers, Jennifer Jo Cobb and and Jamie McMurray talking about their careers in racing and how they got there. It’s a very light video, not terribly in-depth, but it’s interesting to see how some of these drivers view their path to NASCAR and what helped them get there.

Careers in Racing Series: Finding and Prepping for a Racing Job

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We tuned in to an webinar recently entitled, “Working in Sports.” While the webinar went into deep detail on only a few topics, it inspired us to create a series of posts on careers in racing – how to achieve your goal of obtaining a motorsports career.

This series is going to cover a few topics on how to find and obtain a career in racing, and depending on the response and information available the topics may evolve and be explored more in depth. What we plan on covering is: searching for motorsports jobs, creating the perfect motorsports resume, networking in the racing industry, interviewing for racing jobs and other ways to get the experience you need for careers in racing, including internships.

When thinking about a career in racing, there are two things you need to think about: setting yourself up for a racing job and actually applying and obtaining a motorsports job. They require different actions, but both are essential for your job search if you are able.

We’ll talk more about the act of setting yourself up for a racing job in a future post, but in order to do so, you’ll have to know what future employers are looking for in a new hire. That’s why it’s important to do these searches well in advance of looking for a job. When you know what the employer wants, you can build your resume in that direction.

For example, let’s say you do a search for job listings for race teams and see that most of the posting require you to know AutoCad. Now you know that you will need to have AutoCad training before applying for these jobs perhaps a year or two down the road, so you can begin your education now instead of when you actually need that job.

So let’s talk about the actual search process. In order to find the jobs you’re interested in applying to, you’ll have to do quite a bit of varied searching. One of the best tools out there is Indeed.com. Indeed will search a broad range of job descriptions without giving you some of the more spam-like postings you’ll get on Monster or other job boards.

The best way to start with all searches is putting in motorsports or racing, and leave the rest of the fields blank. You don’t want to even narrow it down to a geographic region, because you already know that racing jobs are rare and you may need to relocate even though many of them will be in the Charlotte area.

Once you’ve done the search at a job site like Indeed, you want to expand to sports-related job sites. Teamwork Online has postings for a variety of motorsports companies like ISC Motorsports and NASCAR. You don’t need to sign up for an account to view the jobs, although I would recommend that you sign up for email alerts – free! – so that you can be the first to know about any racing jobs that come up.

Google is the next tool I would use in your racing job search – this is a great way to find postings on specific team websites or unadvertised positions. Using the advanced search tool, you want to use keywords like motorsports and racing in the required fields along with hiring, employment and resume. Then, you want to put in one or two months in the date range to make sure that the job listing is recent and active. You can then visit the results and see what comes up.

Another one-off site worth visiting is Jayski.com. The webmaster is honest about not actively keeping these listings up to date, but often they are notified about job openings from insiders within teams. It’s hit or miss, but worth a visit.

Now that you’ve picked out a few job listings that you want to target for application or for future research, you can prepare yourself to apply for the racing job of your dreams. We’ll talk more about the steps you’ll want to take in a future post – next up: resume preparation!

Have you found any great postings? Feel free to share below, and we’ll do our best to give you tips on how to apply!

Motorsports Engineering Innovation in NASCAR History

By Motorsports Student 1 comment »

It’s pretty obvious that NASCAR is filled with marvels of motorsports engineering. But there have been some truly standout moments in NASCAR’s history where motorsports engineering completely changed the game.motorsports engineering in NASCAR

One of those moments came almost 15 years ago, during the 1997 All Star race, when Jeff Gordon took the Hendrick Motorsports Jurassic Park-themed Monte Carlo, affectionately nicknamed ‘T-Rex’, to victory lane. The Hendrick team, led by engineer Rex Stump, had completely re-engineered the beast from the ground up.

With an engineer’s zest for problem solving and design improvement, Stump posed a question to his team that everyone in a motorsports engineering school will hear at some point during their studies: if you could start from scratch, what would you do to make this car better and faster?

The car that Stump and his team designed will go down in history as a technical marvel as it debuted at Charlotte Motor Speedway in the 1997 All-Star race, then called The Winston. Although the race was fairly unexciting, with Gordon holding the car back for the first two segments and then unleashing it in the final laps to take the lead, the car itself was something that had never been seen before in NASCAR.

What made it exciting, then and now, to motorsports engineers was that the car was completely legal because most of the changes fell into the gray areas of NASCAR’s rulebook at the time. Everything from the materials the car and its parts were made of to the angle of certain components was evaluated and adjusted if needed. Some changes were minute and some were significant, but when the car went through technical inspection it passed because of Stump’s team’s careful and exact consideration of the rules.

Even NASCAR was impressed by the ingenuity in Stump’s machine, although it forced officials to rewrite the rulebook the next morning. Like many engineering feats, T-Rex was the product of creative thinking combined with technical know-how – what every motorsports engineer hopes to achieve.

Want a motorsports scholarship? Now is the time to apply…

By Motorsports Student 1 comment »

Are you looking for scholarships to help you pay for or reduce the cost of school? It doesn’t matter what time of year it is, whether you’re returning to school in the fall or it’s winter break, now is the time to start looking and apply for scholarships, whether they are motorsports scholarships or just funding a motorsports education.

No matter where you’re going to be attending school, what age you are, or what you’ll be studying, there are scholarships out there that you can qualify for. But many of the scholarships have deadlines far in advance of the semester so that they can go through applications, decide on a winner and prepare paperwork with your college.

1. GENERAL SEARCH

The first step in getting a scholarship is doing a search on what’s out there. One of the best places to start is Fastweb, an online scholarship search tool. It’s a great way to see what kinds of scholarships are out there, and what it takes to apply for them. You can also purchase a scholarship book but you want to make sure that it’s up to date with the latest information, like The Ultimate Scholarship Book 2012: Billions of Dollars in Scholarships, Grants and Prizes.

2. IDENTIFY YOUR STANDOUT QUALITIES

Once you know what kinds of scholarships there are, from essay to application, you’ll want to narrow your search down to your strengths and anything else that makes you unique aside from wanting a motorsports education. Do you go to a church? Do your parents belong to a club or work for a large company? See if those organizations have scholarships available.

Did you grow up farming potatoes? Have you been involved in student government? Are you a skilled photographer? If you’re interested in a motorsports education, you’ve obviously shown some interest in racing. Motorsports scholarships are out there in addition to scholarships targeted towards your other interests and skills. Some include the Ricky Hendrick Scholarship, the Automotive Women’s Alliance Motorsports Scholarship and many more.

3. SEARCH BY SPECIFICS

Do a google or Fastweb search for terms with your standout points along with ‘scholarship’. There are lots of scholarships out there and, whether they offer a $500 prize or a gift card to Amazon.com, every little bit helps when it comes to paying for college.

4. APPLY

Once you identify a few scholarships that you qualify for, it’s time to get to the applications. The strategy that will work the best for most people is to pick less than 10 scholarships and give those the best application you can instead of spreading yourself thin by applying to every scholarship out there.

And the best way to apply? Start. That’s often the hardest part for most people, but it’s the most important. Draft an outline of what you’ll write or do for the scholarship. Then start filling it in slowly. You’ll have a draft of your essay or application. Then, edit it. Then have your parents read it. Then edit it more. Then have a teacher read it. Have everyone you can get look over your application. Very few applicants will do this, so it will improve your application, and chances of getting a scholarship, greatly.

5. BE DEDICATED

Set aside 15 minutes every day for your scholarship search, and make that happen. If you feel like working longer, and often you will, that’s great. If not, at least you’re creating a habit out of it.

Good luck with your scholarship search as you pursue a motorsports education, whether it is at a motorsports engineering school or otherwise!

 

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