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At IndyCar, Liz Smith is the keeper of all the information, from rules to logistics and beyond

April 17, 2026

In the midst of a high-speed, high-stakes IndyCar race, two drivers collide — scattering debris over the track. A yellow caution flag is thrown; penalties are levied.

Liz Smith, sitting in race control, officially logs the penalties and fires off messages to the teams about what’s happening on the track.

On paper, Smith is the senior manager of competition and operations at IndyCar. In reality, she’s the keeper of rules and logistics and stats, “the hub of information,” as her boss says — and not just on race day when she’s managing communications to and from teams’ pit stands from race control.

Smith, 40, essentially acts as the IndyCar Series’ liaison to teams, drivers and stakeholders. She collects official results, operations manuals, schedules, transportation details and more — any type of logistical information a team could need, firing off dozens of emails leading up to a race.

She sits in on engineering meetings, helping with project management as IndyCar works on a new car.

And Smith is also “the keeper of the rule book,” working across different departments to make sure all the rules are updated and relevant. The only living rulebook, Smith said, lives with her.

“Basically, everything that goes into a race that has to be communicated to teams — whether it’s operations manuals, practice groups, qualifying groups, official results, any type of schedule, any type of communication that they need or want — I am gathering that internally,” Smith said, “whether it be from our operations department or engineering department or transportation.”

By the time Smith gets done explaining her job, what she does at IndyCar, she needs to take a breath.

It’s a lot, for sure, but it helps that Smith, a Bay Area native, is gregarious and a proud extrovert.

And she’s done pretty much everything across the motorsports world.

Smith didn’t grow up a motorsports fan, however. Her weekends were dominated by San Francisco 49ers football rather than NASCAR races.

But an event coordinator job landed her at Laguna Seca, Monterey County, when it was still Mazda Raceway. Smith managed the volunteers and was in charge of all the food and beverages on site. She also helped VIP guests, and eventually volunteers, with “hot laps,” or rides around the track.

She put on dozens of helmets. She buckled countless five-point harnesses. She unbuckled them. Down to the last rider.

And then she found herself strapped into a Ferrari 458.

“I don’t like rollercoasters,” she warned her driver.

“This is going to be fun,” he promised her.

And, much to her surprise, even traveling 154 mph down the straight, it was.

“Once I got out of the car, I wanted to know everything. I wanted to know the top speed of every car that came to our track,” Smith said. “I wanted to know how much it weighed. I wanted to know … when there’s different cars running at the same time, how do you make them equal?

“I was so interested in all the tiny details,” Smith added. “It was like a whole new world opened up.”

That was 2011. Since then, Smith has worked in a variety of roles in the motorsports industry, from handling travel and accommodations for the staff and teams of what was then Andretti Autosports to serving as an assistant team manager for Bryan Herta Autosport, where she managed and led his first Pikes Peak International Hill Climb effort.

“I’ve been on the promoter side of the race tracks,” Smith said, “sold the tickets, managed the marketing team.”

And then IndyCar came calling.

For Smith, despite her vast experience, working for IndyCar itself — rather than individual teams — was a new challenge.

“This is an aspect of our industry that I’ve never seen,” Smith said.

It certainly helped, she said, coming into her role at IndyCar in February 2024, that she already had so many established relationships with people in the paddock. She’s worked to build the trust of team managers, who come to her for information, help, or just a hello or a welfare check.

Smith, who now lives in Indianapolis, always wants to learn new things — even as she’s sitting in race control, an admittedly daunting job. That first year, she said, she had a pit in her stomach, afraid of doing something wrong just because the stakes were so high.

But by last year, she was more comfortable. It wasn’t long before she started to think, “How can I make things better?”

So as the Acura Grand Prix of Long Beach gets underway on Sunday, Smith will be in race control, viewing the race from a completely different perspective:

Collecting the data, transmitting messages — and thinking ahead to what’s next.

Orange County Register

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At IndyCar, Liz Smith is the keeper of all the information, from rules to logistics and beyond

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