JAMES ROE JR’S heart-rate is going through the gears. He’s in the gym pushing the body beyond its comfortable limit. The young racing car driver is about to be put into the “stressed zone”, where the more fatigued he becomes, the more he will be tested mentally. 

What shape comes next in this pattern?

. . . Tricky at any time but when the pulse is near top speed and a breath is hard to catch, it becomes far more so. When the question is answered, more are quickly fired. The subject can switch from logic to geography.

Name the capital of this country . . . 

And the next one . . .  

In this line of work, you’ve got to become comfortable being uncomfortable.    

“It’s very hard to simulate the car,” Roe says, “but you’re in a race, a street course, walls all around you, a car breathing down your neck with a lap to go and you’re in the lead. You’ve still got to think clearly and be process driven so that’s what we’re trying to manipulate the whole time. So, yeah, that was today.” 

Today is far from done. It’s early afternoon when we meet in a hotel bar in Naas, and Roe has just finished his second workout of the day.  

“Do you want a few biscuits, do ya? Sure I can’t eat them.” 

He pushes the small wrapped snacks that came with his coffee, made with oat milk and a triple measure of caffeine, across the table. 

Within a 10-mile radius of this spot in Co Kildare must be dozens of jockeys struggling to make weight. Roe, home from Carmel, Indiana for Christmas and new year, wrestles with a mechanical beast just as sensitive to its pilot’s mass as any derby winner. 

Roe, has to lose 10lbs by the first race of the year which takes place on 5 March in St Petersburg, Florida. Hence the oak milk and a hundred other lifestyle tweaks. 

“Less fat,” he says. “I’m not a huge fan but you have to do it.”  

Weight, he says, is the primary concern as the new term approaches, adding that every 10lbs over his fighting size equals an additional tenth of a second a lap.     

“And we deal in 10ths and hundredths every time we go, so if you’re a tenth of a second off pole . . . and it’s not in the car, but in me, that’s performance we’re giving away.”

Roe is trying to strike a challenging balance between gaining upper-body strength and cutting weight. Come the season’s beginning his 6’ 1” frame will be carrying no more than 8% body fat, which he’ll maintain until the end of the campaign in September.   

The first gym session of the day was at 8am, circuit training. Run 2km then work on core and upper body strength. Then repeat with rowing instead of running, then another circuit which begins on the bike.    

The lunchtime session was where his reactions under pressure were honed and primed. The other focus was the all-important neck strength. “If you’d walked into the gym an hour ago you would have thought I was a psychopath, with the thing around my head and the weights hanging off the side of it,” he says. 

Just another morning in pursuit of the dream, to race and win as an IndyCar driver.    

*****

The 24-year-old’s ambitions are coming ever closer to being realised. Roe has recently signed for Andretti Autosport for the 2023 season in Indy NXT, formerly known as Indy Lights, which is one rung below IndyCar, the top level of US motorsport which rivals F1 for profile and exceeds it for maximum speeds reached. Close to 400,000 people attend the Indy500 each year, the pinnacle of a season that some 69 million fans follow.

Roe calls Andretti Autosport a “powerhouse” of his sport. 

“Andretti have teams in Indy Nxt, IndyCar, Formula E . . . They’re in the middle of buying an F1 team, they’ll be on the grid there,” Roe says. “V8 super cars in Australia, partnerships with sports cars teams in Le Mans; they’re a global corporation in the motorsport business so naturally for me to be in that environment, around them and everything they have going for them, was a huge goal of mine.” 

Roe’s move to Andretti began last July when J-F Thormonn, the president of the organisation, made contact. What’s going on with your season? What are your goals? Just a general chat, Roe says. Last season “wasn’t the best” in Indy Lights, he adds.     

He went with a new team, TJ Speed Motorsports, for the series. He says a group coming together for the first time to take on established players such as Andretti and HMD “was like taking a sword to a gunfight essentially”. 

So Roe told Thormann that he wanted to be with Andretti for the coming season – that was his goal. 

The conversation ended and Roe next heard from Thormann in September. They wanted to offer him a two-day test. This, Thormann told him, was a chance for them to gauge him in the car. Roe knew what they’d be looking for. “What your lap times are like, what your consistency was like, what your feedback was like, how you work with your teammates, what your dialogue was like, what your fitness was like, how you could develop the car . . . how can you benefit the team?” 

After putting his best effort into the test, Roe flew to Munich for a trade show at which his title sponsor Topcon had a presence. Thormann phoned while he was there. “We want to offer you a contract for next season. Let’s get this show on the road here.”

*****

Roe puts his progress to date down to a solid work ethic, which was perhaps inevitable. He grew up in a family with business on either side of the tree. His mother’s family are auctioneers. On his dad’s side is a motor repair shop on the Sallins Road, where alongside James Sr you will also find his uncle, Michael Roe, a storied driver who made a significant impression on American motorsport in his time, racing in IndyCar in 1985, having won the Canadian-American Challenge Cup, or Can-Am, in ’84. 

“Naturally from a very early age you just work. I remember every summer holidays, school break, weekends, I’d be in the garage,” Roe says.  

Other drivers entered competitive racing at a far earlier age than Roe. “All the guys around me in Andretti, Romain Grosjean in IndyCar, teammates Hunter McElrea, Jamie Chadwick and Louis Foster and these guys in Indy NXT, they’ve all been driving since they were four or five years of age in go karts.” 

Roe’s start was “quite different”. From the age of around six or seven there were cars to be rallied around the fields at the family home in Bodenstown, just outside Sallins. Many vehicles that came into the family business not worth repairing would be bought from the customer by Roe’s dad. Volvos, BMWs, Toyotas, all kinds of makes and models. Some of them could just about run. “But once it moved to some degree, we’d take it to the field, my dad and brother,” Roe says.    

He would also take his parents’ keys and spin up and down the drive. “I could go missing for hours sitting in the car,” he says. 

As the aptitude to match his passion became apparent, Roe’s dad and uncle told him the deal. You earn and save the money to buy your first racing car, and the resources will be there in the family business to work on and run the car while Michael has the knowledge to be your engineer and coach. By the time he was 15 the money was saved, the car bought and a podium banked in his first race at Mondello in the Ginetta Junior Ireland class. A less formal but arguably more comprehensive primary education in the sport was done. 

Roe moved to America in 2018 straight after he sat his Leaving Cert. He arrived in Elkhart Lake, Wisconsin and slept in the ArmsUp Motorsport team’s truck for the first two weeks.   

“How bad do you want it? Are you willing to go to that degree where you’re living out of trucks and living out of a case on the workshop floor to chase this dream,” he says.  

Since then he progressed through F2000, F3 and Indy Pro 2000. Along the way he has had wins at famous circuits like VIR, Road America and Watkins Glen. 

In 2022 Roe boarded 18 transatlantic and 96 internal flights in the US. “All for working, testing, partners, sponsors. A guy like J-F sees that, sees the willingness to work and get stuck in and with their resources, their team, their equipment . . . He knows I can touch the pedals and turn the wheel in the right manner, and with the willingness to work we should have a successful season.” 

*****

You can’t talk about modern motorsport without talking about data, or as Michael Roe calls it, “the squiggly lines”.   

Much has changed since Michael’s heyday in the mid 80s. Where once there was a rev counter and feel, every car now has a system with more than 1,000 data sensors running from the moment the power is turned on. 

“They have sensors for absolutely everything from throttle position to steering angle to brake pressure to suspension movement to water temp to everything. It goes into downforce, wheel speed, it goes on and on,” the younger Roe says. “What we nickname it as drivers is the lie detector. There’s no arguing with it.” 

Each Andretti car has a full-time engineer assigned, with the driver-engineer relationship crucial to success or failure. Within the data is a driver’s channel. “The stuff that I care about, the stuff that I can do to manipulate the car. What I’m doing with my feet, hands, downshifts.”  

Roe adds: “I can overlay my data against my teammate’s data. So you put the two over each other and I can see what I’m doing in some areas better than him and other areas where he’s better than me so I very quickly learn and use it as a tool to advance myself, and it’s accurate to the millimetre.”  

Reports on races are broken down into segment times. A bad segment can be dissected quickly. “You say, ‘well ok you carried 20 feet more brake in that area’, or ‘you got off the power five feet too early’ and you can go through it all. Ultimately it brings us back to answers . . . it takes all the guesswork out of it.”

During practice sessions Roe can give feedback to the engineer over the radio, asking for more front end, or rear grip, or more stability on the brakes. “He’ll adapt a car based off my feedback. We’ll go back out on another run, go faster or slower, whatever way, then you have the comparisons of those two runs and you can overlay the two and see exactly where we were stronger or slower, which hopefully is not the case too often. Then you can start building real knowledge, based off facts and data, to further the car’s development throughout the year.” 

Is there a danger of overkill from too much data? Could technology, as in many aspects of life, go from being a good servant to a bad master? It’s a fair point, Roe says, in that the crucial elements of racing remain the same. 

“At the end of the day basically it’s about feel; a certain feeling to push the limits, because in motorsport whoever can drive on that thinnest line for the longest amount of time is the guy that’s going to win.” 

A really good engineer, says Roe, “has a bit of give and take”; they know that the data doesn’t lie but often the driver knows the fuller truth. What makes for a marginally slower individual lap could lead to a faster 30 laps if the driver, who is “making it happen on the track”, is trusted.    

And as important as the data is, Roe can’t think about it when he’s behind the wheel. 

“No. I’m immersed in the job that’s on hand. I can visualise the data in my head. I know when I brake, what that brake trace will look like on the data, I can get to that degree, but, no, it’s just driving and you deal with that afterwards.” 

Ultimately, he says that the stopwatch still tells the result, as it did 100 years ago. “The quickest guy is still the quickest guy.” 

*****

Michael Roe gives his nephew a different sort of feedback to the data. He flies over for a number of races and follows the rest of his nephew’s contests from home. He’s available “24/7” with “very honest advice”. 

“That, in this industry where we nickname it the piranha club, is more than valuable. You can’t put a price tag on that,” Roe says.  

The feedback from Michael is “very blunt”, which is the way James Jr likes it to be delivered.  

“That’s my personality too, I probably actually get it from him,” Roe says. “We’re very direct. He’ll tell you ‘that was shit’ or ‘that was good’. He’s very logical in that if he says something I never second guess it because it’s so direct, there’s no fluff there, no waffle. And you know your best interests are at the bottom of what he’s said. It’s a very honest relationship and we get along like a house on fire.”   

The straight-talking dynamic is not just reserved for inter-family discussions. In this most ruthlessly results-based business it doesn’t pay to talk around the truth.   

“What I find is the higher you go up, and the bigger the operator that you’re dealing with, the two Andrettis (Michael and Marco), J-F, Rob Edwards (chief operating officer), they don’t have time for bullshit. They’re so busy that it’s just blunt, to the point. Get the results and get on with the job.” 

This lack of equivocation has also been apparent to Roe in the commercial aspect of his sport. “Any successful person that I meet, even off the track . . . I meet a lot of very senior executives of big corporations and at a high-performing level, no one has time for waffle or fluff.” 

Being involved in this sport, Roe says, is like running a full-time business “that happens to have a race car involved”. 

In 2022 he estimates he was at his base in Carmel maybe one week in every four. The rest of the time he was traveling to race, and to sell the value of what’s doing to sponsors. An Irishman close to the top level in this sport is a compelling proposition to commercial partners, in particular those in Irish America. 

Some 60% of Roe’s 18 transatlantic and 96 domestic flights last year were on the commercial trail. “It’s a huge part of our world. A huge amount of my time is spent in that department,” he says. Roe has just hired two people, a commercial strategist and a director of content, who are  “going to take a huge weight off my shoulders”. 

That said, he remains the point of contact for now, and enjoys the business world, even when the time demands are considerable.   

“Three weeks before Christmas I was on the road . . . Florida, San Francisco, San Diego, Texas, New York, doing deals, dealing with executives, current and new ones, sitting down with them, presenting a programme, the opportunity on hand and all that goes with it and did the deals and was very successful, but it was literally three weeks on the road sleeping four hours a night.”

*****

Throughout our conversation Roe is amiable and fluent, the relaxed Kildare accent now given an American ring. Answers come readily to him. The only time he pauses is towards the end of the chat when he’s asked what he gets from driving on the most fundamental level. 

He stops and looks away for several beats then starts to speak, slowly at first. 

“I suppose it’s, um, . . . It’s a feeling that you’re on the limit, it’s that difference between I’ve got it and it’s got me kind of feeling, where you’re so close to the edge but you haven’t gone over it, you know probably similar to walking a tightrope, that’s when you’re on the limit, one brake half a foot too late or be on the power half a foot too early or turn in half a foot too soon and that’s it. It’s gone. You’re doing that at 200 miles an hour, concrete walls all around you, there’s a thrill there in that. And when you put down a proper lap, a proper proper lap, and you’re on pole there’s nothing like it, because the gun was to your head for a lap and probably three or four more moments on the lap when you should have been on the wall but you survived it . . . It’s that kind of thrill, balancing the art, you know.”