Episode 8: Pit Stop Precision
Introduction
Walk down pit lane at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. On a race day, the lane is divided into 33 boxes, one for each car. Each box is about 30 feet long. The pit wall, painted with a wide white stripe, runs the full length on one side. On the other side is open track, where the cars come and go at 60 miles per hour.
Look at one specific pit box. Maybe it's the #8 box, where Marcus Ericsson stops twice during a typical race. Maybe it's the #2 box, where Josef Newgarden stops. Take your pick.
Now imagine a car coming. A Dallara IR-18, the chassis we covered in Episode 4. It comes off the track at 60 miles per hour, brakes hard, slides into the box, and stops within inches of where it's supposed to be.
Six people go over the wall. The car is now in their hands.
In the next seven seconds, those six people will jack the car off the ground using compressed air. They will remove four tires. They will install four new tires. They will refill the fuel tank with about 18 gallons of fuel. They will possibly adjust the front wing. They will drop the car. They will signal the driver to go.
Seven seconds.
The driver pulls out. He is now half a lap back of where he was before he pitted, because of the pit lane speed limit. But everyone else also has to pit. If his crew was faster than the crew of the car he was racing, he gained position. If his crew was slower, he lost position. Pit stops are where races are won and lost.
This is choreography. It is also engineering. It is also sport. And the people who do this for a living are some of the most highly trained athletes in motorsports that you have probably never heard of.
This episode is about what happens in those seven seconds. The six people, the equipment, the math, and the story of Angela Ashmore, a Purdue mechanical engineer who in 2022 became the first woman to win the Indianapolis 500 as part of a winning team.
The Six Over the Wall
Six people go over the wall in an IndyCar pit stop. That number is fixed by rule. If a seventh person crosses the wall during a stop, the team gets penalized (Autopedia, 2026).
Each of those six people has a specific job. They do that job and only that job. They have practiced it thousands of times. Here is who they are:
Position 1: The front jackman. Often the same person as the crew chief. He stands at the front of the car. As soon as the car stops, he plugs a high-pressure air hose into a connection point on the chassis. Compressed air rushes into the car's built-in air jacks, which raise the car off the ground in less than a second (LinkedIn / Lean in Real Life, 2018). He also typically signals the driver when the stop is complete.
Position 2: The outside front tire changer. He kneels at the right front tire. He has a pneumatic impact wrench, also called an air gun. As the car is being jacked up, he is already loosening the single lug nut that holds the wheel on. He removes the old tire, installs the new one, and tightens the lug nut. The whole process takes about two seconds for a skilled crew member (Wikipedia, 2026).
Position 3: The inside front tire changer. Same job, opposite side of the car. The left front tire.
Position 4: The outside rear tire changer. Same job at the right rear of the car. There is one important wrinkle. This crew member cannot take his position until AFTER the car arrives, because rules prohibit the car from driving over the air hose for his impact wrench (Wikipedia, 2026). So he has to wait for the car to stop, then move into position. This costs about half a second compared to the other tire changers.
Position 5: The inside rear tire changer. Same job at the left rear of the car.
Position 6: The fueler. He stands at the side of the car, holding a fuel hose connected to a large fuel tank on the pit wall. The hose ends in a connection point called a buckeye. As soon as the car stops, the fueler inserts the buckeye into a socket on the car. Fuel flows in by gravity. Modern IndyCar fuel hoses include a built-in vent and overflow line to keep the process safe and contain any spills (Wikipedia, 2026).
That is the six. There are also five or so additional crew members who stay behind the pit wall and support the operation. One person hands new tires over the wall to the changers. Another person takes used tires that come back across. Another person operates the water hose used to wash spilled fuel off the car before it leaves. The team race engineer and strategist watch from the timing stand at the back of the pit wall.
But the six over the wall are the ones the camera sees. They are the ones with the visible roles. They are also the ones who have to be physically present, in a 30-foot box, while a 1,650-pound car arrives at 60 miles per hour and they have seven seconds to send it back out faster.
What Happens in the Seven Seconds
Let's actually break down what happens in those seven seconds. From the moment the car stops in the box to the moment it pulls away. Time-stamped, beat by beat.
Second 0.0: Car arrives in the pit box. Stops. Driver hits the pit lane speed limiter button, locking the car's engine to a maximum of 60 miles per hour.
Second 0.1: Front jackman plugs the air hose into the chassis. Compressed air begins to inflate the car's air jacks. The front of the car rises first, then the rear.
Second 0.1: Simultaneously, the fueler inserts the buckeye into the fuel socket on the side of the car. Fuel begins flowing into the tank.
Second 0.5: Car is fully raised on its jacks. All four tires are now off the ground. The three pre-positioned tire changers (front-right, front-left, rear-left) begin loosening their lug nuts with their impact wrenches.
Second 0.7: The fourth tire changer (rear-right) has now moved into position. Begins loosening his lug nut.
Second 1.5: First lug nut is removed. The tire changer drops the impact wrench on the ground (this is intentional, see Segment 4) and pulls the old tire away from the car.
Second 2.0: A behind-the-wall crew member hands the new tire over the wall. The tire changer mounts it on the hub.
Second 3.0: All four old tires are off. All four new tires are on. Tire changers grab their impact wrenches off the ground and tighten the lug nuts.
Second 4.0: All four lug nuts are tight. Tire changers raise their hands to signal completion.
Second 4.5: Front jackman disconnects the air hose. The car drops back to the ground.
Second 5.5: Fueling continues. This is the bottleneck of most modern pit stops, because fuel flow is limited by gravity and by the size of the fuel line. About 18 gallons of fuel flow in approximately 7 to 10 seconds.
Second 6.0: If the front wing needs adjustment, a tire changer may use a manual adjuster on the front wing. This is rare during a routine stop but common after a setup change.
Second 7.0 to 8.0: Fueling complete. The fueler removes the buckeye. The car is released.
Second 7.5 to 8.5: A behind-the-wall crew member squirts water onto the buckeye area of the car to wash off any spilled fuel. This is required by rule (Wikipedia, 2026).
Second 8.0: Front jackman signals the driver. The driver releases the clutch and pulls out of the box.
The total elapsed time depends on what slowed the stop. The fastest IndyCar pit stops in routine conditions are around 7 seconds. Most race-condition stops are between 9 and 12 seconds (Wikipedia, 2026). Stops with damage repair, wing changes, or unusual conditions can take 15 to 30 seconds or longer.
Now think about what just happened. Six people performed dozens of specific actions in the right order, with no room for error, in less time than it takes to read this sentence. If any one of them is half a second slow, the team loses position on the racetrack. If any one of them makes a mistake (like over-tightening a lug nut, or under-filling the fuel tank), the car may not finish the race.
This is not optional precision. This is the price of admission.
The Math of a Pit Stop
Why does a pit stop matter so much? Let's do the math.
The pit lane speed limit at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is 60 miles per hour. The pit lane is about 0.3 miles long (Wikipedia, 2026). A car traveling the pit lane at 60 mph takes about 18 seconds to traverse it end to end (0.3 mi ÷ 60 mph × 3600 sec/hr).
By comparison, a car running on the racetrack at race speed (let's say 220 mph average) covers the same 0.3 miles in about 4.9 seconds (0.3 mi ÷ 220 mph × 3600 sec/hr).
So just traveling the length of pit lane costs the driver roughly 13 seconds compared to staying on the track. Add the 7-to-10 seconds of actual servicing in the box, and a single complete pit stop costs about 20 to 23 seconds of race time.
Now multiply. A typical Indianapolis 500 strategy involves 5 pit stops per car. That is 100 to 115 seconds, or roughly two minutes, spent in the pit lane during the race. Two minutes out of 2 hours and 45 minutes. About 1.2% of the race.
That doesn't sound like a lot. But here is the kicker. The difference between a fast pit crew and a slow pit crew, over those 5 stops, can be 10 to 15 seconds. That is 10 to 15 seconds you gain or lose on the cars around you, because of nothing the driver did.
How big is 10 to 15 seconds? At 220 mph, that is 600 to 900 yards of track. Half a mile of distance, given or taken, based on the speed of six people in a 30-foot box.
There is more. Pit stop timing strategy is its own discipline. When you pit matters as much as how fast you pit. If you pit just before a yellow flag comes out, you may get the entire field to bunch up behind you under caution, effectively reducing the time penalty of your stop. If you pit just after a yellow flag comes out, you may give the leaders a free lap. Race engineers like Angela Ashmore and Brad Goldberg, who we will meet in Segment 5, spend the entire race making these calculations in real time.
The other reason pit stops matter so much: fuel mileage. We covered this in Episode 5. An IndyCar carries 18.5 gallons of fuel. At race pace, the engine consumes fuel at a rate that varies based on track, driving style, and aerodynamic configuration. A typical race stint between pit stops is 30 to 40 laps. If you can stretch your fuel an extra lap or two before pitting, you may pit one fewer time over the whole race. That can be the entire margin of victory.
Race strategy, in other words, is mostly pit strategy. The driver does the driving. The car does the driving. But the difference between winning and finishing tenth often comes down to what six people did in seven seconds, multiplied by five stops, divided by who had the smartest engineer at the timing stand.
The Equipment
Let's talk about the equipment that makes the seven-second pit stop possible.
The air gun. This is what the tire changers hold. Properly called a pneumatic impact wrench. It costs about $6,000 per gun (LinkedIn, 2018). It runs on compressed air supplied through a hose from a tank or compressor behind the pit wall. The gun spins a socket at very high speed. Pull the trigger one way, it removes the lug nut. Pull the trigger the other way, it tightens the lug nut. Crew members deliberately drop these expensive guns on the ground after removing the lug nut. There are two reasons. First, dropping is faster than setting the gun aside. Second, the reverse switch on the side of the gun automatically gets pressed when the gun lands on its side, so when the crew member picks it back up to tighten the new lug nut, the rotation is already reversed (LinkedIn, 2018). The dropping is engineered into the workflow.
The single lug nut. IndyCar wheels are attached to the hub with a single lug nut, not the multiple-bolt pattern you see on a passenger car. This is the single biggest reason IndyCar pit stops can be faster than NASCAR stops (which still use 5-lug-nut wheels). One lug nut means one impact wrench operation per tire instead of five (Sarah Moore Racing, 2026). The trade-off is that the lug nut has to be much larger and stronger than a passenger car lug nut, because all the force of holding the wheel on the car at 230 mph passes through that one connection.
The pneumatic air jack system. Built into the chassis itself. There is no manual floor jack involved. The car has air jack pistons in the floor that extend downward when fed compressed air, lifting the car off the ground. When the air is released, the car drops. The entire jacking and dropping operation takes a fraction of a second on each side. This is one of the major reasons IndyCar stops are faster than passenger-car maintenance (Wikipedia, 2026).
The buckeye and fuel hose. The fuel hose ends in a quick-connect fitting called a buckeye. The fueler pushes it into a matching socket on the side of the car and twists. The hose locks in place. Fuel flows from the team's large pit-side fuel tank, by gravity, into the car's fuel cell. The hose has a built-in vent line that releases air from the fuel tank as fuel flows in, and an overflow line that captures any fuel that spills. The modern integrated design replaced an older two-hose system in the mid-2000s (Wikipedia, 2026).
The pit-side fuel tank. Each team's tank is filled to a specified volume of fuel for the race. The tank sits on the back of the pit wall. The fuel flows by gravity to the team's pit box. There is no pump. There is no fuel pressure. The system is designed to be simple, safe, and inspectable.
The wash water hose. After every pit stop, a behind-the-wall crew member sprays water onto the buckeye area of the car. This washes away any fuel that may have spilled during fueling. It is a fire-prevention measure. Required by rule (Wikipedia, 2026).
Tires. Each car has multiple sets of tires for each race weekend, all mounted on wheels and pre-positioned. Tire allocation is set by IndyCar rules and varies by race. At Indianapolis, teams have enough tires for the practice, qualifying, and race combined. Each set is labeled with a number so crew chiefs and engineers can call specific sets onto the car at specific times.
Every piece of this equipment is engineered. Most of it is custom built for racing. Some of it (like the air jack system inside the chassis) is unique to motorsports and would not exist in any other industry.
Angela Ashmore and the Women Who Came Before
On May 29, 2022, Marcus Ericsson won the 106th Indianapolis 500 in the No. 8 Huski Chocolate Honda for Chip Ganassi Racing. Standing in Victory Lane next to him, in a yellow team shirt, was a 35-year-old woman from Michigan named Angela Ashmore (RACER, 2022).
Angela Ashmore is a Purdue University mechanical engineering graduate. She has a Master's degree in mechanical engineering from Purdue. She was, by every available historical record, the first woman in the history of the Indianapolis 500 to be part of a winning team's race-day operations (RACER, 2022).
Her role on the car: electronics and data acquisition specialist. She managed the No. 8 car's telemetry, the on-board computer systems, the dozens of sensors that report on every system. She sat on pit lane next to race engineer Brad Goldberg during the race, working with him on fuel mileage and strategy. The race they ran together was, as IndyCar veterans put it, "called from the timing stand." Ashmore was part of calling it.
She did not start in IndyCar. She started in NASCAR, at Roush Fenway Racing in 2015, "basically as an assistant to the assistant" doing tire reports and compiling data (MEL Magazine, 2022). She worked her way up through the Xfinity Series to a primary race-engineering role in the NASCAR Cup Series. In 2020 she got the chance to come back to Indiana, where she had gone to school, to join Chip Ganassi Racing in IndyCar. In her third season there, she won the Indianapolis 500.
In 2024, Ashmore was promoted to lead race engineer on the No. 11 Honda for Marcus Armstrong (RACER, 2024). She is no longer the assistant. She is now responsible for the engineering setup, the race-day strategy, and the technical leadership of an entire IndyCar entry.
She is also no longer alone. Danielle Shepherd, another Ganassi engineer, was promoted to lead race engineer at the same time. Kate Gundlach, who was Ashmore's assistant engineer colleague at Ganassi, now works as a performance engineer for Arrow McLaren on the No. 5 Chevy driven by Pato O'Ward (RACER, 2024). Cara Krstolic, Firestone's director of race tire engineering and manufacturing, is a mentor to all of them.
The path Ashmore is walking has had others on it for a long time. Let me name them.
Maude Yagle. In 1929, Maude Yagle was the full owner of the car Ray Keech drove to victory in the Indianapolis 500. In an era when women were not allowed to participate in motorsports, she had to enter the car as "M.A. Yagle," using her initials to disguise her identity. She won. The fact that a woman owned the winning car was not publicly acknowledged for years (RACER, 2022).
Anita Millican. In 1980, Anita Millican became the first woman to receive credentials to work on an Indianapolis 500 team. She was a mechanic and engineer. She went over the pit wall in pit stops, making her the first woman to do so. Later in her career, she built the championship-winning shock absorbers used by Team Penske and Helio Castroneves at Indianapolis (RACER, 2022).
Diane Holl. In the late 1990s, Diane Holl became the first woman to win an IndyCar championship as a race engineer (RACER, 2024). She was working at Ganassi at the time. She set the institutional template for the women who would come after.
In 2022, the same year Ashmore won the Indianapolis 500, women worked on the engineering or pit crews of all three top-finishing teams. Cara Krstolic posted a photograph of the women who had worked at the 500 that year, and the social-media response was, by some accounts, ugly. But the fact on the ground was that women were now central to the operational success of the highest level of American motorsports (MEL Magazine, 2022).
There is more to come. In 2022, Chip Ganassi Racing and PNC Bank launched the Women In Motorsports program, part of PNC Project 257. The name refers to the estimated 257 years it would take, at current rates, for women to be paid equally to men in the same roles. The program offers free internships with housing to women in college and technical schools throughout the United States. Ashmore serves as a close mentor to the women coming through (Yahoo Sports, 2023).
For Indiana high school students, here is the takeaway. Angela Ashmore was a Purdue student who walked into a Michigan short-track race shop and asked to work for free. She rose through NASCAR, came back to Indiana, won the Indianapolis 500 as an engineer, and now leads her own entry. The path she walked is open. The Purdue College of Engineering produced her. The Purdue Formula SAE student team gave her hands-on experience. Indiana built her.
Pit Crews Are Athletes
A modern IndyCar pit crew member is an athlete. Like the driver, like the engineers, the people who go over the wall are physically trained to do what they do.
Consider what their job actually requires.
The outside rear tire changer has to sprint across pit lane (avoiding traffic, including their own car coming in), kneel down, manipulate a 25-pound impact wrench, remove a tire that weighs about 25 pounds, install a new tire that weighs the same, tighten a lug nut, and stand back up, all in approximately 2 to 3 seconds. They will do this five or more times per race.
The front jackman has to be physically strong enough to connect a high-pressure air hose to a chassis fitting on the first try, every time, while a car is coming to a stop directly in front of him.
The fueler has to handle a fuel hose that, when full of about 18 gallons of fuel, weighs over 120 pounds. He has to insert the buckeye on the first try, hold the hose steady while fuel flows for 7-10 seconds, and disconnect cleanly. He is also the person most at risk of a fire emergency, since he is closest to the fuel source.
All six over-the-wall crew members are in full fire-resistant Nomex suits, same as the driver. They wear helmets. They are working in the open at a racetrack where ambient temperature is often 90°F or higher. Their work is physical, urgent, and dangerous.
How do they train? Most professional IndyCar pit crew members lift weights, do cardio, and practice their specific motions thousands of times per season. Modern IndyCar teams have dedicated pit stop practice facilities, often with a chassis mockup that can be raised and lowered exactly like the real car. Pit crews practice the entire choreography in real time, with stopwatches running, multiple times per week during the season.
Many pit crew members come from athletic backgrounds. College football, college soccer, college wrestling, college baseball are common feeder sports. The physical attributes (explosive strength, agility, hand-eye coordination, ability to perform under pressure) translate directly from organized athletics to over-the-wall pit work. Some NASCAR and IndyCar teams actively recruit from college sports.
The career path is real. A typical full-time pit crew member earns somewhere between $80,000 and $150,000 per year, depending on team and experience (industry estimates). Crew chiefs and engineers earn substantially more. The work is seasonal in some ways (17 races for IndyCar; offseason in winter), which appeals to some people and not to others. The travel is intense. The pressure is real. The pay is real. And for someone who came up in sports but never quite made the professional ranks, motorsports offers a path to keep that intensity alive.
For Indiana high school athletes, this is a career most have not heard of. It does not require a college degree. It does require physical conditioning, the ability to work as part of a team under pressure, and a willingness to relocate for the right opportunity. The Indianapolis 500 alone employs over 300 dedicated pit crew personnel across the 33 teams. Across the whole IndyCar season, NASCAR, IMSA, and other professional series, the number is in the thousands.
Wrap-up
Here is what I want you to take away from this episode.
A modern Indianapolis 500 pit stop is one of the most coordinated team performances in all of professional sports. Six people. Seven seconds. Dozens of individual actions performed in the exact correct order, with zero room for error, while a 1,650-pound car sits in their hands and the rest of the race waits outside the box.
It is choreography. It is engineering. It is athletics. It is strategy. It is, depending on how you frame it, a microcosm of how every well-organized team operates.
The lesson, I think, is this: most great work is not done alone. The driver wins the race. The driver gets the milk. The driver kisses the bricks. But the driver does not change his own tires. He does not pump his own fuel. He does not calculate his own pit strategy. He does not handle his own telemetry. He does not write his own software. He does not build his own chassis. He does not lay his own bricks. The cliché that "the driver wins the race" is, in important ways, just a cliché.
The truth is that an Indianapolis 500 victory involves dozens of people doing very specific, very specialized work in very tight coordination. Engineers like Angela Ashmore, pit crew members who train year-round, mechanics, strategists, broadcasters, medical staff, safety personnel. The driver is one critical part of a team performance. He gets the trophy. The team won the race.
The same is true in every other field. The doctor doesn't save the patient alone. The CEO doesn't run the company alone. The teacher doesn't educate the student alone. The journalist doesn't break the story alone. Every visible achievement is the visible portion of a much larger and mostly invisible team effort.
The Indianapolis 500 makes this visible in a way most professional work doesn't. You can stand on pit lane and watch the team performance. You can count the people. You can time the stop. You can see the choreography. And if you are a young person trying to figure out where you fit in the world of work, watching a pit stop is a remarkable lesson in the value of being one specialized, excellent piece of a larger machine.
Sources
Autopedia. (2026). Pit stop. Retrieved from https://automobile.fandom.com/wiki/Pit_stop
LinkedIn / Lean in Real Life. (2018, May 23). Indycar pit stops. Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lean-real-life-indycar-pit-stops-ryan-kaisoglus
MEL Magazine. (2022, June 12). Under 10 percent of IndyCar engineers are women. She's one of them. Retrieved from https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/angela-ashmore-indy-500-women-in-racing
Motorsport.com. (2016, September 9). Being part of an IndyCar pit stop crew. Retrieved from https://www.motorsport.com/indycar/news/being-part-of-an-indycar-pit-stop-crew/
Purdue University Persistent Pursuit Podcast. (2022, July 6). Purdue's Angela Ashmore makes history as first woman IndyCar crew member to win Indy 500. Retrieved from https://stories.purdue.edu/podcast/angela-ashmore-indy500-winner/
RACER. (2022, June 3). The history-making element to this year's Indy 500 win. Retrieved from https://racer.com/2022/06/03/the-history-making-element-to-this-years-indy-500-win
RACER. (2024, March 5). Ashmore, Shepherd breaking down barriers with Ganassi. Retrieved from https://racer.com/2024/03/05/ashmore-shepherd-breaking-down-barriers-with-ganassi
Sarah Moore Racing. (2026, March 28). Pit stop strategy across racing series: comparing F1, IndyCar, and NASCAR in 2026. Retrieved from https://sarahmooreracing.com
TAG Heuer Official Magazine. (2023, June 8). The art of an Indy 500 pit stop. Retrieved from https://magazine.tagheuer.com/en/2023/05/30/indy500-2023race-what-is-a-pit-stop/
Wikipedia. (2026). Pit stop. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_stop
Yahoo Sports. (2023). First woman to win an Indy 500 was Marcus Ericsson's engineer in 2022. Retrieved from https://sports.yahoo.com/
INDYCAR. (2024). Pit Crew: Roles on a race team. Retrieved from https://www.indycar.com/2024/Future-Dev-IC101/On-Track-Competition/Roles-on-a-race-team/Pit-Crew