Gundlach ready for move into the engineering spotlight at Arrow McLaren

09/27/2024 12:00 PM

NTT IndyCar Series veteran Kate Gundlach will be sitting in a new seat on an Arrow McLaren timing stand next season, as the top-tier performance engineer on Pato O'Ward's No. 5 Chevy has accepted the offer to lead one of its entries as race engineer.

The offer was made to Gundlach heading into the 2024 season, but she declined, citing a desire to spend one more season in the understudy role next to O'Ward's race engineer Will Anderson.

Without fanfare, the team and Gundlach also spent time earlier in the year with the roles reversed as they used the non-championship test and heat races at The Thermal Club to have her work as race engineer on the No. 5 with Anderson there to support his teammate.

After completing another season with O'Ward that included three wins en route to fifth in the points, Gundlach is ready to helm one of the other cars—likely Nolan Siegel's No. 6 Chevy—as the team conducts a thorough adjustment of its organizational chart.

"When they first offered me the role, it was a bit of a surprise and I felt I had to do some very deep soul searching to see if I was emotionally and physically ready for the role," Gundlach told RACER. "And my answer to them was that I needed more time, needed more time to get myself together mentally, and still felt like I had unfinished business with Pato because we’d been in the championship hunt nearly every year with him, and I just wanted one more try to knock it out of the park.

"As the season progressed, and as I did a lot of work mentally, it started to fall into place that, 'Okay, I’m ready for the next challenge.' And as much as I adore Pato – he is very special to me, he’s the driver that I’ve worked with the longest in my career ever, and I feel like we had a really close bond and we communicate really well – and as much as I hate to let that go, I feel like I need to step up to grow more. I feel like I’m in a better place to do that."

Gundlach rose to prominence at Chip Ganassi Racing, where she was the assistant race engineer during Scott Dixon's championship run in 2018 alongside data engineer Danielle Shepherd. Gundlach left Ganassi to accept a promotion to performance engineer, and as her Arrow McLaren career started to point towards moving to the top of her profession, she changed her approach, modified her working habit, and began preparing for life as a race engineer.

It's like being a head coach in many ways; there's a crew chief in charge of the car's mechanical quality, a race strategist tasked with calling the right plays, and a staff of support engineers to involve, and as a first-time race engineer, Gundlach knows the success of the program — in every area when the car is on track and performing — is her responsibility, as everyone involved with the entry reports to the race engineer.

"The race engineering role, I paid sharper attention to it after the offer was put on the table; it takes a lot more soft skills than just your basic knowledge of vehicle dynamics," she said. "You have to not only make the car go faster, but there’s a lot of people to manage. Your relationship with the driver becomes more critical, more intimate. You need to make sure that you’ve got a good energy with your timing stand, that you have very clear expectations of your people. I’ve learned that there are things that I don’t want to think about as a race engineer. I don’t want to think about anything the performance engineer is doing. I need that person to be super-sharp and to keep up and to provide me the most the best information possible.

"That's what I came to the realization of at The Thermal Club. I sat down and made this list of, 'If I was a race engineer, what would I do differently from this point of view?' And then I took that information back into being a performance engineer and tried to be a better performance engineer for my race engineer, based on what I wish I would have been more clear about at Thermal, and what I needed in that position. It's the car build. It’s the relationship with the crew chief. It’s the relationships that you have. You’re ultimately responsible for everybody’s performance here and everybody’s bonus check at the end of the season."

Gundlach is a no-nonsense, tough-as-nails character when it's time to compete; her background as a driver, car builder in college, and daughter of an amateur racer means she's seen and done just about everything in the sport. And then there's her friendly and engaging side, which has made her one of the favorite people in the IndyCar paddock. Both aspects of Gundlach's character will be required as the boss of an Arrow McLaren entry.

"It’s a lot heavier to carry, and it is also heavy to carry knowing that you are the only one who’s going to make a decision," she continued. "As a performance engineer, I always answer to the race engineer. The race engineer can tell me to pound sand if he doesn’t like the idea or whatever, but I’m the one making decisions now. In the moment, I can't go bounce anything off of somebody else. I have excellent teammates who I can work with, but when it comes to the heat of the moment, it's on me, and that’s a level of awareness that I felt like I needed to make sure I was prepared to handle."

Gundlach's respected for her work as a racer and as one of the greatest advocates for inclusion in the sport. She's in a constant role of supporting the women who come into IndyCar as mechanics and engineers — on her team or among Arrow McLaren's rivals — and it's only fitting that after demonstrating excellence for many years, she's been recognized for those contributions and elevated to the highest post in her discipline.

Former colleague Shepherd and Indianapolis 500-winning engineer Angela Ashmore were promoted to race engineering roles last season, and if they remain in those positions, IndyCar could make more history with Gundlach becoming the third in 2025.

"It’s a subtle shift, but it’s a recognizable shift," she said. "You’re seeing more women on timing stands, more women are applying for positions or reaching out and asking, 'How do I get into this?' We’ve hired Lizzie Todd in the systems engineer role. We've got Lindsey Falk, who came in as a hybrid engineer. We have a woman named Ellie Trine who came on recently, working in engineering, and of course, you got Grace Hackenberg on dampers and going over the wall. And it’s not just here. It’s growing everywhere.

"It’s interesting because everyone is coming in with new perspectives, and now I’m actually starting to feel old here! But it’s really refreshing to see how much confidence these women are bringing with them into teams. That was something that I was lacking when I got into it. It was very intimidating to walk into a building or a room and be the only woman there and feel like everyone’s eyes were just hyper-focused on you and seeing how you’re going to perform, like, 'Can you can you cut it or not?'"

In Gundlach's time, the series has gone from only needing one hand to count the number of women working across all teams on pit lane to needing a spreadsheet to keep up with the annual growth of women in IndyCar.

"And now I feel like women can walk in with more confidence, and though they still have to prove themselves, just like everybody else here, they just have one less hurdle to overcome," she said. "They’re very good at carrying themselves. And I’m very proud of them all. I think that’s a big thing that you can sit back and be like, 'All right, there’s progress here.' It’s a small shift, but I’m really proud."