Cross & Crescent

Lee Szczypski (Embry-Riddle 2000) has been attending the Indianapolis 500 race for years. He started while growing up in Indianapolis. He later would host his fraternity brothers in town for the event.

Now he arrives at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway at 5 a.m. on race day to make last minute adjustments to two of the 33 cars running later that day.

“Other races can get mundane and you just go through the motions, but the Indy 500 never gets old,” Szczypski says. “Not for anyone in racing, no matter how long you’ve been in it.”

“I get chills up my spine when I hear Jim Nabors sing ‘Back Home Again in Indiana,’ the fly by, and when they announce to start your engines,” he says. “It truly is amazing.”

Breaking In

Szczypski has always been intrigued by Indy Car racing. While in school at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, he and his fraternity brothers would venture to the IRL race in Orlando, Florida.

One year at the race, he obtained a pit pass and began asking around to see if a race team needed a volunteer for an internship. An engineer from one of the teams was interested in Szczypski’s aerospace engineering studies and gave him the opportunity to work for the team from April until June as an intern for Indianapolis 500 preparations.

Soon after, Szczypski left school and returned home to Indiana to pursue a career in racing. He realized that it would be virtually impossible to get into racing without knowing someone, and it would ultimately be his connections that would give him the possibility to succeed.

“Faced with the opportunity of having a desk job or to travel the country and work in racing,” Szczypski says. “I could never have passed up this opportunity while I had the chance.”

Building a Reputation

In his first couple of years, Szczypski would wait by the phone hoping a call would come in for work. He says, “Until you get a reputation, it is very tough to get in. And you have to start at the bottom no matter what, because people seriously have their lives on the line.”

In 2003, he finally got a break. A friend he had kept in touch with from his internship needed some help. “He called me up and I went to go help AFS racing. I ended up working with them until the end of the 2003 season.”

Szczypski says, “There is no training program in racing. Pretty much how it works is someone says, ‘we need you to do this,’ and you try to learn it and not mess up.” Yet the learning curve was easier for him because, “having been at Embry-Riddle and learned its engineering background helped me understand the mechanics of the car.”

The following season he went back to work full time for AFS racing, which races exclusively in the Indy Pro Series, the feeder circuit for Indy Car.

When the 2005 season rolled around, Szczypski received an offer to work on the crew for Indy Car with Playa Del Racing. He says, “It was a huge risk for me to leave my full-time job at AFS since Playa Del Racing had the intention of entering a car in only one race, but that race was the Indy 500.”

He took the opportunity and worked on the pit crew for driver Jaques Lazier’s car. He was able to stay with Playa Del Racing, but also spent the rest of the season working side jobs for six different Indy Pro Series teams.

This season, Playa Del Racing is racing full time in the Indy Pro Series. The team also entered two cars in the 2006 Indianapolis 500; Lazier drove one car, finishing 17th, and Roger Yasukawa drove the second car, finishing 16th.

“Knowing how hard it was for me, I can really tell people just keep your eyes on your goals and go after them,” he says.

Playa Del Racing and Data Acquisition

Since Playa Del Racing does not typically race Indy Car, the team recently built the cars for the Indianapolis 500.

For both leagues, Szczypski works as the data acquisition engineer. His role entails monitoring the hundreds of sensors that are on the car and crunching the numbers to see what is going on with the car.

Beginning in early April, Szczypski began reviewing the data from the 2005 Indy Car to see how it could be improved. He studies the variables in the car such as toe, caster, camber, and shock height to best improve performance and make the driver feel comfortable.

“There are two sources of information,” he says, “the driver and the car’s raw data. And both sources need to be satisfied in order for the car to perform well.”

During races, Szczypski works in the pits with multiple computers crunching the data. With driver input and the information he provides, the pit crew has the ability to make adjustments to the car during the few the seconds the car is in the pits.

The Racing Fraternity

Szczypski has taken his college fraternity days and compared it to a very different group, the racing fraternity. “There are a number of people that you wouldn’t normally be drawn to if it weren’t for the fraternity. It is the same thing with the race team, you have to be able to adapt to a number of people and make a good working environment.”

Playa Del Racing has about 20 employees, all of whom are collectively a tight-knit group. Similar to life in a chapter house, the team is always together. There is no such thing as going home after work.

“With all the traveling, you often stay at other people’s houses or at a hotel. You share the TV and they are in the room when you call your girlfriend,” Szczypski explains. “You really have to work with people you like.”

“A good racing team operates a lot like a fraternity,” he explains, “If you have a situation where people are backstabbing, or if the bond of brotherhood isn’t there, it hurts the whole — whether in a fraternity or in a racing team.”

Lambda Chi

The Embry-Riddle chapter began its recruitment process before school started, during orientation. Szczypski’s remembers meeting the men of Lambda Chi Alpha and being instantly impressed by the strength of their brotherhood. “They took us in before we were in college and treated us with respect from the beginning. They were really interested in who we were.”

Embry-Riddle is rather unique because it is strictly an aviation school. The school is a melting pot, for many students work prior to enrolling, many serve in the military, and few are from the school’s home state of Florida.

The melting pot idea was also evident in the chapter. “There wasn’t one type of person in the fraternity,” says Szczypski. Yet he believes there was “great cohesive group because of their common bond.”

“There are a million stories,” he recalls of his college days. “But my best memory is my first semester, because having people who really cared and who you could trust was something new to me.”

Szczypski was active within the chapter. He attended the 2000 General Assembly and served on the International Ritual Team. He also held the offices of recruitment chair, fraternity education chair, and briefly served as the chapter’s president before leaving school.

“Taking a leadership role in the fraternity is incredibly beneficial in life,” Szczypski says. “Dealing with people and handling the pressures and planning involved, you have to learn to rely on your teammates and peers.”

With the rigors of the racing schedule, Szczypski often looks for support from his fraternity brothers. Whenever he is in a new town, he checks out his chapter’s website to see if there are any brothers he knows who live nearby.

Whenever possible, he will make plans to meet or bring them out to the track, but admits, “It is often difficult to find the time because I am not on a vacation, and there is a lot of work involved in preparing for each race.”

Szczypski is living his dream. And though his dream job goes by really fast, he believes “joining a fraternity — specifically Lambda Chi Alpha — is the best thing I have done.”