Tyler Paige: From JR Motorsports to the Olympic Games

Ron Lemasters | 7/28/2021

News

JRM employee Tyler Paige is competing in the Tokyo games for American Samoa. He competed in his first race last night and will sail four more days as he attempts to qualify for the medal round.

MOORESVILLE, N.C. (July 28, 2021) - It's not often one hears of a stock car racer competing in the Olympics. The Games do not have an auto racing category.

It's even rarer to hear that said stock car racer (engineer, to be exact) is competing in sailing right this minute off the shore of Japan.

Yet, Tyler Paige is doing just that, and when he's done, he's coming back to JR Motorsports to continue his chosen career as a NASCAR engineer.

The 25-year-old New York City native is competing for American Samoa in Sailing, and has been a hands-on participant in that country's boat racing resurgence. After sailing as a youngster, Paige competed in events and worked his way up the ladder through the competition matrix toward the Olympics. That led to him being noticed by American Samoa, a seven-island chain located about halfway between Hawaii and the east coast of Australia in the South Pacific.

American Samoa needed some help with its sailing program, Paige said.

"American Samoa's sailing program had kind of been through a lot, and they were looking for someone to help them rebuild it," he said. "They had a 10-year period where sailing as a competitive sport on the island had kind of died out and they were working on bringing it back. They participated in the Pacific Games and were trying to get back to the world stage.

"I kind of came in to help coach the kids and spent some time on the island developing the Laser (boat) program. I was given the opportunity to represent the island in international competition."

The pandemic short-circuited the Tokyo Games in 2020, and Paige, who was supposed to stay in American Samoa to train, was sent home in February. "I thought it was only going to be a few weeks before it blew over and I could get back, but the same way NASCAR was shut down at Atlanta, the island was shut down."

In addition to sailing, the young engineer has always had an affinity for racing on dry land...in NASCAR stock cars.

A trip to the annual CES electronics showcase in Las Vegas with his father while a junior engineering student at Tufts University did the trick for Paige.

"I had followed NASCAR, but I went to the CES show in Las Vegas every year with my dad as a father-son trip," Paige said from his hotel room in Tokyo. "I had the opportunity with iRacing to race against Denny Hamlin and Erik Jones in person, in the simulator next to them, and they flew me to Charlotte for the NASCAR Xfinity race, where I had the opportunity to sit on their pit box and watch the engineers. I knew then that's what I wanted to do."

As for what he'll be doing in Tokyo during the Olympics, it really boils down to a series of races to advance to the top 10 among his rivals, and then to race for a medal in the Men's 470 class.

What is a 470? It's a boat, of course, that measures 470 centimeters (15.4 feet), and the races take place in an area of ocean shaped roughly like a trapezoid. According to the Olympic web site, sailing is a race against other boats and the ocean. Boats have to account for the pull of tides, strength (or lack thereof) of the wind and other weather factors. The boats tack back and forth, moving to harness the wind that is their sole source of power. Sailors also use their bodies to generate force and achieve the best speed possible. Each race finish earns points, and the top 10 boats will race for the medals.

While boat racing is still racing, it is vastly different in many ways than NASCAR racing, but there are some similarities, Paige said.

"What is similar about them is, aerodynamically, we're trying to do the exact same thing," he said. "We're trying to generate side force with the air. In NASCAR, you use the air to create grip; with sailing, we use that to generate our thrust forward. Even the racing itself is very similar. It's all dirty air. The air off the cars creates turbulence for the cars behind. In sailing, you're trying to get the lead early so you don't have to deal with the dirty air either. It's similar, and it's an extreme engineering feat to get the cars on the track and the boats in the water, so we love what we do."

To do that, Paige and his teammate will hang off the side of the boat to keep way, while accounting for the tides, the wind and other environmental factors. He did most of his competitive sailing in a 420-centimeter boat before moving up to the 470 class, and Paige said the differences were akin to those between the NASCAR Xfinity Series and the NASCAR Cup Series.

"The 420 is kind of the equivalent of the Xfinity Series in NASCAR, and 470 is like the Cup Series, and that's what you race in the Olympics," he said. "You sail the 470 a bit differently, it's a little heavier and behaves a little differently in the water. The 420 is where names are made and you get to show your stuff; the 470 is what you step up to when you're trying to make the Olympics.

"It (the 470) has a lot more horsepower because it's a bigger (sail) rig, it's a lot more aggressive in how you have to sail it. We shake the boat around a lot to create our own wind with body motion. I'm hooked into the toe straps parallel to the water, trying to create that, and my teammate is in a harness and holding onto the trapeze wire. He'll just leap around, creating a fanning motion in the sail to move us forward. It's very full-on."

As an engineer, that makes sense to Paige. He earned his degree in mechanical engineering from Tufts University in Massachusetts--"I'm probably the only engineer in NASCAR from Tufts," he chuckled--and embarked on a plan to get involved in the sport as he had in sailing.

At JRM, Paige did a variety of jobs in helping to prepare the team's cars.

"I did a little bit of everything," he said. "I worked around the shop, using the ROMER Arm (measurement device) wherever they would need it, doing the aerodynamic assembly of the body panels for a given track. I'd assist on the pull-down rig (used to simulate setups), spent a lot of time in the Hawkeye scanner..."

The fact that he grew up without the hands-on stock car racing background the majority of the team had meant he would have to adapt, and he did.

"I would do some non-engineering jobs, because I don't have the automotive background," Paige went on. "The value I have is from the engineering and aerodynamic side. A lot of the guys I work with grew up working on Late Models, and I just don't have that background. I had the opportunity to help tear down cars every week when they came off the race track, or help Billy Wilburn or Cory Shea, any of the car chiefs, with setups on the cars to get that experience and get my hands dirty learning the car inside and out so I could be a better engineer."

Having that experience made the 25-year-old yearn for a bigger stage.

"I love what I'm doing at the shop, but someday I want to be on the road with the team," he said. "As people get promoted and move up through the ranks, I'd love to slot in as a traveling engineer with the team in some fashion. I just want to be at the race track right now, just work my way up through the ranks and help the team in any way that I can."

Once he's finished with the Olympic Games, Paige will embark on his dream to be at the track and move up the ladder. The fact that many crew chiefs these days are engineers is a point Paige gets very well. What he's doing on the water is similar to what Jason Burdett, Dave Elenz, Mike Bumgarner and Taylor Moyer do every week for JRM.

"Crew chiefs always talk about setting up a car and making adjustments to try to take advantage of the track conditions and so on." Paige said. "We're trying to do the same kinds of adjustments with the wind. If we start the day in five knots of wind and it is going to build up, we have to make the same kinds of adjustments to compensate for more breeze that a crew chief would have to make to adjust for the track getting hotter and slicker. The setups all have a kind of commonality in how they perform on the car and on the boat. It's really about making the right adjustments for the conditions, the same way a NASCAR crew chief would."

Some of the tools he uses on the water relate to the adjustment points on a stock car, too.

"Our mast rake in a boat is kind of like our track bar on the race car," Paige said. "The same way a crew chief will tighten up or free up the car, we balance the handling of our boat by changing the angle of the mast front to back."

Paige is scheduled to compete today and tomorrow at 11 p.m. ET in the preliminary races for the 470 class to determine the 10 boats who will race for the medals on Aug. 4 at 1:30 a.m.

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