| March 25, 2019 Staff Report IMSA Wire Service DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. – Ask Jamie Eversley what her favorite moment is on any given IMSA race day and she will paint a picture. “My favorite thing about race day is the smell after the whole field takes the green,” Eversley. “It’s just this perfect blend of rubber, hot asphalt and burnt fuel and that smell is so engrained in my memory. That’s one of my favorite moments of the entire event. That moment right there and being on pit lane getting to see that pack and that beautiful two-by-two formation come across the line, and then watching them scramble.” Eversley has been a Truck Driver and Pit Lane Official with IMSA’s Logistics Department for three years, one of the few women to break barriers on the competition side of sports car racing. But Eversley was meant for this, growing up on a horse ranch with a family that had “gasoline in their veins” and living less than an hour from Michelin Raceway Road Atlanta. Her father was a longtime road racing car chief and her brother, Ryan, currently competes in the IMSA MICHELIN Pilot Challenge. Eversley started young, changing her first engine before she was 10 years old and working for the family’s team not long after. In her teenage years, she worked for Panoz Racing just up the road in Atlanta before serving in the Marine Corps for three years fresh out of high school, ultimately climbing to the rank of Sergeant. Returning to civilian life in Georgia, though, it was clear the racing industry was calling her name. “The smell of octane just pulled me back in,” Eversley describes. Following her first year as a full-time truck driver for Magnus Racing in 2015, Jamie held the same role with Freedom Autosport in 2016, a fitting connection given the team’s military background. Not only did the team’s transporter – which Eversley described as “a rolling monument” – have bolded names of every United States soldier lost in combat since 9/11, but one of the team’s race car drivers was Liam Dwyer, a fellow Marine who lost his leg and suffered other life-threatening injuries after stepping on an explosive in Afghanistan in 2011. “It didn’t blend in, let’s just put it that way,” Eversley said of the transporter. “That bright green camo covered with names and a giant eagle, globe and anchor on the side, it was a spectacle. You throw Liam Dwyer into that and it’s a party. It was a real privilege getting to work with Liam and the whole group of guys. That year was a lot of fun.” But it’s not always been easy being a female in the racing industry. “When you think about mechanics, pit lane crews, truck drivers, there aren’t many women,” she said. “Ford Chip Ganassi’s GTLM team had a female car chief who was also a tire changer. I loved seeing that because, except when I was on a pit crew, I don’t remember there being any other women over the wall with me.” That realization has motivated Eversley to encourage and support other women in the IMSA paddock, no matter what role they’re in. “If I see a female face in the paddock that I don’t know, I add it to my to-do list that I need to meet her because there aren’t that many of us,” said Eversley. “When you can make those kinds of connections and have each other’s backs, having that kind of network and getting to know each other is something I’ve always enjoyed connecting on.” But Eversley’s influence within the paddock reaches further than she initially thought. She has learned that wearing an IMSA Official firesuit makes a quick first impression on female fans, particularly the younger generation. “I have younger girls all the time pull me aside and they’re like ‘How did you get into this?’” said Eversley. “It’s like the lightbulb just went off in their head. I remember the day the lightbulb went off in my head that said, ‘Wait a second, I can do that too. This isn’t the NFL, I can do that too.’ I love seeing that moment in young girls because you can see it in their eyes. It’s like this spark gets lit and they just realized this isn’t just a boys’ sport. ‘I can do that if I want to.’ And for Eversley, that’s the bigger picture. “Even if they never end up working in racing, the fact that light bulb came on and they realized it doesn’t matter if it’s a male-dominated industry, it doesn’t matter if most of the time it’s boys doing that job,” she said. “If you want to do it and you work hard enough and you have thick enough skin, you can do whatever you want.” |
