Episode 248: Jill Gregory, COO of TWG Motorsports and President of Andretti Global

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Business Radio. Welcome into episode 248 of Cars and Culture with Jason Stein here on SiriusXM

Business Channel 132. Great to have you along for the ride again with us this week.

Today we're stepping inside one of the most important and fast evolving organizations

in global motorsport. Because while the cars get the headlines, it's the leadership behind

the scenes that's shaping where this industry goes next. And few leaders are doing that more

directly than Jill Gregory. Jill is the COO of TWG Motorsports and President of Andretti Global,

a role that puts her at the center of one of racing's most ambitious platforms.

We're talking about an organization competing across multiple series, IndyCar, Formula E,

Extreme E, and pushing towards something even larger, now a place on the Formula One grid.

But what makes Jill's story compelling isn't just the scale, it's the path. She didn't come

up through the driver ladder, she built her career in marketing, partnerships, and brand

strategy, learning how to connect fans, sponsors, and teams in ways that move the business forward.

And now she's leading at the highest level of motorsport, where performance on the track

and performance in the boardroom are completely intertwined. So today we'll talk about how she

manages that. We talk about the scale of global racing and the realities behind expansion into

a new series like Formula One and how the business of motorsports is changing. It's Jill Gregory

joining us next on Cars and Culture. Hi, I'm Jill Gregory, and this is Cars and Culture with Jason

Stein. Sitting at the epicenter of one of the most ambitious global motorsports portfolios in the

industry, Jill. But I want to first start by thanking you for being on the show and commending you on

a year and two days. Do I have that right in your current position? You have done your resource,

yes, absolutely. This is my second St. Pete race here in IndyCar, and I love it.

The second day of the second year? Very, very true. Second day of second year, and I'm loving it.

How's the first year been in the role that you're in? There is so much to talk about with

TWG Motorsports and just your, the umbrella organization as a whole, but how do you characterize

year one? You know, I think it was a lot of test and learn, or a lot of learn, and then testing

kind of towards the end of the year. So I think anytime you take a new role, a big part of that is

really getting to know the people, understanding what's happening. You can't come in guns,

blazing, and change everything. So you do a lot of observation and learning, and we have a great

team, not just in Andretti, but across all of our teams at TWG Motorsports, which I'm sure we'll talk

about. And so learning about who they are, what they do, and what raw material do we have to work

with, and what we can tackle first. So it's been an amazing year of learning for me, and I think

any big challenges, like can you learn? Can you grow? Can you build a team? And those are all

things that I've been able to do this year. What does it mean in practice when you're juggling

multiple race teams in multiple series? How do you split your attention? How do you, where do

you focus in first? Yeah, I think, you know, there's probably two things. One, you have to do a

little bit of triage, right? So what is the most hands-on fire moment that you have in a given day

or in a given week? But as you kind of ease into it and you build a strategic plan, you know that

each of these seasons have cadence, each of the teams have a cadence. So I think you can really,

if you set out a good strategic plan, hopefully your firefighting is in the kind of rare occasions

because you're working a plan on each series. And then, you know, there's obviously a lot of overlap.

You know, we're going to start the season this year. We've already started a Formula E season.

We've already got a NASCAR race under our belt, the Daytona 500. We're here in St. Pete. Next week,

we go to Australia. We had Daytona with IMSA. So I think it's front-loaded to the beginning of the

season. After we get these season openers kind of under our belt, we will go kind of get into a rhythm.

Yeah, it's a rhythm of also categorizing, understanding, bucketing each one of those

series, right? Part of the emphasis of the announcement of you coming in was on aligning

on-track performance with commercial success, which you've known a lot about. How do you,

for lack of a better term, operationalize that alignment across that portfolio where you want

great results, podiums, but you also want to succeed on the commercial side?

You know, I think it's all about goal-setting and, like I said, having a strategic plan.

I think that there's on-track performance drives commercial success. So I think even,

from my very early NASCAR days, only to do research, what do fans want? Yes, they want big

personalities. They want to win. They want their driver to win, their team to win. So across our

entire portfolio, we need to be focused on winning. But I think there's also the flip side to that is

let's build a valuable program for our partners that they can really get behind and understand

and understand their business and how we can help drive it. And then, if we win on the track,

it's gravy for them. So I think you can't focus on one at the expense of the other. You've got to

have equal billing. But I think there doesn't need to be a big gulf between the technical side

and the commercial side. And what we've really tried to do across all of our teams is narrow

that gulf so that the teams work together and success for one side means success for the other.

Was the appeal of this the blank sheet of paper a little bit in that because of the

start of the Formula One journey combined with other journeys that you've been on before

and the expansion of say a Formula E journey, you could kind of look at all of them and say,

okay, how are we going to chart this? And it's my opportunity to craft all of it.

It was. I mean, look, I was an asker for a long time. I was very happy in Sonoma. We were laughing

in Miami at the Grand Prix last year. And we kind of saw two ladies sitting at the bar at 11 o'clock

having an apparel spritz. I'm like, oh, that was me like six months ago because I was bored and I

didn't have enough to do. Well, that is certainly not the case now. But I think that when you're

involved in this sport and you see an opportunity like this, your career is in across motorsports

and auto, like this is a once in a lifetime opportunity, right? Not just the Cadillac F1

piece, which that in itself is a once in a lifetime being a part of a team that puts that on the grid

for the first time. There's not going to be a lot of people that are going to be able to say that

they did that. But I think it's also what Dan and TWG Motorsports are building with

this motorsports portfolio that has highly functional and successful teams in multiple

forms of motorsports. You see pockets of it. You see, you know, some of our competitors have

IndyCar, NASCAR, you know, IMSA, you've got Formula One, IMSA, IndyCar, but the breadth of our portfolio

and the fact that we don't want TWG Motorsports doesn't necessarily need to be a household name.

We want Andretti to be successful, Spire to be successful, Wayne Taylor racing. So we have these

legacy teams and the ability to take each of those teams and really highlight what they're best at,

but then provide this back end standards of excellence and resourcing. That was another

kind of once in a lifetime piece of it. It's, it is standardizing those processes,

operational discipline, I would imagine, and yet allowing each team to function independently,

right? Let them go. Absolutely. Look, they broke your fixit, use whatever analogy you want.

But, and I can be very frank with you, you know, anytime a corporate entity comes in,

and these are race teams, they're like, oh, is, are they going to come in and tell us what to do?

Are we going to lose our individuality? Like, how's this going to work? And there's just a

natural skepticism. So I think year one has really been about, we are not coming in as the parent

company air quotes to tell you how to do something or change everything. Yeah, corporates here and

we're going to tell you how it's going to work. How do you take the best of what's already happening

and then provide, again, that standard of excellence, that operational discipline

that just makes each team do what they do best and do it better and maybe that'll be invisible

to the fans. The mandate is to compete at the very top of the sport. You've had leadership roles,

you've operated at the top of the NASCAR ladder and Sonoma too. How have those experiences

maybe shaped your approach on a cross-series management today? What are you borrowing from

what you did there? I think it's a great question. I think the core discipline of building a team

doesn't change whether you're at one sanctioning body or the other, or if you're at one track

or the other. You need to find the best people. You need to trust the people to do what they do best,

give them autonomy, but provide enough of a steady hand and guidance to really leverage

the capabilities. So I think that what I learned a lot at Sonoma was much different. Building a team

at the track level was much different than I probably even expected. I left NASCAR with a

pretty structured, process-oriented environment, rule book, sanctioning body, set schedule,

and a track environment is very different. Your employee base is different. What you're trying

to do, you are operating a facility on a day-in and day-out basis and you're monetizing that

facility. So we had a set schedule and we had our core events with the NASCAR race and the

Precision Club. We were trying to build Turn 11 and we're trying to go get all the OEs to come

and it was right after COVID. So I think what I learned there is that I think building a team,

the philosophy is the same, but how you take the individual pieces of that and build a team,

you have to be very flexible on what's going to work for that particular challenge.

And I kind of learned that one size doesn't always fit all. You have to be a little more

flexible and kind of take what the job needs versus applying some leadership principles that you've

read in a book. Respect for your employees and again letting them do what they do best

has always been a mantra of mine, but it comes to life a little bit different based on the structure

that you're in. A bit about your background, what did NASCAR need when you came in and

how do you feel you left it at that time? I'm really proud of my time at NASCAR. I

saw a lot of good friends there, a lot of them here this weekend, but we at the time probably

a couple of the things that we did that were most impactful I think because really got into the

driver development piece of it, not driver development on the track and like an academy type

situation. It was personalities, digital and social. When I started at NASCAR it was several years ago

and not very many motorsports leagues and still don't. We're using digital and social and having

the drivers get involved in social media and talk to them about building their brands. It's far more

advanced now, but we had a program there called the NASCAR Next and it was Blaney and Bubba Wallace

and Chase Elliott and guys that are now Cup Series veterans. Those were things that we were

doing for the first time when I was there. One of the other things that we did other than get out

of COVID, which is kind of a big one, but we rebranded the NASCAR far mark which is what we used

to call it and it was kind of very traditional, very hadn't been refreshed since the early,

early days and we just wanted to modernize it a little bit. So I think that you see when I see

the NASCAR bar mark now it's a very, it's an icon and we just try to do some things differently

and not try to alienate the core fans, but just try to bring NASCAR in and have it be appealing

to more people and I think you see IndyCar probably has the same opportunity in front of them right

now. I was just going to ask you about that as we sit here in St. Petersburg on the now the precipice

of another year and I've had Doug Bowles on the show this week, I've had Mike Schenck on the show

this week. What does IndyCar need this year from your perspective to step back, not necessarily the

team itself, but what does IndyCar need in order to push through to the next level because

Mike talked a lot about hitting the bottom of the of the roller coaster last May.

Trying to come up out of that. What do you think it needs? I think the raw material are there or

all the components are there. I think that what Fox is doing obviously was not just the investment

in the promotion of the sport, but investment in the sport itself. I think it just needs more

eyeballs. I think when I got here and obviously been around the IndyCar product before but not

in a role like this, it's the best kept secret out there, right? The racing's great, the drivers

are great. Everybody's accessible. Everything's accessible, people are happy and in a good mood

and you know there's just so much positive momentum. We just need more people to know about it. So I

just was talking to Doug earlier. I'm like what do you need us to do from the team standpoint?

Is it our drivers? Is it you know a commercial committee that we can get together on because

if we can work together and figure out how to let more people into the tent,

it's going to go crazy because I think there's so much positive momentum here just not enough

people know about it. Doug talked about having seven or eight million people watch the Indy 500

and seven days later in Detroit, a million people watch the race and trying to figure out why that

Delta exists and have it fix the Delta, if you will. And what is the storytelling not just at the

Indy 500 because yes, the storytelling around the Indy 500 is unmatched, right? But how do you

take what happens in safety and then take it to Phoenix now and then take it to Texas and the new

markets again, really positive. I mean when they announced the DC race, huge amount of interest.

So all the elements are there. I think if we can just as an industry string it together into a

narrative to tell fans why they should pay attention and what's compelling about it,

then we're going to take that raw material and take it to the next level.

The General Motors Cadillac relationship with the F1 team, what does the partnership

require operationally from your seat? How are you coordinating? We had Duncan Aldrid the head of

GM North America on the program recently talking about all of the energy the GM is putting behind it.

How do you fit into that puzzle? We are extremely lucky to have General Motors as a partner. I'll

talk about a little bit about that but then also Cadillac as a brand. So General Motors is a partner

and I feel really lucky for myself because I already knew a lot of the people I'm working side by

side with because of my NASCAR days. So Jim Campbell, Eric Warren, Mark Royce, General Motors loves

racing and loves motorsports. Their investment in this is not just financial or technology,

it's emotional. They want to win and I think we are side by side. So TWG and General Motors are

basically the two owners and then the Cadillac F1 team is the offspring of that. So for example,

when I head out to Melbourne tomorrow, we will be meeting our GM partners there. We will be sharing

a hospitality like we are partners side by side in that and then General Motors has the luxury of

in each market that we go to, they are going to have a really strong regional presence,

depending on the size of their. So General Motors Australia and New Zealand hugely energized by

this new entry into Formula One. But our day in and day out, we have a weekly call with the team

at GM, myself and a former current colleague, Brian Weatherford, who we basically plucked off

of the IndyCar and Reddy team and she has such a strong relationship with General Motors that she

handles that on a day-to-day basis. So we are really side by side with them on all the decisions

that we make and how we go to market because this is a shared brand. This is not just Cadillac is in

the name of the team, but we are equally invested in making sure that this is successful and I think

we are just trying to be side by side with GM every step of the way. And then the Cadillac brand,

I think the biggest, one of the bigger revelations for me is I knew the Cadillac brand was big,

but even, and if you had Duncan on the show walking around wearing a Cadillac F1 shirt or

sweatshirt in Vegas, every fan has a Cadillac story, has an affinity for that brand, they love it,

the script, the icons, there's so much to be told about people's affinity for the Cadillac brand

and the fact that we get to bring usher that into this form of motorsports and with a CEO and chairman

in Mary Barra and Mark Royce that love racing, it couldn't be a better partnership.

New layers of complexity with that, regulatory, technical, commercial. Does F1,

I guess, what does F1 introduce to the Andretti organization that changes the Andretti

view of it because of all of those things you kind of now worry about?

Yeah, I think we've got to just be, so we have to be a little bit separate. Obviously there's,

as we work on setting up this Formula One team from the very beginning,

you know, there are certain regulations in the FIA that you don't have with IndyCar,

they're different, right? So I think that just staying on the right side of that,

separate but equal, I guess, is a good way to describe it. Again, back to our earlier discussion,

it's how do you take the best of the teams and the partnerships that you have and apply them

when needed, although keep the teams standing on their own two feet when that makes sense too.

Yeah, when you step back with TWG Motorsports, ultimately you're building a collection of race

teams, but it's also a unified global motorsports enterprise, isn't it? That's a little, I mean,

those are sort of daunting goals and objectives and not every other team on the grid, actually,

I don't know if anybody else is doing the same thing at all of these levels. That's a unique

opportunity, isn't it, for TWG to separate themselves from? It is. I mean, when you think

about being a Motorsports and a Fishing Auto and you think of the Uber opportunity that would exist

if you're a partner or a fan and you want to be at the Day 200 500, at Bathurst, at Monaco,

at the Indy 500, there's no other team, collection of teams that can deliver that. So I think if we

unlock this opportunity properly, there could be partnerships that are across the TWG Motorsports

portfolio, but there might be partners that we have that really want to be invested in any car

and you see a lot of them here today. So we're going to let the teams kind of stand on their own,

but if there is a chance to, we are having a lot of conversations right now with Spire and

Andretti on partners that might be interested, they're already with us on the NASCAR side,

but do have interest in IndyCar. Hey, tell me what that's all about. Maybe we've reached a

different market geographically with one of the properties and not the other. Maybe there's,

you know, there are partnerships across the Wackenshaw Supercars team that have some

some raw material there we can look at. So I think we've barely scratched the surface of what

that could look like. Again, back to our earlier point, a lot of observation and learning about

what the scale of the opportunity could be, but if we're doing it properly, you could be a partner

across multiple Motorsports, but get that same level of service, the same ROI, the same visibility

that you want, you just can do it with a one-stop shop. Without knowing it, is the structure a bit

of a blueprint for how modern Motorsports organizations could be built in the future?

I think so. I mean, look, I think there's a lot riding on those at work. I think we've seen really

early signs. I mean, there are people that and you're here in St. Pete, you see whether it's the

NASCAR garage, the IndyCar paddock, the people are not that different. You see a lot of the same

folks. You have a lot of the same relationships. Why not? Why does each series have to be in

its own silo? It's just because it's always been that way. But if we can prove that it doesn't

have to be that way, you can move very freely across the Rolex 24, roll into the day 200,

come to St. Pete and move seamlessly through all of those ecosystems. Then I think that could

really unlock some power for a brand. What is just a couple more things? What success for you,

if you measure it, I don't know, five years out, Jill, is it championships? Is it global brand

growth? You're a brand person, right? Successful entry, competitiveness in a new realm like Formula

One. Is it all those things? Yes, yes, and yes. I mean, look, we are in Motorsports, right? So

wins and pulls. I mean, the very basic level. But as I mentioned earlier, if those things are

working, then nothing stands on its own. I think if we're winning, then the commercial piece comes

along. We need to be successful commercially and then bring wins to those partners. Nothing is really

that self-contained. So yes, we want to win on the track. Anybody that's involved in Motorsports,

that's the passion point, right? It's that competitive fire. We have a new driver with willpower,

and that guy wants to win. Not that our other guys don't, but you could just see it in his eyes.

So you want to harness that. But we want that same winning desire to be across commercial,

even how we're presenting ourselves here this weekend in St. Pete. We had a very set goal of

showing up differently. And I feel like we've met that this year, or at least first race.

So I think that the little things are the big things, right? We want to have that

winning competitive spirit, whether it's what the guys are doing to get the car ready to go

into qualifying here in a second, or if it's what the experience is when you walked up to the front

door of hospitality today. It's the same mentality. It's just the outputs a little bit different.

And it's way different than Visa, Bank of America, or Sprint, isn't it?

It is. Your background. It is. Now, those are selling phones.

Now, the phone wars are their own thing, right? Podiums there.

Yes. Our goal is, can we be a platform for those brands to do more of what they want to do,

whether it's sell phones or build a brand or promote Visa everywhere you want to be.

True. We can provide a platform for that.

Well, best of luck. Thank you for the time in the middle of the St. Pete craziness.

And especially before you're headed off to your 18-hour flight, definitely appreciate the time

and effort. Very enjoyable. I really enjoyed talking. And love to get you to the Miami GP.

I would love to be there with you. We could do some special things there as well.

That sounds great. Thank you, Jill. I appreciate it. Thank you.

A big thanks to my guest again, Joe Gregory, COO of TWG Motorsports and president of Andretti

Global. To see more Cars and Culture interviews, visit the Cars and Culture YouTube channel,

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and culture makers who are driving the industry forward. That's this week's episode,

episode number 248 of Cars and Culture. I'm your host, Jason Stein. We'll see you down the road.

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Episode 248: Jill Gregory, COO of TWG Motorsports and President of Andretti Global

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Day 200

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