Former Columbus resident Mitchell Maxie, left, talks with other crew members for driver Romain Grosjean prior to last year’s Indianapolis 500.
Submitted photo
Mitchell Maxie was living in Columbus and working at Bob Poynter Chevrolet in Seymour a couple years ago when a chance encounter led to a career change.
The Seymour native ended up meeting an IndyCar worker who talked him into getting into the racing business. Maxie landed a job with Andretti Autosport in early 2022 and is getting ready to work his second Indianapolis 500.
“Back in 2014, when I quit racing at Brownstown, I actually worked for a very short period time for an IndyCar team, KV Racing,” Maxie said. “But things just didn’t work out perfect for me, so I ended up moving back to Columbus. My wife, one of her friends’ husband worked in Indy Car, and when he and my wife met, he kind of talked me into racing. I was talking to some old friends one day, and the next thing I knew, I was talking to people at Andretti, and I got hired as a mechanic at Andretti.”
Maxie is a front-end mechanic, responsible for everything from the driver, forward, on the car of Romain Grosjean. On race days, his job during the pit stops is to remove the tearoff, clear plastic sticky film when they clean the windshields.
“Indy Car is a much smaller scale than NASCAR,” Maxie said. “In IndyCar, the mechanic is also the pit crew. So come Sundays, the same guys that worked on the car during the week change tires.”
Maxie will work on Grosjean’s car the entire month of May, including in the May 13 Indianapolis Grand Prix, but on Indy 500 race day May 28, he will be a rear tire changer for Marco Andretti’s car.
Marco Andretti will compete in the Indy 500 only. Andretti Autosport’s four full-time drivers — Grosjean, Colton Herta, Kyle Kirkwood and Devlin DeFrancesco — will run in the Grand Prix and join Marco Andretti in the 500.
“I would say everybody is excited,” Maxie said. “Obviously, it’s the biggest race for us. Everybody gets excited, but we work a lot that whole month. It’s a little stressful some days, but I look forward to it. We haven’t got to win it yet, so that’s always our goal.”
On Saturday, Grosjean won the pole for today’s Children’s of Alabama Indy Grand Prix at Barber Motorsports Park in Birmingham, Alabama.
“I’ve got a hell of a team,” Grosjean said after winning the pole. “We’re doing such a great job this year. The car is awesome, and I have three teammates I can rely on. I went with the setup, the baseline we have, and from the moment we started quali, I knew we had it. I just didn’t want to mess it on the last lap.”
Maxie travels with the team to all of the stops on the IndyCar schedule, including this weekend’s race in Alabama.
“It’s a lot of work,” Maxie said. “It takes some time getting used to being gone a lot of weekends, whether it’s racing, testing or new travel. We work year-round, whether its testing, or wind tunnel-type testing or prepping race cars,” Maxie said. “They don’t like us taking vacation during the season, so we all take our vacations in the offseason. It’s very challenging, but rewarding at the same time.”
Now 31, Maxie lives in Greenwood and works out of the Andretti Autosport shop on Indianapolis’ northwest side.
“Once we load in before the Grand Prix, we’ll just go straight to the race track,” Maxie said. “The track becomes our shop.”
After graduating from Seymour High School in 2010, Maxie raced super stocks at Brownstown, North Vernon and Bloomington for three years. But he never really imagined that he would one day be working in one of the country’s two biggest auto racing organizations.
“I’ve always been into racing, even as a kid,” Maxie said. “I went to my first 500 as a sophomore in high school, but I never would have told you then that I’d be doing pit stops in the 500. It’s kind of cool, but kid of crazy at the same time.”
