Sting Ray Robb: IndyCar Racing, Backcountry Elk Hunting, and Growing Up in Idaho

Full transcript of the Tom Rowland Podcast, Episode 912 with Sting Ray Robb.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. Today we have a different type of story. We are going to go outside of the hunting and fishing world into the IndyCar racing world. But the reason we're doing that is because our guest today is also an avid hunter and fisherman. He grew up in Payette, Idaho, and his name is Sting Ray Robb. You might think, like I did, that there may be no similarities between hunting and fishing and IndyCar, but we do discuss that, and there are more similarities than you think. Stand by for a great conversation with Sting Ray Robb.

My name is Sting Ray Robb. I'm the driver of the number 41 Goodhart Chevrolet in the NTT IndyCar Series for AJ Foyt Racing, and you are on the Tom Rowland podcast.

Tom: You're a natural. You got your own podcast?

Sting Ray: No. Not yet.

Tom: Yeah? Well, you should.

Sting Ray: One of these days.

Tom: You should. You're too busy driving. Sting Ray Robb, how are you doing, man?

Sting Ray: I'm doing great, Tom. Excited to be on.

Tom: Well, I'm excited to have you. You were saying before we started recording that you do a lot of podcasts and a lot of interviews, but not necessarily about fishing, which is interesting because you're coming from the IndyCar world, right?

Sting Ray: That's correct.

From Payette, Idaho to the IndyCar Series

Tom: And so you grew up in Idaho, which is, I guess, why you have a background of hunting and fishing, Payette, Idaho. How in the world does a kid from Payette, Idaho end up as an IndyCar driver?

Sting Ray: I don't know. I really don't know how this happened. But it is pretty crazy. I mean, I'm one of two drivers ever to come from Idaho. And it seems like God's timing and his perfect plan to get me to where I'm at today, but I was lucky enough to be born into the passion of parents that loved Corvettes, so that's where I got my passion from. It's also where I got my name from. It's not because of the fish or marine biologists — there's not too many oceans in Idaho. So Sting Ray came from the Corvette. And then from there, I mean, I was just kind of in the right spot at the right time every step of the way, worked my way up through the karting ranks, then onto the cars eventually.

Tom: So in Idaho, is karting a big sport, or where would be the hotbed for that? You say there's only been two drivers come out of Idaho — where do most drivers come from?

Sting Ray: Usually, as far as American drivers go, you're definitely going to see more of an East Coast influence. For me growing up, I spent a lot of time in Florida because that's where we could race in the winter — the Florida winter tour series. And then on the West Coast you had California as well. There's a lot of drivers there, some professional sports car drivers, some IndyCar drivers, some NASCAR drivers too. So it's kind of the two coasts, and everywhere in the middle has to funnel to both of those. But being from Idaho, we didn't have a whole lot. Our hotbed in Idaho was probably Star, Idaho when I was a kid — a little quarter-mile, super bumpy, super fast racetrack. But now it's kind of grown, and it's cool to see — there are two new go-kart tracks that have gone into Idaho. My hope is that we can get a young generation of drivers to follow in my footsteps, and then I'm not just one of two — maybe I'll be one of twenty in a hundred years from now.

Tom: That's so cool. Do you see a path where you can help with that — create a school, or do something with your success?

Sting Ray: Yeah, I've been doing a little bit of that already. I go back every fall, and there's what they call the Spud Cup, which is kind of our local regional championship race. During that time, I usually try to do some driver coaching of young drivers — kids from about seven to thirteen years old in the go-karting ranks — to try to get them tuned up and share the skills I've got. Because when you're at a club or regional level, you don't get that grand-view experience that comes from traveling the world for go-karting. That's what expanded my horizons — getting to be and see and do those things around the world. I got to see, okay, I might be the best at my local track, but I'm a little frog in a big pond when I go somewhere else. So I'm just trying to bring those experiences to them rather than them having to go get it somewhere else that's more expensive and a lot more challenging to get to.

Tom: That's got to be very rewarding. I think in any sport, when you achieve a certain level and then can pass on your knowledge and experience, that's super rewarding. So when you start with karting, is there a natural kind of progression to Indy, or do you just take opportunities and run with them as they come?

Sting Ray: Yeah, most drivers start in go-karting. That's really the foundation you have to have because it teaches you race craft. It teaches you the basic mechanics — when I put a stiffer rear axle in the kart, this is what it's going to do; when I put stiffer rear springs on a car, it's a similar idea, a similar feel. But in the go-kart it's much more visual — you're pounding the axle out of the rear end and putting a new one in, so you get to see the effects of everything working together. The next step up is usually a lower level of whatever series you go to. Racing is kind of unique because it's not like other sports where there's just one single ladder that leads to the top — it's more like shattered glass. You can split over here, come back this way, then go up to the top. A lot of young drivers go through what I've gone through, which is the Road to Indy — the junior ranks that lead to IndyCar: the Single-A, the Double-A, the Triple-A, and then the major leagues of IndyCar racing. That's a great platform because they're racing the same weekends as IndyCar, usually with a lot of the same teams, so there's a lot of experience and knowledge that trickles down through the different ranks. It's nice for a young driver to have that inspiration of thinking, hey, Sting Ray Robb was in the seat I'm in five years ago, and if he can do it, I can do it. So that's usually what I'd recommend to young drivers who want to go into IndyCar — start in the junior ranks of the Road to Indy, the open-wheel series.

Balancing Racing with Hunting and Fishing Growing Up

Tom: Nice. And when you were a kid, you obviously have a background in hunting and fishing and the outdoors. It seems like summer would also be kind of karting season — how did you balance your time in the outdoors with what started as a hobby and turned into something far more than that?

Sting Ray: Yeah, I had to say to my parents — I didn't miss a hunting season until I was about twelve years old, and the only reason I missed that one is because I was on the other side of the world at a go-karting world championship. I just grew up in Idaho, and hunting and fishing were pretty much in my backyard, at my fingertips essentially — everywhere I looked, I had the ability to go out and do that. So balancing that with being on the road — we were gone almost 42 weekends a year some years in the early karting ranks — part of that was mixing time with school, mixing time with sports. We'd get a day, just one day, to go hike through the mountains and hopefully see something we could shoot at, or go fishing in the afternoon after school. So it was limited. But as I got into the higher ranks in high school, I was only racing from about March until September, and hunting season pretty much starts in September, so I didn't miss a whole lot of hunting time. When I was home during the summer, my best friend in high school and I would hop in our kayaks and float the Payette River, going bass fishing in between races. On Wednesday and Thursday afternoons I'd be out on the river, and Friday mornings I'd be at the racetrack trying to drive as fast as I could.

Tom: That's so cool. At this point, do you use fishing and hunting in the outdoors as a way to relax? I could imagine what you're doing is incredibly stressful and you have to be incredibly focused — is that a way you spend your off time to recharge and be at your best for racing?

Sting Ray: As much as I can, yeah. I think God has given us a great gift in the outdoors, and to be in that creation is something I find very renewing — it's where I kind of recharge. During the off-season is where I get to do the most of that, so you'll find me out duck hunting, you'll find me fly fishing somewhere in the mountains, as much as I can from September until about February. That's just trying to make it a priority in my life — it's a passion of mine, you could call it a hobby if you will. Hopefully it doesn't take over my current professional hobby, but it's been pretty cool being from Idaho and being able to go home during the off-season and have that access.

Elk Camp and Big Game Hunting in the Family

Tom: So when you were growing up, were you mostly elk hunting and deer hunting, or upland birds too? What was most available to you?

Sting Ray: Big game hunting was kind of the name of the game for my family. I remember October 10th every year, we were up in the mountains waiting for elk season to open. It was always a good thing to have that time back with the family. We had elk camp, where the grandparents would haul their camper up into the mountains, and that would be our base camp for most of the month. My uncle now — he's an archery hunter, so I'll go up with him in September elk hunting. And then deer hunting kind of supplements the time in between those two seasons. It's been pretty good, and I feel very blessed to not be the only one in my family who likes to do that, because it is good camaraderie. When you spend that much time in the mountains hiking around, and you're suffering when it's dumping snow on you and it's freezing cold and you're not seeing anything, it's still a good time because of the people you're with.

Tom: Man, for sure. I love elk hunting, and I hunt a little bit to the east of where you are. But it's a time that I spend with my boys — they both went to Montana State, one graduated from Bozeman and one's still out there, and we spend our time elk hunting out there. It's incredible. Do you like archery yourself?

Sting Ray: I like it in the sense that I like watching it. I have not gotten the archery belt on yet — I'm hoping in the next few years I can pick that up, but I've been a rifle hunter my whole life.

Tom: Yeah, nothing wrong with that. But archery is an interesting thing all to itself — and so is shooting, long-range shooting and everything. You've got to dial it all in and everything has to be perfect.

Sting Ray: Yeah, archery has been a whole different kind of adventure for me, kind of learning how to do that.

Tom: And I'd imagine that a well-tuned bow, when they get that thing perfect and whatever you're aiming at, you're going to hit it perfectly if everything else is perfect — I'd imagine that could be similar to driving, when you get your kart or your car just perfect and then you have to operate it perfectly. But I wonder — it seems like fishing is so peaceful in so many ways, although it can be incredibly intense, especially in some of the fly fishing situations we find ourselves in — do you ever see any similarities to the world of racing and fishing?

What Racing Shares With Hunting and Fishing

Sting Ray: Oh, yeah, absolutely. My initial reaction is, of course, they're very different — I'd way rather be sitting out on a lake somewhere off the side of a boat catching a big perch and taking it home to eat that night. We don't get to catch and cook in racing, unfortunately — usually your rewards have to do with supplementing your life. But one similarity I'll point out, and I think this goes for most things, is that chase. We love to chase things as humans. We love to desire and have a passion for something, and what makes a chase really good is the challenge, the tribulations you go through, and the troubleshooting. One of my favorite things about car racing is that I have to work with a team — my job is to designate what the issues are so I can take it back to my team of engineers to find a solution. That problem solving, that troubleshooting, is what really makes a team great. And it's the same in hunting — you have to figure out where these animals are, where these fish are, and it's not just a quick, easy answer. We can't just throw up a map with red dots showing where each animal is. Same thing in racing — there's no perfect setup, there's no perfect race line, so you have to go out there and experience it to find the success. That's what makes it enjoyable, and I think that's why we do it. If it was easy, it wouldn't be fun. We love the challenge, we love the sort of manliness that comes from that feeling of, man, I can do this — I can go out and find what the answer is time and time again.

Tom: Well, as a driver, it seems like if you're also an incredibly good mechanic, you could at least communicate better to your team what's going on in the car. How important is that as you get better and better? How much more time do you spend on what's going on with the car so you can understand what they're doing? I mean, it's got to be a perfect team to win, right? Because it's incredibly competitive. So as you're starting out as a kid karting and learning to deal with your own kart and the different axles and everything, some people fall more towards being the guys who are fixing the cars and making sure they get the best performance, and other people gravitate towards driving. How do you navigate that when you're considering this as a career? Is it obvious which one you're suited for?

Sting Ray: It's a great question, and it's kind of funny you say that — my roommate, I live in Indianapolis now, but he's someone I grew up with, from Eagle, Idaho, and he went the engineering route. He's an engineer on a team I raced for coming up through the ranks, and I'm a driver, so it's fun — we get to work together because he's got that engineering mind, I bring the problem, and he brings the solution sometimes. But I think what really affects a driver's ability to decide which direction to go is how you feel things — what's the intuition, the instinct telling you is happening. The only way you can have a great instinct is if you know what's happening inside the race car. You have to have good mechanical knowledge in order to understand what you're feeling, the feedback you're getting, because it's so much more than visual. You can see the car sliding, see the front tires sliding, the rear tires sliding — but what's really telling you what's going on is your seat, your backside. Everything is being transferred through the seat of your pants, how that yaw is being transformed through the load and through the bumps. We're dealing with so many different factors, and it changes the whole package — if one part is wrong, you might have to change everything else to get that one right, or change the one to fit the package. So it's just a matter of how you're feeling things, what your instincts are telling you that you need in order to go faster. I think the guys who go more towards the engineering side really tune into, okay, what's the tire pressure — is it half a PSI higher, and if it is, it'll come in halfway through the lap rather than on the first lap. There's just a different decision-making process for how you get speed out of the car — they're someone who's really in tune to the process of it versus the actual happenings of it, I think. So there are definitely different personalities that go along with those, but it's definitely hard. A lot of guys who grow up go-karting want to be race car drivers, but sometimes it doesn't work out — they don't have the backing, because unlike basketball or baseball, it's not usually the best drivers that make it to the top. Usually it's the guys who have the best abilities but also the best backing. You're looking at the best in the world, but they have to be just as good off track as they are on track — you have to have the whole package.

Sponsorship, Money, and Making It Off the Track

Tom: Now when you say off track, do you mean sponsorship and the personality and ability to raise that money, or is there something else?

Sting Ray: Absolutely, yeah. You've got to be a spokesperson for the brand you're representing everywhere you go, and that's also how you network, how you visit with people, how you change people's lives. When you meet someone, you have to be able to make a difference in their life somewhere or another — and I'm being very dramatic about this, making it sound like a lot more than it can be. But if you have someone who's a fantastic driver, on a school rating maybe an A-minus driver, and there's a guy with a B-plus driver rating but an A-plus off-track rating, they're going to be the one in the seat because they can stay there — they have longevity. Honestly, the thing about racing is you do have a lot of instinct, a lot of talent, but hard work beats talent every time. You're going to have a guy who's really, really good and young, but if he's not putting in the work to make it to that top level, he's not going to make it — or he might make it, but he's not going to succeed. So it's the driver who puts the time in away from the racetrack who really has success on the track, because our time is so limited. The further you get up in the ranks, the less time you actually get in the seat, so I'm spending much more time in the engineering room and out knocking on doors and doing sponsor events than I am actually driving a race car.

Tom: Ain't that funny — that's so similar to fishing and sponsorship in what we do. You get to a point where all you're doing is fishing, and then you transcend to, okay, now we have to learn this whole sponsor world, and you find yourself fishing less. But then the fishing, which was once the hardest part of the whole job, becomes the easiest part of the whole job — if you can get this other part figured out, you get to go back out there and catch fish. It sounds like the same thing with driving — that's the easy part for you now, the other part is maybe the hard part. How did you learn about sponsorship and how to act off the track? Did you have good people around you, or was that the school of hard knocks?

Sting Ray: Yeah, it's a bit of both — I had the school of hard knocks and I had great people around me. I remember, it was 2006, so I was around 14 years old — that was kind of the time I was making the transition from go-karting into cars. At that time my parents had kind of funded my career, and I was lucky enough to be in a spot where my dad was semi-retired from the grocery store they owned, so he could be on the road with me as my mechanic. He got his go-karting dealership license, worked on my engine, and would buy and sell the go-karts I was racing so we could supplement my career — I went through the ranks so I could have good equipment and be competitive and on the road all the time. But as I moved into cars, he couldn't be my mechanic or my engine builder anymore — those had to be a team of people. So we had to figure out a way to make it to that next level, how to break through. My manager, Peter Rossi — father of Alexander Rossi — came on in 2017. People might recognize that name because Alexander was the 2016 Indy 500 winner and currently drives for McLaren in the IndyCar series. They figured out a program that worked for him and then met us with it, and that helped fund my career as I got into the upper ranks. Along the way, I was doing meet-and-greets, sponsor events — I'd actually sit down with a group of thirty potential investors and present myself as a young up-and-coming athlete they could invest in. As a fifteen or sixteen-year-old kid, I was selling myself, selling my career to these guys and pitching them on why they should get into motorsport racing, which sounds crazy for a sixteen-year-old kid from Idaho named Sting Ray — like, don't trust him with your money, that's a bad idea — but so far so good, they've done well. I mean, you just learn as you go. I didn't have any media training, any professional training to go get a business degree — this is stuff we had to learn as a team along the way to get to the top.

Tom: Yeah, me too — same thing, I don't have any training in any of it. It's mostly the school of hard knocks, but both sports of fishing and racing have pioneers out there in front of you that created a plan of how to do it. Bill Dance has been on TV for sixty years — all you've got to do is watch what he did and then do that. You have lots of drivers who came before you where you can say, that guy seems to be the most professional one, he's highly sponsored, what's he doing, I want to learn more about him and then just do that. That's with when you were traveling so much with your dad — what would you travel in, an RV or what was the rig like?

Sting Ray: We had a twelve-foot trailer towed behind a Chevy 2500 or 3500 truck that we'd travel the country with. I'd usually load up in the back seat with my pillow so I could sleep. We were doing road trips all the time back and forth to the Vancouver, BC area, Arizona, sometimes the East Coast to North Carolina, Florida, all that. If it wasn't my dad and I driving all over, it was my grandparents — we'd fly out and meet them somewhere. If there was a tight turnaround, they'd hop in the truck and head that way, and we'd meet them halfway. A lot of times it was simple, easy, just trying to get from place to place as quick as possible.

Tom: But how would you get your kart there?

Sting Ray: The grandparents would tow it. So I'd fly, and they'd tow it and bring it back. Sometimes we had two karts, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast. With karting it's a small world, I'm sure it's the same for fishing — we grew up running the same circles we're still running in today, and the teams and people you were racing against kind of became your racing family. So we'd say, hey, we can't drive back and forth to these two races next weekend, can we throw our kart in the back of your truck and you take it for us? They'd say yeah, so every once in a while we'd be with a rogue team somewhere in the middle of America because we didn't have enough time to drive our kart to and from a race, and we'd unload out of their trailer and load it back in, and they'd take it off to the next one sometimes.

Tom: Wow, that's awesome, man — that's kind of like rodeo, actually. It sounds a lot like what some bass fishermen would do — there'd be two big circuits and almost no way to fish both of them, but if you could fish both you'd have a chance of winning a lot more money, so they'd have a boat and truck set up on the East Coast and one on the West Coast, and whichever rig was closer, that one's going there. That reminds me of that movie "Eight Seconds" — about rodeo, Tuff Hedeman and Lane Frost. They started rodeoing and then thought, what we should do is get an airplane and fly, and instead of doing one rodeo a day we could do a couple. They took it to a new level at that time — great movie.

The Hot Seat: Rapid Fire Questions

Tom: Sting Ray, we do this thing on the podcast called the hot seat, where I ask a bunch of either-or questions, kind of rapid fire — don't put too much thought into them, but it's a good way of getting to know you better and gives us a couple things to talk about afterward. You ready for the hot seat?

Sting Ray: I'm ready.

Tom: This first one might be the most obvious or the most intriguing — would you rather drive or fly?

Sting Ray: Drive.

Tom: That's kind of what I thought — you and your dad were putting, what, 20,000, 30,000 miles on your car in a summer. How many miles would you put on in a summer?

Sting Ray: I think the most we did was around 50,000 miles.

Tom: 50,000? That's a lot of good talking time.

Sting Ray: Oh, yeah — lots of good windshield time.

Tom: For sure. Okay, chocolate or vanilla?

Sting Ray: Vanilla. Chocolate makes me sneeze.

Tom: Text or call?

Sting Ray: I'd say text then call.

Tom: Would you rather hunt or fish?

Sting Ray: Hunt.

Tom: Favorite athlete of all time?

Sting Ray: Oh, that's a great question. Shoot. I'm going to say MJ.

Tom: Good one. Okay, you know what a Rubik's cube is, correct? If you had a choice of going to prison for two weeks, or going to prison for the time it would take you to solve a Rubik's cube, which would you pick?

Sting Ray: Give me the two weeks — that would be way faster.

Tom: That's kind of my answer too, except you could pull the stickers off. I remember pulling the stickers off when I was a kid. I just saw a guy the other day juggling three Rubik's cubes, and while he was juggling them he was solving them. I put it on my social media because I thought, what have I been doing wrong — this guy can juggle three Rubik's cubes and solve them all at the same time, and I haven't been able to solve one yet. Okay, would you rather have ten million dollars now, or ten million dollars later?

Sting Ray: Ten million later.

Tom: Okay. Favorite car of all time?

Sting Ray: 1966 Sting Ray Corvette.

Tom: You can do one outdoor activity as much as you want, but that's the only one you get — what are you picking?

Sting Ray: It's funny, this is counteracting my last answer, but fly fishing, probably.

Tom: Okay, and if you could fly fish for one species, as much as you want, but only that one fish, what would it be?

Sting Ray: Probably trout.

Tom: Any particular type of trout?

Sting Ray: Well, I was going to leave it general so I had more options.

Tom: Now we push the edge here — what is your favorite kind of trout?

Sting Ray: I'd say cutthroat.

Tom: I would think that from where you're from, that would be the answer — Idaho has some of the greatest cutthroat trout fishing in the world, and the Snake River fine-spotted cutthroat is right there. That's the only place it lives. And the Yellowstone cutthroat too, in Idaho. Let's see — best piece of advice you remember being given?

Sting Ray: Oh, man. There are no accidents.

Tom: I like that one. One thing you do every day that you know makes a difference in your health?

Sting Ray: Reading my Bible.

Tom: Mindset or skill set — which is more important?

Sting Ray: I'll pick skill set. I think so, anyway — we can get into that.

Tom: Well, we'll talk about that right after this question. What would you consider your catch of a lifetime — could be a fish, might not be?

Sting Ray: Probably my fiancée. We're getting married in November, so I was pretty lucky to catch her.

Engagement, Family, and an Idaho Wedding

Tom: Alright, and where is she from?

Sting Ray: She's from the Indianapolis area.

Tom: Okay, and does she know about racing? Is she a race fan?

Sting Ray: Yeah — being in the Indianapolis area, she had to know it one way or another. The Indy 500 is the biggest race in the world, so for her it was like, oh yeah, of course you're a race car driver, that makes sense. But it's actually kind of funny — one of our first activities together was going to her parents' house and going frog digging. So I found out she liked the racing side, and then I found out she liked the hunting side too. I kind of won the lottery on that deal.

Tom: Well, can she cook frog legs?

Sting Ray: She can — she does good.

Tom: Okay, well that's the grand slam — she likes all of the things and she's a great cook. That's fantastic. So you're getting married in November — do you know where yet?

Sting Ray: Yep, we're getting married in November near the Indianapolis area, and then we're going to do an Idaho reception about a week later with my whole side of the crew. I've got a large family and it's a bit of a mess, so I said, forget it, we're going to come to you guys, throw a party there, and we get two awesome weddings.

Tom: That's a good idea. And it's November in Idaho — that's a beautiful time. There's nothing like the fall in the West.

Sting Ray: Yeah, that's a beautiful time in Idaho.

Tom: Man, the fall in the South is really nice too with the leaves changing, but there's a certain feeling with the impending winter coming — you just see everything scurrying around, like, we've got to stock up. You guys have no idea what it's going to be like in about four months.

Sting Ray: It makes you not take it for granted, I think, too — you feel that pressure, like, tonight's the day, we're going to go out and use it.

Tom: I know, you really do. In the South when it's fall, it's a really nice time to be outside, to be in the woods, but you don't feel like if we don't use this now we're going to be sorry in a few months when we're just sitting inside. What did you think about the Idaho winters? It sounds like you were on the road forty-two weeks, so you didn't have to necessarily deal with them like some people.

Duck Hunting Idaho's Hot Springs and the Snake River

Sting Ray: Idaho is a cold state. Where I am, I'd imagine, is really cold.

Tom: I know the other side of Idaho, where I spent the most time, on the South Fork of the Snake River — the Snake River comes really close to you, but it's slightly different, and it's very cold over there.

Sting Ray: It is, yeah. I've heard stories of family members who used to live there where it'd be negative 40 in the winter with a wind chill on top of that. We're not quite that cold where I'm from, but in the winter it was usually go snow skiing or duck hunting — those were our two activities, so you'd wear the layers and head out and enjoy it. I really love four seasons — having four full seasons in Idaho was one of the things I enjoyed most about it. The scenery is great, the activities are great, but being able to see the process of each one, I really enjoyed.

Tom: So when you're duck hunting in the wintertime, are you finding a spring creek, or how are you hunting ducks?

Sting Ray: There's a lot of options — there are some hot springs in our area that we used to go hunt, and there's also the river, the Snake River, that rolls through and never quite freezes over. Sometimes it gets close, and we avoid it in those few weeks. But the hot springs are really cool because they'll flow into a ditch, so everything's frozen over except that, and you can go jump-shoot the ditch and get a few birds out of it. It's a good time.

Tom: Yeah, that's cool. What ducks are you getting primarily?

Sting Ray: Lots of mallards. Where I live it's actually a lot more wood ducks, which is interesting — one of my first ducks was a wood duck. I'm now living in the Indianapolis area, and they're like, you shot a wood duck? No way. I haven't been duck hunting here, so I probably shouldn't speak too confidently, but they're a rare thing here, I guess.

Tom: I think a wood duck is the most beautiful of all the ducks.

Sting Ray: I agree. And they make really cool sounds too — not just your standard quack, which I like.

Tom: That was my first duck too, wood duck. I bet that's a lot of people's first duck — it's the kind of duck where if you have a little piece of property with some trees around, you've got a pretty good chance of having a couple of wood ducks, where you're not going to pull in fifty mallards without a larger area. But mallards like to pour into those little tiny places. My son in Montana has a little spring, and it doesn't take much, and they will cover that thing up. I went this year to Edmonton, Canada, and hunted with my dad and my boys, so three generations, and we did everything dry field. Have you ever hunted like that?

Sting Ray: I haven't done any farm field hunting, no.

Tom: I hadn't either until then, but my dad's getting a little older — he's 86 and loves duck hunting, and I wanted to take him someplace where he didn't have to do the waders and the boats. He still gets around pretty good, but you put a pair of waders on and that's a whole different story for anyone. I was trying to figure out something I could do, and a friend said, you should check out this dry field hunting up in Canada. I looked into it, and it's incredible — the mallards and geese pour into these fields. Truly amazing. Where I grew up in Tennessee, we were occasionally just on the edge of the flyway — when you're barely on it, you get a few ducks here and there, but when you're squarely in the middle of the flyway, it's totally different. There are so many birds — you look in the sky and it's just clouds of birds everywhere. They're not all going to come to you, because they've got a million places to go with all those fields up there, but somehow those guides up there know that if we put up a big decoy spread here, there's a really good likelihood we're going to get them here.

Sting Ray: That's cool. Did you guys hunt out of a pit, or were they blinds — what was the setup?

Tom: We started out in lay-down blinds, which is kind of the cat's meow, the best thing — but honestly my dad was having a little hard time with that, and we had a couple other people for whom the lay-down blind wasn't ideal. So we did that a few times, and then they'd make these A-frames and brush them all in — they'd bring everything in a trailer, all the decoys, the A-frames, all the brushing material. When we left, all of it went away, all the branches and brushing material — they had tons of grass and would brush you in totally. It was amazing. Those guys were incredibly professional, and just like you, they duck hunt every day, like you race — you're an everyday guy, 42 weekends out of the year.

What a Season Actually Looks Like

Tom: You were racing as a kid — I don't know what your schedule is now. You said the off-season was March through September when you're racing?

Sting Ray: Yes, that's it — March through September. We do about seventeen race weekends, a few practice weekends here and there. This week, for example, we were in Mid-Ohio, dead smack center between Columbus and Cleveland. I'm home Monday, flying out tomorrow to the simulator in Charlotte, North Carolina — in the simulator all day with the team — then flying straight from there to Iowa for our two races there this coming weekend. There's a lot of back to back in the racing season, but also testing in between each one, so it's really stacked into about a seven-month window. Then the rest of the year, I'm kind of free and clear to do whatever I want, as long as there's no sponsor events.

Tom: So what do you do? I know physical fitness is a big part of being a race car driver, so you've got to stay in shape — what do you do?

Training Like an IndyCar Driver: French Contrast, Isodynamics, and the Death Ladder

Sting Ray: Yeah, that takes up a lot of my off-season. There's a gym here in Indianapolis called PitFit that specifically trains drivers, mechanics, and engineers, and their goal is to get us fit and ready for the season. A lot of the grind we're doing is in the September-to-March window, so I'm usually up ten pounds at the beginning of the season and down ten pounds during the racing season, just because it falls off — we're burning so many calories. It's hard when you're on the road to stay in shape and keep that physical strength up; it can wear you down through the year for sure. Trying to find a balance is what I've been working on most lately — as a rookie that's something I took for granted, and I've gotten a lot better at it this year.

Tom: So what kind of stuff do they have you do?

Sting Ray: Lots of lifting, but more than that it's a lot of endurance-athlete training — if you look at triathletes or runners, it's a lot of that same cardiac output range. We're anywhere from about 130 to 180 beats per minute on our heart rate during a race, and races are two to three hours long normally. So for that time you've got to be able to sit in the car with your heart rate elevated at that level, but also the cockpit can be 130 degrees. So it's heat training — we sit in the sauna, go out and do a twenty-minute exercise at max output, then go back and sit in the sauna and do cognitive training. They call it Synaptec — a lot of visual reaction, like touching lights when they light up. There's another level where they have you put goggles on that black out your vision for a quarter of a second and then flash open, to try to impede your vision like you'd have on a racetrack if there's a crash — a car flashes in front of you and reveals the other side, and you have to react in that short window where you can see.

Tom: Wow. And they have you do this in the sauna?

Sting Ray: You usually do it right before and right after the sauna, because when you're hot, sweaty, and exhausted, your brain and cognitive function goes way down, and they want that tuned up so you don't have that big variance in cognitive function.

Tom: Wow. And how hot do you have the sauna?

Sting Ray: Usually about one-forty, and we'll sit in there twenty to forty minutes depending on the day.

Tom: Okay, and how are you monitoring your intake of hydration when you're doing that, as it applies to racing? Do you have a hose you're drinking out of in the car?

Sting Ray: In the car we do, and I'll be honest, we don't utilize it enough because it's just sitting there for you to sip on. You get the cotton mouth like you're hiking up a mountain and sweating — same idea, you just wet your mouth to survive and keep breathing. We're not really, really focused on hydration during the race — it's all before and all after. I'll drink three or four electrolyte drinks before I sit in the car on race day.

Tom: Okay, and how do you manage not having to pee while you're in the car?

Sting Ray: You're not worried about it at all — it's all getting sweated out. I'll lose about three, four, five pounds in a race just in sweat.

Tom: Yeah, I know what that's like — I was a wrestler, and you'd lose five, six, eight pounds in a practice easy. Especially back when I wrestled, they'd tell you it was weak to have water, so you wouldn't drink any during practice, and you'd just keep sweating and feel terrible afterward. But it's pretty extreme to think about your heart rate being at 170, 180 for three hours — even running a marathon, your heart rate's not quite that high. I ran a marathon in three hours and thirteen minutes, which was pretty quick at the time — I'm not a great runner, but I worked hard at it, trying to break the three-hour mark. I needed three hours ten to make Boston and hit three-thirteen, so I looked at it as kind of a disappointment, but years later I look back and think three-thirteen wasn't so bad.

Sting Ray: That's pretty good.

Tom: I didn't meet my goal — I wanted to run Boston and missed qualifying by three minutes. But that's pretty intense. I'd imagine the way they're training your reaction time is really interesting, throwing you in the sauna and training before and after. When did you start with a team of people training you — how early in your career did you start paying attention to physical fitness and thinking that's a place you could really step it up?

Sting Ray: 2019 and 2020 was kind of the stepping point for me. In 2019 I was still in the Double-A ladder, called USF Pro 2000 — complicated, but you don't need to worry about that — and I was getting into races where I physically couldn't hold onto the car. I felt like the car was getting away from me and thought, I think it's sliding — but no, the car's not sliding, you're just running out of breath. I remember one race specifically toward the end of the season — I'd worked my way onto a very good team, progressed through the year, got to the last race, qualified first, was leading right up until the last five laps, and just drove off the track by myself. There got to be a little dirt on the tires, and when it came time to make a correction to a slide, I had no energy left to do it. After that, I decided to hit the gym a lot harder, and that off-season I really went into the program with PitFit. Then 2022 is kind of where I took it to the next level, and I got to see the strength that was needed — before it was endurance, now it's the strength. The physical stamina you have to have in the car is great, but also the strength, because of the amount of torque going through the steering wheel. It got to the point where it wasn't that I was running out of breath — I physically was not strong enough to turn the wheel anymore, because on a hot track with sticky, brand-new tires and a full fuel load, the car is heavy. When you lean on those tires you feel the weight — we don't have power steering. So the g-forces on my body, plus the steering, plus trying to hold my head up with my neck muscles, it all added up to the point where it exceeded my limits. That's still something I'm working on today — you'll see drivers get out of the car hot, sweaty, exhausted, and I think that's just the name of the game when you're pushing the limits like that.

Tom: Wow, that's really interesting. So how are they training you for that type of endurance, to get stronger at holding the wheel for that amount of time?

Sting Ray: There are a couple of things we do. They have what they call French contrast weight lifting — you'll do a bench press workout, a standard barbell bench for, say, three to five reps, rack the bar, immediately go over to a medicine ball and do six explosive throws at the wall, then hit the ground and do six explosive push-ups, then get on an elastic band and do six more explosive push-ups. That French contrast is the contrast between the heavy-load weight and trying to explode through that resistance. We also do what's called isodynamic workouts — same idea, a bench press with dumbbells instead of barbells, but instead of a full range of motion, you stop halfway up and hold for five seconds, finish the rep, go all the way down, back up to halfway, hold for five seconds, and do that for about ninety seconds at a weight that's on the limit of failure — you want your last rep to be a grind to get out. We'll do those on offset weeks — one week French contrast, the next week isodynamic, along with the main workout, whatever it is.

Tom: Wow, and what would the main workout look like on a day like that?

Sting Ray: Usually a full-body lift — a bench, or a squat, or an incline bench and a deadlift, something like that. Then the isodynamic and French contrast tie in — French contrast usually goes straight in with the workout, isodynamic is more of an accessory part. In between each day we do a cardio session — threshold workouts, and also a steady-state long endurance day. A lot of times during the off-season we'll have a competition between other drivers where we'll do a 10K on the ski erg or a 10K row, or one of the things they always love to introduce is the death ladder — you do 100 meters on the rower and 1,000 meters on the skier, then 200 meters on the rower and 900 meters on the skier, and so on, going from one end to the other on both machines. That will wear you out — it's about a forty-minute workout done that way.

Tom: What's that called?

Sting Ray: Death ladder. Called the death ladder.

Tom: I love it — I'll definitely be putting that in. Because it has a really cool name, it'll be perfect for my group. I really like that. I've never really thought about doing that — I have three ski ergs in my gym and about thirteen rowers, but I hadn't heard of that French contrast, and the isodynamic I've seen but not by that name. It's really interesting. What about your diet — what are you eating? You said you're losing so much weight in the season — how does your diet change from in-season to off-season?

Fueling a Race Weekend: Diet and Recovery

Sting Ray: I'm eating just about as much as I can, but it's hard on race weekends because I'm so nervous — I can't take in much. A lot of times what I'm doing for breakfast is Greek yogurt, whole fat, unsweetened, with granola, banana, some chocolate chips, and maybe some almond butter or peanut butter mixed in every once in a while, and some honey — or an omelet. Lunch today was actually kind of cool — a friend at the last race had just gone walleye fishing and sent us back with about five pounds of walleye, so I had ramen with walleye and a couple of boiled eggs in it. Phenomenal. Dinner is usually as much as I can eat, whatever it is — I'm not cutting out carbs, I'm not cutting out any sort of fats, because those are things I need for calorie intake. On a race day we're burning close to 4,000 calories, and after the race it's usually around 3,800 or 3,900, so I'm eating and trying to recover with as much food as possible. Fats are the big thing, honestly, which is interesting on race day, and that's where the yogurt comes in — good fats, whole proteins — and the carbs come from veggies, fruit, rice, or pasta. It's a big combination. There's not really anything I try to cut out as far as types of food — just no processed foods if I can avoid it, no sugars that aren't natural. If I can have honey, a little bit of fruit, that's usually pretty good to get me through the day.

Tom: Are you working with a nutritionist, or does anyone help you with your diet?

Sting Ray: I have, yeah — at different times I've checked in to make sure I'm still on the right track. I got the green light last time. One thing they had me introduce is dried fruit, which is interesting because it's a higher caloric intake with less of a filling food, so that's a snack I'll have between meals.

Tom: Wow. And at what point did you notice the changes in your diet were really making a difference in your performance?

Sting Ray: Probably about 2021 — more than two years ago now. I was running out of energy through the day at the racetrack — I'd get off the track feeling good, but I'd come in and sit with the engineers and be lights out, falling asleep in the engineering room, and I'd have to go lay down, take a nap, reset, or eat, and just feel very sluggish and lazy. When I started putting in calories I could burn, it woke me up — I quit having to have a shot of espresso to get in the car, quit needing whatever it was to wake me up. Food's a great thing, it's a tool we need to utilize more often — I think people underestimate that. If you're low on energy, check your diet, it can change your life. The way I train, the way I'm racing, affects how I eat — the eating should not affect it.

Tom: Right, you're eating based on your input and output — you have to have enough calories to support yourself, your brain, your focus, and your body, and if you're not getting that, you feel dead.

Sting Ray: Absolutely.

A Driver's Daily Schedule, In Season and Off

Tom: So what about your daily schedule in season versus off-season? You seem like you're going all the time — I mean, this is you being a professional athlete. What does that look like?

Sting Ray: In season there's a lot more activity for sure — a lot of engineering meetings, more time on the simulator. I actually have a simulator here at my house that I get to train on. Yesterday, for example, we were on track racing Sunday, drove home Sunday night, and Monday morning I took it as kind of a recovery day — physically I'm not doing a lot, I did a little rock climbing and rode my bike a bit, and ate what I could. Then I was on the simulator for about an hour and a half with my team, getting ready for this next weekend's race — practicing passing, practicing race lines, all that, so I'm ready to go, switching gears to the next event, looking forward rather than looking back at the last race.

Tom: Wow, and does the simulator wear you out like the car?

Sting Ray: It can, if you spend enough time on it. It's funny, yesterday I was starting to feel it because I was still sore from the race Sunday. I was joking around — we've got a series of ovals coming up, and I said I think my right shoulder is going to be bigger than my left by the end of the season from turning left so much, but that's just the way it goes, I guess. Got to figure out how to get through the pain a little bit.

Tom: Wow. I wonder — I don't know anything about this, but it's fascinating to me because your physical performance, even in something like fishing — the type of fishing I did, basically pushing a 16-foot boat with a stick, a couple of guys in front, usually blowing 20 miles an hour right in your face — it is a lot like being a professional athlete, and I found I was doing okay, but kind of like you, I started getting in better and better shape, and I realized this is in direct proportion to my performance on the water. I'm more focused, I have more energy, I'm better at talking to my customer, they're having a better time, I'm able to be attentive to their needs and what's going on with the tide and the wind, and I'm able to catch more fish. So I found getting in better shape, I was catching more fish, and I was a better fishing guide — that led me to want to get in better and better shape, which is where the running came from. And then it's like, okay, what else can I do — what happens if I pay more attention to my hydration, my electrolytes, and the performance goes up, and what happens if I pay more attention to my diet, and the performance goes up even more — to where it becomes almost like an obsession. Now I want to be in as good a shape as I possibly can because I see that turns into dollars in my pocket being a better fishing guide on the water. I've seen that with so many sports. But I wonder in racing — do they test for performance-enhancing drugs?

Drug Testing, Safety, and Team Fitness

Sting Ray: Yeah, they do.

Tom: It seems like this physical stamina would be a place where certain drugs could really improve it, I'd imagine, but I don't follow racing enough to know if that's something that's common, getting popped for a drug test.

Sting Ray: Yeah, there definitely are drug tests that go on. A lot of times it's drivers who've been smoking something they shouldn't be and get popped for it. But there are also stories of guys who said, man, I'm feeling really tired at the racetrack, and someone says, hey, take this pill, it'll wake you up — so they take the pill, and it's the best race of their career, and they're like, man, what was that, and it turns out that was Adderall, and now you're banned from the series for the rest of your life. So they're very attentive to that, and they want the drivers to be healthy — that's a big thing in car racing, they have a very good safety team and medical team, and they don't want to see your performance be bad. That's not why they're limiting us — they want us to be healthy and have longevity in our careers, so they're helping us find natural ways to do that. They do cognitive testing pre-season, vital checks during the season, and random drug tests during the season, trying to make sure everyone on the teams — not just the drivers, but mechanics, engineers, everyone — is doing their job to the best of their ability and staying healthy.

Tom: Yeah, it makes all the sense in the world — you can't get behind a pickup truck and go 55 if you've had things in your system, so why would it be different going 200 miles an hour? I was thinking more along the lines of performance-enhancing drugs, like steroids, or even blood doping, like bicycle riders do — it seems like that could be very effective in driving, and with as much money on the line I'm sure they're definitely testing for that in all the drug tests. I never even thought about that for a driver, because the physical strain of being a driver is intense, and more than most people realize, I think. And if you want to be really good at it, that's a controllable factor — you can control your diet, your hydration, your training, to a point. I guess I'm not as much of a race fan as I should be.

Sting Ray: I'll win you over eventually, don't worry.

Tom: No, I love watching it, I just didn't know how much you're paying attention to what you're doing in the gym. And even the pit crew, man — this part I do know a little about — does the pit crew train at the same kind of fit-crew place that you train at?

Sting Ray: Some do — my pit crew does not currently. They have their own gym at the shop they work at, and they can train as much as possible, but honestly right now we're in the midst of the season, where it's just go, go, go, go, so they're turning the car around rather than practicing pit stops. Because I'm on a smaller team, I go to some of the others where they're training every single day in that area. But you definitely see the advantage of someone who's fit and fast on the tire changing, because tires aren't light — they're heavy, and to be able to pick one up, throw it around, and throw another one on, you've got to be strong, and quick, and accurate.

Tom: But the advantage of just a slight improvement on that is huge.

Sting Ray: Massive. Huge.

Tom: How do you get to the point in your career where, like you said, you're on a smaller team and don't have that advantage — how do you get to the point where that becomes a real focus of the team?

Sting Ray: That's kind of the last thing, honestly. If you get the engineering right, the basic mechanics right, and the driving correct, that's usually the last tower to fall. Part of that is because when you get everything else right, it creates less work for the team — you're doing fewer changes between sessions, dealing with less fatigue on the mechanics between races, because it's usually a larger team — instead of having seven mechanics, you have ten. That extra three people makes a big difference in how quickly a car goes together, or a new wrap or new wing goes on — all that happens much more quickly and efficiently, which opens up an extra forty-five minutes at the end of the day, and they can hop on the pit stop car and practice pit stops.

Looking Ahead: A Bachelor Party, Elk, and Chukar in Idaho

Tom: Nice. That's super interesting. As far as this year goes, do you have any hunting or fishing trips, other than the wedding you're planning, that you're looking forward to?

Sting Ray: Yeah, actually I'm having my bachelor party coming up here pretty soon, because I had a small window during the Olympic break that we could fit it into. So I'm going to get some of the guys and go up fishing — there's a high mountain lake I like to hike into near where I live, and hopefully I'll catch a few cutthroat there. It's one of my favorite places, so quiet and peaceful and beautiful. That's the goal. And then for the off-season, definitely some duck hunting, definitely some upland hunting — my uncle takes me upland hunting as much as I can get him talking about going. He's got two wire-haired pointing griffons, so we'll head to the mountains with them, and my other buddy's got a yellow lab and a boat, so we'll hit the river in that, go get some ducks, and maybe some elk hunting put in there somewhere — I've got to figure out where that's going to be. Hopefully in October I'll be making a trip back to Idaho before the wedding, if the fiancée lets me sneak away for a little bit.

Tom: Nice. On the upland birds, are you hunting chukar, grouse, pheasant, all of them? What are you hunting?

Sting Ray: Yeah, we've got chukar, we've got grouse, all that stuff. I found my first chukar during the off-season this last year, and it was kind of cool too — it was like wildlife day, because my fiancée flew in with me. We were going to go out for the weekend and see the family, see the mountains, show off Idaho a little bit before winter. And on the drive up to where we were chukar hunting, there was like a hundred head of elk — they were bugling down in the valley below us as we were hunting up the mountain shooting chukars. When you go chukar hunting, usually you'll see ten to fourteen birds on a good day — we saw like 35, 40 birds. It was unbelievable. And then on the way home we saw three bald eagles, like fourteen deer — it was unbelievable how many animals we saw. She's like, is this normal? And I'm like, no, don't get used to this — but you're coming with me every time we go hunting now. So it was pretty cool.

Tom: Win her over?

Sting Ray: Oh, yeah, definitely did. It was a very good day.

Closing Thoughts

Tom: That's fantastic. Well, man, I've loved this — I really had a great conversation with you and learned a ton about racing, and it's cool that we have commonality in the hunting and fishing world. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story with us.

Sting Ray: Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Tom: Tell people how they can follow you and cheer you on.

Sting Ray: Yeah, so I'm on all social media at Sting Ray Robb — that's Sting Ray, and then R-O-B-B, two B's in Robb. My website is www.stingrayrobb.com. And if you want to follow the IndyCar series racing, you can go to NBC Sports broadcasting or Peacock TV — we're also on the USA Network for some races, so you can tune in there as well.

Tom: And what's your number?

Sting Ray: I'm number 41, in the Goodhart Chevrolet — the car is white with paw prints all over it, so you can definitely pick us out. It's an iconic livery that we have.

Tom: Alright, well, we'll be watching, we'll be cheering you on, man, and good luck with your wedding and with all of your hunting and fishing. We're glad to have you in the hunting and fishing community, and you'll have that whole community behind you as you're racing all year.

Sting Ray: Thanks, Tom. Appreciate it.

Tom: Alright, thank you. We'll be back next week with another awesome guest, and thank you to Sting Ray Robb for coming on and sharing his story. Alright, see you.