American Scot Elkins in Perfect Orbit as Race Director for FIA Formula E, Extreme E

• The Portland, Ore., course for June 24 Formula E race is a deviation from the series’ city street circuits and will see slight tweaks.

• Racers, Elkins says, have unique opportunities in the all-electric motorsport to be ‘a part of the computer of the car’.

• Elkins even helped design a potential race course on the Moon.

What’s Scot Elkins, a farm boy from near Terre Haute, Ind., doing, inspecting streets from Hyderabad, India, to Sao Paulo, Brazil, to Berlin, Cape Town, Monaco, and Jakarta . . . and even designing a racing course on the Moon?

Elkins can regale a crowd with insight into growing corn and beans and harvesting hay and can tutor someone about the craftsmanship and design of a bespoke Taylor Guitar. But how and why has he also traded his life of suburban comfort in Southern California for sharing the occasional week on a refitted British Royal Mail Ship called the St. Helena?

Why would he ditch Disneyland-style indulgence several weeks a year to share tight quarters on a boat with a fleet of battery-powered race cars, chairs made from recycled plastic bottles, a hydroponic herb garden, and a handful of climate-change scientists?

Elkins is race director for both the EV-rooted ABB FIA Formula E Championship and its off-road, race-in-remote-locations cousin, the Extreme E Series. And he jokes that he’s “the token American” in the midst of this European-centric pioneering movement that’s designed simultaneously to showcase the benefits of sustainable electrification in motorsports and to raise awareness about how reducing our carbon footprint can have a positive effect on climate change.

“It's an amazing experience. Just our team at the FIA, we've got people from Spain, Poland, France, Germany. There’s just the experience of working with it and then translate that to all the teams and everybody that's different. And then it's just an amazing experience,” Elkins said.

“That first race I did in Long Beach, I just filled in for someone. And I was living in Northern California at the time, and I knew enough people through the racing network that I had,” Elkins, a former Champ Car and IMSA tech executive and deputy race director for Formula 1, F2, and F3, said.

His colleagues asked him to come and help. “They gave me a couple of shirts, and I guess I did an okay job, because they asked me back the next year. And so it was a kind of a relationship thing that turned into seven years’ worth of work. So you just never know where things are going to come from and how it plays out. When somebody asks me something, I always try to say yes, because you just never know where it's going to lead.”

This current turn in his career has led him to discover that he indeed can serve in on-track leadership in two wildly different types of series with the same mission. And it has enlightened him about certain ironies.

As for the dual role, Elkins said he doesn’t have to shift gears mentally too often, even though he manages Extreme E competition off-shore from the St. Helena.

“If you're a race director and you have a way of doing things, it doesn't really matter what the racing is. You kind of follow your own processes and follow your own patterns,” he said. “The main thing is always, regardless of where you are and what the racing is, just trying to always stay calm. People around you react off of you. So if you freak out, everybody freaks out. So you try to keep everything calm.”