Ashmore, Shepherd breaking down barriers with Ganassi

Chip Ganassi Racing will make history this weekend when Angela Ashmore and Danielle Shepherd contest their first NTT IndyCar Series events as race engineers. They follow the pioneering IndyCar race engineer Diane Holl, who won in the late 1990s with Adrian Fernandez, and Arrow McLaren’s Leena Gade, also from England, who spent part of the 2018 season engineering the car driven by James Hinchcliffe.

For Ganassi, whose team has been at the forefront of bringing women racers into the paddock and developing talent through its Women In Motorsports intern program, Ashmore and Shepherd are part of an ongoing effort to develop talent within the organization.

“When it comes to Angela and Danielle being lead engineers on the cars this year, they’ve obviously been in our system for years,” Ganassi told RACER. “While they’ve been in our system, they haven’t had an opportunity to put their own signature on their work. I think this will obviously be that opportunity for them.

“Having said that, when people take over a position, you get a different perspective and a fresh set of eyes in the conversations within their peer group. They’re going to bring to bring a fresh set of eyes in terms of the ways that we do things.”

The promotions come after years of distinguished work by Ashmore (main image), who graduates from the assistant engineer role on the Indianapolis 500-winning No. 8 Honda entry for Marcus Ericsson to lead the No. 11 Honda for Marcus Armstrong.

While Ashmore is moving from one Ganassi IndyCar to another, Shepherd has been called back to IndyCar where she’ll be in charge of engineering the No. 4 Honda driven by rookie Kyffin Simpson. Shepherd returns from the team’s factory prototype program in IMSA’s WeatherTech SportsCar Championship where she was the lead engineer on the hybrid No. 01 Cadillac V-Series.R.

Prior to her IMSA role which delivered multiple victories — including an overall win at the prestigious 12 Hours of Sebring — Shepherd was part of Ganassi’s championship-winning team in 2018 with Scott Dixon, when she served as performance engineer.

That IndyCar title, which also included former Ganassi assistant engineer Kate Gundlach, was a first for women working in an engineering capacity, and four years later, Ashmore would add to that legacy by becoming the first female engineer to win the Indy 500.

For good measure, Shepherd was also part of Alex Palou’s championship-winning engineering team at Ganassi in 2021 and based on her skills, was elevated to full race engineer status over the next two years in IMSA.

“I started racing in IndyCar and spent a few years there and then had the opportunity to be able to move over to the IMSA and I didn’t actually know a whole lot about sports car racing before going over there, so it was it was an interesting experience,” Shepherd told RACER.

“It was really good to be able to see a different side of racing and I learned a lot, but engineering a race car is engineering a race car. And then to be able to have the opportunity to come back and do race engineering on the IndyCar side really is a full-circle thing.”

Together, Ashmore and Shepherd become the third and fourth women to hold the highest engineering position in an IndyCar team and do so at the same time, and while working for the same team, which is another first within the series.