Welcome to the Marshall Proop Podcast.

Focusing on mental health in racing.

We're doing this on the IndyCar side to start.

Hope to do more episodes on this theme.

Starting with my friend Gavin Ward,

team principal at the Aaron McLaren, three 3-car, NTT-IndyCar Series team,

team owned an offshoot of McLaren Formula One program, GAV, with very deep Formula One experience with Red Bull

during the peak of their success back in the Sebastian Vettel and Mark Weber era, moved over to Indycaro Team Penske,

race engineer for Joseph Newgarden.

Two of them won a championship right off the bat in 2019.

Hard times, though, that had struck Gavin before he came here,

but especially once he got into this new and high-profile role

with Team Penske. So now that he is in a absolute top leadership situation at Aaron McLaren,

fascinating to hear from Gavin about the decisions he's made, areas of health care, mental health, looking after

things within the team, a lot of great folks there at Aaron McLaren, but here we have a bit

of a break from tradition.

One of the many things that I appreciate about Gavin, motor racing we so heavily associate it with machismo and

toughness and just grind through it and bite down harder and deal with whatever it is,

whether it's physical, mental pain, emotional, whatever it might be, just absolutely grind your

way through it. And I appreciate Gavin saying, you know what,

I've been through this. That doesn't work. You can do it. But it really does hurt you in the long

run. In a team-based environment, it actually makes us weaker. So working from his own experiences in life, he has sought training and help

...