You know when someone loves what they do when they speak about it with passion and excitement. With an engineering background and a passion for racing, Cara Krstolic, executive director, race tire engineering and manufacturing and chief engineer, motorsports, at Bridgestone Americas, is one of those people.

A native of Akron, Ohio, Cara started her career at Bridgestone as a vehicle dynamics engineer. But her curiosity for learning goes farther back than that. As the daughter of two teachers, Cara remembers growing up with an interest in science and the outdoors. She would do experiments with her mom, a science teacher. Later as a college student at the University of Akron, she participated in Formula SAE challenges, where she and a team designed and competed with small formula-style racing car. Soon after graduating, she started at Bridgestone and hasn’t looked back. Her story of making her way to the motorsports side of the business is one of grit and a strong work ethic.

Those traits and more are what allowed her to work her way up to become the head engineer for all race tires for the Bridgestone and Firestone brands, building tires for storied races like the Indy 500.

In this episode of Johnny g & Friends, presented by Firestone, Cara and Johnny g discuss:

• Cara’s career trajectory at Bridgestone (0:53)
• A typical race weekend for Cara –the schedule, data collection and all (3:52)
• Data points collected at a typical race weekend (5:39)
• Johnny g’s first encounter with guayule in the early 90s, which is a plant Bridgestone is using a sustainable alternative to natural rubber (11:35)
• Future application for guayule in racing tires (14:24)
• The atmosphere and race day and Cara and Johnny g’s favorite part about it (17:27)
• How more women are involved in racing and Cara’s advice to young women for achieving a career in racing (19:59)
• Rapid Fire Questions (22:51)

For more episodes of Johnny g & Friends, presented by Firestone, click here.