Get to know Borg-Warner Trophy engraver Reid Smith

BRUCE:

IndyCar fans, it's time to start your engines. Welcome to Pit Pass Indy, a production of Evergreen Podcast. I'm your host, Bruce Martin, a journalist who regularly covers the NTT IndyCar Series. Our goal at Pit Pass Indy is to give racing fans and insiders view of the exciting world of the NTT IndyCar Series in a fast-paced podcast featuring interviews with the biggest names in the sport. I bring nearly 40 years of experience covering IndyCar and NASCAR, working for such media brands as NBCSports.com, SI.com, ESPN Sports Ticker, Sports Illustrated, Auto Week and Speed Sport. So let's drop the green flag on this episode of Pit Pass Indy. Welcome to Pit Pass Indy as we continue our fourth season of giving IndyCar fans a behind-the-scenes look at the NTT IndyCar Series and the drivers and teams that compete in the Indianapolis 500. Let's get to know one of the hidden heroes of the Indianapolis 500. It's Reed Smith, the engraver of the famed BorgWarner trophy. He etches the winning driver's first and last name along with the average speed of the race and the year on the panel just below the bass-relieved sterling silver face of the winning driver. That sterling silver face, of course, is sculpted by famed sculptor William Behrens of Tryon, North Carolina. Smith is located 100 miles to the east on the booming Ballantyne area of Charlotte, North Carolina, where he works out of his engraving studio at his home. It takes quite a steady hand to sculpt the face for the trophy, but it also requires a steady hand to etch the name and the information that goes below the face. Let's find out how he does it in this exclusive Pit Pass Indy interview with Reed Smith, the engraver for the famed BorgWarner trophy that immortalizes the winner of the Indianapolis 500. We're going to do something a little bit different today on Pit Pass Indy. Normally we talk to Will Behrens, the sculptor of the BorgWarner trophy. We had him earlier in the month. Today we're going to get a chance to introduce everybody to the engraver. whose engraving is on the BorgWarner trophy. It's right below the winning driver's face on the permanent BorgWarner trophy for the Indianapolis 500. It's Reed Smith. Reed, you've been in the engraving business for about 35 years. You got the call back in 2021 from William Barron's of all people. They were looking for an engraver in the area. How surprised were you when all of a sudden you found out you were getting ready to be the engraver for the permanent trophy for the Indianapolis 500?

REED:

Well, it was exciting. I was very unfamiliar with the words BorgWarner Trophy until I received a call from Will. It was probably about four o'clock one afternoon and I received the call and he kind of introduced the thoughts of the project with me. It went over several months, probably a year of phone calls and emails before it was announced. And then I got a group email that just said, Will has chosen the new engraver. And so that was very exciting. You know, I'm not going to pretend it wasn't. You know, of course, I probably called my wife and called my mom right away. And so, you know, it's nice to do some nicer and high profile work and know that your work is appreciated.

BRUCE:

This is a man who's done countless sports trophies and awards and all types of things in the engraving world, but you told me earlier you're not a sports fan. You don't really watch sports, and at first you really didn't know what the Borg Warner Trophy was until they told you Indianapolis 500.

REED:

That was the first time I remember paying attention to the name Borg Warner Trophy and I said no I didn't recognize that name and then he was you know Will was kind enough to to explain it and that this is the award for the Indianapolis 500 and I was like you know who doesn't know that that name and so that's fascinating.

BRUCE:

And now that you're involved with the Borg Warner Trophy you now watch the Indianapolis 500 and to somebody who's not a sports fan It's a thrilling event for people who are involved in sports, but what's it like for somebody who really isn't a sports fan?

REED:

Well, there's a lot to take in, because it's funny about it, you know, being a part of it makes it that much more thrilling. And it's the only sports thing that I've ever watched on purpose. And so I enjoy, you know, just saying, all right, I'm not doing anything. I'm not going to the grocery store on Sunday afternoon on this day. I'm going to sit and watch the race and I enjoy it. And it's amazing how thrilling it is. And I'm just, when I think about the race, I think about, you know, the last few moments of the races and how quickly the positions can change. It's just fascinating. The physics of drafting still just blows my mind and how that, you know, they're running wide open the whole time and then all of a sudden somebody's flying past and, you know, it just can change so quickly.

BRUCE:

And does it just seem to somebody who hasn't come up watching auto racing or being involved with sports in general, just how insane it is?

REED:

It's unreal and just all that goes with it and putting the whole thing together and just know that these people dedicate their lives to this. And this is a huge part of so many people's lives. And this has been greatly important to so many people before I even really understood the very small amount that I understand about it.

BRUCE:

Not only do you have men in those machines that are really risking a lot to try to achieve the glory of winning the Indianapolis 500, but just the enormous size of the crowd that attends that race, 330,000 people. Last year's race may have gotten pretty close to 350,000 people. But when you see that much humanity that loves a sporting event that much, what do you think of that?

REED:

Well, it's a very different It's just a very different lifestyle and culture that I'm used to because I'm not really into sports. It just has never been part of my life. I've always been more of the artistic, you know, and more dramatic type loves. So it was a very different world. But it's just nice to know that there are things that everyone loves and different people like different things. And I'm coming to enjoy it more and more.

REED:

So how did you become an engraver?

REED:

I fell in love with the art when I was 17 years old. My father opened a trophy store. He was with the Sears Corporation for 24 years of his early working life. And he quit and opened his own business where he did trophies and promotional items. And that's where I began engraving, doing some machine engraving. And during the course of that, learned that there was such a thing as hand engraving. And there was an old man named Jim Buchanan, who worked near Uptown Charlotte. And I happened to visit his shop one day. I think I was picking up something for the family store. And he asked, son, are you interested in engraving? And I was like, well, I guess, you know, I have worked the pantograph machine. And he goes, no, no, no, this is done by hand. He said, come around here and let me show you a thing or two. And it very much, I don't know if you've ever seen the Norman Rockwell painting that, It's called The Watchmaker, but it shows a little redheaded boy watching The Watchmaker work. And I had red hair when I was little. And it just so much reminds me of me because it was just like the heavens opened and it was just like, I want to do that. How do I learn?

BRUCE:

But it's so meticulous and so precise. And how do you even begin to describe to people what's involved in the process?

REED:

Well, it's, there's art, there's craft, there's a lot to, that goes into it with working with metals. It's like any other love or any other craft. You learn by doing and by continuing to do. And it's one of those things, one of those strange things that you just continually run into roadblocks and just problems that happen. But for some reason, that love stays there and wants you to overcome, overcome that. But basically you could think of it like wood carving. You're removing, you're actually removing metal, whereas machine engraving doesn't typically remove any metal. And so you're carving at, you've got a chip of metal that's coming out and you're, you know, so it will last a lot longer and wear a lot better than the machine engraving of today.

BRUCE:

So in your 35-year career in the engraving industry, what were some of the things that you worked on before you got involved with BorgWarner?

REED:

I have primarily done antiques, silver, jewelry, that type of thing. And along with that, there've been a lot of things that come my way because they couldn't be done on a machine or because anyone who did machine engraving felt it was too risky. In the early 90s, probably one of the highlights of my career is I got to work on a set of musical instruments for the Ludwig Drum Corporation. And we did a replica snare drum that was done back in the 20s and 30s. The Black Beauty that were engraved with floral patterns. Got to do that and a couple of famous drummers ended up with with those drums. Ringo Starr was one of them. And if you remember the old Doc Severinsen band from the Johnny Carson Show, their drummer, Ed Shaughnessy, I did his caricature on all the spaces between the hardware on the drum for that. So that was a highlight. But I've done a lot of different things. I've done strange medical equipment that people wanted you know, names on or identified somehow. Lots of jewelry presentation trays for the Federal Reserve Banks with signatures on them. Just lots of things. If it's metal and my tools will touch it, I'm typically happy to work on it.

BRUCE:

Well, when it comes to drummers, you're not going to get any much more famous than Ringo Starr of The Beatles. Pardon the name drop. How do you begin the process of the BorgWarner Trophy? Steve Schunk of BorgWarner delivers the base that has everything on it with the exception of the 2024 image of Joseph Newgarden, which will be attached to the trophy later. But if you could walk us through the engraving process.

REED:

Well, it starts where we place it on my workbench when he takes it out of the case and I end up turning it upside down and remove the six screws that are on the bottom of it and take the bottom off of it. A lot of people would be interested to know that there's lots of goodies and memorabilia that's stored inside the base. So anyway, I do that, then I move it to my workbench. I cradle it on a, it's basically a flannel pillowcase that's filled with rice, and it can cradle it, but yet hold it firmly enough for me to move it around. Most of the job is involved with just manipulating the trophy itself. There's a lot of turning and twisting, so my back muscles get pretty shredded over the day. You know, it's probably 50 or 60 pound base. but I'm guessing at that. But anyway, it's significant weight and I just manipulate it around. I basically wax the surface and that will accept a pencil line and I put the design, hand draw the design or in this case where we had the duplicate winner, I think I showed you the process of taking a pull and transferring the design over. So I was able to do that. And then, so you just get the design on there somehow, whether it's by hand drawing it or transferring it from something. And then you use the different hand tools to cut out the design and get that all done. And you clean your waxy film off from where you've been working on it and give it a final touch. That's a very, very broad sweep of what it takes to do it.

BRUCE:

But when you transfer the name over, if you could describe that to the listener, how that processes.

REED:

The way I did it for doing Joseph's second entry on the trophy, I took this black powder called Bone Black and I filled the previous cuts. And then I took a piece of basically scotch tape and put it over the top of that and rub it down so that the black powder that's in the cuts sticks to the tape. and then I carefully peel it off and then I wax the surface. It's a mixture of beeswax and half mutton tallow. It's a fancy word for sheep fat, if anybody doesn't know what that is. But anyway, it's used to help dull the surface so that the reflections keep down. But it also will lift the black powder that's on the tape, it lifts it to the surface. And then when you peel the tape off, then you have the image there. And then basically I'm tracing over the top of what was previously done. And that's a great way to keep from misspelling anything.

BRUCE:

So by doing it that way, it sounds like what a forensic scientist would do, lifting fingerprint or thumbprint off.

REED:

I guess in a short way, it is very similar to that.

BRUCE:

whatever happens if you make a mistake after the engraving process to be able to go in and correct it?

REED:

Well, I remember in my training, one of the tasks that I hated the most was metal finishing, but that has gotten my butt out of trouble more times than I can count. So, you know, metal does have a certain amount of movement and fluidity to it, but I think I told you I made a little, in fact, I made a couple of them today that I didn't tell you about yet, but You take this highly polished piece of hard steel and you can gently rub and basically push some of that metal back into the cut and then just keep working it. and even out the surface. As I've often told people, the first rule of engraving is do it correctly. So you do all you can to try to avoid problems, but they do come up and it's part of the work and it's part of the art and skill of it. And basically I have to think of it as design and not as handwriting. But when it's all said and done and I wipe all the schmutz off of it, You want it to look like it says Joseph Dugard in 2024 and his speed, you know. So you just kind of look at it through different eyes.

BRUCE:

There's also some mathematical equations involved. You use some calipers like a draftsman would use to get precise measurements. How do you come up with the mathematical formula of where I start so that everything is perfectly centered?

REED:

Well, the center, if like when I did Joseph's name last year, I hand drew the letters and I was asked to emulate, you know, when I started doing it in 2021, I, you know, they showed me a particular style that was engraved on the trophy that they wanted to emulate. So I've tried to copy that ever since because each artist is going to do it a little bit differently. But I started there and, you know, you find your center point and you can kind of, when you're hand designing the letters, you can work from the center out to get it centered. And sometimes it works out better than others. And, you know, the You know, the skill over 30 years goes a little bit faster than it did at year one. But you draw it and you redraw it. And anyway, you basically work from the center out and you can mark the sides and see how close you are. You know, it's just some of it's trial and error. But you know, you start with marks and you try to hit your marks. I probably didn't explain that very well.

BRUCE:

Working from the center out is interesting because most people when they write, they write from the left side over to the right side. You go center. Yeah. Then do you go to the right next or do you go to the left next or is that pretty much?

REED:

I typically go from the center to the right and then I see where that last part lands and then I'll mark how far from the edge or where if I'm in a tight space, I'll mark that and then I'll mark one on the left side of that same margin and then start from there and try to meet. And then you can adjust and then there's like you can start by sketching and then you can use a light scribe to further refine the design. And then your cut is the finality of that. So you have chances to, to massage it. And, you know, not all letters take up the same space. Experience helps.

BRUCE:

We'll be right back to Pit Pass Indie after this short break. Welcome back to Pit Pass Indie. Here is the second part of my exclusive interview with Reed Smith, the engraver for the Borg Warner Trophy for Pit Pass Indie. Since you began engraving the BorgWarner trophy, the winners have probably had the most letters in their last name. Yep. You've had Castronevas. You've had Erickson, who's got two S's in his last name, not one. And you've got Newgarden. So how complicated and how difficult was it to really work with? Well, I look at these other winners and they had names like Foyt. Or Unser.

REED:

Sato.

BRUCE:

Yes, Sato. Why didn't I end up with a guy with four letters in his name, not 12? How unusual or unique do you think that is that you've become the engraver of the long last name winners of the Indianapolis 500?

REED:

Is that my title now? But no, if you look at it like, say, Sato's name, you know, you got four letters and that's all there is on the line. That is a much more extended version of that Roman-style lettering that's, you know, so in doing Castroneves or Erickson or Newgarden, whatever, you know, you just, you do a more condensed, slender letter. You know, you make it fit. You still have the same box to, you know, the same size box to work within. So it's like life. It gives you chances to adapt.

BRUCE:

Well, the fact that you've had every winner that you've engraved has been the longest last name might help me be able to pick a winner in 2025. Oh, OK. OK.

REED:

OK.

BRUCE:

Prior to that, though, in twenty nineteen pageant, oh, there was probably medium length in terms of letters in that name. And then in twenty twenty Sato four letters. It's like I said, that's one of the things that it's amazed me is beginning in twenty one. It's probably the driver with the longest last name of anybody in the field is the guy that you have to engrave. But there's also the first name, and you do the first name above that, and I believe that's a different size, or is it?

REED:

No, it's the same height characters. In fact, all the characters are the same height. But like the speed that's up at the very bottom of the trophy, you know, is I think they do six digits including the decimal and then you have the MPH on there. So that's a significant length and that's a more slender character.

BRUCE:

Now does the MPH get a period after?

REED:

They do. They do. We went with what had been done before and M period, P period, H period.

BRUCE:

As an engraver, did you inspect the other engravings that are on the trophy?

REED:

Oh, always. If I'm in an antique store or a museum or... meet people and I can tell that they have on hand engraved jewelry. I'm always, I always enjoy looking at other people's work, studying it, you know, just each individual fingerprint is, is in there. And, you know, and they were in the BorgWarner trophy. In fact, the first year I did it, they kind enough to give me basically like a coffee table book about the history of the trophy. And it has close up photos of all them. all the engravings and there are some different styles that they used to do a rounded block style on there and then it changes you know a roman style that has like serifs you know the little triangle tops and bottoms that might remind you of like old stone carving pardon me if i'm boring you with oh no no no this is this is typography speak but because i'm going to ask you a typography question when you finish okay but uh but I'm rare to do the short version of a story, but my long version is all that I've said, and the short version is I love seeing other people's work, so.

BRUCE:

Well, the trophy debuted in 1935, and they went back all the way to 1911 to put all those images and inscriptions on the trophy, so somebody, whoever the engraver was back then was pretty busy that year.

REED:

I would love to see how that cup was managed, just manipulating it while working on it. I mean, I don't know if he rode it like a horse or just straddled it or what, but that's... Well, there was no base. Well, yeah, I know, but the cup is significantly taller. And is it all... I've never had the cup in my possession, so I don't know. Is it all one piece? Is it...

REED:

The top comes off the cup. But the actual trophy itself is. The wings, the handles. Yes, that's all attached.

REED:

That's a, that would be a, that's a, a feat to undertake just the manipulation of it while you're working on it.

BRUCE:

And also you probably don't get a chance to really get to know the winner, but have you heard from winners after you've done your role?

REED:

I have not. I have dealt with, uh, with Steve Shunk primarily, and I've gotten to meet by phone and speak with Will Barron's numerous times. But I haven't heard from the drivers. They have so much going on, I'm not even hurt. It's not about me, but I just, I see more photos than probably the average person that Steve shares with me. And it's amazing all the events that they have to go to and the personal appearances that go with winning. And that's just a huge level of excitement that's in and around that. And I'm not hurt in the least if I don't hear from anyone. I'm just glad that there are people that trust me with the Borg Warner Trophy and that's, It's quite a highlight in my work and life.

BRUCE:

But there's a little bit of serendipity involved with how you ended up getting it and just the fact that. Will Barron's found you. And to think that how that happened is what really got the rest of this going.

REED:

It is. Like I said, he called me on the phone one day. He said he found my website, which is good. It's one of the reasons you have it on. I feel like you're pretty much invisible if you don't. If somebody can't find you online, it's a lot tougher. But he found me and evidently saw samples of my work. that looked like I might have been a good match. And we spoke numerous times and I was very, very, very proud that they trusted me with it and wanted to use me for it. And now this is my fourth time and that speaks volumes. And I'm sure it didn't hurt that I'm also in North Carolina and that maybe they can condense some trips as they travel the trophy around.

BRUCE:

And finally, wrapping up here with Reed Smith, the engraver of the Borg Warner Trophy, two of the most iconic trophies in sports, Stanley Cup that goes to the champion of the National Hockey League and the Indianapolis 500. And to think that these are trophies that really are immortal and that are going to look the same 50 years from now as they looked 50 years ago, only the exception will be there'll be more faces, more engravings and probably another base. But to know that your work, your handiwork is going to be on something that people are still gonna be admiring 50 years from now, how humbling is that?

REED:

It is quite humbling. The first time I did it in 2021, I remember it hit me after I did it. Nobody can take that away from me. I don't want to make it about me. I don't want to make it bigger than this. But that was a big deal, being able to work on the Board Warner Trophy. And just knowing that I have done something and nobody can say that I didn't or that I didn't. And there's also wonderful people like Kay Durham in Columbia, South Carolina, that I do jewelry work for. I have so many wonderful, wonderful clients and I'm just tickled that Boar Warner trusts me and that it's part of history. As simple as that.

BRUCE:

And perhaps one day you'll be at the Indianapolis 500, get to experience it all for yourself.

REED:

That would be a whole other level. I see it on TV and it's a big thing. I don't know. I'm kind of at a loss for words for looking for what that would be.

BRUCE:

And finally, just to put a time element on from the moment you begin your engraving till the time it's done, takes how long?

REED:

Today's been a little bit different, but it's typically taken between six and eight hours to do that. And sure, it just depends.

BRUCE:

Today's been a little bit different because I've been in a way. So what I'm going to do now is step out of your way and let you finish up. But Reed Smith, famed engraver who lives here in the Ballantyne area of Charlotte, congratulations on being part of the historic BorgWarner trophy. Good luck with finishing up your engraving for Joseph Newgarden, a back to back winner, by the way. He collected an extra $440,000 for winning it back to back. Thank you for joining us today on Pit Pass Indy.

REED:

And thank you, Bruce.

BRUCE:

And that puts checkered flag on this edition of Pit Pass Indy. We want to thank our guest Reed Smith, the engraver for the Borg Warner Trophy, for joining us on today's podcast. Along with loyal listeners like you, our guests help make Pit Pass Indy your path to victory lane in IndyCar. For more IndyCar coverage, follow me at X, previously known as Twitter, at BruceMartin, one word, uppercase B, uppercase M, underscore 500. This has been a production of Evergreen Podcast. A special thanks to our production team, executive producers are Bridget Coyne and Gerardo Orlando. Recordings and edits were done by me, Bruce Martin, and final mixing was done by Dave Douglas. Learn more at evergreenpodcast.com. Until next time, be sure to keep it out of the wall.