Austin Lee, who is 33, oversees the raising of the iconic Texas and American flags at the Austin–area speedway as its senior director of campus services.
I grew up in San Antonio working on lawn mowers, building fences and decks, doing a little tile work—but nothing like what we do here. I started learning concrete and other trades, and after about two years at Circuit of the Americas, I took over the welding department, then worked my way up to management.
We’re always busy. It’s a large property, about 1,500 acres. We’ve got painters, fabricators, landscapers; there’s 28 of us total. Between events there are car clubs and private rentals coming to the track. No day is the same.
Our entire staff will be here all weekend for a large event like Formula 1. We’ll make sure that the guests are happy, that there are no trip hazards, that everything’s up to par as far as repairs, and then we’ll wait for radio calls.
Any issue that arises, we’ve gotta address it. For example, teams have temporary tents built out for members of their organizations. But the tops are open, and I think team Ferrari likes its privacy. We had to build out a secondary ceiling for them, and we had to do it at night when the teams weren’t there. We didn’t finish until two or two thirty in the morning.
The flags are forty feet tall by eighty feet wide, and each one weighs 86 pounds. It could take four to five guys on a nice day to unfurl them—or ten to twelve when it’s windy. We put them up for all our major races, like F1, MotoGP, and NASCAR. We have a smaller American flag that we’ll put up for pretty much any track rental.
Nine grommets attach each flag to its main cable. Once it’s attached, we use a drill to turn the internal winch and hoist it to the top of the flagpole. We like to get both flags up a day before the race teams load in, and they remain up until the teams load out. At night we have an LED spotlight that illuminates them.
A flag like that is very difficult to handle. We don’t wear any special gloves, but the main focus is keeping the flags off the ground and respecting them as much as we can while getting them up and bringing them down. We have waterproof storage boxes to keep them in. We think of it as an honor.
Weather is tricky. Thankfully there hasn’t been a major event where we’ve been unable to put up the flags. But there’ve been a couple of times when it was too windy and we weren’t able to get them down. Any winds above fifteen miles per hour make it difficult. We had one guy get tossed in the air about five or six feet—he was holding on to the end of the flag, and a gust came through. A few people just lost their grip, but the end whipped up and took him for a ride.
This article originally appeared in the October 2024 issue of Texas Monthly with the headline “Austin Lee, Chief Flag Handler at Circuit of the Americas.” Subscribe today.
