Like many Vanderbilt University seniors, will be on the career fast track once he graduates on May 11.
Few will be able to keep pace with the mechanical engineering major.
Jaeger will be driving for the Brian Stewart Racing team in the Indy Pro Series as he continues his quest to make it as a top tier race car driver. The Indy Pro Series is a developmental racing series that feeds talent into the Indy Racing League.
“My plan is to give racing 100 percent of my focus after graduation,” Jaeger said. “My goal is Formula 1, but I’d be extremely happy if I became an Indy car driver or a sports car driver.”
For the past four years, the Cincinnati native has been balancing university life with his driving duties. Part of the mission was convincing professors that his racing career deserved the same kind of leeway as football and basketball players. One strategy was showing professors a photo of him in his car – with a Vanderbilt logo on the back wings.
“I had to convince them I wasn’t just slacking off or sleeping in,” Jaeger said. “I really made it a point to have a conversation with each professor and then get all my work done early if I had to miss a class.
“Being in engineering it was a little bit easier because many of my professors were interested in the engineering side of race cars.”
Jaeger got interested in the sport through his father, who raced at local tracks in Ohio. Jim Jaeger also designed and sold the Escort radar detector through his company, Cincinnati Microwave.
“He was upset when the government came out with the 55 mph speed limit,” Brad Jaeger said. “The idea was out there for radar detectors, but being an electrical engineer, he saw the design and said, ‘I can do this better.'”
Brad Jaeger raced go-karts until he was 16, and then began racing one of his father’s old cars at club tracks in Ohio. In his freshman year at Vanderbilt, he joined a professional team and jumped to the Formula 2000 series.
In 2004, he won the Pacific Formula 2000 championship. He spent 2005 competing in some Formula 2000 races and also
moving up to the Star Mazda circuit.
In 2006, Jaeger was racing in Montreal in a support race to the Formula 1 Canadian Grand Prix. He was caught in the middle of a 16-car pileup and was hit in the head by an airborne car.
“I was knocked unconscious,” he said. “I had a concussion and a hematoma on my brain stem. That took me out for almost the entire rest of the season. It was a pretty scary experience.”
With school coming to an end just as a new racing season gets underway, Jaeger says he is fully recovered from the crash and ready to give his driving career his full attention.
Down the road, he’d like to continue his engineering education.
“I’d like to eventually get a master’s or Ph.D. and design cars,” he said. “Already my education makes me a better driver because it helps with my understanding of what the car is doing. So, my college experience really complements my racing career.”
Media Contact: Jim Patterson, (615) 322-NEWS
jim.patterson@vanderbilt.edu