"I'm an IndyCar driver." Shelby says it with no small amount of pride. This is a woman who not only insists on wearing one of her three Indianapolis 500 rings everywhere, but she has the racing series' logo tattooed on the inside of her right wrist. She lives and breathes for the sport. "I drive the No. 2 Chevrolet for Team Penske." She also has a tendency to forget when she's talking to people who aren't also in the business and don't know that means she drives for the top team.

A nod back toward her boyfriend, who has the better part of a foot of height on her. "Peter is the strategist for my teammate's No. 3 car. He calls the races, so I guess you could call him the captain of his team, in a sense." She worked with a different strategist who was much more difficult, but that was a whole other long story. "What we do probably isn't as cool as a starship, though," she adds with a laugh.