How a former NC State football snapper became Danica Patrick’s race car engineer

William Lee is all about seeking perfection.

As the N.C. State football team’s long snapper from 2004-06, only one of his 347 extra-point, field-goal and punt deliveries did not arrive successfully at the holder or kicker.

His 4.0 grade-point average in mechanical engineering earned Lee valedictorian honors at N.C. State’s spring 2006 commencement. Then he was perfect in the classroom while earning a pair of master’s degrees and a doctorate from N.C. State in mechanical engineering. His doctoral thesis was titled “Modeling and Experimental Characterization of the Interfacial Behavior of High Strength Aluminum Alloys.”

Now, for the sixth year running, the 32-year-old Lee aims daily to produce the perfect ride for the Stewart-Haas Racing team as primary race engineer for Danica Patrick’s car.

If you do not believe there is a thread that runs between mechanical engineering and car-racing technology, let Lee explain in perhaps his best impersonation of Sheldon Cooper.

“It parallels the finite element analysis work I did in grad school where I could change the different aspects of the microstructure of the aluminum in my model and subject it to different loading conditions to see how it responds,” Lee wrote in an email. “Now I have the numerical model of the car, where I can change springs, shocks, etc., and subject it to the loading of each track and see how the car responds.”

Lee had little idea growing up in Fuquay-Varina that he could someday marry his loves of engineering and sports. His parents, Emily and Bill, took care of guiding their son in academics. Both were teachers at Fuquay-Varina High School.

Lee was on his own in sports. He ran track, reached the state high school quarterfinals as a senior 215-pound wrestler, and twice earned all-conference honors as a two-way lineman in football.

When he was 13, Lee learned the finer points of long-snapping on the tailgating lots of Carter-Finley Stadium. N.C. State was playing UNC later that day when Lee’s eighth-grade teacher, Mike Proctor, began teaching him a long-snapping drill. The drill, where the left hand acts as a guide and the right hand throws the ball, is a similar motion, Lee says, to a toss made on a soccer throw-in.

Lee then began prepping for a three-season career as Fuquay-Varina’s long-snapper. Four years later, his high school wrestling coach, Mark Harris, escorted Lee on a visit to N.C. State, where he met with the Wolfpack’s special team’s coach, Joe Pate.

Pate placed a depth chart in front of Lee with only Danny Young listed under long-snapper. Invited as a walk-on, Lee served an apprenticeship under Young for two seasons, then won the starting job for the next three seasons.

His lone bad snap, which Lee says he has attempted to forget ever since, came on a punt against UNC in 2005. (He does remember it occurred on his first snap of the game, left hash mark, 6-yard line, at the field house end of Carter-Finley Stadium, and that the punt was blocked). Otherwise, it was a career full of successes, one of the highlights being a 2005 Meineke Car Care Bowl victory over South Florida. As part of the bowl experience in Charlotte, Lee and his teammates rode in a stock car at Lowe’s Motor Speedway.

In graduate school, Lee faced a project for a dynamics class where he was charged to research a paper, then reproduce and extend the calculations involved. Lee, with assistance from N.C. State professors Andre Mazzoleni and Mohammed Zikry, constructed a computer model to determine how a football is held and how the hold affects the trajectory on a field-goal attempt.

Lee was the lead author on the paper titled “Aerodynamic effects on the accuracy of an end-over-end kick of an American football” that later appeared in Sports Engineering magazine. He also concluded that warming up on the sideline with a wet football had a detrimental effect on snapping a dry football during game action.

“I was always curious, because it always seemed like I would sail the ones when it was dry,” Lee says. “I wanted to see how much of an affect that was. The numbers kind of backed up what I believed.”

Now Lee deals in computer models or simulations that can run a virtual car on every NASCAR track, using analysis of aerodynamics, kinematics and tire data. During races, Lee calculates fuel mileage for Patrick’s car and assists in strategies for when to make pit stops.

“He has one of the most critical jobs from start to finish and is certainly one of the best in the sport at it,” says Billy Scott, Patrick’s crew chief.

It is the perfect job for Lee.

This story was originally published October 30, 2017 at 12:20 PM with the headline "How a former NC State football snapper became Danica Patrick’s race car engineer."