In December 2022 Eddie Fuhrer, now a senior studying journalism at Lehigh, started a website to report on the lower levels of car racing, USOpenWheelNation. At first it was tough to get anyone to respond to his email requests for interviews, but over time his audience grew and he could tell the site was becoming more influential.

A year later Fuhrer featured a young driver who was up and coming, not already well known to his readers. Alex Popow had moved to Florida from Venezuela and was having a lot of success in regional races but struggling to secure the financial backing he needed to move up to the national circuit. That was the first time most of Fuhrer's audience had heard Popow's name. 

"Usually I was interviewing drivers who were established or were on winning teams, but this was one of the first times where I really sought to highlight someone who deserved an opportunity but didn't get one," Fuhrer recalled. Popow "still texts me. That was the difference maker to him being able to make it in racing because he is now racing on the national level in Formula 4."

Now the racing world is recognizing how influential Fuhrer's work has become, too, honoring him with the 2025 Rod Campbell Award. Named after a pioneer in motor sports promotions, the award provides paid apprentice work to a young adult who wants to work in motor sports journalism, public relations, marketing, sales, business development, or sponsorship. This is the fourth time the award has been given (and the second time Fuhrer applied); all four previous winners now work full-time in the racing industry.

For Fuhrer, the award is the natural outgrowth of years of hard work. He started attending races with his dad and grandpa and writing about them when he was in elementary school. In high school he established his own website to cover sports at Kiski Area High School, the school he graduated from north of Pittsburgh. And at Lehigh he has been a prolific sportswriter for The Brown and White, the student newspaper, in addition to running USOpenWheelNation.

Hitting the Gas

As a child in western Pennsylvania Fuhrer became a racing fan in the shadows of his dad and grandpa. While they mostly watched races on TV, they attended races at Lernerville Speedway in Sarver and Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course in Lexington, in addition to NASCAR tracks in Dover, Bristol, and Charlotte. When Fuhrer was 11, though, his father died in an accident. 

"From then on my relationship with the sport changed from something I did with him to something I associate with his memory," he said. "That became a really important part of my life and an important way to connect with my past."

In the last couple of years fun racing experiences have brought Fuhrer back to his childhood. When he interned for Fox Sports in the summer of 2023, he got to do a standup broadcasting segment at Charlotte Motor Speedway, one of the first tracks he went to as a child. And in 2024 he got to interview the son of Dan Wheldon, one of Fuhrer's favorite drivers when he was little. Wheldon died in an IndyCar race crash in 2011.

"I got the chance to interview his son after he won one of his first races at the lower level of racing last year, and that was just something that was so cool, the fact that racing carried through that family regardless of tragedy and the fact that I got the chance to interview him," he said. 

Going back almost as far as Fuhrer's love of racing was his desire to become a writer. He recently found a journal from fourth grade that he had formatted as a sports section from a newspaper covering car races. In high school he built his own website to cover sports at his school. By the time he arrived at Lehigh in the fall of 2021, he had become an experienced multimedia journalist, sharing live updates on social media during games and producing videos and infographics afterward.

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Getting the Green Flag

Fuhrer graduated from high school during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic and committed to Lehigh before he had ever visited the campus. Initially he wasn't sure he wanted to study journalism, but he wanted a college experience that would be academically rigorous. He sought out Matt Veto, journalism professor and student newspaper adviser, and became very involved at The Brown and White, the student newspaper. Though Fuhrer's biggest contribution at the newspaper was his sportswriting, he wrote for all five sections and won a 2024 Student Keystone Media Award for his coverage of the Israel-Hamas protests on campus. 

"Eddie became our human database in the newsroom. He'd dig through The Brown and White archives and Lehigh Sports stat sheets and come up with some of the most incredible story notes," Veto wrote in an email. "It might turn into a single line in an overall piece, but it'd be a detail that absolutely no one else would have, which is what made it stand out. And so one day, the sports information director for another school in our conference reached out to Eddie to find out where he got a stat about their school."

He has also had elite internship experience during his college career. In addition to interning for Fox Sports in 2023, he worked for NBC Sports at its headquarters in Stamford, Conn., during the Olympics in the summer of 2024. He helped run the Peacock streams for more than 50 different events.

"Really, it was the kind of work I was surprised they would let an intern do because if I messed up, nobody's watching USA gymnastics," he said, laughing. He enjoyed interning there alongside Lauryn Heskin, a friend from his freshman dorm at Lehigh.

While in Bethlehem he has made time for a couple of new hobbies. Fuhrer loves trivia competitions and is the captain of the school's quiz bowl team. He is proud to have been part of the Lehigh team that made it to the national tournament in 2022. He also joined the tap dancing and swing dancing clubs at Lehigh, even though he had no prior dancing experience. 

Pushing the Limits

As a college student Fuhrer knew he wanted to have "a very serious passion project," and he considered several options before deciding to write about the lower levels of racing. The website was rough when he first published it at the end of 2022, and about 50 people read it in the first month, possibly all relatives of his, Fuhrer remembers with a smile. Now the site gets anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 readers per month, and his accounts on TikTok and Instagram get around 150,000 impressions per month. 

His audience is younger than the typically aging audience of car racing, partially because of the content he produces, particularly on TikTok and Instagram, and partially because most of the drivers he writes about are between 14 and 23 years old. That means his audience is attractive to advertisers. 

Managing the business side of the site has been a steep learning curve for Fuhrer. He started out paying for everything out of funds he made at summer jobs, but he has brought on paying sponsors now. With an audience that consists largely of young drivers and their families, the sponsors he attracts offer products they might want, like helmets or race car parts. Figuring out how much he can charge them has been a challenge.

"You have to start small and try to get enough money just to cover a flight or cover the meals for a given weekend, but my plan is to continue to develop trust and continue to develop the sales and business experiences with these companies that I can eventually sustain myself and potentially do my own work entirely full-time," he said.

That's one of the things he hopes to learn about during the fellowship after graduation. The Rod Campbell Award winner gets to work alongside professionals Campbell mentored at different motor sports and automotive companies. Fuhrer hopes to move to Indianapolis by the end of the summer and become fully immersed in the racing world. 

"What they've done is just provide a really great pathway for people who otherwise probably would have had a lot more challenge getting into the industry full-time to have that opportunity, and I'm very grateful," he said.