NASCAR Then and Now - Ben White [4]
As NASCAR teams have grown over the years, the jobs within the team have become more and more specialized, to the point that every part on a car is analyzed and repaired only by people with direct knowledge of it. Today’s NASCAR Sprint Cup crew chief is often compared to a National Football League head coach. His role is to lead them to make certain that everyone on the team is prepared for every situation on the track. He also “calls the plays” regarding race strategy, and relays the game plan to the driver, the high-speed quarterback who executes the strategy.
With his ever-present cowboy hat, often stained by dirty hands, team owner and chief mechanic Smokey Yunick was an inventor who often applied a perfect mix of science and street smarts to produce race-winning engines and cars. A gruff character who rarely, if ever, delivered his opinions with a sugar coating, Yunick’s brilliant mind was constantly coming up with ways to get a leg up on the competition, often stretching—or breaking— NASCAR’s rules.
Illinois native Chad Knaus spent the first decade of his career working for several different organizations before being tapped to lead Jimmie Johnson’s No. 48 team in 2002. The rest has become NASCAR history, with four straight Sprint Cup championships from 2006 onward. Johnson’s skills and smarts, combined with Knaus’s technical wizardry and communication skills, have made the No. 48 team the class of NASCAR. When problems arise, the two work their strategy, come back to the front, and often are the ones celebrating in victory lane.
Team Bosses
During NASCAR’s early days, “the team owner” was often the same guy who drove the car to the track and ran it in the race. But as the sport grew in the 1950s, it became more professional. By the 1960s many teams had become organized, professional entities, employing drivers, mechanics, engineers, and even marketing and public relations people.
Today, a top NASCAR Sprint Cup team employs as many as 500 people, including dozens of mechanics and engineers, dedicated pit crews, driver coaches, media, licensing, and public relations staff, as well as travel coordinators. NASCAR has indeed become big business, but it is still fueled by the same passion for racing that drove the sport’s first competitors.
Carl Kiekhaefer was a NASCAR pioneer of sorts, the first team owner to build a multi-car powerhouse team, employing as many as a half-dozen drivers to wheel his solid white Chrysler 300s. A well-known entrepreneur of outboard boat engines, the Wisconsin native was first and foremost a businessman, and the purpose of his brief but dominant foray into NASCAR was to get his Mercury Outboard Motors logos in front of the buying public. He put them in the history books, as well, securing NASCAR championships in 1955 (with Tim Flock) and 1956 (with Buck Baker) before abruptly leaving the sport, citing that he had achieved his goals.
With nine Sprint Cup championships in his trophy case, Rick Hendrick is the man to beat in today’s NASCAR. After a successful career as the owner of race boats, the well-known North Carolina car dealer followed his dream of becoming a NASCAR team owner in 1984. Starting out as a one-car operation with Geoffrey Bodine as his driver, he enjoyed immediate success, and later became a powerhouse after adding Jeff Gordon in 1992, winning four championships with Gordon, the 1996 title with Terry Labonte, and Jimmie Johnson’s four championships through 2009.
Mechanics and Pit Crews
No professional race team can have success without the support of many people working behind the scenes. Decades ago, a top team consisted of fewer than a dozen people who handled every detail. With sponsorship dollars as little as $100,000 for a single season in the 1970s, the company payroll only had room for essential personnel. There were no fleets of cars filling race shops in the early days of NASCAR racing. At most, a team might build three different cars—one for short tracks,