Former championship crew chief Ray Evernham oversees his own operation. Credit: Autostock

Role different but goal still same for crew chiefs

MARTINSVILLE, Va. -- The suspension of crew chief Chad Knaus for the season's first four races shed light on the role that each team's leader plays in preparing the car for Sundays.

With Knaus at the team's shop in Concord, N.C., and success following the No. 48 car on the road, it strengthened the argument that much of each Sunday's race is won during the week. But for the sport's best, it's become a battle of being the best manager rather than being the best behind the wrench.

"When I started doing it in 1998, I changed tires, I built shocks and did setups," said Jimmy Elledge, crew chief for rookie Reed Sorenson. "Today, your teams are so big you have to be involved in all the areas so it kind of takes you away from what we all started doing, and that was being a mechanic."

"Almost every single thing has changed on a race team in the last few years, but really it's the same car that it was 10 years ago -- the components aren't that much different," said Ryan Pemberton, Joe Nemechek's crew chief. "It's a different quality."

Indeed.

Former crew chief and FOX Sports television analyst Larry McReynolds joked about the days when the only equipment he needed on pit road during the 1980s and early '90s was a stop watch. Now, there's a whole pit box full of technology. There's a camera above the pit box. There's real-time statistics.

Larry McReynolds Credit: Autostock

But most importantly, he said, there are more people.

"The crew chief is not really hands-on with the racecar anymore because of so many people you have working on it," McReynolds said.

The job, he said, has shifted from physical to mental. Instead if being known as the top mechanic on the team, crew chiefs are now the masterminds behind getting the most out of their equipment, keeping the right personnel in the right places and keeping NASCAR on its toes.

"These [crew chiefs], I think it's safe to say they are definitely rule-makers," McReynolds said. "I think NASCAR will be the first to tell you that the guys who continue to write the rulebook more than anyone are guys like these here who always try to take it to the next level."

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Former crew chief and Wood Brothers pioneer Leonard Wood was one of those who helped take the action in the garage and on pit road a step higher, only in a different era. He turned tire-changing and car-fueling into an art form in the 1950s and '60s.

While his brother, Glen, drove the family's car week-to-week, it was Leonard who crafted pit crews of family members and friends and turned their normally slow routines on pit road into speedy ballets in order to minimize time lost.

The result revolutionized the pit stop.

"What these people do -- people like Leonard and [former crew chief] Smokey [Yunick] -- is genius," said former crew chief-turned-car owner Ray Evernham, who was recently named by the media as NASCAR's top all-time crew chief. "They looked at the mechanics of making pit stops faster and ways to improve it. What I did was look at the people side of things -- because I really didn't know about the equipment."

But he learned.

HAIL TO THE CHIEF Ray Evernham has been selected as NASCAR's top all-time crew chief in a vote by the national motorsports media.  •   Complete story, click here

Evernham is known as the modern-day Wood, an innovator of pit stops and making gutsy calls on pit road, the first of which put Jeff Gordon in a position to win his first race in 1994, at Lowe's Motor Speedway. Everyone took four tires. Evernham put two on Gordon's car, leading to a faster stop and a victory.

"At the time, we had 13 people working on the cars so it was hard to make time and take a break and go practice pitting," he said of preparing his race teams during the 1990s. "Now people have taken it to a new level. You look at pit stops, and the equipment is the same or even less.

"It's all due to the human development. What goes on right now on pit road is really pretty amazing if you watch it week-to-week."

The crew chief's role is still an art form, Wood said, but of a different kind.

"When I was working, the crew chief was the chief mechanic working on the car," he said. "Nowadays, it's gotten so big, you've got to have an engine man, a transmission man, a chassis man. A crew chief really needs to be smart enough to put the right people in the right places."

If the crew chief accomplishes that, Evernham said, the goal is still the same.

"I think everybody will tell you here," Evernham said, "that all we ever wanted to do is make a racecar go fast."