1on1 with RCR's high-tech pit-crew coach, Matt Clark (cont'd)

Q: Do you find a lot of parallels between coaching college baseball and coaching NASCAR pit crews?

Clark: Coaching is coaching, and one day I hope to be a corporate consulting coach. So I'll still be coaching then. ... For me, I'm a baseball guy and so is our strength guy, Ray Wright. He played at LSU and won a national championship. There are so many parallels with baseball and a lot of the movements that we do as far as on the pit stops that we do.

I'll start talking to some of the guys, and although it's not necessarily in baseball terminology, the foundation is there and we apply that to what we do over the wall.

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What they do on a regular basis is staggering. What I vowed to those guys as a coach is that I would try to keep up with them. I told them I wouldn't ask them to do anything I wasn't willing to do or hadn't done in the past. But I can't hang with them in their workouts. They go to exhaustion.

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-- MATT CLARK

Q: Can you give us a specific example or two?

Clark: As we have the jackman set up on the right side, as we have him set up to go right to left, you have to keep your hips slightly open. And it's the same thing as when you're taking a lead off first base. If you're going to steal second base, you can't steal second base with your hips closed. You have to have them slightly open, so you can explode and go in the direction that you want to go. It's the same principle with our jackman.

There are some other principles in our hand-and-eye coordination stuff. I love middle infielders and how their hands and eyes are involved in handling the ball; [it's the same as] our guys handling the guns and lug nuts, tire indexes. So there are a lot of parallels that we draw every day.

Q: Talk a little about your dad. You said he was a street racer?

Clark: I don't want to paint my dad in a bad picture. But you know, it was a little bit more accepted [back then] -- and if you saw the blue lights, you ran home. He would do that in different towns up in New England. The towns were small and they would race each other. He would go and drop my mom off at the house and say, 'So-and-so challenged me to a race.' And then they would go race somewhere. Not necessarily for money, but always for pride.

So he would go and change out the rear tires, take out the back seat to lighten her up, put on the stuff he needed to race in -- and he would leave at [midnight] to go racin'. Unfortunately, he saw some very good friends get badly injured, even killed, and that was a wakeup call for him. As he kind of changed his ways, he pointed us in a direction that was different. For that, I was glad. But racing has been a great dynamic for me to live out my career.

Q: What does your dad think of all this?

Clark: Fortunately when I was at Hendrick Motorsports [from 2001 until leaving to take his current position at RCR in January of 2008], we won a lot of races. We won championships there and rings. What I did, every ring we won, I bought for him. Every ring we ever won over there, I sent to him -- and he wears 'em proudly.

He's a prison chaplain now, and when he goes into the prisons, he shows off those rings. ... He's just a proud pop right now.

Q: So he's gone from street racer to prison chaplain?

Clark: Well, we grew up in the construction business. And honestly, that's where I learned the value of hard work. If you don't work, you don't get paid. And all those things translate to the racing industry. ... A lot of these guys work to get the truck loaded -- and if that's 7 or 8 at night, then it's 7 or 8 at night. A lot of these guys just worked Memorial Day. That's just the way it is, and that's the way it was for us back in the day, too. Our dad taught us the value of hard work, and I'm so grateful for that.

Q: Speaking of hard work, obviously all the hard work you guys have been putting in paid off when the No. 31 team won the recent Pit Crew Challenge?

Clark: That was a big deal for RCR and our crew guys on the No. 31. It was a combination of a lot of hard work and our strength coach, Ray Wright. He kept those guys pounding and in great shape. We made a real effort. We made a real determination that we were going to win.

Q: What kind of physical conditioning do those guys go through?

Clark: I can really only speak to what we do at RCR. Ray Wright does an unbelievable job. What they do on a regular basis is staggering. What I vowed to those guys as a coach is that I would try to keep up with them. I told them I wouldn't ask them to do anything I wasn't willing to do or hadn't done in the past. But I can't hang with them in their workouts. They go to exhaustion. Those guys walk out of the gym absolutely spent.

I've got a good friend of mine who is absolutely chiseled. I challenged him to come up and have a workout with us and told him he wouldn't make it through half of it. It was a lighter workout and he had to tag out halfway through. He didn't believe me. He told me afterward, 'Now I'm a believer.'

Joe Menzer is the author of "The Great American Gamble: How the 1979 Daytona 500 Gave Birth to a NASCAR Nation." Click here to purchase.