Last time Panthers coach visited shop veteran driver won Sprint All-Star Race
CONCORD, N.C. — It was the sort of game-day speech that Ron Rivera has been accustomed to delivering in his four seasons as an NFL head coach — forceful, designed to inspire and motivate. Tuesday morning, though, his words didn’t resonate inside the familiar setting of the Carolina Panthers’ locker room but instead in an all-hands team meeting at Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates’ NASCAR headquarters.
Rivera’s first visit to the Ganassi shop, in May of 2014, wound up being a roaring success. Just days after the Panthers’ coach met the team and offered a speech about staying relevant in an evolving sport, Jamie McMurray found himself on Victory Lane in the NASCAR Sprint All-Star Race. With results like those, McMurray might’ve been prompted to ask what took so long to book the return trip?
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“We’ll see, I guess, how it goes this weekend,” McMurray said with a laugh, pointing toward Sunday’s race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. “He’s been a really good friend of (team co-owner Felix Sabates), and he’s become a really great friend of our team’s, and I’ve become a real big fan of his. When you watch on TV and watch other sports, I don’t know that you appreciate everything that goes into it and how talented people are behind the scenes but he is an amazing guy and he is where he is because of his ability.”
With 19 of 36 Sprint Cup Series races in the books this year, Rivera’s speech could almost be considered a slightly belated halftime pep talk. Either way, it comes at a pivotal time for the Ganassi team, which heads into Sunday’s Crown Royal Presents the Jeff Kyle 400 at the Brickyard (3:30 p.m. ET, NBC Sports Network, IMS, SiriusXM) with seven regular-season races left to bolster the credentials for both McMurray, the 2010 Brickyard winner, and teammate Kyle Larson in the Chase for the NASCAR Sprint Cup playoffs.
It’s a spot Rivera was in last year with the Panthers, who rallied from a six-game losing streak midway through to win their final four regular-season games, win a division title and earn a playoff berth. After last weekend’s race at New Hampshire, McMurray clings to the 11th spot in the 16-driver Chase Grid while Larson sits 21st in the series standings, having missed a race because of illness. Both drivers are still searching for their first victory in 2015.
Rivera’s speech was tailored to reach a different audience but the shared bond of teamwork bridged any potential gap between the motorsports world and professional football. That became evident last season when Rivera asked the Ganassi team for footage of the team’s race-winning pit stop last May, intending to show his team and to illustrate how the Panthers could benefit from similar coordination and cooperation.
It was at last year’s All-Star event that Rivera learned that an 18-second pit stop seems fast in layman’s terms only. The head coach also learned that the two sports have more in common that one might think.
“There are a lot of parallels and first and foremost, it starts with teamwork,” Rivera said. “Really, my message is to make sure everyone’s doing what they want to do and everybody’s doing what the group wants to do because at the end of the day, if somebody’s not on board and doing the things that they need to do to give you a chance to win, you’re not going to win. Also, the parallel being that last year as a football team, we started hot then had our problems. Same thing with these guys — they started hot and have had their problems.
“And I know at the end of the day, they’ve still got seven weeks left. They have every opportunity to get into the Chase for the Cup, so who knows. That’s really the message, that they can control it. They control their own destiny and the truth of the matter is, on any given Sunday, they’re the best race team and they’ve got a chance to win.”
After his nearly 20-minute talk, Rivera said he’d welcome the chance to return, adding that spending time in another professional sport helped to enhance his leadership skills. If the coach’s presence remains a good-luck charm for the Nos. 1 and 42 Chevrolet teams, he may be called upon as a much more frequent visitor.
“To have someone of that caliber available to you to talk to your team in a real-life situation, somebody they know and somebody they respect and understand, that speaks their language, we’re really, really lucky to have an outsider like that come in with a little different perspective, but exactly on point,” Ganassi said. “We’ve got seven weeks till the playoffs begin and we want to have both cars in.”