Hendrick Motorsports crew chief Greg Ives announced on Friday that he will retire from his role atop the No. 48 team pit box after the 2022 season and will take another position within the company.
Ives has been a crew chief at Hendrick Motorsports for eight full-time seasons, inheriting the position with the No. 88 team when Steve Letarte left to become an analyst for NBC Sports. Ives won three races with Dale Earnhardt Jr. his first year in 2015, and 10 total so far in his time with Hendrick.
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Ives and driver Alex Bowman are coming off a four-win campaign in 2021, the highest in a season for both driver and crew chief and their first year together in the No. 48 shop. All told, the Ives-Bowman partnership will span five full-time seasons.
“It’s been a great ride,” Ives said Friday during a media availability at Daytona International Speedway. “But ultimately, it came to the point where I’m ready to be home with my family, go-kart and softball dad, and maybe even flag football coach.”
Bowman is one of 14 drivers who has qualified for the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs ahead of Sunday’s Coke Zero Sugar 400 (10 a.m. ET, CNBC, Peacock, MRN, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio), the regular-season finale at Daytona. All seven of his Cup Series victories have come in partnership with Ives, who Bowman has nicknamed “The Riddler” for his sometimes cryptic communications over the team radio.
“I don’t know anything different than Greg,” Bowman said, noting that the search for a new crew chief is ongoing. “So just trying to think about the things that are going to benefit me the most and think about kind of the leadership that I need and what can help me has been interesting. We’ve had a lot of conversations so far, and I’m excited for Greg and the fact that he’s not really going anywhere else and he’ll be close by at Hendrick Motorsports is really good as well.”
Before his promotion to the Cup Series, Ives spent two years as a NASCAR Xfinity Series crew chief, which culminated in a championship with driver Chase Elliott for JR Motorsports in 2014. He moved to Hendrick Motorsports the following season.
Ives shed some light about the scope of his new role with the organization, which he said should work closely alongside VP of competition Chad Knaus and fellow team leadership in Jeff Gordon and Jeff Andrews.
“Chad and I work well together, and he’s gotten into a lot of different things with Jeff Andrews’ move up to help support the company,” Ives said. “And I see myself somewhere in the middleman of different projects — any project to come up, making sure that they are successful, taking direction from Chad and Jeff Gordon and Jeff Andrews and whatever else Mr. H wants. There’s wasn’t really like, ‘hey, you’re directly in charge of this or that.’ It’s more like, you’re a guy that can provide performance for us and get our company where it needs to be in other things other than just crew-chiefing one team.”