Car chief Chris Sherwood will serve as the substitute crew chief for the No. 20 Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota of Christopher Bell as Adam Stevens recovers from a double knee injury sustained while on vacation with family, the team announced Monday.
Stevens, 46, underwent successful surgery to repair both knees and will work from JGR’s headquarters during the upcoming races.
“I hate that I won’t be at the track for a few weeks, but I will be fully engaged remotely,” Stevens said in a team release. “I am very thankful for the depth and strength of this 20 team and don’t anticipate my physical absence having any effect on our performance. The surgery went well, and I will be back at the track in a few weeks.”
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Stevens joined SiriusXM NASCAR Radio’s “SiriusXM Speedway” on Tuesday to explain what sidelined him: an errant attempt to leap off a diving board while visiting family in Ohio.
“We were swimming in the pool Sunday afternoon and taking turns jumping off the diving board with the nieces and nephews and my kids, and doing flips and just enjoying ourselves,” Stevens told SiriusXM. “And I felt like my flips weren’t quite as impressive as my 15-year-old son. So, I amped my game up a little bit, and it was fine. And another turn through the line and try a little harder, and they were getting prettier. And my last trip — probably ever now at this point — and I just jumped a little too hard and loaded up a little bit too much on the end of the diving board and ruptured both my patellar tendons at the same time.”
While recalling the story with a hint of humor — “My wife warns everybody I don’t do anything halfway; it’s a character flaw,” he joked — the seriousness of the injury took precedence in the middle of NASCAR’s two-week break for the Olympics.
“Thankfully, I got some good care up there in Ohio and got the ball rolling quickly when I arrived back in North Carolina on Monday and was in surgery on Wednesday morning,” Stevens said. “And the surgery went well. Pretty straightforward. There was no ancillary damage in either knee. It was just that patellar tendon on both sides; no ligaments, no bones, no bone structure issues. So, it was a straightforward fix if you’re an orthopedic surgeon. Wouldn’t be straightforward for any of the rest of us, I guess, and now we’re healing up.”
Stevens, a champion in 2015 and 2019 as crew chief for Kyle Busch, added that if his legs were kept straight, the feeling was more uncomfortable than it was painful. “But any amount of knee bend was extremely painful,” he said. Upon his initial emergency room visit, Stevens was given Velcro leg braces with steel bars to lock his legs out “and I can hobble around with these things on with a walker now,” he said. “And prior to surgery, I just had a cane and these braces, and that was enough to get me around. But my legs have to stay straight at all times for about six weeks.”
Stevens will be relegated to helping the team call races from JGR’s “war room” at the team’s headquarters in Huntersville, North Carolina, while recuperating from his injury. It won’t be his first time there — previously assisting from afar after past at-track suspensions — which removes some of the surprises of working remotely.
“In the heat of battle, you’re not taking in much information visually,” Stevens said of working from the war room. “You don’t have the context of the people around you or the gravity of the situation or how things are layering on top of each other. I just have a couple different data streams, a couple different cameras, all of the scoring, all the SMT, all of the communications. But you’re missing a lot of context. And there’s definitely something to that, which is why we go to the race track.
“But as the years go by, I’ve had the great fortune in my past Cup history to have been suspended numerous times and have experience with this, so we know what we’re up against, and we’ve all gotten a little bit better at it. And technology advances and internet connections get better and every time that you or somebody in your group or in your periphery has to go through something like this, for whatever the reason, you get a little bit smarter.”
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With Stevens away from the track, Sherwood will step into the crew-chief role on-site, fulfilling the position like he did when Stevens was suspended after pre-race inspection at Watkins Glen in 2021. Bell drove the No. 20 Toyota to a seventh-place finish that day. Additional support will come from engineers William Hartman and Chris Whitenight.
“Certainly, the people on my team — Sherwood and William and Whitenight and everybody else who’s going to step up — are more than capable,” Stevens said. “And we’ve found it best through the years, too, that the more we can keep it internal to the team, the more the lines of communication and the job titles and the job descriptions don’t have to change. When you bring somebody in from the outside, even if they’re inside your company, they don’t know the flow of your team. They don’t know whose responsibility is what. You spend a lot of time educating and telling a person like that that you don’t have to tell and educate that somebody internal to your team.
“So Sherwood filled in for me at Watkins Glen when I got booted on race morning inspection, and he did a great job. And that’ll leave William and Whitenight to do their normal roles. And I won’t be the voice on the radio, but I’ll have access to almost everything except for the context that being present gives me.”
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Bell’s No. 20 Toyota currently sits eighth in points with four regular-season races to go before the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs officially begin. In 22 Cup Series starts this season, Bell has wheeled the No. 20 to three wins, seven top fives and 12 top-10 finishes.
Bell and the Cup Series will race at Richmond Raceway in the Cook Out 400 on Sunday (6 p.m. ET, USA Network, MRN Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio, NBC Sports App).