But down the steep hill and across the street from the pristine race shops, tucked away behind the administrative offices, chassis and body shops and the musuem, is the pit pad, which the coaches are busy readying for the day’s practice with the No. 25 team of Chase Elliott, who is running five races for Hendrick Motorsports as a part-time Sprint Cup Series rookie this season. The first crew member to arrive is the rear tire carrier.
“Hi, Jeff Knight,” he says with a firm handshake and a Southern drawl that reveals his North Carolina roots.
But Knight is no rookie himself.
Twenty years ago, he was the rear tire carrier for another young star named Jeff Gordon — and an original member of the celebrated Rainbow Warriors pit crew.
“That was probably the biggest time for me,” Knight recalled, referencing the back-to-back championships for Gordon in 1997 and 1998. “Knowing I was a part of something that was getting ready to be history. And you really didn’t know what it was going to be 20 years later.”
At 50 years old and happily employed as a pit coach of the No. 13 Sprint Cup team, Knight didn’t foresee himself getting back to pitting race cars before this season. When asked if he’ll come out of pitting retirement — which he just entered in 2012 — after this year, he chuckles and says his body can’t take any more abuse.
And for a man who started his NASCAR career with a fledgling Gordon, likely ending his pitting career with an up-and-coming Elliott — Gordon’s eventual replacement in the No. 24 car — is the perfect finale.
It’s like the beginning, and now the end, of a rainbow.
• • •
Back in 1995, Gordon was just a young driver from California trying to race with the big boys of the South. And Knight was an equally young athlete hailing from Matthews, North Carolina, who had spent more time on a football or baseball field than at a NASCAR track.
But one aspect of the pit crews caught Knight’s sports-minded eye.
“I’d seen it on TV … how competitive it was and it was a team sport,” Knight said, referring to the crew members and their pit stops. ” … That’s what kind of triggered me to want to get involved in it.”
After an audition with pit coaching pioneer Andy Papathanassiou in 1995, Knight joined the No. 24 pit crew later dubbed the Rainbow Warriors: a group of men who became known for their athleticism and swiftness on pit road, paving the way for the athletic nature of pit stops today. Led by renowned crew chief Ray Evernham, Knight and the Rainbow Warriors helped Gordon record double-digit winning seasons from 1996-1998, including consecutive championships in 1997 and 1998.
During that time, “Jeff Gordon” became a household name and the No. 24 rainbow-colored Chevrolet an icon. Nevertheless, the driver was never a ghost figure to his crew.
“Jeff always made himself available to us,” Knight said. “He was always at the meeting. He would come around and you would see him before the race — Victory Lane a lot of times.
“… He’d come to the race shop every now and then and drive the pit practice car for us. He was just a good guy, like he still is. You just don’t find many Jeff Gordons in the sport this day and time.”
In a journey generously peppered with success, traveling and long days in close quarters, Knight also formed close bonds with his fellow firesuit-clad Warriors.
“To be a good pit crew, you’re together so much this day and time, you’ve got to get along,” Knight said. “It’s like a brotherhood. … Most of (the Rainbow Warriors) still stay in contact to this day. Of the six or seven that go across pit road, I still talk to three or four on a regular basis.”
The team members became so close that when they did leave Hendrick Motorsports in 2000, they did so as a group, with five of the six Warriors moving to Robert Yates Racing to pit the No. 88 car of future Hall-of-Famer Dale Jarrett. The close-knit relationships between the No. 24 team members led to impressive pit stops, making them the team to beat on pit road — a notion that was both an honor and a heavy load on their shoulders.
“There’s always pressure anytime you’re running for a bunch of wins and championships and running in the top five every week in this sport,” Knight said. “There’s pressure on every single pit crew member. But back then there was a little more added pressure because Jeff was so young. He was the up-and-coming superstar in the sport and we had a lot of pressure from Ray Evernham to be the best every single week.
“… But after a while, you either made it or you didn’t and if you made it during those pressure times, it was just like going out there like anybody else goes to work every single day — it just became second nature to us. That’s how it was taught to us and that’s how we believed — we believed we were going to win every single race and we believed every single week that we were going to be one of the best teams on pit road.”
• • •
The high-pitched shriek of air guns signals the beginning of the No. 25 team’s practice. Knight preps the tires off to the side, his business-like demeanor reflecting years under Evernham’s instruction.
And when the practice car comes screeching to a halt for the first stop, Knight races around the car, carrying the 50-pound tire with seeming ease. Most of the four-tire stops fall around the 13-second range, a satisfactory time for the coaches, especially considering the No. 25 team uses older equipment than the other Hendrick squads. They’ll aim for these times this weekend when Elliott makes his second of five Sprint Cup starts this season at Richmond International Raceway.
“There are only five opportunities — you’d love to win a race,” Knight said. “But I think the main goal is to just go out there — we know we don’t have the equipment that the other teams have, we know we’re older than everybody else — but at the same time to just be competitive. To go out and do good, solid pit stops.”
But Knight, dressed in a dry-fit black T-Shirt and Hendrick Motorsports sweatpants — the standard uniform of the team’s pit crew members, doesn’t look his age of 50 years. He flies through pit stops, jesting back-and-forth with the visting No. 48 tire changer during breaks and talking with his new teammates. It’s like he’s back home, doing something that first became second nature to him 20 years ago.
“To get to go back and come back to Hendrick Motorsports where I really started my career pitting it — finish it pitting the car,” Knight said. “… And that’s why it meant so much, to come back and do that for five times for a kid who’s going into Jeff Gordon‘s car, who I pitted for so many times, won a lot of races and championships with.
“To kind of end it like that before (Elliott) goes into that car, it’s pretty special.”
Knight (shown holding tire) gets ready to spring into action at the pit pad.
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