SALISBURY, N.C. — Work-life balance in NASCAR is definitely a thing. The delicate, industry-wide dance to keep career aspirations and personal moments separate affects all comers. Race teams arguably have one of the more rigorous time-management tugs-of-war of them all.

Hours at the track can be long, and the shop-centered preparation to get there is another pressing commitment. It’s part of why Niece Motorsports’ Cody Efaw encourages his staff to shut it off once the clock strikes closing time.

“I take a lot of pride in not working extra,” says Efaw, Niece’s team CEO and president. “My motto is ‘7 to 4, not a minute more.’ ”

Sometimes, though, shutting off work mode doesn’t always mean leaving the workplace. Not long after Niece moved into its current home in 2023, Efaw and Co. had a vision to bring the life part of work-life balance onto the team’s 20-acre plot. Think along the lines of installing a ping-pong table in the break room, but on a much larger, more specific scale.

Quitting time at Niece Motorsports often means a late-afternoon migration to a homemade dirt track that’s nestled against the woods circling the shop’s backyard. The bullring — which measures a fifth or one-sixth of a mile, depending on whom you ask — has become an important gathering place for employees of all types as spectators or competitors. Their families often join in on the fellowship.

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“As much fun as you can have with 6 1/2 horsepower,” one driver notes in the small pit lane as a colleague’s go-kart buzzes into the neatly banked turns. The extracurricular oval track is just one of the things Efaw has had a hand in building. There’s also the three-team operation that’s entering its second decade of NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series competition, but he’s also helped to build a community within the shop’s walls.

“I think it’s something where we spend more time with our work family than we do our own family. I have for 20-some years,” Efaw says from the driver’s seat of the team’s track-packing Jeep, a racing executive who’s right at home in well-worn jeans and scuffed work boots. “So you’re around these guys all the time, but you’re in the pressure cooker, right? You’re at the track, everything’s a go, there’s a job to do, we’ve got to go. So you never have a chance to laugh.”

Race weekends used to be longer, Efaw notes, and some of the schedule lulls and breaks offered more time to develop team camaraderie. The dirt track fills that void, providing a reminder of the fun factor that’s drawn so many into racing in the first place.

“It’s just awesome to know when it hits four o’clock, a lot of people at your regular jobs, they leave and go home to their families, but a lot of our families come here and watch us fool around back here,” says Matt Gould, a 20-year-old racer splitting time between trucks and late models. “So it’s awesome. Like, I know as best as anybody that this race team is family-oriented, so it’s cool to see other families be oriented into this team.”

The reason Gould knows is that his father, Phil, has been a Niece Motorsports staple as a crew chief since 2019, a pivotal year in the organization’s history. His son has been a fixture since then in his own right, earning the nickname L.P. — for “Little Phil” — around the shop.

The elder Gould has seen both sides of the team’s evolution, from its feisty upstart beginnings in a small, rented space in Mooresville to its rounding into a contending organization housed in an 80,000-square-foot facility that hums three miles from Salisbury’s town center. He said the expansion has been significant, but the small-team character and charm have never left.

“It’s grown from then, but it’s a small niche group and reminded me what racing was like when I first started out, which was family — like me and my brothers and buddies and friends building a car and going to the race track and racing,” said Phil Gould, now also Niece’s director of competition. “A lot of those roots came back to me and reminded me how much I like that.”

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On a January weekday, chassis work whirs over a music bed of classic rock from a nearby radio. The Allman Brothers’ “Blue Sky” plays while the trucks that will wear Niece’s almost sky-blue logo are being built and buffed, with the NASCAR season’s official kickoff approaching in Daytona.

In the pockets of the shop floor that aren’t occupied by trucks in various states of race readiness, the fruits of Facebook Marketplace have their homes. In one corner, a fully functional high school athletics scoreboard has been salvaged, and it’s complete with lighted numbers, controls and a working buzzer. In other tucked-away spots, second-hand karts sit idle on tiny tires awaiting their time to go.

If the lines in the shop sometimes blur between the work-life split, so does the division between the front offices and the hands-on work bays in the back. On this typical offseason Thursday, Matt Gould is on chassis-building detail, improving his skills on the assembly row and finish fabrication — “whatever they need me to do,” he says. His father’s day is also split between meeting a General Motors rep in his office and making seat rails back in the shop’s main floor. While there’s a threshold between the carpet of the office world and the smooth, hard surface of the shop, that line blurs, too.

Donovan Strauss, 20, has all the markings of an up-and-coming racer with CARS Tour experience, but on this offseason Thursday, he’s on a ladder, peeling an old vinyl wrap off one of Niece’s haulers to get the team ready for Daytona. “I look at people that succeed, they have work ethic,” Efaw says. That trait stretches across each of the team’s departments.

“You get on more common ground when you’re in there elbow to elbow, and everybody’s pitching in,” Phil Gould says. “… I think the younger kids coming in being able to work and help is big, just gaining respect of all the people that work here. These guys, they’re our face when they go to the race track, so getting to know them and having a rapport, I think, is important.”

Even while he’s overseeing the dirt oval and making enhancements to the grounds, Efaw is still working. When he’s not fielding phone calls from team partners, he’s observing. When one driver in Niece’s pipeline blends his kart onto the backstretch and then promptly slows with a dry fuel tank, he files it away that a more hands-on approach might be needed to assist his development. Another driver has his go-kart dialed in after an adjustment. Efaw notes that, too.

Management has long been in Efaw’s blood. The 41-year-old had four people reporting to him when he worked as a youngster on a dairy farm growing up in rural Ohio. His standout high school athletics career placed him in positions where a captain’s sense was almost required — a basketball point guard, a pitcher in baseball and a quarterback during his football days. Those lessons have served Efaw well as he manages the nearly 60 full-time employees under Niece’s roof.

“I don’t want to punch a clock. I refuse to have time clocks unless the state comes in and tells me I’ve got to have them,” Efaw says. “I do believe in everything there, from the drivers being in there working, there’s a level of continuity. Chemistry is sometimes tossed to the side over margins or profits or production or what we’ve got to get done, but if you have at the core a solid continuity and chemistry and a positive culture, you’ll be able to achieve all those things. I just think a lot of that’s overlooked because of the bottom dollar, so I think it’s very important that they come through this cycle.”

The organization’s big plans for the season ahead include an all-star press for the Feb. 13 opener at Daytona (7:30 p.m. ET, FS1, NASCAR Racing Network Radio, SiriusXM NASCAR Radio). Cup Series regular Ricky Stenhouse Jr., a former Daytona 500 champ, will be in a Niece Motorsports truck for his series debut. So will extreme sports star Travis Pastrana, who returns to Niece for his first NASCAR start since 2023. Americana influencer Cleetus McFarland has joined forces with Niece to attempt his first Truck Series race. And Ross Chastain — a regular in the Cup Series and at the Niece dirt track who launched to national-series prominence along with the team seven years ago — plans to max out his mandated eight-race allotment of Craftsman Truck Series events with the team this season.

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More is potentially in store for the dirt track, too. Efaw talks about retaining walls, some basic bleacher seats and the possibility of tapping into the expertise of ownership partner J.F. Electric for lighting.

Phil Gould says he welcomes the recreation but also laughs at how his family’s journey has made a full-circle trip. When his son, Matt, graduated to full-bodied stock cars as he climbed the racing ladder, the Goulds sold off their go-karting equipment. Now they’re back in business.

“Being able to go back there and turn some laps keeps me young,” the elder Gould says before joking, “or makes me realize how old I am when I go out there.”

Phil Gould might be a fair distance removed from his driving days in the Pro Stock division at historic Wall Stadium in his native New Jersey, but one of Niece’s most popular attractions has drawn him back in. The friendly competition has meant more father-son moments for the Goulds, but other team members and their families have built similar bonds while kicking up some North Carolina clay.

For this crowd, a ping-pong table in the break room just wouldn’t do.

“I was racing with Matt, and actually I led most of one of the races, and he passed me about two (laps) to go, nerfed me out of the way,” Phil Gould said. “I mean, I wasn’t mad. I was jokingly mad. He said, ‘Well, Dad, that’s how you taught me how to race.’ I was like, ‘Well, good point. I guess I’d be mad if you didn’t.’ ”