CHARLOTTE, N.C. — D.J. Twitty was taking it all in: the jackmen lifting the race cars, the whizzing of air guns screwing in lug nuts, the slinging of 50-pound wheels. For a South Carolina native like the 24-year-old Twitty, the cacophonous scene was just this side of paradise.
“I’m ready to make this my home,” Twitty said. He was one of 55 recruits who attended the annual pit crew combine for Hendrick Motorsports. The auto racing team’s coaches and trainers use the all-day event in June — and a smaller, three-day minicamp held last week — to find a half-dozen or so athletes capable of jumping onto a track, gassing a car and changing tires in less than 10 seconds.
Twitty, a former running back at the University of South Carolina, was in attendance because Hendrick and other teams have learned that former football players often make the best prospects for five-man crews, thanks to their strength, agility and speed. So teams scour college campuses looking for players like Twitty who didn’t catch on with an NFL team and want to trade their football helmets for fireproof suits. A few, like Twitty, know about NASCAR — he grew up rooting for driver Denny Hamlin — but most are new to the sport and can barely change the oil on their own cars.
“You don’t grow up playing pit crew in your backyard,” said Keith Flynn, Hendrick’s developmental pit crew director, who has recruited athletes for 14 years. “Most of these football guys had no idea that this is even an opportunity. But once they come on campus and see the place, they get pretty excited.”
NASCAR races can cover up to 600 miles, with cars zipping around the track approaching 200 mph. Yet, races are often won by seconds, or even slivers of a second, and a slower pit stop can cost teams hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money and potential sponsorships. Every second saved in a stop is worth about 20 car lengths on the track.
Last season, the average margin of victory was 1.11 seconds, and it was under one second in 19 of the 36 races. The margin of victory was under one second in 10 of the 23 races so far this season.
“While you are fighting for every position on the track, you can gain multiple spots on pit road,” said Dave Alpern, president of Joe Gibbs Racing, which has about 50 athletes in its pit crews. “It can 100% win you a race and absolutely lose you a race.”
The pursuit of that edge is why Hendrick, Gibbs, Penske and other big race teams invest millions of dollars to hire and train dozens of tire changers, jackmen and gas-can carriers who can work in chaotic conditions on race days 38 weeks a year. Teams are building state-of-the-art gyms and hiring top trainers, chefs and yoga instructors. They are also paying hefty salaries — some can reach $200,000 or more — to sign top athletes and lure pit crew members away from rivals.
Hendrick began holding its formal pit crew combine 15 years ago, and this year’s group was the largest. The athletes, who included a few college lacrosse players and wrestlers, were separated roughly by body type: bigger linemen in one group, lankier receivers and defensive backs in another, and squatter linebackers and running backs in a third. They were evaluated on 12 different skills and tasks. (At minicamp, coaches collected 49 different data points for evaluation.) For several hours in scorching heat, they ran sprints around cones, raced to put lug nuts in wheels and lifted weights at a bench press, activities that looked like those at an NFL Pro Day, minus the football.
After lunch, they were taken to a pit pad — basically, a practice area — where they were handed jacks, air guns and tires. Trainers showed them where to put their feet and knees, which hands to use and how to dance around the other pitters.
“If you’re a football guy, the drills are pretty similar,” said Ben Wilson, a former wide receiver at Penn State. “But the pit crew is a big learning curve because you don’t practice changing tires, and if you do, it’s rarely in eight seconds.”
Wilson learned about pitting from Brandon Johnson, a fellow Penn State alum who signed with Hendrick in 2018. Like many recruits, he did not circle back to NASCAR until after he had given up on making it to the NFL. He had not followed the sport, although his uncle, an avid fan, encouraged him to try out with Hendrick. Flynn invited Wilson, who has been living in Santa Rosa, California, to his first NASCAR race at the Sonoma Raceway in early June. Wilson was impressed with the teamwork and camaraderie of the pit crews, and the next day, he bought a plane ticket to Charlotte, North Carolina, to attend the combine.
Wilson’s performance was good enough that he was one of the 18 athletes invited back for this week’s minicamp, which includes more drills, video sessions and team-building exercises. (One year, the recruits watched FBI hostage-rescue teams practice in Quantico, Virginia.) Only a handful of the athletes will be offered contracts. Salaries vary widely based on experience and tasks, but crew members make on average about $87,000 before bonuses and incentives, according to nascarchronicle.com.
For most of NASCAR’s 75-year history, mechanics, fabricators and others in the shop doubled as pit crews. Wood Brothers Racing is credited as the first team to develop the choreography of the pit stop. The “Rainbow Warriors,” who worked Jeff Gordon’s colorful cars in the 1990s, were the first full-time pit crew that did strength and agility drills and watched video of its pit stops to see how they could be improved. The crew helped Gordon rack up the third-most wins in NASCAR.
“If you go back to that era, the teams were much smaller,” said Chad Knaus, a tire changer on the Rainbow Warriors who is now vice president of competition at Hendrick. “So, if you were changing engines during the week and then in a pit crew on Sunday, you’d be spent.”
Pit crews have become on-camera stars featured in Netflix documentaries (and were the subject of a comedy series starring Kevin James). A guest NASCAR pit crew won a competition at the 24 Hours of Le Mans race last year. The crews have their own competition on NASCAR’s All-Star Weekend, and the winning crew wins $100,000.
For decades, NASCAR teams relied on the wizardry of their mechanics to squeeze faster speeds out of their cars. But the introduction of the Next Generation car in 2021, giving every race team the same parts and pieces, has evened the level of competition, making the fractions of seconds saved in pit stops more important than ever.
The Next Generation car has forced pit crews to adapt in unexpected ways. Wheels now have only one lug, not five, which has shaved seconds off pit stops. But instead of short tire changers with good hand-eye coordination, teams are looking for left-handed tire changers who have an easier time tightening the lugs. The new wheels make tire changers less important than jackmen, who now must work faster.
Hendrick fields pit crews for its four cars in the NASCAR Cup Series, but also for the two cars driven by Spire Motorsports, a rival team. Several other Hendrick pit crews work in the Xfinity series, a lower-tier circuit, and the Craftsman truck series. Hendrick is expanding its pit crew roster to about 50 athletes, from 37, and is planning to build a new training center that will be more than twice the size of its current 12,000-square-foot site.
Smaller teams find it hard to keep up with this pit crew arms race, so they find it more efficient to hire crews from larger teams.
“It’s probably not a way to win championships by having someone’s fifth and sixth crew,” said Jerry Freeze, general manager of Front Row Motorsports, which uses crews from Gibbs and Penske. “But for where we are today and the cost of putting in our own facility, it’s a pretty good bang for the buck.”
The 23XI Racing team, part-owned by Michael Jordan, hired its own pit crews last season after using crews from Gibbs, the team founded by the Pro Football Hall of Fame coach. The team opened a state-of-the-art gym in its new headquarters this year, and broke ground this week on a pit stop practice center. In March, it went to the Big 12 Pro Day — a showcase for college football players to impress NFL teams — to recruit athletes.
“We told them if your NFL dreams don’t work out, here’s another avenue,” said Steve Lauletta, the team’s president.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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