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AUTO RACING

Pros In The NASCAR Pits

By TONY FABRIZIO The Tampa Tribune

Published: Jul 1, 2007

Shaun Peet was on the downside of a minor-league hockey career. He wasn't going to make it to the NHL, but he had a lot of competitive fire left.

When an 18-game suspension for fighting put him in the Greensboro Generals' grandstands in 2001, Peet met "a guy who worked in racing." That launched him toward a second career in a side of sports that only now is being thought of as athletic.

A native of Vancouver Island, Canada, who played four years of hockey at Dartmouth, Peet made an unlikely transition to NASCAR. He is now the pit crew captain and jack man on the Team Red Bull No. 83 Toyota driven by Brian Vickers.

"I knew Triple-A [hockey] would be the top of the mountain for me, so when this came about, it seemed perfect," Peet, 32, said from Mooresville, N.C. "You were still part of a team, you still got that adrenaline rush, but you weren't rolling out of bed feeling like you were 50 years old."

Peet is part of one of the most interesting trends in NASCAR. As new rules have made the cars nearly equal and the talent disparity among the top drivers has shrunk, team owners have looked increasingly at pit stops as a means to gain positions.

Where once the cars were pitted by the shop mechanics or somebody's cousin, a growing number of teams are turning to former high school, college and even professional athletes to help speed up stops and reduce mistakes.

"Teams found that as you would go after athletes and bring one or two of them in, it would change the aspect of the pit stop, because they would be much faster hand-eye coordination-wise, lateral movement-wise, up and down-wise," said Greg Miller, Peet's pit crew coach at Red Bull.

The benefit is cutting both ways. Team owners get faster pit work, and former athletes who were probably headed for regular jobs - Peet was going to be a firefighter - get to stay in sports and earn salaries that can run well into six figures.

Infiltrating The Ranks

The movement toward more athletic crewmen is so new that the number of imports from other sports is still relatively small. But many teams already have at least one or two.

For instance, Nextel Cup points leader and four-time champion Jeff Gordon's gas man is Caleb Hurd, the placement holder at Virginia Tech for current Cincinnati Bengals kicker Shayne Graham. Hurd also is an engineer for Hendrick Motorsports.

Chip Ganassi Racing, whose pit crew is coached by former Florida A&M head trainer and Milwaukee Bucks strength coach Phil Horton, has several former college players, including Mark Jacobs, a defensive lineman at Kentucky when Tim Couch was the quarterback.

Team Red Bull, with the only pit crew in NASCAR dedicated exclusively to pit stops and training, also has Aaron Schields, a former high school All-American wrestler from Kansas, and Mike Metcalf, a former starting fullback at Appalachian State.

Schields came into NASCAR from Pit Crew U. - yes, there's such a thing, and it's part of the Pit Instruction and Training school in North Carolina.

Not surprisingly, Joe Gibbs Racing - owned by Washington Redskins coach Joe Gibbs - is trying to get ahead of the curve for having more athletic pit crews.

"The next phase here is we're going to a full-blown, almost football-like combine where, later this [month], we're bringing in 200 college athletes for a tryout," said JGR's Mike Lepp, who actually holds the title of athletic director. "It's the first step toward going strongly in that direction."

Not everyone is sold, though. Lance Munksgard, whose Ginn Racing No. 01 team leads the season-long Checkers/Rally's pit crew competition, believes that while former athletes bring valuable skills, they can be liabilities when they don't have a background in racing.

"If in certain situations where a race car needs to be fixed, if they didn't grow up working on cars, they can have a hard time fixing them," he said. "Some crucial decisions, like whether a [damaged] car should be sent back onto the track, are left to someone who doesn't know about a race car."

Ginn Racing general manager Jay Frye agrees and points out that even in the NFL, the fastest athletes aren't always as productive "as the kid who runs a 4.8 [40] and has football skills and different knowledge and instincts to be a football player."

More often than not, though, NASCAR teams are sold that developing trained athletes into pit crewmen is the wave of the future.

"I look highly on guys that come out of college as athletes, because I was one," said Roush Racing pit crew coach Andrew Carter, a former linebacker at Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, N.C. "I know the athletic ability they have helps them pick up their skill a little faster than a guy that really wasn't involved in sports."

No Smoking During Pit Stops

In the early days of racing, pit stops took so long the driver would sometimes get out and smoke a cigarette while the work was completed.

NASCAR's Wood Brothers - Glen and Leonard - invented the modern, choreographed pit stop.

"I can remember in 1960 at the World 600, one of the top cars belonged to Fireball Roberts, and it took his crew 45 seconds to change two tires and gas," Leonard Wood said. "So we realized right then there was time to be gained."

Among the Woods' many technical innovations was improving the hydraulic jack so it raised the car in fewer pumps. Other teams copied the Wood Brothers' techniques and technologies, and pit stop times started dropping like temperatures behind a cold front.

Today's fastest crews, aided by accomplished athletes, are changing four tires and refueling the car's 17 3/4 -gallon tank in less than 13.5 seconds.

"You need to turn it between 13 flat and 13.4," said Heath Cherry, the rear tire carrier for Joe Gibbs Racing's Denny Hamlin and a former Lenoir-Rhyne linebacker. "To actually pick up spots, you need to be at 13 flat or under. It's amazing that it's gone that far."

Not until 1993 did someone take a serious look at the athletic side of pit stops. That's when Hendrick Motorsports hired former Stanford football player Andy Papathanassiou as pit crew coordinator.

Papathanassiou brought in more athletic crewmen and, equally important, he worked them furiously to improve their strength and endurance. The result was the Rainbow Warriors, NASCAR's first high-profile pit crew. They helped Gordon win his first three championships.

Nowadays, the top teams have multiple pit crew coaches, strength and conditioning coaches, trainers, nutritionists and even sports psychologists. Training regimens run the gamut from weightlifting and running to cycling and mountain biking.

Pit stops and pit stop practices are videotaped and studied like football plays.

At Joe Gibbs Racing, the emphasis is on the physical side of the job. Crewmen do conditioning work year-round and practice four to five times a week. They have weight goals. They participate in a nutrition and hydration program with some "pretty scientific and proprietary energy product," pit crew coach Lepp said.

Lepp likes trained athletes because they're often better equipped to handle heat.

"We have to wear fire suits and helmets," he said. "At a place like Indianapolis, where there's a wall of concrete on every side of you, pit road is typically 110 to 120 degrees.

"Endurance and the ability to deal with heat are critical. All of our boys wear downloadable heart-rate monitors. We download all of their heart rates after every race. In a typical pit stop, they go from 90 beats per minute to 190 in a 30-second block. So we're looking for fit people - which we didn't always get."

From NFL To Jack Man

Tim Goad grew up in Claudville, Va., about 10 miles from the Wood Brothers' former longtime shop in Stuart, Va. While attending a NASCAR race during his nine-year NFL career as a defensive lineman with the New England Patriots, he made the offhanded comment that he wanted to be a jack man one day.

After he retired, Goad got a call from the Woods. Their jack man had gotten hurt and they needed a replacement in a hurry. Goad practiced for four days and then jacked the Wood Brothers' No. 21 car at Richmond that Saturday. The first prominent former professional athlete to make the transition to NASCAR, he has been a jack man ever since.

Now the jack man and pit crew coach for Kevin Harvick Inc. in the Busch Series, Goad looks for former athletes when he has spots to fill.

"The stuff you do around the car are athletic-type movements," he said. "You're shuffling, you're moving, you're stepping over, you're dodging obstacles like air hoses, lug nuts and stuff like that. You have to be pretty nimble on your feet."

Lepp looks for certain body types for particular jobs at Joe Gibbs Racing. An ideal jack man is strong and 200-plus pounds. Tire changers need lightning-fast hands and quick feet, so many are in the 5-foot-7, 145-pound range. Tire carriers, who have to wield 75-pound wheels as if they're made of plastic, are linebacker types.

The gas man and catch-can man should be tall, because one needs to hoist the 90-pound gas can and the other has to reach over and make the track bar and wedge bolt adjustments. The catch-can men at Joe Gibbs Racing are 6-5, 6-7 and 6-8.

Horton, the Ganassi pit crew coach, prefers former baseball players for the tire changer position.

"When you're dealing with an impact wrench and you take somebody who has a mind-set of attacking things, ripping things off and moving real fast, it turns into a mess," he said.

Red Bull's Miller, who has a master's degree in exercise physiology, looks for crewmen who don't get unnerved.

"You've got to have guys that have been there and know how to deal with pressure and the end-of-the-race scenarios where the pit stop has to be good," he said. "You've got to execute the play."

PIT CREW ATHLETES

Here are some of the athletes from other sports who are participating on NASCAR pit crews. Several more are scattered around racing's developmental series.

Reporter Tony Fabrizio can be reached

at (813) 259-7994 or afabrizio@

tampatrib.com.