Subscibe to our feedFancy Footwork Needed to Finesse Spots on Pit Road
A 12- or 13-second pit stop is a thing of beauty to watch. For many, the changing of four tires, adding two cans of gasoline to a bouncing, growling racecar is like a choreographed ballet. There’s fancy footwork, fluid hand motions, all with a very real element of danger.
Perhaps the best way to fully take in the various steps of a pit stop is to watch it in slow motion.
One person who has a great interest in the fancy steps by the No. 48 Lowe’s crew is the driver of the blue-and-silver beast, Jimmie Johnson.
He says he often spends his few moments on pit road carefully observing the work going on around him. Of course, the footwork of his crew is obscured from his view.
“If I can see their feet we’ve got a problem,” he chuckled. “Jeff [Gordon] has had ‘em up on the hood of his car a time or two.”
But seriously, Johnson is well aware of the goings on around him.
“I can tell by their posture how the stop is going, “he said. “I can almost see the changer hitting lugs the five times he leans forward. I can tell if it’s a good or bad stop by where the tire changer is, if he has moved on, especially from the right side to the left.”
The drop of the jack lets him know the rear changer is done on the right, and then he has an even better way of monitoring the activities on his side of the car.
“I have a little mirror on the left side, and I can watch pretty closely what’s going on with the rear tires,” he said. “The front tire I can’t see much, but the heads of the tire changer and tire carrier are visible. Still, over the years I’ve been able to understand where we are in the pit stop, if the front’s ahead of the rear… I can sense that by looking around in my 14 seconds on pit road.”
Johnson also can speak about pit crew performance from experience – a little of it, that is. In an earlier time, he once was a tire carrier himself.
“I carried tires once in an ARTGO race at Kaukauna in Wisconsin,” he said. “Sterling Marlin was the driver of all things, which was interesting for me. The first stop I indexed the wheel great, and we had a great stop.”
The second go-round didn’t go so well.
“I couldn’t get it on there to save my life,” he said. “For a minute there I thought I had a future as a tire carrier if the driving thing didn’t work out.”
In today’s NASCAR world, pit stops have become so perfected by all the top teams that even the best outfits can’t count on gaining their driver many positions on a pit stop. Now it’s more about trying to keep from losing him spots.
“There used to be some separation between teams,” Johnson said. “Now it’s so close, everybody’s so tight, it boils down to not losing spots on pit road, not making a mistake on pit road. It’s so competitive now.”
Rick Hendrick, owner of Hendrick Motorsports, saw firsthand how pit stops changed over the past two decades.
“Ray Evernham really raised the bar when he got here,” Hendrick noted. “The No. 24 team was the class of the field on pit road for a long, long time. Chad was a part of that team and that pit crew, so I think that’s had a big influence on how he approaches it with the 48 team.
“The guys are a lot more athletic now, and so much more goes into it nowadays,” he added. “You have the practices, the conditioning, the work in the film room. There are some great pit crews out there that we compete against, so every piece is so important.”
It has gotten so competitive that crew chiefs like Chad Knaus and pit crew coaches like Greg Morin of the Team Lowe’s crew spend hours studying film of pit stops and even pit stop practice. Just like a football coach watching game film, they look for way to gain fractions of seconds, and they dissect mistakes to discover the root of the problem and develop ways to keep the same mistake from happening again.
“We’ve done a very good job analyzing pit stops and the placement of the people,” Knaus said. “We look at the way you get around the car if you’re a tire changer, the way you get around the car if you’re a jack man, the way the equipment is placed on the wall, behind the wall.
“It’s something that’s practiced religiously. When these guys practice pit stops, they don’t just go out there to do pit stops. They track the foot placement, hand placement where hoses are going to be laid out. They practice everything.”
The typical pit stop routine has been perfected over time, so the focus has shifted to fine-tuning each crew member’s movements. It is Morin’s responsibility to study the film and look for any step, no matter how minor, that can be done faster and more efficiently.
“The areas we tweak are movement around the car, the way they get up and out of their tire-changing stance,” he said. “Those are the areas we really focus on in terms of making up time.”
More often than not, the improvements on pit road can be traced to the crew’s morning workout sessions in the gym at Hendrick Motorsports.
“We work in the weight room on explosiveness, speed, agility and footwork,” Morin said. “Not only do they have to be quick, have to be agile to get around hoses, lug nuts on the ground, gas cans.”
And a hiccup that occurs in a split second can mean the difference in a clean stop and a slow one, Morin said.
“If a changer has to hit one extra lug nut on the right and left, that adds six tenths of a second to the stop,” he said.
Where the best teams often rise to the top is when there’s damage to the car that must be repaired in a hurry. Routines are adjusted and roles change, just like a football team calling an audible. Sometimes there’s no set plan, but the way the crew reacts can help a driver salvage points or even win a race.
“Everything is laid out and choreographed the way it needs to be,” Knaus said. “If an audible has to happen, that’s when the guys have to go in there and do whatever needs to be done.”
And more often that not, borrowing a phrase sometimes used by Hendrick teammate Mark Martin, the Lowe’s crew has a knack for being able to “get ‘er done.”