Winning people, winning teams equals winning races
With all of NASCAR’s attention being placed on engineering the cars to be as similar as possible, teams and team owners have realized it’s become more important than ever to have the right people in the right places.
Trucking 2000
11/14/2008
While it’s true that NASCAR is about fast cars, today, more than ever, it’s about people.
With all of NASCAR’s attention being placed on engineering the cars to be as similar as possible, teams and team owners have realized it’s become more important than ever to have the right people in the right places. A far cry from the teams of 20 years ago, today’s NASCAR operations have grown into large organizations full of specialized, often degreed employees. To gain the advantage, garages need the highest caliber individuals and they need them to stay.
Perhaps, nowhere is this more evident than in Hendrick Motorsports, currently the sport’s most successful operation with seven championships in the past 13 years and 172 Cup victories since its inception in 1984. While carrying it out isn’t simple, according to Hendrick Motorsports’ executive vice president and general manager Marshall Carlson, the philosophy is, and it starts at the top.
“Rick [Hendrick] has got an expression that’s kind of interesting,” Carlson said. “It’s that ‘hardware is going to come and go, whether it’s a new car or a new engine piece – hardware is going to come and go. But what carries you through and what’s going to make the difference is the quality of the people you’ve got.”
Red Bull Racing Team’s Pete Wright, who’s one of many Sprint Cup garage dwellers who epitomizes an era when teams, and their personnel, learned to do more with less, and loves to tell the story of how Billy Hagan Racing’s 1984 Winston Cup championship team with Terry Labonte had fewer than 20 full-time employees.
That was then. The large multi-car teams that currently dominate the sport, winning every championship since 1994, when current multi-team conglomerate Richard Childress Racing had just one team; albeit for the late seven-time champion Dale Earnhardt, number anywhere from 200 to 600 employees.
“It’s always been a people business, and when you’re all located within a central geographic area, unlike other sports businesses where you have different teams in different parts of the country, we’re all pretty close and we all go to the same events,” said Steve Lauletta, president of Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates. “So there are a lot of relationships that get built, not only with people on the same teams but also among people on opposing teams.”
Ganassi has championship teams in the Indy Racing League and Grand-Am Rolex Series for sports cars, as well as maintaining two full-time teams in Sprint Cup and another full-time Nationwide Series operation.
“Certainly the sport keeps getting more and more intricate, from all the different aspects, whether that’s on the racing operations side or on the business side,” Lauletta said. “And when you have a business that continues to grow and get more and more popular as NASCAR has, the teams have to react to that and the people involved become more and more important.”
Joe Gibbs Racing, which currently fields three full-time cars in the Sprint Cup Series, has won 67 races since its inception in 1992, and three of the past eight championships. Former crew chief Jimmy Makar, who was one of Gibbs’ first hires, learned the value of people when he worked with 1989 Winston Cup champion Rusty Wallace, and he said it’s even more important in 2008 to have the right personnel.
“It’s probably more of a people sport, as far as the need for a larger number of people to come together,” said Makar, now JGR’s senior vice president of racing operations. “The teams have grown, there’s more specialization inside the teams and there’s more need for all of the people to do their jobs well. “That’s the difference between some of the better teams and some of the teams that don’t perform quite as well, [the better teams] have someone specialized in every little aspect of the game, compared to when you had guys in the past that did three or four different jobs, just because you had to.”
“I would certainly think that right now the people are as important, or more important, than ever before,” Gillett Evernham Motorsports general manager Keith Barnwell said. “You’ve got [driver/crew chief] combinations that have been together and are thriving. You’ve got to get everybody on the same page and with the new car, your people have maybe got to [be] willing to step out of the box and trust each other more now than you ever have.”
Yates Racing could be considered a throwback in a lot of ways, considering its running its two cars with less than 100 people. But co-owner and general manager Max Jones said it’s no less an issue that the people matter most.
“It’s about the people that have the passion to go race these cars,” said Jones, a champion sports-car driver who has management experience across the several racing disciplines. “The more passion, the more dedication and the better work ethic you have, the better race team you’ll have. Getting all the right people together and to get along and work together is a challenge, too.”
Dale Earnhardt Inc. has won 24 Cup races this decade, and DEI’s vice president of motorsports, John Story, said the equation remains virtually as simple as ever.
“We all get our equipment and our tools from the same place. It’s all a matter of what you do with it,” Story said. “There’s a tremendous investment in people.”
In NASCAR racing, the evolution of equipment and the need to compete has brought on an unprecedented need for specialization, as Red Bull vice president and general manager Jay Frye pointed out.
“The only thing that’s different than five or 10 years ago is the sport has become more specialized, so there are more specialists, obviously more technology and more degreed individuals,” Frye said. “So the sport has changed, but it’s still very much about all the people that you have in all those positions. It’s still a team sport and you’re still building a team.”
“Team” and “teamwork” means the difference between winning and losing in NASCAR racing, and not surprisingly, Hendrick’s Carlson said his vice president of competition, Ken Howes, shared a quote with him that Carlson has posted in his office: “Your value here is directly proportional to your ability to work well with other people.” “That is a pretty unique perspective in a competitive environment, if you think about it,” Carlson said. “It says you can have all the talent or technical skills that anyone could ever want, but if you can’t apply them in a team environment, they’re not going to be much good to the organization.”
A lot of the need for specialists has been driven by the newer Car of Tomorrow, Story added. “Because we’ve been put in a tighter box, and so we’re spending more time and energy trying to find subtle differences between our cars and someone else’s, and they’re doing the same thing, too. You’re working harder in smaller areas and trying to find really, really, really small improvements, and in order to do that you have to have better, smarter, brighter people. So finding those right people that can do the job is as hard as it ever has been,” Story said.
“Specialization has been a significant change in the sport,” Carlson said. “If you think about just 10 years ago, most teams had maybe a couple or a few engineers, and that’s what they were called, ‘engineers.’ Today, we’ve got 60 engineers here and they’re doing things that are so different from one another; everything from a race engineer to a shock engineer, a simulation engineer; program engineer, design engineer, kinematics engineer, and their specialties are very definitive.” While Carlson said the ones who are different have the capacity to understand the entire system, they have to be very focused to find a competitive advantage.
“Because these organizations have gotten larger, everybody’s gotten a lot more detailed in a lot of different areas,” Roush Fenway Racing general manager Robbie Reiser said. “So [using] the specialized person in certain areas has become greater because of that reason. You used to run these companies with 10 or 20 people, and now those organizations have 400 or 500 people; so those departments have changed, the direction, and the detail work of how you do things has changed because you try to get better in all the different areas.”
Frye’s interesting perspective on the sport goes back to the formation of MB2 Motorsports in the mid-1990s, through MBV Motorsports to Ginn Racing, a merger with DEI and then his switch at the beginning of this season to Red Bull, a second-year organization in Cup racing.
“It’s funny, but when we started [MB2] in 1996, we had 10 people for a one-car team,” Frye said. “Now, the Red Bull team is a two-car team and we basically, for a round number, have 200 people.”
Barnwell, who ran at the time a Busch Series team, PPC Racing, which finished first and second in the championship with drivers Jeff Green and Jason Keller with a total of about 26 employees; said specialization is good, but the loss comes when you have people who only know about their specific area of the racecar.
“Years ago, you had a guy standing in the pit area that if you had a guy twist an ankle on pit road, that guy grabbed a gun and went,” Barnwell said. “He might have been the car chief or even the crew chief. Now, you have backups for positions, just like in the NFL or NBA and that drives your numbers up.”
Earlier this season, Ganassi had to close one of its three Cup teams because of a sponsorship shortage, but while that affected the more than 70 people that had to be released, the big picture hasn’t changed.
“Without a doubt, specialization has led to increases in both the number and caliber of people we have, particularly in the size of the teams,” Lauletta said. “We have 250 people working now on our two Cup cars and our one Nationwide car, so as both a race team and a business it becomes more. You have to deal with more sponsors, more human resources, and more finances and all the things that go along with a business.”
Expansion has created an environment in which something as simple as knowing names to go with faces also becomes a challenge, though Reiser said it’s doable.
“In my world, I guess I do know who everyone’s name is,” Reiser said with a grin. “It’s hard to do, but you have to, to stay up with the company and all the things that you’re doing.”