He's Got Shotgun

It may be sports' most demanding job, but being a NASCAR crew chief is the only life for Chad Knaus

It's 9 o'clock on a fall night 20 years ago in Rockford, Ill., and a local short-track ace and his crew chief have been underneath their car since sunrise. The driver wants to call it a day. He stands, throws up his hands and announces that the car is as ready as it's going to be for the next race.

"That's it," he says. "Time to pack it in."

"Hang on," the crew chief begs from somewhere under the hood, his voice cracking. "I have an idea that might buy us a little something."

"Chad," the driver responds, his voice sharply shifting into father mode. "It's a school night, and it's time to go in the house."

Just one more minute. Just one more hour. That's the way it has always been for Chad Knaus, the then-14-year-old crew chief who would go on to become a NASCAR empire-builder. Trust me, he tells his drivers. It could mean a 10th of a second out on the track.

For 20 years, Knaus has known this one truth: work works. His relentless drive transformed his dad, John, from occasional winner to Illinois legend. More recently, it has turned an off-road truck racer named Jimmie Johnson into the most consistent contender on the Nextel Cup circuit. With the 34-year-old Knaus atop his pit box, Johnson has averaged nearly five wins a year since 2002. Two years ago, the pair fell 90 points short to Matt Kenseth. Last year, they lost the inaugural Nextel Chase for the Cup to Kurt Busch by only eight points. Just one more minute. Just one more hour. This year, it could be the difference.

YOU COULD say Chad Knaus is a little single-minded. You could also say LeBron is just a ballplayer or Britney and Kevin are slightly overexposed. "If you call Chad at noon, he's thinking about the car," Johnson says. "If you call Chad at midnight, he's thinking about the car. And if he isn't thinking about the next weekend's car, he's thinking about the car for the track four weeks from now."

Or he's wondering how to handle his driver when tempers run hotter than the engines. Or how to inspire his crew when one bad pit stop has dropped their team out of the points lead. Or how to push the limits of technology-and the rule book-without being busted or busting his budget.

He is mechanic and psychiatrist, aerodynamicist and economist. This is the life of the modern-day Nextel Cup crew chief: circles under the eyes as dark as Goodyear Eagles, bleeding ulcers masked by sweaty smiles, an all-consuming focus that leaves dinner cold in the wake of scribbled calculations on the back of an Outback Steakhouse napkin. The grease monkey with wrench in one hand and shop towel in the other has evolved into an engineer carrying a laptop and a Bluetooth phone. A Cup crew chief is now no different from any other major league head coacha semicelebrity manager of an ever-expanding organization, in a job where the revolving door never stops spinning.

For Knaus, that means keeping tabs on 75 team members and dozens of cars; hiring and firing; sending orders down a chain of command; and relying on his assistant to make sure they get done. "As recently as 2002, I was out on the shop floor putting in the springs and the shocks," he says. "Not anymore. I determine what we need to be doing, but now I send those notes down to my car chief, Ron Malec, the equivalent of an offensive coordinator. Meanwhile, I'm off testing or doing a sponsor appearance or, more often than not, I'm in a meeting."

Win or lose, Knaus' 72-hour race weekends are followed by a routine that begins at 7 a.m. on Monday at the Hendrick Motorsports complex in Harrisburg, N.C. A meeting with department heads within the Lowe's team is followed by another with Hendrick division heads from the chassis and engine departments and the director of competition. Then there's a powwow with Robbie Loomis, crew chief for Jeff Gordon. (Johnson's teammate owns a piece of the No. 48 car.) And then, maybe, lunch.

"We race 38 weekends, and we have more than a dozen test sessions," Knaus says via cell phone from a rental car in Phoenix. It's 6 a.m. on a Wednesday in June, and he's on his way to one of those sessions. "My day off each week is Thursday morning from 8 to 10."

While Johnson dines at Cipriani on Fifth Avenue with his fashion model wife, Chandra, Knaus tries to squeeze in a one-hour meal in North Charlotte with his extremely patient girlfriend, whose name he prefers to keep under wraps. "I don't do the balancing between work and our relationshipshe does," Knaus says with appreciation. While Johnson was hitting the big screen with his cameo in Herbie: Fully Loaded, Knaus was explaining the finer points of shocks and springs at New Hampshire, on his gearhead cable show.

The crew chief doesn't have time to go to the movies; he's hunkered down at the office watching miles of game film. In between a barrage of phone calls and constant drop-ins by his crew members, Knaus rolls tape from the race just run, last year's race at the track coming up, then the year before that and the year before that. Like Tom Brady breaking down dime coverage, he looks for patterns and tendencies. How many cautions are likely? When do they typically happen? How much time will he have to make crucial decisions to pit? What did the winner figure out that everyone else missed? Each trend, tire temp and gut feeling finds its way into a mountain of three-ring binders and a room full of hard drives. While NASCAR's constantly changing car specs limit technical carryover from season to season, Knaus' hunches could still pay off with a victory years down the road.

"I don't know if anyone realizes what this job has become," he says. "It has to be your entire life, period. If I'm not working on or thinking about my race cars, I figure someone else is out there working on theirs."

Starting with testing in the first week of January and ending in late November, NASCAR follows the longest calendar in sports. And when the brutal midsummer stretch arrives, so does a natural letdown throughout the Cup garage. The thought of 16 more weekends away from homecombined with triple-digit track temperaturesbreaks the spirit and back of even the most tested mechanic.

But Knaus isn't about to slow down now. "I work out three days a week," he says. "We have an incredible facility here and personal trainers on staff. I have two mountain bikes I take on the megawatt driver was mired in 15th place at the end of July. "Honestly, I'm not thinking about that. I am totally focused on the track coming up. Maybe I'm afraid that if I slow down to think about anything else, I will realize how exhausted I really am."

When guys finally do flame out, it's often a spontaneous combustion. Pat Tryson, now crew chief for Mark Martin, once resigned from Geoff Bodine's team live on ESPN in the middle of a race. The demanding Rusty Wallace plowed through three crew chiefs in 26 months before pairing with Larry Carter for 2004. Ricky Rudd and Michael road with me. Staying in shape helps me keep up the pace. If I keep up the pace, they can't catch me, so I have to keep it up all the time. And the competition is probably out there thinking the same thing. It's kind of sick, isn't it?"

NFL coaches hold press conferences to discuss their heart conditions and NBA coaches publicly declare that their bodies can no longer take the strain. But NASCAR crew chiefs, still unaccustomed to the spotlight, tend to keep everything under the hood. "I get asked all the time about the stress of making sure Jeff Gordon is as good as he has been in the past," says Loomis, whose "Fatback" McSwain have split and reunited more often than George Steinbrenner and Billy Martin. Between last Thanksgiving and July 4, 17 of 43 Cup crew chiefs were fired or reassigned to other positions or simply quit, including those on the high-profile rides of Dale Jarrett and Dale Earnhardt Jr. Over the same seven months, only one driver, Robby Gordon, was released.

"Who are you going to get rid of when things go bad?" laments one of the dismissed. "The driver whose face is painted on the side of your team truck and printed on a million T-shirts, or the guy whose name can be scraped off an office door?"

Every two- or four-tire decision gets hammered on message boards by mechanic wannabes and fans entirely too loyal to place blame on their driver. Less than a decade ago, only the neurotic faithful knew the names and faces of every Cup crew chief. Now, web trollers can click through fan sites such as knausified.com or chad.theloudlibrarian.net (hosted by a noisy bibliophile) to discuss everything from strategy to underwear choice. Thanks to the web, the only real respite from the pressure-anonymity-has been stripped away. "Maybe we ask too much from these guys," says Knaus' team owner, Rick Hendrick. "But I've got to be honest: they created this situation. And I think they thrive on it."

Since Hendrick founded his Cup team in 1984, the car-sales mogul has employed such alpha males as Harry Hyde (imitated spot-on by Robert Duvall in Days of Thunder) and current NASCAR R&D guru Gary Nelson. And then there's the greatest workaholic of them all, Ray Evernham. A vet from the IROC garage, Evernham came aboard in 1992 to help bring along Jeff Gordon, who was 21 at the time. The new crew chief walked in and questioned everything. He spent his days reorganizing the team's structure and his nights reading the works of Vince Lombardi, who is buried in the same Red Bank, N.J., cemetery as Evernham's grandfather.

"I know a lot of people thought we were crazy," says Evernham, whose unorthodox ways helped win three Cups and 47 races with Gordon and Hendrick. "And it wasn't just hanging motivational signs all over the shop." He hired pit stop coordinators and created specialist positions in the shop to keep an eye on each facet of the team. He assigned everyone a well-defined role, then held them all accountable.

And in 1993, he hired a kid from Illinois to help build his cars. While working sheet metal on the fabrication floor, Knaus watched how Evernham ran the tightest shop in the hills. As a front-tirechanger on the famed Rainbow Warriors, Knaus learned how Evernham commanded the pits. "Ray saw himself first and foremost as a motivator," Knaus says. "For the sponsor, for those of us on the pit crew, everybody."

But especially for the driver. Evernham's in-race radio conversations with Gordon would have made Dr. Phil stop and take notes. It was all about establishing trust-an idea as old as the sport itself. Drivers have always wanted someone in the pits who knows them best. "When that helmet goes on and that window net goes up, it's a lonely place," says Richard Petty, who won seven championships teaming with his cousin, Dale Inman. "The first voice you hear over that radio is the man who has your life and livelihood in his hands. And you have his in yours. If the two of you aren't dialed in perfectly, then it won't matter how much money you have behind you or how great your sponsor is."

Even as the sport becomes more technologically advanced, winning is still as much about people as about pistons. "Everyone who has ever had success at this level did so in part because of the crew chief-driver relationship," Johnson says. "Chad and I appreciate what we have. He doesn't tell me how to drive and I don't tell him how to set up the car. But neither one of us could do his job without the other. Well, maybe Chad could do his, but I sure couldn't do mine."

IT'S 9 O'CLOCK on a June night in Harrisburg, and office after office at the Hendrick complex is dark …with one exception. Chad Knaus has been watching tape for more than four hours, a screening session that began precisely 24 hours after Johnson finished sixth at Pocono. His meetings finished and his paperwork filed, Knaus hits the stop button and gets ready to head home. But as he stands, a thought barrels through his mind, so he scrawls some notes. Then he grabs the remote and sits down again.

Just one more minute. Just one more hour.

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