NASCAR crew chief is a one-man steering committee
First he saw his car spin. Then he saw a puff of white smoke. Chad Knaus knew he had some work to do.
It was the final practice on Saturday, a day before the LifeLock 400 at Michigan International Speedway June 14. Jimmie Johnson, driver of the No. 48 Lowe’s Chevrolet, turned the third-fastest lap in qualifying, then took the blame for not placing his Impala SS on the pole.
But with just over 24 hours until the drop of the green flag, Johnson had yet to complete a practice lap before the No. 48 broke loose (he was side-by-side with Tony Stewart at the time). Its back end swiveled sideways and the car slid to a stop.
“I saw the car spin. That’s really all I saw,’’ said Knaus. “So I didn’t know if he made any contact or not. The first reaction was to figure out if he had crashed. After that, it’s regrouping, getting everybody on the same plane, and going after it again.’’
As Johnson pulled into the garage, Knaus climbed down the ladder of his hauler and deployed his crew. The No. 48 went up on the jack stands. Crew members slid under the car. Knaus consulted with his driver.
Knaus acknowledged frustration. But as the crew chief of the Sprint Cup champion the last three seasons, Knaus is responsible for the car’s performance, and he can’t allow any of his concerns to trouble his driver or crew.
The driver gets the glory. But the crew chief, who also serves as coach, general manager, interpreter, data analyst, whip-cracker, and shrink, is the boss.
After qualifying for the 2006 Daytona 500, NASCAR inspectors found something wrong with the No. 48. The car didn’t fit the rear template used to determine the legality of each body. Knaus was suspended for the season’s first four races, including the Daytona 500, which John son would win with engineer Darian Grubb as interim crew chief.
Knaus returned from his suspension to lead the No. 48 team to its first of three straight Cup championships. Grubb, meanwhile, has teamed with Stewart on the No. 14 Office Depot/Old Spice Chevrolet, learning from his Hendrick Motorsports experience.
“We had a reorganization of the team,’’ Grubb recalled of Hendrick’s shuffle following Knaus’s suspension. “We put a lot more pressure on people to do their jobs and trusted them to do their work in their positions.
“As long as you surround yourself with good people, let them do their jobs, let them prosper in their positions, it’s hard to beat anybody who’s at the top of every position you’ve got.’’
But while crew chiefs like Knaus and Grubb are riding high, others have felt the ultimate impact of poor performance: dismissal.
When Hendrick landed Dale Earnhardt Jr. and put him in the No. 88 to start 2008, the team believed it would be adding another supercharged Chevrolet to its already potent mix. Last season, Earnhardt qualified for the Chase for the Cup, then finished last among the 12 Chase drivers.
This year, Earnhardt finished in 27th place at the Daytona 500, then followed a week later with a 39th-place finish. After a pair of 27th-place showings in May and a 40th-place disaster at the
In sports, the coach often gets the boot before the players. In this case, Eury was the coach.
“This was a situation that I felt like it needed to happen,’’ Hendrick said. “We couldn’t wait until the end of the year. I just didn’t feel like it was fair to our sponsors, fans, or those two guys to show up anymore changing nothing.
“We were working our butts off behind the scenes, but it wasn’t producing any fruit. That’s why I hate doing it at this time of year. I hate having to do it period, because I’d rather work things out. My M.O. is to fix it, not change it. But in this case, I thought it was time for that.’’
In four races since the change, the No. 88 has finished 12th, 27th, 14th, and 26th. Earnhardt enters today’s Lenox Industrial Tools 301 at New Hampshire Motor Speedway 20th in the standings, 277 points behind 12th-place Juan Pablo Montoya.
During their month together, Earnhardt and McGrew have been trying to communicate clearly and develop chemistry - requirements for a driver and crew chief to have success.
“If you want to get to know him, just ask if he wants to throw a crankbait or a rattletrap - just start talking about fishing or hunting,’’ Newman said. “That’s how I initiated my first conversations with him. We started talking about deer hunting last year around the Kansas weekend. We hit it off talking about the outdoors.
“With respect to Tony Stewart or Tony Gibson, it’s nice to have a sense of connection outside of talking about a right-front spring or a left-rear shock.’’
Communication is critical at the racetrack. Teams can run tests at other tracks, shake out their cars on seven-post rigs to simulate race situations, and put their machines in the wind tunnel. With all of their data, they can plug information into their computers to come up with estimates on proper setups based on weather, track conditions, and any variable a car might encounter.
But for all that data, a crew chief needs his driver to provide feedback. When Johnson tells Knaus how the car feels during a race, the crew chief must integrate his driver’s thoughts with the data he already has.
Old school, meet new school.
“We have to develop a correlation between what Jimmie says and what the computer says,’’ Knaus said. “Jimmie does a good job of not trying to understand what’s going on with the car. He just tells us what the car is doing from his perspective.
“We make adjustments to the car based on what he says and based on what the simulation programs say and what our track testing and tunnel data say. I think that’s one of our strong suits.
“Jimmie doesn’t really care what we do to the car as long as it feels better to him and it goes faster.’’
Once the crew chief meshes feedback with data, he must make the right decisions in a short time frame. As the driver pulls into the pits, it’s up to the crew to execute the boss’s calls.
“The biggest thing is the feedback from the driver,’’ Grubb said. “It’s knowing what they want to feel in the racecar, then watching the timing and scoring monitors to make sure we have the speed in it.
“Usually if Tony’s comfortable, we’re not that worried about the timing and scoring monitors at all. He knows what he likes to have in a racecar. But if we’re a little bit off, we have to judge ourselves versus the competition to see where they’re at.’’
Johnson has 42 career Cup wins, but none at Michigan. There was a 27th-place finish at the 2-mile track on Aug. 17, 2003. A 40th-place finish on Aug. 22, 2004. A 17th-place run last August. Early in his career, Johnson never felt comfortable at Michigan, one of just six active Cup tracks where his car hasn’t visited Victory Lane.
But under Knaus’s guidance, the No. 48 team has thrived. Johnson has become more comfortable at Michigan as Knaus has made the car’s setup more suitable to the track.
“It was a tough racetrack for us initially,’’ Knaus said. “But we’ve been pretty competitive lately and putting ourselves in position to win.
“It’s a unique situation. This track has a lot of weather here. Rainouts, rain delays, and things of that nature come into play a lot.
“But we’ve run very, very competitively here. We feel pretty comfortable coming to this racetrack thinking we have an opportunity to win a race.’’
June 14 looked to be Johnson’s day. The No. 48 started third, but quickly overtook Brian Vickers and Kyle Busch for the lead. For 146 of the 200 laps, the rest of the field stared at Johnson’s bumper. But on the final lap, the most dominant car of the field sputtered, its tank drained of the last drop of fuel. Johnson coasted to a 22d-place finish, his third-worst Michigan performance.
Knaus’s fuel strategy came up one lap short. But as crushing as the flameout was, Knaus had to regroup the team for the next race. One week later, the No. 48 ripped off a fourth-place run at Infineon Raceway in Sonoma, Calif., putting Johnson third in the standings behind Stewart and Jeff Gordon.
“I think being confident and secure of your position and of the capabilities of your team and organization has a lot to do with your performance,’’ said Knaus, the only crew chief to win three straight Cup titles. “We’ve got a lot of confidence in what we’re capable of doing.
“We know we’re a come-from-behind team. We’ve always shown that time and time again. We may not always start the race off the fastest. But we come back and finish in the top five or top 10.
“That’s the way we’ve structured our team - to make sure that we’re there for the long haul. We focus on being consistent and smooth throughout the year. That way, when we get to the final 10 races, we can be fresh and attack at that point.’’
Fluto Shinzawa can be reached at fshinzawa@globe.com. 
