Don't forget the 'over-the-wall' guys
By Richard Petty, Special to Turner Sports Interactive
November 7, 2001
12:28 PM EST (1728 GMT)
The Union-Rockingham Pit Crew Championship at Rockingham each fall is always pretty interesting to watch.
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Richard Petty
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This is a big deal to the over-the-wall guys, believe me. It might be controlled pit stops where you don't have a race riding on how fast you can change tires, but it's as intense as anything we do in our sport. Everybody who goes over the wall takes it seriously -- really seriously.
Once a year, the NASCAR Winston Cup teams gather at North Carolina Speedway in Rockingham for the competition. Union 76, NASCAR and the speedway work hard to make it as good a competition as they can -- and as tough as they can. This year they cut it back to the top 25 teams in the car owners standings. But those 25, one at a time, went out there and changed four tires and put in fuel.
The guys from Matt Kenseth's team won this year -- doing all of that in 17.695 seconds.
That's incredible. I mean, I know guys who take that long to get out of their recliner and walk across a room. Those boys changed four tires and fueled a car in that length of time.
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Matt Kenseth's crew won the Pit Crew Challenge.
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Somebody was showing me that some 15 years ago, the winners did the same thing in 23 seconds -- and everybody thought that was incredible.
These guys who go over the wall on pit stops, man, it's hard to believe. Thirty years ago, whoever went with you to the race track went over the wall once the race started. Now, we have special guys who specifically train to be over-the-wall pit crew members. They lift certain weights, run certain distances, practice certain ways. You want your fuel man and jack man to bbig, heavy and muscular, but you want your tire changers limber and quick.
Mark Mauldin is the guy who figures all of that out for us. Mark is a former college football coach -- try to get him to stop telling you about his days at Catawba College, an NCAA Division II school in Salisbury, N.C. -- who has worked to learn training techniques that can be carried over to stock car racing. He works with the pit crew guys each week with weights, aerobics and a couple things I'm not exactly sure what they are doing, but it seems to be working.
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The winning team.
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He put together a program with Advocare for help with nutrition, including race day stuff and week-long stuff. Red Wing Shoe has developed special footwear that our crews use. Oviously, there is a lot of difference between what somebody working on engines all day would want to wear and what a guy trying to jump a pit wall and change tires would want to wear.
There is a flat-out science to this stuff. And it has to be that way.
When you have races being decided by less than a second, then every second of a pit stop gets pretty crucial. The difference between winning and losing could come down to where a front tire changer put his foot or if the jack man lifted like he was supposed to with Mark the past couple of weeks. Shoot, it can come down to the driver hitting his "mark" when he stops in the pits. All of that stuff is important.
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John Andretti's No. 43 in the pits.
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So when I watched those boys in the Union 76-Rockingham Pit Crew Championship last week, I had to admire them. It's a tough job that doesn't just happen a few times for a few seconds each time on Sunday. Going over the wall is a lifestyle these days.
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