Yes, racing is athletic — look at the pit crews

Drive for Diversity remakes teams at all levels of the sport

LOS ANGELES — When Tyriq McCord joined NASCAR as a pit crew member a little more than three years ago, his knowledge of what made a car go fast stopped and started with the gas pedal.

“I didn’t even know how to change the tire on my car,” he said.

But he could bench-press 225 pounds and run 40 yards in 4.5 seconds, and those were the kinds of skills Phil Horton was looking for.

A former athletic trainer in college football and with the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks, as the pit crew coach for stock-car racing’s Drive for Diversity development program Horton has recruited more than 100 former college and professional athletes, from lacrosse players to linebackers, to work as tire changers, tire carriers, jackmen — and women — and gasmen for teams in all three of NASCAR’s top three nationwide series. And while that has undoubtedly made NASCAR more diverse, it’s also made pit crews better and faster, which can mean millions of dollars in a sport where the average margin of victory last season was 1.011 seconds.

“The speed of the game in our world has picked up dramatically so we look for athletes because it’s so specialized,” said Chris Burkey, director of human performance and the pit crew coach for Joe Gibbs Racing who was a Division I college football coach and NFL scout before coming to racing in 2009. “When I got into NASCAR, a lot of guys that had been in the sport a long time said this will never work. Now basically 98% of pit road are former athletes.”

NASCAR opens its 75th season Sunday with the second Clash at the Coliseum, a 150-lap dash around a quarter-mile oval set up on the floor of the historic stadium in Exposition Park. Qualifying for the 27-car field was to be held Saturday afternoon. The tightness of the Coliseum track and the short length of the 37.5-mile exhibition event leaves no room for pit crews or pit stops, but both elements will be decisive when the NASCAR regular season opens at Daytona in two weeks.

For that you can thank Horton, who everyone in NASCAR refers to as Coach Phil.

Horton got his start in racing 25 years ago as a personal trainer for former driver Ernie Irvan. However, the longer he hung around the track, the more his background in elite team sports convinced him racing could get better if pit crews had fewer people who could rebuild a carburetor blindfolded and more people who could handle the stress of competing before a crowd of 100,000 every weekend.

“When it came to performing pit stops, they were not performers, they were mechanics,” Horton said of the old-style pit crews. “They knew how to use the tools, they were good at what they were doing. But when it hit the fan, they couldn’t perform.

“So we’re not only looking at them being athletic, but being able to handle the pressure and perform under pressure. And that’s what athletes have been trained to do.”

McCord admits after jacking up a NASCAR racer multiple times every weekend, he still can’t change the tires on his own car.

“To be honest, AAA can come out there and do anything for you,” he said. “I still don’t know how to change my own tires.

“I still have a lot to learn. I need to know where the carburetor is, man.”