CONCORD, N.C. - The clanking of weight plates and a few groans of exertion echo out over the up-tempo beat of a hard rock song blaring over gym speakers.
If one didn't know any better, one would swear he or she were in a football locker room.
And one would be close to being correct, at least in terms of the men barking out encouragement and light-hearted ribbing as the day's workout is turned in. But while the sights and sound are familiar, the sport is different.
Welcome to the Hendrick Motorsports gym which throughout the day is teaming with the organization's ever-growing number of pit crew members. But much of the day-in, day-out routine is the same and for a large number of them, that commitment to the process was forged long ago in a football weightroom housed on a university campus.
On Tuesday, four empty chairs sat vacant between the machines and one-by-one, were filled. Dax Hollifield, a jackman and former Virginia Tech linebacker who graduated from the school after his senior year in 2022 as the school's fourth all-time leading tackler (355), arrived first. Next strode in Jarius Morehead. A tire carrier now for the organization, Morehead spent five years at NC State, winning the DeWayne Washington Award in 2018 for the squad's best defensive back. He left the program after the 2019 season with 224 tackles, five interceptions and a pick-six to his credit.
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Then strolled in a pair of the company's veteran big men - John Gianninoto followed by Landon Walker. Both were former offensive linemen: Gianninoto a four-year starting center at UNLV and Walker, a tackle at Clemson who left after the 2011 season as the school's all-time leader in snaps played (3,131) and starts (49). The two are now long-time fuelers, Gianninoto on the No. 9 car and Walker on the No. 24.
While cameras were being placed and microphones checked, conversation quickly ignited between the four, starting with the intricacies of the 3-3-5 stack defensive scheme versus a more traditional 4-4 front. Gianninoto's Rebels are already off to a 1-0 start after a win over Idaho State in Week 0 last Saturday while the Tigers, Wolfpack and Hokies all have big openers this weekend.
But with the Southern 500 looming on Sunday night at Darlington Raceway, a NASCAR crown jewel race at one of the circuit's most historic venues, all four have work to do this weekend aside from checking in on Saturday's scoreboard. It's those common threads - both past and present - that unites so many within the Hendrick Motorsports fold. Up and down pit road on any given race day, you will see the relationships that have been laid in recent years, all forged on a foundation of shared experience.
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“It makes it easier. Pretty much all of pit road is either football or another college sport,” Morehead observed. “So, I think it makes for a competitive atmosphere. Everybody knows what they want to do. They want to beat each other off pit road, even if you’re working for the same organization. It just makes it way easier.”
“Also, we’ve all been through so much stuff,” Hollifield echoed. “You went through 5 a.m. workouts in the dead of winter, regardless as of where you went. You’re cut from the same cloth. You have that bond as being a collegiate athlete regardless of where you went. You can wear that on your chest, I guess.”
It's a brotherhood that's certainly grown exponentially in both Gianninoto's and Walker's time in the sport and the evolution of stock car racing in recent memory can be felt as much on pit road as anywhere. Both brought in around 2012, hiring former collegiate athletes was still a relatively novel idea. Now, spearheaded by pit crew coach Keith Flynn, that effort is a priority complete with combines, training camps and a recruiting initiative that's ongoing and far reaching.
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“I was hitting John up on Facebook when we got here. That’s how old we are,” Walker grinned. “We didn’t know this existed to the extent it did. We were kind of slowly recruited. We came into the sport and you didn’t see the D1 guys sort of leading the pack, being starters on pit road. It was mostly guys who’d been mechanics that were transitioning into being pit road athletes. We were kind of that first, second or third class that got into it.”
While Morehead, Hollifield and so many other pit department athletes can share tales of their first encounters with Flynn, Gianninoto said his introduction to an opportunity in NASCAR was largely happenstance.
“I didn’t know much about the sport. I got lucky that Red Bull Racing was working out at UNLV when they came out there for the Las Vegas race and that’s when I kind of heard about it,” Gianninoto recalled. “I talked to some of those guys and my roommate got into it and the rest is history.”
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Gianninoto, Walker and the rest of the early waves of former college athletes replacing traditional mechanics on over-the-wall crews have helped make history as well. Since the mid 1990s, spearheaded by former Hendrick Motorsports crew chief Ray Evernham, focus on pit road precision has intensified, seemingly every year. And likely never as much as now, in the single-lug-nut, Next Gen era.
Evernham once searched for seconds. Modern day crew chiefs and pit personnel are digging for fractions of fractions of that. A tenth here, a couple of hundredths there, shaved over relentless repetitions, film study and training.
From that perspective, it's hard to imagine a more appropriate background than football. Ask any college coach today if his team's ever played a perfect game, his answer will almost assuredly be, 'No'. It's likely you'd get the same answer when asking crew chiefs about flawless four-tire stops.
And there's also an acceptance of extenuating circumstances. An oblong ball won't always bounce a positive direction and the racing gods will always be fickle.
“I think it still goes back to football where you’re taking it one play at a time, right?” Gianninoto said. “Where you’re just trying to do your task that time and it’s going to change a little bit each time. The car hits pit road like the play is called in football, so, you just go step-by-step and then you just kind of see where the chips fall at the end.”
That approach helps swallow defeat and in racing, wins are much rarer and more difficult to come by than in football.
“You’ve got a 50-50- shot every weekend in football, there’s not going to be 38 other teams with a chance to beat you. So, when you go to a race, you almost have to change your mindset,” Walker said. “You have to be like, ‘OK, a top five, a top 10 – those are good days.
“Especially for these guys just coming in and being put on cars while trying to earn their keep. It’s one of those things where, they’re learning what they’re doing. So, they may not be on a car that’s going to win every weekend and it’s definitely a tough transition when you get into racing to learn that it’s not about the wins and losses anymore. It’s about being on the team and learning to get better at my job.”
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And each job - just like positions on the football field - is unique and comes with its own set of demands and specializations. Walker and Gianninoto both taller and broader, must hoist gas cans around. Jackmen, however, are much more involved in the choreographed movements the team must perfect, leaping over air hoses and avoiding teammates while getting a race car up in the air and back down as quickly as possible.
“(A pit stop) is very, very similar to a football play,” Hollifield explained. “A stop is nine seconds long, a really good one is eight seconds, which is pretty similar to a football play, the only difference is, instead of 30 seconds of rest (in football) you have 30 minutes, so you’re able to recover. But it’s all out go. Especially in my position, being a jackman. It’s nonstop movement. It’s very twitchy. The best jackmen we have here are former running backs or linebackers or tight ends – very twitch guys that are really strong, really big lower halves – that’s really what we look for. It’s very similar in that perspective.”
Hollifield, a former defensive standout, adds an analogy for each pit stop.
“I like to explain it as a third down from each stage,” Hollifield said. “The driver and crew chief are doing the job on first down, second down, but to really execute the whole series, it’s coming down to getting new tires – it’s make it or break it time. You’ve got to do your job. You’ve got to get off the field. You’ve got to do it. That’s how I feel about it. That’s the closest situation I’ve felt to playing football.
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His comparison is quickly met with approving nods from his cohorts and again, illustrated the commonalities between pit road athletes with football backgrounds. At Hendrick Motorsports, those experiences bridge age gaps and upbringings, skill sets and personalities, ever strengthening the ties among teams and within the entire organization.
And if any team is to win, it needs to be tight-knit. With each new class that enters, those who came before are making sure that cohesion continues to develop.
“Seeing all the guys that are coming into the sport now, when John and I first started in 2012, it wasn’t like that,” Walker summarized. “It was really rare to have guys that were even Division 1 (athletes) and now it’s like the entire pit road is made up of that.
“It’s really cool to have that in common with these guys … Being able to see these new guys coming in now, it’s wild we’re still bringing in guys every year and that the program is still working itself through everybody.”