This is the Busiest Time of the Year in NASCAR Shops

“Boy I bet you can’t wait for the season to be over so you can take a break.” Well…

“So what do you do from know until Daytona? Take a few months off?” Actually…

“What do you do in the off season? Do you still get paid during vacation?” Oh boy.

I have heard these questions more times than I can honestly keep track of. In reality folks who may or may not be race fans ask them. But they are asked by people who do not truly know what being part of a race team is actually like. And how would they? If someone has never been professionally involved with an auto racing team there is no accurate statistic to research. But allow me to elaborate from my own experiences.

Following the season-ending race, shop details change but the shop schedule does not. The only weekly alteration is not having to load the transporter every Thursday.

NASCAR’s top three tours have concluded shortly before Thanksgiving in recent years. How long a team’s Holiday weekend lasted depended on how prepared a team’s inventory was. The elimination of Daytona testing in January has moved some planning.

The cars and parts for the next season should be beginning to be built part way through the previous year. Many factors come into play in order for this to become reality. How many cars are built that will conform to next year’s rule package? How many are crashed that need repairing? When are our wind tunnel dates? What test dates are scheduled? What kind of manpower is available? Is there a sponsor signed that will fund everything just mentioned? The answers for one team are not the same as the next team.

The toughest winter combinations I have been through include having two days off all winter, Thanksgiving Day and Christmas Day.

I have worked through the seven-seven-seven combination. Every worker in the garage area knows that slang term. That means seven days per week, seven a.m. to seven p.m.

And leaving the shop at seven p.m. did not mean you stayed late. That simply meant you went home on time. We often stayed late. More than one paid a visit to the hospital for various illnesses.

Working every single day except two from November to February can exhaust a person mentally and physically. The joy was driving to Daytona Beach to begin speedweeks knowing we had a couple of days off scheduled during the week.

Not all teams operate under those circumstances but they do exist. They tend to be ones that do not have the funding compared to the heavy-hitting budgets of the sport. I have worked for a struggling, tired race team fighting to get into the top thirty-five in Cup points. The memory still lingers of being garaged next to a top-twenty team during a Daytona test session. Their cars were half a second faster than we were and all their guys were putting in forty hour weeks. Auto racing has plenty of irony to go around.

I have also been employed with a big budget team that is able to build new test pieces, have the time and people to try items on the seven-post rig, and keep the hours in the shop to a manageable amount.

Everybody in the garage would be willing to work longer if it meant beating the competition. But there is whole lot of merit to working smarter and not harder. Some budgets can not buy that idea.

No two race teams are on the same plan. Drive by one at five o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon and the parking lot may be emptying out. Drive by another at eight o’clock on a Sunday evening and the employees might still be grinding, welding, wrenching and have no signs of letting up.

A good, quality team wants to keep the speed and advantage it has. The ones that ran mid to rear of the pack need to catch up. Every team has their own agenda.

Racing is not a typical nine to five business. The most time allowed to strengthen and advance a program is when there is no race to be loaded for every week. This is the time when the most hours are worked and the weekly chassis schedules are the most full. Contrary to what some believe there is no off season. And this is the busiest time of the year.

Races are mostly won at the shop. And what is learned there is applied at the racetrack. The Daytona 500 is not won in February. It is won right now.