So there you are, sitting in your team’s pit area, minding your own business when you hear the spotter key the mic and say: “Uh, you okay?”

Now the mad dash is on…

Those three words are usually followed by some sort of explanation by the driver and/or spotter of what happened and then a quick description from the spotter about the damage done to your racecar.  As quickly as you can, you make sure all your tools are ready to go, you’ve got four fresh tires to put on, and the team and the crew chief try to quickly work out some sort of game plan to get the damage fixed and your driver back on track without losing a lap.

During my career I’ve worked for teams that had both good drivers and bad drivers.  But no matter the level of talent, sometimes you hear those dreaded words.  You know you are going to be in for a long night when you are standing on the wall peering down pit road, and here comes your car trailing smoke and looking like it just went 12 rounds with Holyfield.

As long as the car is still rolling, usually the first priority is to get four new tires on the car.  Most times after a wreck the tires will either be flat or flat-spotted, and we’ve all seen the damage that a flat tire can do to a car.  Once the tires are replaced, you start finding bent metal to try and straighten.  Making sure the nose is still relatively aerodynamic and that the spoiler (or wing) is still sticking up are usually two of the most important things to fix.  We also try and make sure that we don’t have any fender rubs and that no broken fender braces are sticking out that could cut down a tire.  You will see guys using everything from hammers, to baseball bats, to their own bodies to try and fix damage.

And it’s always crazy, because unless your car is really tore up, you are going to try and keep your driver on the lead lap.  So when the driver comes down pit road, the team only has the amount of time it takes the pacecar to make a lap to make repairs.  Once the field comes out of four, the driver has to take off to keep from losing a lap.  He will then return to pit road, and the repairs will continue.

Those races usually consist of somewhere around 341 pit stops (give or take a few) for tires, BearBond, sheet metal patches, checking the toe, more BearBond, oh, and more BearBond.  And you end up doing all this work so you can finish 31st, eight laps down.  Can we say bummer?

As much as it sucks though, wrecks are just part of racing.  The level of competition is so high that drivers must be constantly right on that razor’s edge between being fast and wrecking.  And every driver, once in a while, will run out of talent and wad one up.  When he does, we’ll be waiting, hammers in hand.

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