Behind the scenes, crew members keep NASCAR Chicago Street Race running smoothly

Chicago Tribune

2 days ago

At the door of the DGM Racing trailer, Janice Kennett sat peacefully in the double shade of a tent and her Chevrolet baseball cap.
She took advantage of a quiet moment between her caretaker duties for the racing team: Kennett washes all the drivers' suits and ensures the team is stocked with cold drinks and snacks. She and her husband, Gary — who drives the truck for the team — have been with DGM Racing for four years. They drive to all 33 race weekends from their home in Lake Wales, Florida, where Kennett uses her own washing machine to do the team's laundry.
'People work better when they're taken care of,' Kennett said.
Behind the many wire fences surrounding NASCAR's fan area, dozens of trailers and hauling trucks are lined up like oversized dominoes. Back here, everyone wears long black pants or heavy suits, protecting themselves from the gasoline and asphalt that makes racing dangerous for the large crews that come with every driver.
This is the sweaty world of NASCAR, where mechanics lie belly-up beneath racecars, their hands covered in grime. It's not glamorous or easy, but this work is the lifeblood of American racing.
Late Saturday morning, water poured out from under the hood of Joey Gase Motorsports' No. 53 car, driven by Sage Karam. Five team members, in green and black racing shirts, crowded around the vehicle. Sweat ran down everyone's foreheads as one mechanic crawled under the car, and two others set up a tent to shield them from the sun as they worked.
Mechanics often perform this kind of maintenance. When drivers do their practice loops at the beginning of a race weekend, their cars accrue all sorts of damage. The JR Motorsports team had at least 12 people working on one of its cars, while the Joey Gase group did its repairs just a few trailers away.
Behind another fence, Sunoco employees distributed dozens of gas tanks. To their right, technicians from Goodyear Racing carefully studied piles of tires, which were stacked up all over the NASCAR area.
Getting tires to cars is one of the more complex aspects of a race. , the Goodyear Racing product manager for NASCAR, said that his company provides roughly 3,000 tires to cars every NASCAR race weekend. Cup Series vehicles get a maximum of seven pairs of tires for each race. XFinity Series cars get a maximum of six pairs. Most teams hold onto a pair or two of 'scuffs' — used tires — as backups. Almost all the tires used in a race weekend are immediately recycled into rubber dust.
Heinrich and his team are usually the first to arrive at a race site. They have to unload and organize thousands of tires, and then collect data on every tire so that small manufacturing discrepancies can be accounted for and explained to teams, which receive tires at random.
'You really can't help but to have an appreciation, or be somewhat of a fan of racing, when you work for Goodyear,' Heinrich said, 'because, really, the core of the automotive business is racing.'
If it rains, all those numbers change, and teams are allotted an additional four sets of wet-weather tires. They're necessary to prevent slippage when it rains, but will slow down a driver once the track dries up again.
The Chicago Street Race, with its imperfect asphalt and lines of yellow and white paint for average city drivers, offers an unusual track for Goodyear tires. That aspect, however, is out of Heinrich's hands.
'That's why this place is so special,' Heinrich said. 'It's just different. It's not a purpose-built racetrack.'
The five-person crew at Cope Family Racing would agree that this weekend is different. Usually, the team has a trailer with all of its tools right behind the pit box. But because the pit road area is so limited, in the middle of downtown Chicago, the crew had to park elsewhere and lug all the tools to the pit road.
Bradley Carson is one of three mechanics on the Cope team, which is the smallest as well as one of the newest in the series, not that it has limited XFinity driver Thomas Annunziata, who qualified in the middle of the pack for the Chicago Street Race.
Saturday afternoon, as the temperature climbed into the mid-80s, an oil-caked Carson was sitting on a tire in the shade of his team's pit box.
'I'm exhausted,' he said.
He had every right to be. Carson, 62, who lives in Morrisville, North Carolina, and the two other mechanics on the team, rebuild Annunziata's car nearly every week and after a racing weekend, it requires a complete renewal. For Carson, a 19-hour day, four times a week, is nothing unusual.
He admitted that the job takes a lot. But he wouldn't give it up.
'People are doing this because they want to do this,' Carson said.
He got into motorsports as a 16-year-old not-always-legal drag racer in Los Angeles. Carson fell in love with 'the thrill' of being around cars and stuck with it.
'You build something and it comes to life,' he said. 'It's a calling, in a sense … something that drives inside of you.'