Tag: pit crews

OM in the News: NASCAR’s Pit Crews and Operations

Chapter 10 of your Heizer/Render/Munson text , Human Resources, Job Design, and Work Measurement, opens with a Global Profile featuring high performance teamwork at auto races. In the case of NASCAR, races can cover up to 600 miles, with cars zipping around the track approaching 200 miles per hour. Yet races are often won by seconds, or even slivers of a second, and a slower pit stop can cost teams hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money and potential sponsorships, writes The Orlando Sentinel (Sept. 3 , 2024).

Every second saved in a stop is worth about 20 car lengths on the track. Last season, the average margin of victory was 1.11 seconds, and it was under one second in 19 of the 36 races. The margin of victory was under one second in 10 of the 23 races so far this season.

“While you are fighting for every position on the track, you can gain multiple spots on pit road,” said the president of Joe Gibbs Racing, which has about 50 athletes in its pit crews. “It can 100 percent win you a race and absolutely lose you a race.”

The pursuit of that edge is why Hendrick, Gibbs, Penske and other big race teams invest millions of dollars to hire and train dozens of tire changers, jackmen and gas can carriers who can work in chaotic conditions on race days 38 weeks a year. Teams are building state-of-the-art gyms and hiring top trainers, chefs and yoga instructors. They are also paying hefty salaries — reaching $200,000 — to sign top athletes and lure pit crew members away from rivals.

The athletes, who included a few college lacrosse players and wrestlers, are separated roughly by body type: bigger linemen in one group, lankier receivers and defensive backs in another, and squatter linebackers and running backs in a third. They are evaluated on 12 different skills and tasks. (At a NASCAR minicamp, coaches collect 49 different data points for evaluation.)

Teams have learned that former football players often make the best prospects for 5-man crews, thanks to their strength, agility and speed. So teams scour college campuses looking for players  who didn’t catch on with an N.F.L. team and want to trade their football helmets for fireproof suits. For most of NASCAR’s 75-year history, mechanics, fabricators and others in the shop doubled as pit crews. Pit crews have become on-camera stars featured in Netflix documentaries.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Which tools in Chapter 10 could be used in a pit stop?
  2. What change has been made in crew sizes in the past 2 years? Why?

OM in the News: Who Should Jack Up the Car in a Nascar Pit Stop?

The pit crew for Christopher Bell in action at Phoenix Raceway

“There are two ways to win a Nascar race,” writes The Wall Street Journal (March 10-11, 2023). The first is to go faster, when you’re in motion, than anyone else. The second is to spend less time at rest than your opponents, shaving away expensive tenths of seconds sacrificed in pit stops, as we illustrate in Chapter 10’s Global Company Profile.

Joe Gibbs Racing (JGR) has done it both ways—on the track, with star drivers like Denny Hamlin and Martin Truex Jr. In the pit, it has brought the business of data analytics to the greasy work of changing tires and refueling cars. JGR’s crews have been either the fastest or second-fastest in Nascar every year since 2014, a span during which the organization has won two Cup Series championships. A month into the 2023 season, three JGR drivers are among the top 10 point earners on the circuit, due largely to the roster of ex-football and baseball players assembled in the pit.

Their ranks include CJ Bailey, a former college running back who has become Nascar’s premier tire carrier, and Caleb Dirks, a former pitching prospect for the Atlanta Braves who now applies his length as a jackman, sprinting out with his hydraulic device and pumping the pitting car airborne. (An experienced pit crew member who works for a top-tier team, by the way, can make around $500,000 per year).

Affixing motion sensors and running JGR’s pit crew through a gamut of high-tech exercises. data analysts logged the fluidity with which they transitioned from one effort to another. A 4-tire pit stop is a frantic 5-man ballet—all tight corridors and heavy equipment, set at breakneck tempo. The difference between a 9.8-second and 10.8-second stop can decide a race and a season.

The analysts isolated biomechanical thresholds that, if met by a prospect, predicted success in a certain role. Prospective tire changers were valued for their baseball hitting background but also for their “arc of hip rotation.”  Tire carriers had their relative eccentric force production gauged. One such uncovered gem was Bailey. Their data revealed that he had the precise proportions of upper-body might and nimble footspeed of the ideal carrier. Last season with JGR he was graded as 13.8% more efficient than any other carrier in the sport—the fastest hauler of metal and rubber alive.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. How do time and motion studies apply to Nascar pit stops?
  2. What methods analysis tools in Chapter 10 can be used to examine pit stop efficiency?

Video Tip: NASCAR Racing and Time & Motion Studies

Jay and I spend a lot of time developing the Global Company Profiles that open each chapter. The whole idea is to motivate students as they enter the topic by providing an interesting company that uses the techniques we are about to introduce. Some of the firms highlighted are Hard Rock (Ch.1), Disney (Ch.4), FedEx (Ch.8), McDonald’s (Ch.9), Amazon (Ch.12), and Delta (Ch.15). But my favorite Global Profile (and the one that took us the longest to create) is definitely the introduction to Chapter 10, Human Resources, Job Design, and Work Measurement. Here we highlight Rusty Wallace’s NASCAR racing team and how they live and breathe  time studies in the “pit”, where tires are changed and fuel added.

We just came across a great 6 minute video to accompany the Global Profile and think it’s a nice way to kick-start Chapter 10. The video features the NASCAR team of Kyle Busch and looks at the anatomy of a pit stop. The pit crew manages an amazing 73 maneuvers in just 12.12 seconds. Even if you aren’t a racing fan, I think you and your students will be impressed by this operation. It also makes a good tie-in to discussion of flow diagrams (Figure 10.5),  activity charts (Figure 10.6), and operations charts (Figure 10.7).