Winning Team: Here’s an Organization That’s Organized

Before the No. 44 Jaguar had even made its way through the victory lap and back to the pit Sunday afternoon in the Los Angeles Times Grand Prix of Endurance, owner Bob Tullius was shaking hands all around and telling members of his crew, “It was the 23-second pit stop. You did it! You did it!”

He congratulated driver Hurley Haywood, too, of course, and greeted John Morton with a hug when he climbed out of the car after catching Chip Robinson in the turbocharged Lowenbrau Porsche on the next-to-last lap to win the three-hour race by less than three seconds.

But when Tullius turned around to find a TV camera in his face, he bubbled again about the 23-second pit stop and said, “They’re the best crew in the business.”

The Jaguar and the Porsche made their last stops simultaneously, and the Jaguar team’s 23-second stop helped close the gap by about six seconds.

Crew chief Lawton (Lanky) Foushee knew going in that they had the car set up right and running flawlessly. He’d been smiling all morning. But when it came time for him to take his bows, he kept referring to the game plan, bouncing the credit back to Tullius.

Tullius had outlined the plan on Saturday afternoon: “Both drivers understand that our first goal will be to stay out of trouble. We want to go as fast as we can go, still keeping a little bit in reserve for fudge time so we don’t get in trouble.

“We can’t go out and have fun racing with somebody early.

“I’d say our odds are about 6-1. We don’t have the power that the turbocharged cars have. You see that in qualifying when they just turn up the boost. We have to sit back at the start and let the Corvette and the Datsun beat each other’s brains out and then we have to try to outlast the Porsches.”

Give him this: He called it.

When Haywood stepped out of the car with 30 laps to go, he told the crew that he could see the Porsche was not coming out of the turns well. Tullius also had determined that Morton would start and finish the race because Riverside International is his home track, and that the pit stops would take place at about the one-third and two-third marks of the race, regardless of caution flags. If Morton had enough fuel not to pit until laps 38-42, then they’d know that the car was running perfectly, and only one more stop would be needed.

Morton turned the car over to Haywood on lap 43 and Haywood gave it back on lap 92.

His drivers drove the race just as he asked them. No hotdog heroics.

This team, Group 44, always does things Tullius’ way. As he explains it, “We have a democracy here until the dictator gets (angry).”

Tullius is a meticulous, disciplined person, and he runs a tight ship, relying strongly on the team concept.

After every race, the winner gives his crew the obligatory word of thanks and credit. Actually, it’s a fact for every team.

Group 44 stresses that it’s not just the crew, it’s the whole team. For Group 44 that means everyone from Tullius to Eric Kent, who drove the truck that brought the car here, and Pamela Compton, the woman who serves as traveling secretary, cook and scorer.

Asked to expound on that after qualifying Saturday afternoon, Morton said, “People think of auto racing and they think of Indy. Thirty-three beautifully painted, shiny, powerful race cars lined up on the track before millions of people and these 33 gods of speed come strutting out to drive them.

“What they see there is 1% of that team’s existence.”

It takes a lot of people in a lot of different roles, leaving no weak links.

Morton said: “When you break down what makes for success, you have to consider the whole team. The best teams are just as successful year after year no matter who the driver is. The team is at the biggest premium. Drivers are a dime a dozen. Make that 50 cents a dozen. We do have our worth.

“But the point is that there are a lot of good drivers vying for the best teams. The drivers that you see having success year after year are the drivers who have gotten themselves into position to always be able to work with a good team.”

In saying that Group 44’s way works, Morton added, “There are as many different ways to run a team as there are owners.”

Tullius is the founder and president of Group 44, Inc., a race shop now in its 24th year. Tullius joined Jaguar 12 years ago as a driver. He won the national championship in a Jaguar E-type V12 in 1975 and he won the Trans-Am championship in 1977 and 1978 in a Jaguar XJ-S.

His racing shop built, developed and raced the XJR-5 ground-effects prototype that began competing in 1982.

These Jaguars are built in his racing shop in Winchester, Va., and he still drives them once in a while. Mostly, though, he oversees and organizes.

Tullius sits during the race with the scorer in the little three-seat shaded stand that the crew erects in the pits. He watches the computer that Compton keeps up-to-the-second and he wears headsets and knows, at all times, what is being done. But he lets his crew do it.

Foushee has been with Tullius for 17 years, so he knows how Tullius wants things done. Tullius puts a premium on the type of people he hires, and he expects the people who stay with him to set the example for the rest coming in.

When he talks about the people who make up his team, he includes the 30 people who work full-time for Group 44 and it starts with the department heads at the shop back in Winchester.

Even there, Foushee is the coordinator.

Foushee has an Air Force background. He used to work on the fleet of planes that included Air Force 1.

It’s common for racing engineers to come from the aerospace industry. As Foushee says, today’s ground effects cars are upside-down airplanes. The wing that holds the car to the track is the same design as a wing that, facing the other way, would lift it off the ground.

They build these cars back in a shop that includes a paint shop, machine shop, engineering shop, fabrication shop. They build their own parts and they build from the ground up.

Foushee, sitting in the 18-wheel truck that transports the cars, the parts, the machine shop on wheels, looked up at the wreck of their newest car suspended from a rack over his head, and considered the almost $200,000 and the several months work of that had been crushed away in one brush with the wall. “Sometimes it makes you want to cry,” he said with a shrug and a smile.

Tullius was testing that car Tuesday when it was destroyed. When a driver makes a mistake, the folks in the pits say, “That’s racing.” After all, it’s the driver’s life on the line.

When a crew members makes a mistake--well, that’s not allowed.

It’s quite an art to gather people who are so talented, so specialized and still willing to lead this type of life and be a team player. But it’s crucial to gather them.

“People who like this business tend to be the vagabond type, and that means that, frequently, they are very individualistic. We have to have people who fit well together.

“From time to time we’ve had people who didn’t fit, and one bad apple can spoil the barrel. When we’ve had problems, we either get rid of them or we change them to fit.

“Years of experience has taught me that if you can keep it light, keep guys from getting too down in the mouth, you’ll have a better-working group.”

The drivers realize that, too.

Morton said, “There is more potential for a crew that is not harmonious to make a mistake. One of the reasons I have so much confidence in this crew is that there are no prima donnas. I trust that they’re all working together . . . “It is crucial that I trust the crew because confidence in the crew equates to confidence in the car.

“The sum of their efforts is the car.”

And Haywood said, “I have to have absolute and complete blind faith in my crew. If I’m going to go out there and go 200 miles an hour in a car that under normal conditions would take a couple of hours to fix but under the stress of racing conditions takes a couple of minutes to fix, either I’m stupid--which I’m not--or I know that the car was put together right . . .

“How well could I drive if I’m thinking, ‘I wonder if he got that top screw tight enough?’ I can’t even have that thought.”

Foushee said, “I’ve seen it in the faces of some of the new, young guys the day they realize what a mistake can mean. They see what someone else’s mistake caused to happen, and there’s a look of--oh, my God, what if I do something like that. You want to see that look.

“There are a million details, and no one of them is insignificant.”

Group 44 has a five-page checklist that must be completed before a car goes on the track. It’s like the list airline mechanics go through.

Asked if he thought people appreciated the kind of engineers that work on race cars these days, Foushee said, “I think the image of a bunch of grease monkeys in the pits was gone long ago. I’m not sure people realize how good these guys really are.”

The guys who jump over the wall to change tires are all fine mechanics and engineers. Some of them specialists. John Churchward, who was hanging over the wall with a board showing lap and time, used to work for the company that designed the car’s fuel injection system.

Brian Krem, who was changing tires and changing the cooling system for the drivers at each stop, is in charge of the engine shop for Group 44. Grant Weaver, who was changing tires and washing the windshield, specializes in the chassis setup. Brian Berthold is an engineer who designs parts.

This Jaguar crew won the pit stop competition last year by an easy margin and takes pride in that.

Tullius loves it. “After we won it, Dan Gurney bet me a grand that his crew could beat us in a run-off. We won again.”