Time Bandits

The car has slowed from 188 mph to 55 in an instant, and then from 55 to whoa in a heartbeat, coming to rest in a parking space along a short wall.

Make that a box within the parking space.

Jeff Gordon has done his job.

Overhead, a camera has come on, chronicling every step of the pit stop, and somewhere, a stopwatch clicks.

Before the car has stopped, Barry Muse is running in front of it, jack in hand. A body-shop worker five days a week, his avocation puts him in the spotlight, before thousands of people at the track and a national television audience.

It also puts him in harm’s way because other drivers have the same idea at the same time. Jack men have been killed in the pits when cars didn’t stop in time.

Jeff Knight drives a truck for a grocery chain Monday through Friday, but now he’s running behind Muse, hauling a 75-pound tire, and Shane Parsnow, an engineer, is lugging an impact wrench.

As soon as the car has stopped, Darren Jolly, a delivery driver all week, hauls out his own 75-pound tire, and Mike Trower, who works for the power company in Charlotte, N.C., has the wrench.

Muse slides the jack under the car and pumps twice. Parsnow and Trower hit their knees in front of the right tires, and by the time they have gotten there, Mike Belden, who drives the car’s hauler cross-country and is the only full-time employee in the crew, has stepped over the wall, carrying an 80-pound, 11-gallon can of gas, which he has plugged into a fixture on the car that lets it drain into the tank.

Chris Anderson, a middle-school teacher, is standing behind the car with a can plugged into an overflow tube that vents the tank.

About two seconds have passed.

The wrench whirs, one, two, three, four, five times and a wheel falls off the car, replaced by another on which lug nuts are glued. Whir, whir, whir, whir, whir, five nuts back on the studs of the hub and the car slams back down when Muse twists the handle.

The five men run to the other side of the car, two more tires are handed over the wall and the process is repeated, with a second can of gas emptied into the tank.

Gordon is gone in a screeching burn of peeled rubber, back to 55 mph on pit lane as quickly as possible, back to 188 mph as soon as he can on the racetrack.

About 17 seconds have passed.

Seven men have left Charlotte early Sunday morning and come straight to the track. They will be back home in time to work their real jobs on Monday, and the time spent between their arrival and departure has been directed toward a goal of changing four tires, filling a 22-gallon tank and doing whatever chassis adjustment is necessary as quickly as possible.

Gassing the car takes 11-12 seconds. The tire change has occasionally been done in less than 16, and while all of this has been accomplished, a pole with a wire brush on it has scraped debris from the grill, Gordon has gotten a drink and Muse has also cleaned the windshield in his spare time.

These are specially qualified men, hired for strength, speed, flexibility and dexterity.

“You look for a guy who’s committed, who wants to do it,” says Ray Evernham, crew chief for Gordon’s car. “And you want certain characteristics. You want your jack man, for example, to be fast enough to get around the car quickly. You want your tire changers to be smaller, littler guys with lower center of gravity to get on their knees.”

They are in a race within the race, and the reward can be instantaneous.

“Sometimes a good pit stop is an easier way to pass cars than for me to spend 30 or 40 laps on a racetrack trying to pass a guy,” Gordon says.

“A split second on a pit stop is usually a whole lot more than a split second on the racetrack because you can make up two or three spots with a second in the pits, but one second on the race track, you might be faster than a guy, but that doesn’t mean you can pass him.”

The consequences of a bad stop can drag out lap after lap, with Gordon struggling to make up spots on the track that were lost in the pits, while the crew goes over the instant replay of the stop on a television, looking for the flaw.

Or, the consequences can be just as instantaneous as the rewards.

“If we have a bad pit stop because it’s our fault and we drop back a couple of positions and there’s a wreck, our day is over,” says Andy Papathanassiou, the pit crew’s coach. “Any time you’re running behind people, you’re more likely to get into a wreck than if you’re leading the race, running up front.”

Papathanassiou’s story is a mixture of stereotype and myth explosion. He came to racing like so many Southern kids, by hanging around the track and talking himself onto a crew. In this case, it was Derrike Cope’s crew at Sears Point in Sonoma, Calif., while Papathanassiou was working with a computer company in San Francisco.

He came to racing as a New Jerseyite, with a bachelor’s degree in economics and master’s in organizational behavior, earned by playing guard for the Stanford football team in the mid- and late 1980s.

“It’s so competitive that you can’t leave anything alone,” says Gordon. “Every little detail is important. If we spend hours on the race car, trying to make it as fast as we can, we need to spend hours on the pit crew, trying to make pit stops as fast as we can.”

They do, as do the crews of Terry Labonte and Randy LaJoie, teammates of Gordon and part of Rick Hendrick’s Chevrolet stable. Papathanassiou works with all three teams, having found his niche in racing.

“When I started with other teams, they said, ‘We’ve been doing this so long we don’t practice. We just do it on Sunday,’ ” Papathanassiou says.

“And I thought to myself, ‘Aha, there it is right there.’ You’ve got to have an organized way to get better at anything. Racing was evolving from a sport in which people had been involved for their entire lives, and a racer did everything: mechanic, fabricator, a motor guy and pit stops. Now there are specialties and my opinion is that that includes the pit area.”

Evernham agrees.

“I started this team in 1992 for Rick Hendrick, and one of the first people I hired was Andy Papathanassiou,” says Evernham, who knew of Papathanassiou because both worked on the crew of the late Alan Kulwicki, though at different times.

“I hired him specifically to train and work with the pit crew. Just like Ed Guzzo is the chief mechanic on the car, Andy is the chief mechanic with the pit crew.

“I see so many people, so many good race cars get in position to win races and lose because of a pit stop. I knew in Winston Cup racing, even if we weren’t a top team right off the bat, if we had a top pit crew, we could gain and that’s the way it’s been. The pit crew has really helped us win a lot of races.”

It’s a million-dollar crew, called the Rainbow Warriors, after the color scheme on Gordon’s Chevrolet, and with an identity of its own.

Turnover is a given on pit row, with low-paid workers moving from team to team, looking for a share of glory. But four of the seven over-the-wall Rainbow Warriors have been with the team since its inception.

“They get a salary, but what rewards are there for anybody who wants to do something extra?” Evernham asks. “They get to be part of something that’s the best. It’s not money that drives them. They’re the No. 1 pit crew in the country, voted on by the fans. That’s something.”

Actually, the mega-money appellation comes from Evernham, who says, “The pit crew helped us win the Darlington Million, and track position really won us Bristol.”

Gordon won a $1-million bonus for taking the Southern 500 with superior pit work at Darlington last year after winning the Daytona 500 and Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte.

He can tell the difference in success and failure while sitting in the car.

“When I hit my marks, I can feel them taking the lug nuts off and you can tell when they’re running around and jacking the right side of the car up and running pretty quick to the left side, you can tell when it’s a good stop,” Gordon says.

“And you really can’t let [a bad stop] get to you. They’re more disappointed in themselves if they make a mistake, and as soon as I leave pit road, they’re already talking to themselves: ‘What was the problem? How can we fix it?’ There’s nothing to be said by me.”

Nothing needs to be said. Pressure goes with the job, because even changing a tire expands in importance when you’re doing it for a front-running team. One mistake can cost thousands of dollars, and everyone knows it.

“A pit crew can’t take a 20th-place car and win a race with it,” Papathanassiou says. “But you can influence a car that can run in the top 10. And we can influence a car in 20th place in the wrong direction too.”

With the Rainbow Warriors, it’s the price of fame.

“I don’t put pressure on them,” says Evernham. “That’s life. With success comes pressure. There’s more pressure on the 49ers than there is on most teams. More on the Braves than a lot of baseball teams. That’s a pretty good position to be in, when you’re expected to win. This crew is better under pressure.

“Everybody wants to be a star for 15 minutes. They’re getting their time right now. There have been teams before them and there’ll be teams after them. Right now it’s their time.”

Fifteen minutes? More like 17 seconds.

Or less.

NASCAR Race Facts

When: Sunday, 12:30 p.m.

TV: ESPN; RADIO: KCKC (1350)

Distance: 200 laps

Purse: $2,343,914