AVONDALE, Ariz. – The pit crew for William Byron and the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports team, a squad that has been intact through all three seasons of the Next Gen era, spend race after race, week after week working in unison.
That wasn’t about to change the day before the group’s second straight NASCAR Cup Series Championship 4 race. That event will begin just after 3 p.m. ET on Sunday at Phoenix Raceway and will air on NBC.
So, when one of the five members of the over-the-wall outfit – fueler, Landon Walker – couldn’t make it to a group interview near the team’s hauler on Saturday afternoon, the team brought Walker with them, via speakerphone.
“It’s cliché but it really is like a brotherhood,” said tire carrier Ryan Patton while holding his cell phone with Walker listening on the other end. “We’ve grown closer over the last couple of years.”
They’re themes that have come up all week in the 24 camp – togetherness, unity, camaraderie.
Certainly, as part of a winning culture, those attributes are imperative. But nowhere are those ideals more important to put into practice than with the pit crew.
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Five men, executing precision manifested in choreography, searching for every hundredth of a second in changing tires and emptying fuel cans while always walking a tightrope between success and disaster. Oh, and with race cars constantly darting in and out around them, it’s dangerous too.
It takes absolute trust, the kind that can only be earned over years of reps, thousands of miles of travel and a constant reliance on each other. If jackman Spencer Bishop doesn’t get the car off the ground correctly, tire changers Jeff Cordero and Orane Ossowski can’t swap out rubber in rhythm. And that’s all with Patton and Walker doing their parts as well, with the five simultaneously hopping over swinging cords and maneuvering around the race car and each other.
The five rank second in the Cup Series in terms of average four-tire stop time at 10.802 seconds. Thanks to a solid qualifying run on Saturday, the team will have the first pit stall for Sunday's race.
“I think everybody at their respective position is the best at what they do in the Cup garage and on pit road,” Patton said. “We’re all rowing in the same direction. It goes beyond putting on the same shirts on Sunday.”
“Where we spend so much time together on the road for 38 weekends a year, building the trust and the confidence in each other … It’s knowing that Patton is going to do his job, I’m going to do mine, we all have each other’s backs,” Ossowski added. “I think being together three years, that’s helped us grow.”
Patton has a pair of Cup Series championships to his credit while Cordero can lay claim to one. However, they’re the only members of the 24 team with a title at the sport’s highest level.
All of them are a little more familiar with the pressure of racing for a championship after Byron’s first appearance in the Championship 4 last November. But stress is nothing new. When success and failure are measured in fractions of seconds, there’s pressure with every stop the group executes.
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“Pressure is only when you don’t know what the hell you’re doing,” Walker proclaimed over the phone. “We know what we’re doing. We feel good about the group we’re going to war with here.
“You have to fall back on and understand that this guy is going to be in this place when you expect him to and you really go out there and you don’t think about what you’re doing because you’re so used to doing it with the guys around you.”
And sure, the team hasn’t won a championship together … yet. But it won the DAYTONA 500 earlier this season. It won a pressure-packed event at Martinsville Speedway in April as Hendrick Motorsports celebrated its 40th anniversary. Not to mention, it’s the group’s second straight run to Phoenix.
Yes, there’s recognition of the importance of the moment from them all. But a lack of confidence won’t be found in William Byron’s pit stall on Sunday.
“We’re not in the Championship 4 two years in a row because we lucked our way here,” Cordero said. “We’re in it because we’ve won nine races over the past two years. We’ve been running up front. The last six races we haven’t finished outside the top six. We know we have all the parts and pieces, so we’re just going to go out and execute.
“(Crew chief) Rudy (Fugle) continuously tells us throughout the year that big-time players win big-time games and we have put ourselves in position to win those big games. No one has more confidence going into these races than the 24 team does, so there’s no reason why we can’t go out there and do it.”
And yet, mistakes happen. Races are often decided by hiccups on pit road, further putting the spotlight and magnifying glass on every move the pit crew makes.
But when those miscues happen, the team members insisted that the first duty is always to pick someone up, not kick them when they’re down.
“It feels like when there is a mistake or something is wrong, it’s just, ‘Don’t even worry about it, it’s an anomaly,’” Bishop explained. “The amount of pit stops we do, one is going to go wrong every now and then. We have confidence in ourselves and in our ability that if one goes wrong, the chances of another one going wrong are pretty slim. So, we’re not going to call each other out or point fingers. It just happens and as long as we keep getting chances, we know it’s going to be good.”
Much more often than not, it is good. Really good.
Will it be good enough to win a championship on Sunday? Maybe.
But you can bet, if there's a big trophy to hoist after the checkered flag falls, the 24 group will do it the only way they know how - together.
“It’s everything you work for in this business,” Walker said. “It would be the top of the mountain for us and it would say a lot about what we’ve done to get here.”