CONCORD, N.C. – Each Wednesday, a new edition of #MorningsWith airs live on the Hendrick Motorsports Twitter account, introducing fans to teammates all across the organization’s Concord, North Carolina, campus.
This week, we got to know director of human performance Andy Papathanassiou.
“You can look at me now like an athletic director,” Papathanassiou said of his role. “We have a certain amount of resources dedicated to the pit department. This gym behind me, an outdoor training facility, a pit practice area that’s completely separate from those two areas, and then coaches and trainers and rehab therapists, orthopedic surgeons that will come and make the rounds, nutritionists, massage therapists – all these kinds of people that are support systems for the crew just like you would have at any collegiate or professional sports program. I direct those resources for the company.”
Joining the organization just before Jeff Gordon’s rookie season in 1993, Papathanassiou was brought in as a pit crew coach as the No. 24 team was being assembled.
A former college football player at Stanford, he began to reevaluate the best way to get the job done on pit road.
“We were looking at pit stops and pit crews a different way than the established teams were at that time, and that’s the way we did a lot of things on the No. 24 team,” he recalled. “We looked at a lot of things differently.”
When he looked at a pit crew, he said, he saw it the same way he saw a football team. Specially trained athletes, through practice and repetition, could excel as a unit. Previously, crews were typically filled with people that worked on the car throughout the week, using their expertise in every part of the car to their benefit.
But Papathanassiou believed a different approach could pay big dividends.
Fast forward to today, and Hendrick Motorsports recruits high-level athletes year-round from all across the country to perform on pit road, working every day to perfect the art.
“It’s the same idea that kicked this whole thing off way back so many years ago, the idea that you have a group of people that are at the right point in their athletic career, they’re big, strong, fast, all those kinds of things, but they also have that athletic mentality that they’ve lived with and honed in on their entire lives,” he explained. “Practice and repetition, coaching, overcoming mistakes, overcoming adversity and those sorts of things, competing in a high-pressure environment, which we have at every NASCAR race. They have those building block skills and we take that and adapt it to pit stops.”
Hear more from Papathanassiou in the full #MorningsWith interview below.