NASCAR Pit Crews Are Staffed Like a Football Roster

Watch a NASCAR pit stop and you assume you are watching mechanics. Mostly you are watching a football roster. The five who come over the wall to service the car on race day are recruited athletes, scouted out of college programs by the teams' own pit coaches.

Too Small for the NFL, Perfect for Pit Road

It started in 1992. Crew chief Ray Evernham was handed Hendrick Motorsports' new No. 24 team and a clean slate, and he hired a former Stanford offensive lineman, Andy Papathanassiou, as NASCAR's first designated pit crew coach. Instead of making do with the mechanics on staff, they went scouting for outside athletes.

"Now it is the norm," Evernham later told ESPN. "If you don't do it our way, you're the one who is crazy."

The job is not wrenching. It is explosive movement in a narrow lane with a car arriving at speed. Chris Burkey, then a pit crew coach at Hendrick, described working the phones through college football programs, hunting players who were just a little too small to draw NFL interest.

Football is the main feeder, but not the only one. At NASCAR's own national pit crew combine, nearly two thirds of the participants came out of college football; the rest arrived from softball, baseball, basketball, lacrosse, track and wrestling.

A Combine, Same as the Pros

Teams also hold their own tryouts, modeled on the NFL combine. Hendrick has run one in some form for more than a decade.

On June 4, 2026, 52 prospects were invited to the team's Concord campus for a one day combine, picked from a recruiting database that head pit coach Jacob Claborn says runs to more than 200 names. A cut follows. The survivors come back in July for a three day minicamp of film study, equipment tutorials and live stops, and Claborn estimated that between one and five of them would be offered a job.

"It's becoming more and more competitive every single year and our reach is becoming more," Claborn said. "We've got guys from California to North Carolina and everywhere in between."

The prospects now test inside a 35,000 square foot athletic center on the team's campus, built along the lines of the football facilities at Alabama, Clemson and Georgia.

Ten Seconds on the Clock

Once they are hired, the training looks nothing like a garage. Strength coaches run ladder drills, hurdles and footwork, then stop repetitions until the movement is automatic.

The equipment is brutal. A full racing fuel can weighs 95 to 100 pounds, and the fueler wrestles it into the car while four wheels come off and go back on around him.

A four tire stop with fuel now runs roughly eight to 11 seconds. The current Cup car, introduced in 2022, uses a single center lock lug nut on each wheel instead of the old five; the Xfinity and Truck series still run five.

The One Percent of the Group

Coaches say the testing numbers only start the conversation. "We're definitely looking for the intangibles," Claborn said. "We're looking to see how they interact with each other. We're looking to see how they retain information. Just who can truly be the one percent of the group."

Fans in the grandstand at every Cup race are watching a football team work, five of them, in about the time it takes to tie a shoe.

And somewhere on pit road on Sunday is a linebacker who never got an NFL call, still chasing a championship.

Hero photo: Justin Haley's No. 31 pit stop at the 2023 Wurth 400, Zach Catanzareti Photo, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).