Fox Sports South reveals faces of those who play in traffic

It’s a trick question when Fox Sports racing analyst Larry McReynolds asks you who made the winner’s circle: The San Francisco Giants won the last World Series, the New England Patriots the last Super Bowl and Kevin Harvick the last Sprint Cup Series championship.

But Harvick didn’t change four tires himself during the race, didn’t dump fuel from gas cans, didn’t get the car in and out of the pit in 10 seconds all by himself.

“It gets lost in the shuffle how much of a team sport this is,” says McReynolds, who was a jackman in the 1970s – when a 20-second pit stop was considered perfection – and later a crew chief. “There’s probably never been more of a team sport.”

McReynolds is one of the voices in Fox Sports South’s latest “Driven” documentary, “Michael Waltrip Racing: Life in the Pits” that follows 17 days of work this season from Bristol to Richmond for the pit crews for Michael Waltrip Racing’s No. 15 and 55 cars.

Producer Keith Wetzler, who did the 2013 “Driven” episode on Hendrick Motorsports, reveals the degree of athleticism and practice expected of pit teams. Their recruitment, training and coaching is similar to big league players.

Many are former football players. Prominent in the program is Shannon Myers, a former wide receiver from Lenoir-Rhyne College in Hickory, who in 1995 became Don Shula’s last draft pick. Myers’ Dolphins career was cut short by a lacerated kidney in training camp, but he found a home whipping off tires in the pits.

After every race, team members break down their performance on game tapes split into fractions of a second, from clambering over the wall to jacking style to how air hoses are cast. They work in a blur in a hostile environment with lug nuts flying amid a fusillade of cars landing at 50 mph.

“It’s like going out to the highway and playing in traffic,” says Evan Marchal, a former offensive lineman for UNLV, now a gasman for the No. 15 car.

“It’s a choreographed dance between six guys and a 3,200-pound race car,” says Waltrip.

“There’s no way in hell I’d jump in front of that car,” says driver Clint Bowyer.

With pit space limited, chief photographer Dan Greene mounted cameras at the bottom of the grandstand with NASCAR’s permission to shoot into the pits. He also relies on the overhead cameras that crews use to assess their performance and the helmet cams each tire changer wears.

What he captured is an unexpected epic of speed against time, and an agility that can only be described as sheet-metal ballet.

This story was originally published May 16, 2015 at 4:09 PM with the headline "Fox Sports South reveals faces of those who play in traffic."