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USA TODAY |
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Posted
2/16/2005 12:40 AM |
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Training schools get
careers on fast track |
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By Chris Jenkins, USA TODAY |
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Assume your vehicle is traveling at 127 ft/s, your rolling radius is
11.5 inches and your wheel is turning at 23 Hz with a slip angle of 4
degrees. What is your slip ratio in traction? — Homework question
from MEGR 3211, Vehicle Dynamics |
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CHARLOTTE — Just
after 8 a.m. on a chilly Thursday in January, professor Jim Cuttino is filling a chalkboard with slashes, numbers and
symbols that, to the uninitiated, might as well be hieroglyphics. Cuttino's students at North Carolina-Charlotte are using
equations to calculate how much force a tire can handle before it stops gripping
and starts slipping. It's this sort of knowledge that will help them land a
dream job with a NASCAR team — or so they hope. Elsewhere in suburban Charlotte —
home to most NASCAR teams — students at the NASCAR Technical Institute (NTI)
learn how to assemble racing V-8 engines and prospective pit crewmembers
practice tire changes at PIT Instruction and Training. It wasn't long ago that if a
big-time racing team needed an extra crew guy for Daytona, the boys in the
shop would be asked if anybody had a cousin handy with tools. But today's
teams are slick, professional organizations, some with more than 400
employees. An entry-level mechanic can make
$35,000; an engineer, $45,000, with realistic hope for rapid advancement and
a six-figure salary. As NASCAR has grown in popularity,
competition for jobs has intensified, spawning a handful of programs that
offer racing-specific training. Teams are constantly searching for
young talent to replace veteran crewmembers hired by other teams or lost to
burnout from NASCAR's grueling 10-month season. But completing a training
program hardly guarantees a job. Only 43 cars will start the season-opening
Daytona 500 on Sunday, and even midlevel teams receive hundreds of résumés a
month. The corporate sponsorship boom of
the late 1990s has flattened, keeping team budgets tight. And executives
value real-world experience over classroom work. "They're all legitimate
schools," says Tommy Baldwin Jr., crew chief for driver Kasey Kahne. "I believe a lot of the kids that get their
training there get trained well. But there's nothing in this business that
beats on-the-job training. "If a candidate can combine experience with
formal training, says Joe Gibbs Racing president J.D. Gibbs, "that's a
home run." That's why Mike Lorusso,
21, spends most of his free time broke and filthy. The senior in
UNC-Charlotte's motor sports engineering program and a few other students
have been helping out a classmate who races at local grass-roots tracks. Lorusso says the experience is invaluable. "It's not as glamorous as you
see when you turn on Fox on Sunday," he says. "But it's worth
it." At last count, 25 graduates of
UNC-Charlotte's motor sports engineering program were working for NASCAR
Nextel Cup or Busch Series teams. Chris Gayle, who graduated in 2001, will be
an engineer for 2000 Cup series champ Bobby Labonte
this season. Brian Campee, who will be the lead
engineer for Dale Earnhardt Inc.'s Busch Series team this season, was hired
before he graduated. Twelve graduates work at the Hendrick
Motorsports mega-team. But of 160 students in the program,
perhaps the top 10 from each graduating class will be given serious
consideration. Students take the same core courses as a typical mechanical
engineering student, giving them something to fall back on. Motor sports
engineering students take several racing-themed electives and are expected to
participate in extracurricular "teams" that teach such things as
welding skills. Before teams began hiring engineers
in the mid-1990s, performance improvements were made in haphazard fashion; a
driver might see a differently shaped fender on a rival's car and prod his
team to duplicate it. Today, engineers save teams
time and effort at the track by using computer modeling to predict whether a
proposed modification will make the car faster. Lorusso has come to realize the value, and limitations, of
racers' experience. Veterans know how to make cars handle better but they
don't necessarily understand why their changes work — or, as he says,
"the engineering behind the madness." In an Engines I lecture at the NASCAR Technical Institute, Eric
Wolfe deviates from his lesson plan to tell the story behind a few trick
parts his team came up with for a race at Talladega (Ala.) Superspeedway in 1996. "We flat-out ate their lunch,
guys," brags Wolfe, a former camshaft designer for the Morgan-McClure
team. The lone female student in the class
of 15 wonders how much extra horsepower a driver would need to pull off a
pass at Talladega without teaming up to "draft" with another driver
(15, Wolfe answers). After spending eight years in the
Army working on satellites, Elsie Burrell was looking for a new career. She
began working on a mathematics degree at a community college but quickly
tired of a traditional classroom setting. "One day, I saw the commercial
for NTI, and I started thinking, 'Well, I really like watching NASCAR. I
wonder if I can get into it?' "
says Burrell, 31. Most of the students who take the
school's 39-week core course, which costs slightly less than $20,000, want to
work in the service department at a car dealership. Unlike other technical
schools, NTI also offers an additional 18-week program that teaches
racing-specific skills — from disassembling, rebuilding and testing engines
to fabricating parts from raw sheet metal. With the NASCAR training, the cost
of the program rises to about $25,000. Again, nothing is guaranteed. "There's
only so many teams," says John Dodson, NTI's
community and NASCAR team relations director. "But what you have to
focus on is the industry of racing. ... There's
thousands of opportunities there." Burrell says working for a racing
team is "a dream" but adds a dealership job is more realistic.
"The sport requires a lot of time and energy, and being a single mother,
I wouldn't see my son very often." There are some female and minority
students in the NTI, UNC-Charlotte and PIT racing programs, but most students
are white males. NASCAR in 2003 helped launch Drive for Diversity, a program
to encourage minorities and women to participate as drivers and crewmembers. Most of the NTI students who are
hired by teams start at the bottom, in the "tear-down" department.
The Monday morning after a race, they disassemble cars and wash parts,
inspecting them for damage. Those who show the right attitude and mechanical
aptitude will be promoted. Chad Knaus,
crew chief for Jimmie Johnson, says most mechanics they hire don't come from
other Cup teams. A typical candidate will have experience in a lower-level
series and show the right attitude. NTI
students who don't get into racing can fall back on a dealership job; Dodson
says a shortage of workers is forecast.
PIT Instruction and TrainingScott Cregue
was sick of working 12 hours a day, six days a week at a construction job in
Toledo, Ohio. He moved to Charlotte in September and enrolled at PIT. A recent graduate of the program, Cregue works at a construction equipment rental agency.
But he believes a racing team eventually will give him a chance to change
tires on race day. "Everybody's looking every day," says Cregue, 20. "It doesn't seem like the job security's
there, but there's so many teams out there." Breon Klopp, one of the school's
founders, says it's common for students to quit their jobs and come to pit
crew school. But unlike executives at UNC-Charlotte or NTI, Klopp paints a
fairly optimistic picture of the job market. He claims a 60% placement rate
for his students, although that includes part-time jobs in lower-level
series. Klopp says the best potential
crewmembers are former high school or college athletes who want a new
competitive outlet. The initial eight-week PIT program
costs $2,280, including gear, equipment and access to the on-site gym and
athletic trainers; pit crew work involves quick, explosive movements and
requires strength and agility training at the professional level. Students spend the first four weeks
learning the basic movements for each job, from tire changers to the "jackmen" who wrestle 20-pound jacks from one side of
the car to the other during a 13-second pit stop. Videotape plays an
important role, as pit stops are choreographed down to individual footsteps;
even a slight misstep will cost the team valuable time. The second half of the class is
spent on specialization — small, quick guys become tire changers; big, strong
guys become jackmen. The best are selected to join
a "varsity team" that PIT hires out to smaller Busch and Craftsman
Truck Series teams that don't have their own crews. John Dannenberger,
22, left his job at a beer distributorship in Kingman, Ariz., to train at
PIT. A distant relative of 1958 Indianapolis 500 winner Jimmy Bryan, he
remembers playing in puddles in the Daytona infield at 4. He always wanted to
become a race car driver but figures being on the pit crew
is "the next-best thing." Dannenberger, who graduated in December, says he's "pretty optimistic,"
even though he hasn't heard from anybody. "Pretty much, when they need
you, they'll call you." |
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