INTERVIEW WITH VP OF OPERATIONS - JIMMY MAKAR
Since the inception of Joe Gibbs Racing fifteen years ago, the man leading the strategy on the racing side of the business has been Jimmy Makar. First as crew chief of the #18 car and now as Senior Vice President of Racing Operations. The results are over fifty Nextel Cup wins and three Nextel Cup Championships – and a lot of great stories and insight. Joe Gibbs Driven was able to sit down with Jimmy and discuss his ride and what makes him look to the future.
Q: Where are you from originally and how did you get into racing?
A: I’m originally from New Jersey. I started getting into racing when I was a kid – my parents were race fans and would take me to races. My Dad bought me a racecar when I was a teenager and we started racing some. After having a wrecked car fixed here in the South I got a job offer to come work down here and I took it.
Q: How did you end up at Joe Gibbs Racing?
A: Well, my wife is Dale Jarrett’s sister, so Dale and I had become friends and talked a lot about racing. He was driving for the Wood brothers at the time and I was working for Rusty Wallace. We had always talked about getting an opportunity to work together, and in ’91 Joe approached Dale about driving for a new team he was starting. He asked him if he had an idea for a crew chief and Dale put my name in the hat so I met with Joe and talked to him and that’s how it all started.
Q: You stepped away from being a full time crew chief in 2002, what are your duties now at Joe Gibbs Racing?
A: I oversee the building of the racecars and lend direction to what way we’re going in the future. I also help the crew chiefs and enable them to focus more on racing and keep them from getting overwhelmed with building the racecars. I also try to tie the engineering aspect of the team with the practical racing applications.
Q: Was it hard at first to step away from being a day-to-day crew chief?
A: Oh yeah, very hard! When you’re a crew chief you focus every week on going to the racetrack and you see your results on a weekly basis. It’s a very high intensity type of atmosphere where things happen quickly. You’re at the shop for 2 to 3 days, you’ve got to download last week’s race and then get ready for the following week’s race within 2 or 3 days. It’s just very, very fast paced with instant results, good or bad. And moving over to a more manager type position, you don’t have that rush from week to week. You’re looking at long-term projects with a short-term project being a month. A lot of things are 6 months to a year out or longer. It’s a little harder to gauge whether or not you’re successful at this kind of job compared to being a crew chief.
Q: You have been an integral part of three Cup Championships, what get’s you excited about coming to come to work in the morning?
A: I think it’s sort of the same issue, just wanting to win races week in and week out. Even though I’m not involved in a particular race with a particular team, having all 3 teams successful on the weekend, running competitively, winning races, and ultimately winning championships – that’s the ultimate goal. To have three teams and make them all work is a huge challenge and it’s tough enough to get one to work. So to come to work and have three good competitive teams that are solid on race weekend week in and week out is something that really excites me. Not many people have been able to do that and to see the company grow to where it is. All the guys come to work excited and know that they can go out and compete and that is really rewarding to me – to keep that going and to work towards the future trying to imagine which directions JGR is going to grow in also keeps me excited.
Q: When you came to JGR, you were dealing with an owner that was “new” to the sport, what did Joe Gibbs, being an “outsider”, bring to the sport of NASCAR that helped improve the way the team operates?
A: Well at first Joe didn’t really have a clue about the racing business because his life had revolved around football. He liked racing all his life – more drag racing than anything else - but he really didn’t have an idea of what it would be like getting involved in a Winston Cup team at that time. It was a unique experience for me because he had no preconceived notions of what you needed to do or how it needed to be done so it was an open book for me to come in and set a race team up the way I wanted to do it. Not very often do you get that opportunity to start a new race team and have an open book with your owner that allows you to pretty much go by your own instincts about what needs to be done. That was pretty cool.
Here’s an interesting story – The first Daytona 500 we were walking through the garage before qualifying and I was telling Joe how important it was to qualify well and how I really hoped we had a good solid qualifying lap so that in case something happened in the 125, we’d still be in the show with a good backup qualifying run. He got this really strange look on his face and I could tell he didn’t quite understand what I was trying to tell him. He finally asked me, “What do you mean we need a good qualifying race so we can get in the race. You mean there’s a chance we’re not going to get in the Daytona 500?” And I said “Oh there’s a good chance we’re not going to be in the Daytona 500”. He didn’t realize that you could go to the Daytona 500 and not make the show and have to go home. I think that reality just struck him pretty hard. I’ll never forget that moment when he realized he might not be in the biggest race of the year.
The one thing I keep coming back to when people ask me about him and what made it different working for him compared to other people is a statement he made to me, and he still quotes this all the time: “You don’t win with Xs and Os and trick plays in football, and you don’t win with technology and parts and pieces in racing. You win with people.” And that to me is a really profound statement. At the time, people were a commodity that weren’t thought a lot about. Most owners thought people who could work on race teams were a dime a dozen and you could find them anywhere. Joe brought a different thought process into the business where people are your best commodity and you need to work to take care of your people and care about them. That was very profound back then. And today I can look around and see a lot of what he instituted and what he believed in a lot of other race teams have adopted as well, and it’s for the betterment of the sport and for the people working in the sport. I think that attracts a better quality employee.
Q: It seems that in NASCAR today, the most important thing is that you have to be continually improving? How do you keep up with that?
A: It is very tough to keep improving and it’s even tougher to be successful and keep improving because you tend to fall back into things that made you successful in the past. If you had a set up that worked for 2 or 3 years and you won races with it, you tend to migrate back to that because you think it’s going to continue to work for you. That’s a dangerous trap. It’s hard to say winning can be a bad thing, but it can be. It can make you complacent and not want to move forward. We talk about that a lot inside the company and I think most guys realize that we’ve got to keep moving. Success is a moving target and there is no such thing as getting to a point and maintaining. We’ve got a great group of engineers and crew chiefs that are thinking about how are we going to get better and what areas are we lacking in. I think it’s just the philosophy of the company that we can’t sit still and we have to react. You know, NASCAR makes changes constantly and that keeps the playing field moving. One of the things we’ve always talked about is we have to be better at reacting to rule changes and changes in the racing community more so than our competitors. We need to get there first and then we will be able to keep succeeding.
Q: What is your most memorable win?
A: Easily, the first...and only Daytona 500 we’ve ever won. A second year team coming out and winning the Daytona 500 was just phenomenal. That was just a very, very special win for us. Our very first win with Bobby Labonte in Charlotte was a very big win. The Brickyard wins with both Bobby and Tony were big wins as well - those are really special.
Q: Any loss that was tough to get over?
A: Oh yeah, lots of them. But I try to forget those. I really can’t think of one in particular, but once you’re in this business long enough, you realize that you lose races that you should have won. Then if you stay around long enough you find out you win races you shouldn’t have won either. So it evens itself out. We’ve won our share of races that we should have never won and we weren’t in position to win - the Darlington race with Bobby when we won the championship in 2000. We were a good top 5 car but a great pit stop put us in position where the rain came immediately after and we beat everyone off pit road and won the race. We didn’t win the race because we were the best racecar there that day - we just got very fortunate.
Q: In 2000 with Bobby and you see it a lot where once a guy gets a points lead, it seems like he can do no wrong. In that situation, are you doing something different to the cars, changing the strategy, or is that just the way it goes?
A: I think that’s just the way it goes. There are a lot of good race teams in this sport that have the potential to win championships. I think what happens is that you get chemistry. You get yourself in a position to take advantage of situations when they occur. That’s where you want to be and that’s what seems to happen to teams when they get in that zone. You’re in the right place at the right time and you can have that going on week after week after week and then all of a sudden it will turn off. I think it’s the nature of sports and the way things happen.
Q: You have dealt with a lot of different drivers with different styles, what do you think are the most important qualities of a great driver?
A: I think one key thing is to be adaptable to all situations. We’re constantly seeing changes in cars, in tires, in racetracks, and a guy who can adapt quickly to changing situations is a guy who’s going to stay up front. Obviously feeling the racecars is a key thing. All these cars have an edge you can get to before you go over the grip of the tires and you either push to the wall or spin out. That’s a key thing for a driver to have knowledge of where that edge is and take himself to that edge without going over it. That’s a key ingredient.
Q: Do you like to see guys with any certain background?
A: I don’t think it matters. You know over the years you’ve gone through cycles of different backgrounds rising to the top. We went through a period of time where the ASA car drivers were the hot commodity with drivers like Rusty Wallace, Mark Martin, Alan Kulwicki...and at that time that seemed to be where most of the best guys came from. Then you got to Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart and the guys like that who came out of Sprint car racing and seemed to be the hot commodity. It seems like it changes every 5 or 6 years so I don’t know if there’s any one type of background that you could use a formula to find a driver from. I think a good driver is a good driver and it doesn’t matter what background he comes from if he’s got talent. It goes back to the adapting thing - adapting to a new car. I think that’s one thing that makes Tony Stewart as good as he is. He can climb out of an open wheel car into a dirt car into a cup car and do just fine. It’s because their talent level is there and they know how to drive racecars.
Q: In your little time off, do you have any hobbies or things you like to do in your free time?
A: I like to fish. Fishing’s probably my number one hobby. Water sports – anything to do with water – boats, skiing, riding jet skis with my kids. River, lake, ocean it doesn’t matter, it just has to be near the water. I really enjoy spending time up in the mountains too. We’ve got a little cabin up there. I enjoy going there and spending a little time outdoors with my family.
Q: Thanks Jimmy for your time and good luck the rest of the Season.
A: Thank you.