At 200 mph, one-tenth of a 
second is a long, long time

For Andy “Papa” Papathanassiou (“Papa-thana-see-you”), pit crew coordinator for Hendrick Motorsports, job performance is measured in tenths of seconds and the difference between success and failure is determined in hundredths. Worse yet, when something goes wrong, it’s seen by millions of viewers on national television.

Hendrick Motorsports (HMS) fields several teams, cars and drivers in NASCAR Nextel Cup Series and Busch Series races. HMS drivers include Jeff Gordon, Kyle Busch, Jimmie Johnson, Brian Vickers and Terry Labonte. Although his name is less well-known than theirs, Andy “Papa” is every bit as critical to the success of HMS racing teams as the drivers themselves.

The logic is irrefutable: if the pit crew fails to run like clockwork on race day, the whole team might as well not show up at all. For this reason, even if he doesn’t often speak of it that way, Andy readily acknowledges his teams have been adapting Lean principles and practices for years.

“We don't delve into the theoretical aspects of Lean every day, but we use those concepts in everything we do,” he says. “Racing is great at exploiting your weakest link and that determines where you sit on the performance scale.”

Unlike other sports, Andy notes, race teams aren’t guaranteed nine innings or four quarters of play.

“There’s no fixing a bad play in racing,” he states. “In football, if you get sacked one play you can try to make up for it the next. In racing, if we lose one-half of one second in the pit, it’s gone forever. So we must design our systems to pay the most attention not to our best stuff, but to mitigate our worst stuff. We need to be smooth and consistent.”

For HMS pit crews, the goal is not ever increasing speed, it’s ever more reliable performance. Pit crews need to operate in that realm on the performance graph where the fastest possible pace meets the line of maximum consistency. The closer a crew is to hitting this point dead on, the faster and more consistently it will perform.  

“Lack of consistency is the killer,” Andy says. “If we do a pit stop in 12 seconds, we’ve kicked butt. But if, in trying to hit 12 seconds, we burn a couple of 15s or a 16-second stop, that’s the one that can kill us.” 

If faster pit stops were inherently better, then the only goal would be to do them faster. But to Andy, the flaw in this logic goes back to the weakest link; to produce a fast pit stop as a group, you need individual consistency, not individual speed.

“To get that fast pit stop, we don’t work with individuals on their speed, we work on their consistency,” he explains. “Helping all seven of them be more consistent leads to a faster pit stop as a group.”

Understanding the process
A critical aspect of this process is to get pit crew members to understand and buy in to it. Then, when the drilling and analysis begins, they understand where it all is headed.

Yes, there is a fire drill aspect to the process. But HMS also uses tools like video tape to analyze movement. Both the team as a whole and its members individually are filmed from a variety of angles to look at team coordination and weaknesses in individual technique. The ultimate goal is a pit stop that flows not mechanically but organically, as if the pit crew is no longer seven individuals but one entity.

“Our pit stops are gauged in tenths of a second,” Andy says. “If you can do a pit stop in the 13 1/4 to 13 3/4 second range, you’re doing okay. Any slower and odds are you’ll lose a spot or two.

“To keep focused on increments of time that tight, we get down to the number of footsteps taken, the number of feet moved, shoulder turns, center of gravity and where you have to be relative to the equipment you’re moving around.”

We have seen the enemy
Andy believes the only competition a pit crew has is itself.

“There is no other team or individual that we have to overcome,” he observes. “It’s all about working within ourselves — to do the best job we can as individuals to produce the best pit stop as a team.” 

Beyond the pit crew, this process is filtering though every level of the HMS organization.

“Each of our groups has its own version of this approach,” Andy says. “Each has its mountains to climb and goals to strive for.”

Is life in the pit really a never-ending quest to shave one more tenth of a second?

This article appeared in the June/July 2005 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright 2005.

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