On Sunday at Michigan International Speedway, crew chief Alan Gustafson will call his 700th NASCAR Cup Series race, marking the most recent achievement in a 20-year tenure in the pits.
However, it does not seem like that long ago that he was crew chief for his first Cup Series race.
A young rookie named Kyle Busch was getting ready to compete in his first full season with Hendrick Motorsports at the 2005 Daytona 500. The team partnered Busch with Gustafson, a rookie crew chief who remembers feeling almost immobilized by the pressure of the expectations.
“I just remember going down there, over my head and super nervous,” he said this week in a reflective, 30-minute interview. “Just treading water. The pressure was unlike anything I’d ever felt. … It was almost debilitating.”
After 699 Cup races, Gustafson has solidified his place among the greatest leaders of this generation. With Busch, Mark Martin, Jeff Gordon, and Chase Elliott—all present or prospective Hall of Famers—he has won at least four races with each of them. His current partnership with Elliott is the longest running driver/crew chief dynamic in the garage.
With three races left, Gustafson and Elliott, who together have won 19 races including the 2020 Cup Series championship, are very much in the running for the regular-season championship.
Chase Elliott, right, and crew chief Alan Gustafson have teamed up to win 19 races and one championship. (Jonathan Bachman / Getty Images)
However, it took Gustafson years to feel fully at ease in his role before he was paired with Martin, which resulted in an unforgettable conversation that altered Gustafson’s perspective. While they were seated in Gustafson’s office, Martin abruptly grabbed him by the arm, as he frequently does in conversations when he wants to make a very strong point.
“Hey, you realize you don’t have to be miserable to be good, right?” Gustafson recalled Martin saying. “That isn’t part of the description. You need to enjoy what you’re doing and embrace it. The success will come easier.”
Gustafson employed the advise as a turning moment in his career, taking it to heart. Since then, he has made an effort to be more self-assured and less insecure; this has taken years, as it would for anyone stepping into a prominent, much watched role.
These days, Gustafson said he feels like he’s “on house money.”
“To make it 20 years in general is pretty amazing,” he said. “Not that I don’t want to win or feel as competitive as I ever have, but I’ve accomplished way more than I ever dreamed.”
Raised close to Daytona International Speedway, Gustafson’s love of wrenching began at an early age. He continued to work on race cars as a teenager, which eventually led to a career in NASCAR. However, Gustafson, who is 49 years old, has discovered that the most fulfilling aspect of his work is now more on the human side than the mechanical one.
“For the first 15 years of my career, I hated everybody in the garage that I competed against,” he said. “You get to a point in your life, and it’s like, ‘Man, I don’t want to be looking back at this selfish endeavor that is really not positively contributing to other people’s lives. I just don’t want to be associated with ‘Win at all costs’ and some of the negativity that comes with that mentality.
“I want to win, but I want to win the right way, and I want to empower and help people grow for the better.”
Gustafson has discovered a profound sense of fulfillment and joy in helping different team members grow. He seeks out those who might have underestimated their potential and helps them realize their full potential so they can grow in self-awareness.
“I try to help people realize you can achieve whatever you want to achieve,” he said. “It comes down to effort and time invested. That’s the same for the greatest race car driver, crew chief or tire changer. … It’s fun for me to help people through that journey.”
Being able to adapt to a wide range of various personalities is essential for crew chief longevity, and Gustafson added that one of the most important things is to be sympathetic and consider the problem from that person’s point of view. This has contributed to the connection between the driver and crew chief, as each of the four personalities—Busch, Martin, Gordon, and Elliott—runs the gamut.
As Gustafson pointed out, the secret is to cultivate those relationships with sincerity, honesty, and authenticity.
“None of them are remotely the same, but every one of them are genuinely good people,” he said. “And you might say, ‘Kyle Busch? Really?’ Well, Kyle Busch is extremely competitive at heart, and that overshadows who he is as a person at times. But he’s a good guy at heart, and he’s a logical person. So we could work through those differences when we got there.”
The position of the crew chief has changed dramatically since Gustafson began 700 races ago, which is one reason he has appreciated concentrating on human capital so much more these days. The crew chief was “the dictator” back then, Gustafson remembered, controlling every aspect of the vehicle, including the aerodynamics, lower control arms, spindles, brake packages, brake ducts, and frame rails.
“It was like thousands of different decisions every race before you go the track,” he said, then added with a chuckle: “Now, you don’t pick anything. It’s all decided for you.”
Gustafson was speaking of the Next Gen car, a race car where every major component is bought from a single source in NASCAR. He likened the transition to being limited to a 10-by-10 box from a playing field large enough to circle the Earth three times.
Naturally, he hated it at first.
“The Next Gen car was hugely disappointing to me,” Gustafson said. “To be honest with you, I took it almost personally that it was to diminish my role. It was almost to the point where (it felt like) this car was specifically trying to devalue crew chiefs, race engineers and the race team I spent the last 20 years of my life trying to grow and was what I loved.”
Gustafson claimed that over the course of the last two and a half Next Gen racing seasons, he has been able to step back and accept it. He reasoned that there are always enough variables in racing to give one an advantage over the opposition.
Even yet, this NASCAR is not the same as the one he fell in love with. He was impressed by the crew chiefs, who possessed the artistic quality of their handcrafted components and unique approaches to achieving speed, and he held in high regard the creative thinkers who circumvented regulations to reach the finish line.
“Being able to come up with a different solution from a blank sheet of paper was so attractive,” he said. “And what is different now is you’re basically solving a puzzle piece differently than somebody else. Before, you could come way out of left field and attack a direction that people didn’t think about. Now, you just have to take all those pieces and put them together in a more efficient, creative way.”
How much longer would Gustafson like to serve as a crew chief, then? He claimed that as he gets closer to 50, the traveling aspect has become much more of a slog than it did at 35. Team members return home to North Carolina in the early hours of Monday morning because most NASCAR races now take place in the late afternoon. They then have to return to the shop later that day on very little sleep.
“It catches up to you,” he said. “It is mentally and physically exhausting.”
However, he continued, there is no emotion that compares to competing for victories with his squad. Whether it leads to success or times of struggle that call for digging deeper, he described the intensity of competition as “extremely seductive” (emotions that can be rewarded when a slump has been vanquished).
Even though he is aware that ultimately the schedule will reach a point where it is no longer physically feasible for him, Gustafson said he has considered what may replace that sensation and is unsure of the solution.
“I still enjoy it, I can still do it, and I can do it at a high level,” he said. “As long as I can check those boxes and say yes to all those, I want to take that opportunity to keep doing it.”
(Top photo of Alan Gustafson, left, and Chase Elliott: Sean Gardner / Getty Images)
