Jeff Gordon is flying again through NASCAR like the Wonder Boy of a decade ago, running away in the Nextel Cup point standings, winning or nearly winning every Sunday lately — and still gaining momentum.
Why?
Steve Letarte.
That’s it. That’s everything, embodied in one deceptively baby-faced New Englander who just turned 28 and doesn’t even look his age.
How good is Letarte as a crew chief?
“Better than I was,” says Ray Evernham, widely deemed the best there ever has been in NASCAR. Until just lately.
Evernham launched Gordon to stardom in the 1990s, revolutionized pit stops and the job of bossing them, and became NASCAR’s first household-name crew chief.
He left Hendrick Motorsports in 1999 to field his own team and Gordon’s career was spotty from then to this year.
Based on the glory years, Evernham two years ago was voted the best crew chief in NASCAR history.
That was just before Letarte began radical surgery to correct Gordon’s slumping career. Arguably it was the most massive re-engineering project ever by one team for one driver, directed by the most uncluttered mind.
The prodigy Letarte’s diagnosis: The driver was no less brilliant than ever. The trouble was the cars. They would be re-evaluated, redesigned, rebuilt from the ground up.
A winning crew chief also must be unflinching at commanding under fire. Letarte sits on the pit box looking for all the world like some mischievous young fan who got hold of a pit pass and stole a headset and a fire suit. Yet he is no less firmly in command than Evernham ever was. Maybe more.
Gordon used to bicker with Evernham on their radio channel. Now, under fire of race conditions, he obeys Letarte without hesitation.
“With the calls he has made,” Gordon says, “you don’t question him. You sit there and go, ‘Yeah. Whatever you say.’ “
The critical moment last Sunday at Darlington, S.C., was typical.
Gordon’s Chevrolet was spewing steam, overheating, and Gordon was resigned to losing to his only real competition of this year, Hendrick teammate Jimmie Johnson.
Under a late caution, Johnson ducked into the pits for tires and fuel, leaving Gordon’s ailing car to limp into the lead.
“Stay out,” was the simple command from Letarte. When the green flag flew, Gordon waited mainly for the booming disintegration of engine parts, the gushing of oil.
“We have this,” came word from the commander in the pits. “Stay with us.”
Gordon held on, and held off the onrushing Denny Hamlin, for his third victory in the last four races. He credits gutsy calls by Letarte for the other two victories, at Phoenix and Talladega, Ala.
But more, Gordon credits the radical re-engineering of his fleet of race cars, begun soon after Letarte replaced Robbie Loomis as crew chief in the fall of 2005 and immediately began completely rethinking Gordon’s situation.
NASCAR rules had changed the cars to suit Johnson, a former off-road desert racer. There was less downforce and grip. To many drivers, cars felt like they were on or over the edge of control.
At the time, Loomis and Gordon wouldn’t argue with success. They went to Johnson-style setups. Gordon tried to force himself to change, “and it just didn’t work for me.”
Letarte came in and reversed the thinking, ordering a test at Atlanta in the fall of ’05 where every spring, shock, nut, bolt and square inch of bodywork would be completely re-evaluated — to suit Gordon.
And Letarte has made Gordon the most successful driver of the Car of Tomorrow, a design Gordon loathed only two months ago. Since then, Gordon has two victories, a second, a third and a fourth.
All this fresh thinking began, quite literally, in Evernham’s backyard in Mooresville, N.C., in the ’90s.
Born in Portland, Maine, into a short-track racing family, Letarte came south when his father, Don Letarte, went to work on Hendrick chassis.
By 17 Letarte was traveling with the Gordon team, managing the tire supply.
“If you’re going to be a crew chief, you have to understand the tires,” Evernham says.
“He got an understanding of that, then the cars, then the [chassis and aerodynamic] setup stuff, then he worked his way up to car chief [responsible for the preparation of the cars before they’re shipped out to tracks] … and now crew chief.”
He was on the team in various capacities for all four of Gordon’s championships — 1995, ’97, ’98 and 2001.
More than 30 Hendrick engineers are better educated. But Letarte, from childhood, has been a hands-on, under-the-car Maine racer.
“I’m still a racer at heart,” he says. “But an open-minded racer. I look at my job more as managing the engineers and their ideas, and applying them to Jeff Gordon’s situation.”
And the two see eye to eye.
“I feel like he and I have always had the chemistry,” Gordon says. “The thing I wasn’t sure of [when he and team owner Rick Hendrick promoted Letarte] was when he got into that leadership role. He has taken a strong hold of it. He has gone to guys who weren’t doing their jobs and said, ‘Listen: Just because we’ve been working as friends doesn’t mean I’m going to let you slide … ‘ And he treats me the same way.”
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ehinton@tribune.com
