Labor of love: Chad Knaus is happy being a championship crew chief
Three days removed from winning a third straight Cup championship, and just 40 seconds into a sit-down conversation, Chad Knaus eyejacks the number of an incoming call on his mobile unit.
“I gotta take this,” he says by way of apology, stepping away from his spartan office on the ground floor of Hendrick Motorsports’ No. 48 team shop.His absence leaves a visitor to wonder about the surroundings.
First off, it’s not a big space. If you walked upstairs and peeked in at Jimmie Johnson, he would be operating in a room twice this size. Like glory and acclaim, it appears most of the square footage is reserved for the driver.
A quick, clockwise scan around reveals a Chicago Bears helmet perched high above a shelf in back of his desk on the left; a pair of black aces pinned to the wallboard beneath, flanked by a horseshoe turned up, presumably for good luck; and a picture hanging on
the right-side wall of the No. 48 and No. 24 cars.
Then, and perhaps most tellingly, there is the book resting on an end table. The Experts’ Guide To Doing Things Faster. Knaus reappears. He remarks in a half-amused, half-irritated way about his conversation with the “GC,” a general contractor in his employ.
“I’m never building another house,” he says.
Knaus says this now but the future, if it goes according to his plan, will probably make a liar out of him. Then, there
will be other people to consider. A wife, some kids and a full-fledged family.
Right now, in these halcyon days of his relative youth filled with victories and championships, he is alone. Really.
At 37, he is in many ways a solitary figure, a lodestar for the hyper-driven young men seeking their fortune in NASCAR.
“I don’t have a lot of close family,” he says. “I’m single. People say the way I do this, I sacrifice my life to do this but that’s not the case.
This is what I want to do. I’m not as interested in having a family, a wife and stuff right now. I do want that, but I don’t want it right
now.”
For some on the outside looking in, there’s a nagging suspicion Knaus could be shortchanging himself as part of some Faustian bargain.
“I’m not. In the people who feel like they have the model of what a person should be, I’m odd in their mind because I don’t have those things. But it’s not what I want right now, it’s just not,” he insists. “I know it’s kind of lame. It’s boring to a lot of people because the model is that I’m supposed to have a wife and kids.”
Only in America can someone be so successful in their chosen profession and feel the need to defend that success
when it doesn’t conform to some popular theory of what happiness should be.
“Yeah, but that’s the model,” Knaus says.
All Work, No Play?
Talk about your model employee; Knaus should be the poster boy for job satisfaction. It’s annoying, in a way, just how much he adores his vocation.
“I love what I do for a living. I really, really do. It’s something that I can submerse myself into, I guess you could
say,” he says.
After a 35-mile drive from his present home in Lake Norman, N.C., to the sprawling Hendrick campus in suburban
Charlotte, a typical office day begins at 6:45 a.m. Knaus says he will “leave anywhere from 4, if I’m going to the gym, to 9 o’clock.”
Hendrick has a fine on-site workout facility, and Knaus will occasionally exercise there, but he finds a separate peace by running along outdoor paths designed for mountain bikes.
“It’s fun to be outside and run on different trails. I enjoy that,” he says.
Not as much as his daytime gig, evidently. “There’s nothing that I don’t enjoy about my job,” Knaus says of the position he has held as crew chief for Johnson since 2002.
Come, on. What about budgets and meetings?
“I love it all. I love my job. There’s nothing that I enjoy more. Every day I come down that hill, and I look at what we’ve got here, I smile. I think, ‘Man, this is pretty cool.’ I don’t think I’ve ever gotten out of bed since 2002 and was not anxious to get to work. Now I’ve taken
time off, don’t get me wrong, and I’ve detached [during] trips and vacations.
“You know how sometimes you hear people talk and say, ‘Man, I just don’t wanna go to work today?’ I don’t think
I’ve ever done that.”
The Nov. 27 issue of Scene featured a cartoon of Knaus (or his “voice” anyway) talking from behind the closed door of this office. The offseason is here, there’s another title to celebrate, another banquet to headline at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City. In the cartoon, Knaus is depicted as being too busy to attend because he’s hard at work. On what? “2009.”
Inevitably, the leader’s yeoman-like work ethic rubs off on everyone around him including the team’s most visible member. Johnson says of Knaus, “He’s the first one in and last one out and working endless hours, and it’s contagious among the team. He’s helped me get outside of what I thought was working hard, and [I] put in more time and enjoy doing it.”
Team owner Rick Hendrick recently likened Knaus to a “machine,” but the crew chief says his offseason will not consist of all work and no play.
“I’m gonna go [snow]boarding in Colorado. I’m going to go to the Caribbean somewhere, sit on a beach, and do some diving. That’s it. That’s what I’m gonna do,” Knaus says in matter-of-fact fashion, as if trying to convince himself he can actually spend that much time away from this place.
Perhaps that’s not fair, and this apparent automaton in his ultra-pressed blue button-down shirt can be a real guy’s guy after all. The Bears helmet could be a sure sign, what with Knaus hailing from Illinois and all. Is this evidence of an inner child and dare we say fan boy lurking in appreciation of the home team?
“No. It’s about people that are driven to do the best that they can. I like that,” Knaus says, again ruining his chance to just be an everyman. “I’m not a specific sports fan. I’m a fan of people who excel in sports.”
Take solace in this little nugget, though. He doesn’t excel in everything. Knaus, like many weekend warriors hacking their way around the links, does not particularly succeed in golf.
His approximately year-long membership at The Peninsula Club, a private course on Lake Norman, so far has
yielded just four rounds of play with scores on a good day hovering in the “high 90s.”
“The thing that sucks is ... it’s closed on Monday. Monday’s the day I’d usually be able to go,” Knaus says.
The cynics out there are probably wondering if he cheats in golf, too. It won’t bother Knaus. But it might bother them to know this about him.
“As far as what people say about me, I don’t care,” he says.
Hanging Chad
The public perception of Knaus as single-minded workaholic is commingled with another sinister persona as, for lack of a better word, cheater.
Darian Grubb filled in for the suspended Knaus when Johnson won the 2006 Daytona 500. Last year, Knaus and Steve Letarte were both tagged with six-race suspensions after NASCAR found illegal fender modifications at Infineon Raceway. In 2008, Knaus
made it through unscathed, or in the dim view of his critics, without getting caught.
Knaus is both unapologetic and unconcerned about the label because he believes he has never cheated. To emphasize the point, he picks up a NASCAR tech bulletin from his desk.
“I’ve never taken the technical bulletin and where it says you cannot do ‘X’, I’ve never done X. I’ve never done anything like that,” he says. “I’m very comfortable with the decisions that I’ve made. The people around me seem to be very comfortable with it. I think that’s why I’ve got the job that I’ve got. I take pride along with my guys in trying to build a better race car. And if we can find an advantage, we’re gonna do it.
Now sometimes when you do that, you get in trouble. It’s just quite simple.” But does it bother him that so many in the public domain believe he is crooked?
“No. Because ultimately the people that know what we do for a living know that I’ve really not done anything
wrong. I don’t have one regret whatsoever. Nothing. We’ve pushed the limits on a lot of things, and you have to.
We’ve got I don’t know how many rules in the rulebook just because of things that we’ve done. Hell, I like that. That’s
good. I think that that is what it’s supposed to be.
“Like I said, I think my peers get it. And that’s all that really matters. The media and the fans … that’s why I don’t read any of that stuff. The thing is, it’s like Jeff Gordon said a long time ago, ‘If you’re gonna read the good, you gotta read the bad.’ So I don’t read any of it.”
The New England Patriots, on their way last year to an unbeaten regular season, drew the ire of a sporting nation because of “Spygate.” The team, which was caught videotaping an opponent’s defensive signals from a sideline location, was deemed to be in violation of league rules.
“What the Patriots got burned with, every team did that and does it,” Knaus says. “There’s things that I’ve gotten burned with that 75 percent of the teams were doing – not exactly the same thing, but something very similar – but it’s just like with the Patriots, the more success you have, the more you get scrutinized.”
Knaus is quick to add that the No. 48 team goes through more technical inspections simply because of its frequency of top finishes.
“If you wanna catch the people that are cheating, look from 15th to 43rd, because those are the ones that are really doing it,” he says.
“The guys that are from 15th and up are the ones going through technical inspection more, people pay closer attention to and you can’t get away with as much.”
Looking Ahead
If the Johnson-Knaus pairing remains intact for the foreseeable future, it’s not hard to imagine the duo challenging the benchmark of seven Cup titles won by Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt.
The reminder of Ray Evernham, though, looms large here at Hendrick Motorsports. After helping Gordon to three titles – the same number Johnson and Knaus have combined to capture – Evernham opted in 2000 to blaze his own trail as team owner. After guiding
Dodge’s re-entry into Cup competition and grooming Kasey Kahne as a possible future champion, Evernham sold a majority interest in his eponymous race team to George Gillett. He may sell off his remaining stake to Gillett, and his future in the sport is unclear.
For Knaus, this serves as a cautionary tale. “I wanted to be an owner when I was a kid. When I set my goals and aspirations for
everything I wanted to do, one of the big ones was I wanted to be a crew chief by the time I was 30. I did that. I wanted to win a race as a crew chief, I wanted to win a championship as a crew chief. We’ve done all that, and then I wanted to be an owner.
Now I don’t know exactly how that plays out. So I don’t know what the next step is,” he says. Knaus concedes team ownership is the next big professional goal. “It is. But I don’t know that I want it for sure. I want to make sure that I’ve got plenty of money, so that when I do decide to get married and have kids, I can spend time with my family,” he says. “I really want to make sure that I can pull that off. So, making sure that I make a good living is very, very important. Making sure that I’ve got security is very, very important.
“It would be tough for me to be an owner and not really run the team. Because if you’re an owner, you can’t run the team. You just can’t. I think Ray saw that. So, I don’t know what I’m gonna do yet.”
One thing Knaus won’t do in the near future is make a full-time career out of television. Even though he appears regularly on Speed’s “NASCAR Performance,” enjoys doing it and describes it as a nice diversion on race weekends, the competitor in him needs to be sated at the track.
“We typically tape it on Friday nights, which is good for me because it gives me a break from thinking about the race car,” he says. “That’s an hour-and-a-half break that we can go do the TV show, talk and have a good time.
It’s nice to go out there and kind of disconnect for a little bit. Even though I’m still talking about racing, I’m still disconnected from what happened that day.
“I’m not gonna do a TV full-time analyst type thing. It’s like I tell everybody, ‘If I’m gonna be at the race track Friday, Saturday and Sunday, I’m gonna be competing. I’m not gonna be there every day and not compete.’ That makes no sense to me.” Knaus hesitates a moment. Then he says, “Right now.”
