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| Meet Tony Gibson, No.8 Budweiser Crew Chief | | Date Created: Oct 11, 2007, 04:57 PM |
 Listen to the Tony Gibson Podcast here!
courtesy NASCAR MEDIA
Hometown: Daytona Beach, Fla.
Organization: Dale Earnhardt, Inc.
Team: No. 8 Budweiser Chevrolet
Driver: Dale Earnhardt Jr.
At-Track Job: Crew chief
Shop Job: Crew chief
Alma Mater: Attended Daytona Beach Community College for two years (’83 and ’84).
Family: Wife, Beth; daughter Laney (14).
First job: Wrench-turner on his family’s local short-track team in Central Florida.
“My background’s kinda like any other racer,” Tony says. “Started at the short tracks.”
And in the classroom.
“When I was in high school, they had what they would call an early release program,” Tony says. “You could go to work a job when you were in your final two years of high school. So I’d leave at 11 o’clock to go home and work on race cars with Dad, and then we’d race Friday, Saturday and sometimes on Sunday at the short track.”
Next job(s): During the late 1970s, Tony progressed as a mechanic on the family team, competing alongside his brother and other relatives as they raced at local Central Florida tracks. “Kind of tinkered around,” he calls it. During the early ‘80s, he found work with teams in the NASCAR Busch Series, then in the NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series, gradually moving atop pit boxes as he gained car chief and crew chief experience.
When prodded, Tony says, “I have to spit some names out, here.”
Those include Cale Yarbrough, Rob Morroso, Alan Kulwicki, Bill Elliott and Jeff Gordon – all drivers he’s worked with over the years. Tony played a critical role on Kulwicki’s series title team of 1992, and was a member of Gordon’s title teams of ’98 and ’01 as the car chief. He worked at Hendrick Motorsports from ’97 until mid-’02, when he joined DEI. His first race with DEI was the Kansas Speedway event that season.
Assignments since have included serving as crew chief for DEI drivers Steve Park and Michael Waltrip prior to assuming car-chief duties for Dale Earnhardt Jr. in ’05.
“There’s a lot of people out there that haven’t won championships,” Tony says, “so I feel very fortunate and very lucky to be involved with the teams that I was involved with – to be able to win races and championships.”
Current job: Crew chief for Dale Earnhardt Jr. Tony will fill that role for the final six races of ’07. He steps in for his good friend and now-former boss, Tony Eury Jr., who worked his last event for DEI last Sunday at Talladega.
Future job: Crew chief for the No. 8 team and driver Regan Smith in 2008.
A peek ahead: Gibson’s excited about working with Smith, who he says tested one of Martin Truex Jr.’s road-course cars earlier in the year, a stint that also impressed Truex’s crew chief, Kevin “Bono” Manion.
“He did a really good job,” Tony says of Smith. “Bono and those guys were really impressed with him. We actually took him on a tire test in Kentucky around a month ago. We were really pleased with his feedback on the feel of the race car. His driving ability was really good. We’re pretty excited about putting some young blood in there with a good strong team and see what we got.”
Second time around: Saturday’s event at Lowe’s Motor Speedway actually marks the beginning of Tony’s second stint atop the No. 8 pit box this season. He served as interim crew chief earlier when Eury sat out a six-race suspension during the summer. The No. 8 team earned two top fives and one top 10 under Gibson, including an eighth-place finish at LMS.
“That’s no guarantee it’ll go good again,” Tony says of his and Earnhardt’s reunion, “but we’re gonna go at it with the same mindset and try to win a race here before the end of the season.”
His mantra: It came from Kulwicki, en route to the ’92 series title. Tony says a bad day during the fall event at Dover International Speedway that season nearly put the team out of championship range – 281 points behind. A practice wreck followed by another in the race wrecked morale as well as sheet metal.
But Tony won’t forget Kulwicki rallying everyone together in the team transporter that day, promising he wouldn’t stop believing in himself or giving up on his title dreams. The soon-to-be-champion also asked his team members to do the same, and two months later, they clinched the ’92 title in the season’s final event.
“I think about him every day,” Tony says of Kulwicki, “and I think about what he told us in that truck every day. And when things get bad, I think of that and I’ll tell some of these guys the same thing. I’ll tell them, ‘I’ve been there and we just thought it was no way it was gonna happen and the next thing you know, we’re standing in New York City (for the traditional Champions Week celebration).’ ”
On DEI’s musical chairs: It began with Earnhardt’s May announcement that he would leave the company his late father founded – the first of many dominoes still falling. His decision to join Hendrick Motorsports made it nearly inevitable that his cousin and crew chief Tony Eury Jr. would follow, along with the three other crew members.
Another announcement – in late summer – revealed the merger of Ginn Racing and DEI, under the DEI umbrella, and the expansion of the organization to four teams. All the anticipated upheaval and uncertainty has made for sometimes-difficult working conditions.
But Tony’s two-plus decades in the sport have taught him resiliency; he promises DEI will emerge a stronger, better organization.
“All my road guys stayed, which was good,” he says. “Everybody else tells you they’re staying, but you really don’t know until the end. You’ll walk in here after (the season-finale at) Homestead and whoever is left is left. So I do walk in and wonder each day who’s gonna quit, who’s really staying.
“But I really can’t control that. I try to, as much as I can, reassure these guys and build hope and faith that they’ll have faith in me. So hopefully with all that, everybody will decide to stay that is here now and we can go on and build a strong company.”
Ties that bind: Different teams and work addresses won’t upend friendships, Tony says. Earnhardt’s team – including Tony Eury Jr. – spend time together away the track and that won’t change.
“We do a lot of things together,” Tony says. “We hunt together and fish together. We go target shooting with our bows and our guns and we do things on the road that keep us a little tight-knit, more tight-knit that some teams are. Dale Jr. has his go-kart track and his RC stuff (radio control cars) that we do together and we’ll continue to do that.”
What they have a very limited time to do together is win. The No. 8 team hasn’t won since the May ’06 at Richmond International Raceway, and a victory last week at Talladega would’ve been the perfect going-away gift for Tony Eury Jr. It wasn’t to be. Engine failure ended Earnhardt’s run – one that included significant time out front.
“We had a strong car, but it just didn’t happen,” Tony says. “We as a team, we have to represent him and the company and go out there and try to get the job done these last six races.”
What he didn’t bargain for: The head-coach aspect of today’s crew chief. Especially for an evolving organization. It’s role Tony says he’s had to master over the years.
“We just started out as good old-time racers and the sport just evolved into this,” he says. “We’ve got to adapt to it, it’s all part of life, and I think all businesses are like this. Anytime you’re a manager, you’ve got to manage people. You’re dealing with several different types of people and they have different attitudes and different concerns. As a crew chief, sometimes you feel like you’re a kindergarten teacher.”
Best Junior radio chatter: For a G-rated audience.
“He’ll be two-wide with somebody and he’ll want to know what the football score is on the Redskins game,” Tony says. “Last week he was leading the race and I guess he was bored and he wanted to know what the score of the Redskins’ game was. So you never know from him.”
Best Junior radio chatter, Part II: Slanting away from G-rated …
Literally.
During a red-flag period at Dover a few weeks ago, Earnhardt was the only driver who parked facing uphill on the high-banked, one-mile track (they call it The Monster Mile for a reason). While clean-up crews tidied the racing surface, the two Tonys tried to decipher their driver’s strategy.
“Everyone else was parked down the race track just in case their motors didn’t start,” Tony says. “So Dale Jr. was the only one parked up the hill, and we’re all trying to figure out what in the world he was doing – if the thing won’t crank, he won’t ever be able to crank it.
“We finally realized what he was doing and he comes on the radio and says, ‘Man, where’s all the good-looking chicks at?’ He only wanted to park near the grandstands so he could look in the grandstands and see all the girls coming down the bleachers to the car.”
Most embarrassing moment: A big splat.
As a younger crew chief in the mid ‘80s, Tony remembers guiding Bill Elliott over the radio as they debated a pit stop during one of February’s Daytona 500 qualifying races.
“He wanted to pit earlier and I wanted to pit later, so we were back and forth,” says Tony, who’d perched atop the pit wall in their stall. “And I went to turn to step off of the pit wall and when I did, my foot slipped and I fell straight to the ground. My radio flew off, my belt broke on my pants and it was pretty embarrassing for me. TV cameras and everyone was standing there, and here I go falling off the pit wall.”
Ugliest-ever uniform: The black flight-suit-looking getup that Kulwicki’s team had to sport one season at Daytona, thanks to a U.S. Army sponsorship.
“We had a camo car similar to the one Dale Jr. had,” Tony says. “We had these black suits on, we actually looked like we flew airplanes, they were like jump suits. They didn’t want to put us in a sand camo suit, so they gave us these black uniforms to wear on race day and over the wall. We looked pretty bad. They were pretty sad uniforms.”
What he bags besides wins: Animals. But don’t gross out. Tony says outdoor pursuits are his mental-health time away from the track.
“I know some people probably think I'm barbaric,” he adds, “but hunting for me, if I didn’t shoot anything, I would be okay. I don’t go out to shoot everything walking; I go for the trophy-type animal. I love animals and I love the outside. If I sat in the woods for three days and didn’t shoot anything I would be fine with that.”
It went Ba-a-a-a: Or until Tony nailed it bow-hunting in Ohio last year – a 325-pound wild Barbarosa ram shot from 52 yards.
“The worst part about it was walking up the mountains trying to find them,” Tony says. “They were a lot faster than we were. It would take us probably about an hour and a half to walk up the mountain where we could actually see them. By the time we would get there, we would get within 500 yards, and they would see us, run down the mountain and back up the other one before we could even catch our breath.
“It was pretty difficult; I think that’s why I’m so proud of that one.”
Ba-Ba the big sheep now stares down from a wall in Tony’s home.
“My wife made me put it upstairs in the bonus room; she won’t let me put it downstairs,” he says. “That’s my racing room and my deer-hunting room, so she makes me keep all that up there.”
The outfitters’ convention: What you get when DEI’s resident hunters and fishers get together. The group includes Tony Eury, Jr., Earnhardt, Truex and Manion, with a lot of gear from Truex’s sponsor, Bass Pro Shops.
“Yeah, we have all these perks we’ve got to stick around for,” Tony says, joking about why he’s staying with DEI.
It’s an atmosphere where “trophies” mean racing spoils and taxidermy.
“Big E was a huge hunter and outdoorsman,” Tony says of the company’s founder. “There are a lot of his trophies hanging around the complex here, I look at those everyday when we walk through the main showroom, or in the deer head room. We get a chance to see some of his trophies and to us that’s a part of him.”
Best memory: Of recent ilk. A particularly fine run at New Hampshire this season, which ended with a top-five finish. It came during Tony’s first crew-chief stint with Earnhardt, during Tony Eury Jr.’s suspension, and he recalls a poignant radio message from his driver afterward.
“He said, ‘You know, I just want to tell you guys how much I appreciate you and how much it has been enjoyable driving your cars these six races, ’ ” Tony says. “And that is when I thought to myself, ‘I have got it made. I have got a great job, I have got a great company that I work for, and I have just been so lucky to be associated with this team and this driver.’ It just overwhelmed me.”
The crew chief’s girls: Tony says wife Beth and teenage daughter Laney are his bedrock.
“They have sacrificed so much for me to do this that I can’t tell them how much I appreciate it and I how much I love them everyday,” he says. “Because I don’t get to spend time with them like normal families do when they have a regular job.”
Laney, however, seems certain to make up for it.
“Every day I am hearing about what kind of car she wants,” her dad says.
At the moment, it’s a nice, sizeable SUV, which causes Tony some groans. Laney has laps to make, first.
“She doesn’t do very good driving a golf cart now, so I’m a little concern when she gets on the street,” he says. “But she’s getting ready to take drivers ed, and go through that, so I am sure that will help her quite a bit.” |
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