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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
CUP: Knaus Staying Put, Aiming For Seven
Chad Knaus says owning a NASCAR team is less attractive to him now than it used to be...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted November 17, 2009   Charlotte, NC
Chad Knaus has been the crew chief for NASCAR Sprint Cup Series driver Jimmie Johnson since 2002. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

Chad Knaus, being the meticulous thinker that he is, had his future planned out years ago: Become a NASCAR crewmen, work his way up to crew chief and then eventually start his own team.

Knaus saw his former boss Ray Evernham do it successfully and figured he could, too. But now, the 38-year-old Rockford, Ill., native is having a change of heart. Standing on the precipice of four consecutive NASCAR Sprint Cup championships will do that to you. So will working for a car owner like Rick Hendrick. Nor does it hurt having a shoe like Jimmie Johnson driving the car you’re tuning on.

It makes one think, something Knaus never stops doing.

“I don't know. My initial goal when I first came into the Cup Series was to obviously become a crew chief and win races and win a championship and then move on to an ownership role,” Knaus said during a Tuesday NASCAR teleconference. “I don't know if I want that now or not. I think it would be foolish of me to try to think that I could be an upstart team and try to make something like that happen.”

The obvious frame of reference here is Evernham, who was Jeff Gordon's crew chief at Hendrick when Knaus was a crewman on the No. 24. Although Evernham built a solid foundation at Evernham Motorsports, winning 13 races between 2001 and ’07, as a team owner he never was able to reach the elite status of a Hendrick or Roush Fenway Racing.

The reason was simple: money. In today’s environment running a NASCAR team means an almost endless amount of sponsor hunting, schmoozing and reassuring. Raising $100 million or so annually to field a competitive Sprint Cup multi-car team is a Herculean task that’s gotten a lot tougher in the last couple of years as the U.S. economy has turned soft.

Evernham sold his team in August 2007, not long after he figured that what he really enjoyed was making race cars go fast, not spending all his time glad handing Fortune 500 CEOs for sponsorship. And one can’t help but wonder if Knaus hasn’t realized the same thing.

“You almost have to have an affiliation with somebody to do that,” said Knaus of moving from crew chief to team owner. “If you look at Tony Stewart and the way he got into Stewart Haas and that deal all came together with the support from Hendrick Motorsports, that deal will work. To start from an outside company I think would be a pretty lofty goal, and I don't know if — after realizing what it is that we've got here at Hendrick Motorsports, I don't know if I would ever want to race against it. It's a pretty amazing place. Just I don't know. We'll just have to wait and see. But the likelihood is probably slim at this point.”


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