HEMBREE: Norris Climbs Into The Fishbowl

Sprint Cup

HEMBREE: Norris Climbs Into The Fishbowl

Over the next two months, Chad Norris and Carl Edwards have much work to do…

Mike Hembree | Posted July 21, 2012 Charlotte, NC

SPEED.com NASCAR Editor Mike Hembree is a veteran, award-winning motorsports journalist. (File Photo)

For Chad Norris, it’s the opportunity of a lifetime.

For Chad Norris, it’s an invitation to fail with the whole world watching.

These are the bold contradictions that come with taking on the hardest job in NASCAR – crew chief for a top-flight team.

Over the next seven weeks, Norris will be in a fishbowl of sorts. As newly minted crew chief for Carl Edwards, who’s in a world of trouble, Norris has taken on the assignment of steering the Roush Fenway Ford No. 99 team into the Chase and into a position to give Edwards another shot at a championship that barely eluded him last season.

The partnership between Edwards and former crew chief Bob Osborne, one that worked so well last season as they raced Tony Stewart neck and neck for the championship, losing in the final minutes of a vibrant Chase, dissolved into a quagmire this season. With seven races remaining to the Chase cutoff, Edwards is in a foggy twilight zone – 46 points out of the top 10 with no victories.

That dire scenario – the extreme possibility of Ford’s showcase driver missing the playoffs only 10 months after coming within a point of one of motorsports’ major championships – led to the Osborne/Norris swap this week.

Now, Norris’ assignment could not be clearer – give Edwards the best possible cars and provide him with the best possible at-track planning and pit strategy to put him in position to win two or more races and score boatloads of points over the next seven weeks, lifting him into the Chase dozen.

It’s a difficult road but not one that’s impossible to negotiate.

In almost all of these situations, much of the pressure winds up on the crew chief’s head. This is largely because it’s much easier to change crew chiefs than drivers (big contracts and all that) and because we often hear, of course, that “the driver hasn’t forgotten how to drive,” so any slack must be the fault of the crew chief or the engine builder or one of the tire changers.

Very few driver-crew chief pairings last more than a couple of years. The pressures are high. The money is better somewhere else. One or more personalities among the team’s elite don’t mesh.

Chad Norris (Pictured) has a tall task ahead as the new crew chief for Carl Edwards. (Photo: LAT Photographic)

And, in the performance realm, the question is – what have you done for me lately? In addition to dealing with the driver’s peculiar needs, the crew chief has to keep dozens of team members happy and productive, stay on the cutting edge of technological change, make split-second strategy decisions that are always expected to be the right choice and, in the cases of some drivers, hang around post-race to answer tough media questions when the frustrated driver runs off to catch a helicopter.

It is not a job for the faint-hearted.

Welcome aboard, Mr. Norris.

Mike Hembree is NASCAR Editor for SPEED.com and has been covering motorsports for 30 years. He is a six-time winner of the National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year Award.
The opinions reflected herein are solely those of the above commentator and are not necessarily those of SPEED.com, FOX, NewsCorp, or SPEED

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Mike Hembree

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