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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
HEMBREE: Trail Ends For Suitcase Jake
"Suitcase" Jake Elder passed away Wednesday at 73...
Mike Hembree  |  Posted February 26, 2010   Charlotte, NC
Legendary Winston Cup mechanic 'Suitcase' Jake Elder in the pits during the Winston 500 weekend at Talladega (AL) Superspeedway in 1981. Elder got his nickname by moving about from one team to another. (Photo by ISC Archives/Getty Images)

If there’s a racetrack in heaven and Jake Elder found his way there, he might finally be in a place he’ll never leave.

And that will be a first for Suitcase Jake. One of the most talented crew chiefs in NASCAR history, Elder, who died Wednesday, worked with dozens of drivers in a career that spanned much of the sport’s organized existence.

Somewhere along the way, he picked up the entirely appropriate nickname Suitcase Jake, thanks to his penchant for working for a team for a while and then moving on. Most of the time it was his choice; some of the time it wasn’t. He was fired from a few jobs, but he’d always pop up somewhere else along pit road.

The very definition of the shadetree mechanic who seemed to know everything there was to know about cars and how to make them go fast, Elder had only a second-grade education and couldn’t read or write. What he could do was remember.

“It didn’t matter where we were or how long it had been since we’d been there,” said David Pearson, who drove Elder-prepared cars to Cup championships in 1968 and ’69. “He could tell you what springs, what shocks we had under the car at every racetrack we went to.”

Elder, who built the heart of his career with Pearson and the Holman-Moody Ford factory team in the 1960s, was a throwback to the early days of stock car racing, when guys who knew stuff about cars got their hands greasy and made them run ever faster.

He was a contemporary of (and close friends with) the great Herb Nab, a top crew chief for Junior Johnson when Johnson’s teams ruled the sport. Elder and Nab had similar personalities. They did their jobs, did them well and stayed largely in the background, generally ignoring the publicity and hoopla that changed the sport dramatically during their tenures.

Elder eventually would work with some of the sport’s greatest names – Darrell Waltrip, Dale Earnhardt, Benny Parsons, Mario Andretti and, of course, Pearson.

On race day, he was focused on one thing – get the car in the pits and get it out as rapidly as possible. He kept cotton stuffed in his ears to dampen engine noise. Unfortunately, said Pearson, that also gave Elder a good excuse to claim he never heard anything Pearson said.


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