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NASCAR News | April 23, 2010
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Hutchens’s seen it all, from Earnhardt to Stewart
By Jay Hart
April 23, 2010
Bobby Hutchens may not be a familiar name, but he’s worked closely with some of NASCAR’s biggest stars. He was one of NASCAR’s very first engineers, working at Richard Childress Racing for four of Dale Earnhardt Sr.’s seven titles.
Today, he serves as the competition director for Stewart-Haas Racing.
Hutchens talked to Yahoo! Sports about his job, what makes his boss, Tony Stewart, so successful and addresses the speculation about Stewart-Haas expanding to three cars.
1. Yahoo! Sports: When you first started at Stewart-Haas, what did you find?
Hutchens: We found sort of a foundation that we could build on. There were a lot of good people, a lot of good equipment and a nice facility. They brought in Tony Stewart and Ryan Newman to drive the cars and Darian Grubb and Tony Gibson to be crew chiefs. You had Matt Borland in place to be technical director.
I don’t know, I felt at home when I walked in and still feel that way today. I just felt like it was a matter of all of us putting our heads together and pulling the boat in the right direction, and we had what we had in 2009.
2. Yahoo! Sports: What does a competition director do on a day-to-day basis?
Hutchens: Day to day, I’m there to help the two crew chiefs get what they need to race week to week. Make sure we’re competitive at the race track. Making sure that we’re in the market for pit crew guys if somebody becomes available. I can be a cheerleader. I’m the team psychologist. I can be a lot of things. It’s never the same thing on any given day.
I’m responsible for the budgets for the two cars, so I work with our financial group. And if insurance comes up tomorrow and there’s an issue with that, I may start working on that. It’s a wide variety of things that I cover day to day. Fortunately, I went to the best racing school that I know of up at RCR and learned how to do a little bit of all that and have a good time doing it.
3. Yahoo! Sports: What is your best memory of Dale Earnhardt?
Hutchens: Probably him walking up behind you and grabbing your neck like he’d do every once in a while just to make sure you’re paying attention.
I know that sounds kind of trite, but I miss him not being able to do that.
4. Yahoo! Sports: Can you explain the relationship you have with Hendrick Motorsports, and is there ever any concern that you’re getting their second-rate equipment?
Hutchens: We buy our chassis from those guys over at HMS, and then we bring them in and do our own work on them – we do our own “bracketries” on them, I’ll call it, to set up our cars the way we like to set ‘em up.
We lease the engines from them on a regular basis. They come in and out of our shops daily. Then we have a technology agreement with them so that we’re privy to the technology that they have.
I think we have a promise from Mr. Hendrick that the equipment will all be the same and if it’s not, or we feel like something is not up to what we feel is the standard, then he’s a phone call away. But we haven’t had to do that.
I feel like once we kind of established ourselves that, hey, we’re going to be a competitive group and that at the end of the day we’re all a bunch of racers and we want to win, I think the door has been swinging as far as that goes from our shop as well as their shop.
5. Yahoo! Sports: Tony Stewart seems to succeed at whatever he does – be it on the track or off it. From your perspective working with him, what makes him successful?
Hutchens: I just think he’s a good honest person who at the end of the day has a lot going for him. He has a very keen sense on the racing side. I don’t think people give him enough credit for not only being a smart racer in the car, but understanding the dynamics of a race team. I think all that kind of adds up to help his leadership skills to help run Stewart-Haas Racing.
6. Yahoo! Sports: Every week Tony gets asked the question if SHR is going to expand. What are the hurdles that you would need to clear to expand to a three-car organization, and if you had to make a prediction, what would you put the percentage at that SHR will expand to three cars in 2011?
Hutchens:We’ve talked about it for quite a while now and A), it’s got to make business sense. B), it’s gotta have the right driver and crew chief that fits our mold with the way we like to do things. And C), I think it’s gotta have a sponsor attached to it long term to insure that we can put the thing together and get it up and running to be successful.
I’d say the percentage is probably 50-50.
7. Yahoo! Sports: Would Kevin Harvick be considered to be one of those drivers that fits the SHR mold?
Hutchens: I think he, and I think there are several drivers whose contract is coming up, that we’ll probably be having conversations with over the next couple months to see what our future in that realm holds.
8. Yahoo! Sports: Any talks on possibly pulling in Kasey Kahne for the one season while he waits for his ride at Hendrick Motorsports to open up?
Hutchens: There’s been some speculation, but to this point we haven’t really been in any contact with any of that. So, I’m sure at some point there will be some line of communication. I don’t really know what the status of all of that is over there. It probably wouldn’t be a smart thing for me to even speculate, but at some point in time I’m sure there will be some sort of conversation about that.
9. Yahoo! Sports: You’ve been in the sport almost half your life. From your perspective, what is the biggest change between 1988 and now?
Hutchens: There could be a lot of answers for that at the end of the day, I guess you might say.
Probably technology. When I first came into it, I was one of the first engineers. Today, we probably have 14, 15 full-time engineers at our facility, and most places are like that.
Even though people think these are redneck cars or whatever, and the rules stipulate a lot closer to stock than Formula 1-type car, there’s a lot of technology that goes into them to make them go around the race track.
Secondly, part of that technology since Dale passed away is the technology for all the safety stuff that’s been developed by NASCAR and all the teams.
9 1/2. One thing that fans don’t know about Stewart-Haas Racing is…
Hutchens: That we’re one big family. I think everybody there enjoys working with everybody else. We love one another and we’re just having fun doing it. We’re just one big family.
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