TBO.com - Tampa Bay Online
Kenseth Expects Quick Transition
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Published: February 9, 2008
DAYTONA BEACH - Richard Petty and Dale Inman. Jeff Gordon and Ray Evernham. Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus. Tony Stewart and Greg Zipadelli.
Here's another longtime driver-crew chief tandem that will go down in history as one of the best: Matt Kenseth and Robbie Reiser.
But the Wisconsin natives and good friends are together no more. When Kenseth rolls off pit road to take his shot at the Daytona 500 pole Sunday, he'll have a new crew chief for the first time in his NASCAR career.
Then again, the voice Kenseth will hear in his earpiece won't be unfamiliar. Chip Bolin, who has taken over for Reiser, has been his team engineer since the team's inception in 1999.
And Reiser, who has replaced Max Jones as Roush-Fenway Racing's general manager, will still have a hand in his effort.
"I think there's a bigger adjustment for Chip than me," Kenseth said. "We've worked together for nine years, and if we can't communicate by now, we've got a major problem. If it was somebody from the outside from a different team or something, I think I'd have a lot more anxiety."
Kenseth and Reiser first got together in 1997 when Reiser, a former short-track driver who made 29 starts in the Busch Series, hired Kenseth to drive his Busch car. They finished second to Dale Earnhardt Jr. for the title in 1998 and third in 1999.
In 1999, Jack Roush hired Kenseth, Reiser and the rest of their team and moved them up to Winston Cup for the 2000 season. Kenseth beat Earnhardt for Rookie of the Year honors and went on to win the '03 title.
Together, Kenseth and Reiser have made the Chase the last four years. Two-time defending Sprint Cup champion Johnson is the only other driver who has made the Chase in every season since its inception.
Eight seasons on the road as a Cup-level crew chief were enough for Reiser, and if the opportunity to move into upper management hadn't come about, he might have left racing, Roush said recently. Now, Reiser oversees the preparations for Kenseth's team as well as the No. 6 car of David Ragan, No. 16 of Greg Biffle, No. 26 of Jamie McMurray and No. 99 of Carl Edwards.
"I think Robbie is going to be a key ingredient in us catching up to these other teams," Biffle said, referring to the fact Roush-Fenway fell behind Hendrick Motorsports and some other teams in developing NASCAR's new car.
"Robbie is a very smart person. He's a very good organizer, and we've lacked that position, so to speak. We've had people, but not of Robbie's caliber of understanding the race cars, the race teams and how they operate and what we need to do technically behind the scenes."
Unlike Reiser, Bolin, a 33-year-old native of South Carolina, did not grow up around racing. He certainly didn't plan on having a career in racing, either. While working on a mechanical engineering degree at Clemson, he began a career designing robotic manufacturing systems.
"I did four co-op semesters at a silicon wafer factory working on robotic systems, really high-tech stuff, but I was like, I cannot be penned up in this factory every day from 6 o'clock to 5 for the rest of my life," Bolin said. "So I started focusing more on vehicle dynamics and stuff like that in my course work."
Before starting grad school, Bolin got a call from his college advisor about an internship at Andy Petree Racing. Bolin didn't know that Petree, now a television analyst, had been a two-time Winston Cup champion crew chief for Dale Earnhardt Sr. or that Ken Schrader was the team's driver. But he took the job, found himself challenged, and he has worked in NASCAR ever since.
And now, after taking the helm as interim crew chief for the first five races last year after Reiser was suspended for a car violation, Bolin will be a full-time crew chief.
Said Kenseth, "Robbie is more the organizer and the hands-on guy, all that kind of stuff, where Chip is more still trying to do the engineering and figuring out how to make the cars go fast, as well as trying to take over a lot of the duties that Robbie did day-to-day.
"It's a little different approach."
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