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How biomechanics transformed Joe Gibbs Racing's NASCAR pitstops
by Samarth Kanal
5min read
Pitstops are one of the biggest performance differentiators in motorsport, where saving seconds in the pits can lead to bigger payoffs on the track. In a series such as NASCAR, where the cars are largely built to the same specification, pitstops arguably play an even more essential role.
Pitcrew members in action getting ready to change the left-hand side tyres at JGHPI lab
That’s where Joe Gibbs Human Performance Institute (JGHPI) enters the fray. Almost a decade ago, NASCAR team Joe Gibbs Racing (JGR) began using biomechanical assessment to better understand how to optimise human movement, reduce injury risk, and ultimately improve pitstops.
How JGHPI applies biomechanics to NASCAR pitstops
JGHPI works just outside Charlotte, North Carolina – on site at JGR's NASCAR headquarters – from a laboratory that can fit a full-size NASCAR car and its pitcrew.
How JGHPI applies biomechanics to NASCAR pitstops
JGHPI works just outside Charlotte, North Carolina – on site at JGR's NASCAR headquarters – from a laboratory that can fit a full-size NASCAR car and its pitcrew.
The laboratory uses more than 80 force plates on the ground to measure the kinetic energy transferred by the athletes – who either jack up a car that weights more than a minimum of 1,451 kilogrammes, fit two or four tyres that weigh around 12kg each, or carry and deliver up to 45 litres of fuel. Furthermore, cameras optically track each pivotal point of an athlete’s body while they work on the car.
Visual data isn’t captured using motion capture suits or reflective markers, as those are too restrictive towards movement. Instead, the laboratory is fitted with more than 40 high-speed cameras that track the movements of every joint on an athlete’s body from 2D video coupled with advancements in AI. The data from each pitstop comes to terabytes of video per hour. Every hundredth of a second the lab collects dozens of data points, forming a complete picture of how each part of the athlete’s body is moving and transferring forces.
The data is then run through computer vision algorithms to generate models. Visually, those models resemble a ‘stick figure’ of a human being to which muscle and bone geometry can be added and scaled to form a model of a specific athlete working on the car.
JGHPI’s laboratory director Matt Osborn explains that the data points collected from each athlete all pertain to subtle movement characteristics rather than macro performance measures such as running speed and jumping height.
“You can extract hundreds of data fields from each movement of an athlete. We’re talking about a table [of data] that’s thousands of rows wide,” he says. “This isn’t about how high you can jump or how fast you can run. Right now, our tyre changer model includes metrics that are related to an athlete’s vertical force production, lateral movement, strength and hip mobility.”
While Formula 1 pit athletes are dedicated to each corner of the car, NASCAR tyre changers, tyre carriers, fuelers, and jack people work on both sides of the car
Many NASCAR pitcrew members stem from baseball, although American football and basketball also make up a large proportion of NASCAR athletes
With those models of athletes, JGHPI can then find out which athletes might serve the pit crew well and how a personalised training and workout programme can be applied to them. It can take around 24 months for an athlete to then make it to a working NASCAR pitstop. With this new biomechanics-based process, JGHPI found a 75% reduction in the time taken to promote an athlete from development to a professional level.
Finding athletes to join the programme can be difficult – and much of it happens via word of mouth.
“We’re not the only people with this problem. Olympic bobsled teams, for example, need to find athletes that come from other sports to fit their profile,” says Osborn.
While numerous anecdotes might imply that most NASCAR pitcrew members are ex-American football players, it's another sport that's actually supplied the most personnel to this programme.
“We are far from [an American] football-focused athletics department. That’s not even the number one place where we get athletes. We’ve had track-and-field hurdlers, hockey players, soccer players, basketball players, but right now we see more baseball players have more success inside our roster than any other sport.”
Why Joe Gibbs Racing prioritised optimising NASCAR pitstops
Joe Gibbs Racing (JGR) began using biomechanics to look into improving pitstops in 2013. The team’s reasoning stemmed from the importance of pitstops in NASCAR.
To illustrate that, JGHPI uses Formula 1 as a comparison. As per its research, NASCAR pitstops are more frequent and more crucial than in F1: Currently, there is an average of around two pitstops per Formula 1 grand prix, while there is an average of six pitstops per NASCAR race. NASCAR races last, on average, just over 180 minutes, while Formula 1 races last approximately 90 minutes on average.
Up to 22 people can be involved in an F1 pitstop to apply front and rear jacks to the car, change all four tyres, make repairs and make minor set-up changes; in NASCAR, just five people are allowed to apply jacks to the car, change tyres, refuel, make set-up changes, clean the windscreen and repair the car. JGHPI therefore estimates that the task load for one NASCAR pit crew member is up to four times higher than one F1 pit crew member, and NASCAR pitstops can be up to 10 times more impactful to a driver than an F1 pitstop.
Denny Hamlin stops for fuel and tyres. JGHPI estimates that NASCAR pitstops are 10 times more impactful than F1 pitstops.
Joe Gibbs Racing is third in the all-time NASCAR Cup Series win tally behind Petty Enterprises and Hendrick Motorsports
JGR's pitstop research started in-house at its base near Charlotte, North Carolina, at the start of the championship's Gen6 rules era in 2013.
By 2015 it had begun biomechanics assessments that led to improved pitstop performance, but - as Melissa Boswell, director of bioengineering at JGHPI, explains - those performance gains began to “plateau”, as JGR could only obtain so much information from standard exercises such as vertical and lateral jumps.
The team formally founded its laboratory and JGHPI in 2021. The lab went beyond traditional biomechanics assessments and captured the biomechanics of every athlete as they performed a full pitstop.
Osborn adds: “From 2018 to 2021, we netted 562 track positions on pit road and the next best team [Hendrick Motorsports] netted 211. When we took our research and applied it to pitstops and it was incredibly impactful.”
From 2013 to 2022, JGR won 100 races compared to Hendrick Motorsports’s tally of 82.
How JGHPI’s lab can be used to improve athletes in other sports
The effect of JGHPI’s laboratory has been transformative on JGR’s NASCAR pitstops, but the results of the lab can be stretched and applied to improve athletic performance in numerous other sports.
“Our journey starts 100% in motorsport, which is actually kind of weird, because, from a human movement problem perspective, [motorsport is going to represent] a small subset of the problems that we solve,” says Osborn.
“Once we built that laboratory, we started working with other technology manufacturers and vendors and suppliers and running into people with the same technical problems in basketball, football, soccer, cricket… Then we decided we would take our lab and try and pivot its focus, not to be in motorsport only, but to build specific capture environments for different problems.
“For instance, right now, it’s actually a basketball court. Because we’re doing a bunch of work for some technology vendors and teams in the NBA and WNBA.”
JGHPI turns its lab into a hardwood basketball court to work with Noah Basketball, a data-service provider that works to improve shooting accuracy for basketball players. The lab works for basketball players in the same way as it does for NASCAR pitcrew members. Furthermore, the Pfeiffer University men's soccer team became the first of its kind to use the laboratory.
As for other motorsport, biomechanics is being used to train drivers and help their injury recovery in single-seater and motorcycle racing – but cost constraints are believed to be the biggest obstacle for teams looking to improve their pitstops with a scientific edge.
However, as JGHPI has shown, investment in laboratory-based analysis can make a tangible difference on the track – and even contribute towards victories and championships.