The people have always been the heart of any successful Cup Series operation, and that's no different in 2008 than it was in 1988.

Among the biggest differences these days are the size of multi-car operations in terms of personnel, how specialized individual employees' tasks and responsibilities have become and the caliber of personnel that is necessary to compete.

In 2008, the Sprint Cup Series is more competitive than NASCAR's premier level has ever been, and this intense level of competition makes retention of personnel even more of an issue than it's ever been.

Finding a competitive edge in the current environment involves diversification, not only in materials and technology, but also in personnel.

And in the end, it seems that keeping abreast of the competition involves maintaining a tightly knit organization -- whether its personnel numbers 50 or 550 -- that sets and achieves goals, gets results, and keeps every level of the organization enthused, from ownership to the sponsors right down to the last rank-and-file employee.

The more things change

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Jimmy Makar has gone from working with an elite driver in Rusty Wallace to managing an elite team at Joe Gibbs Racing.

Perhaps nowhere is the importance of personnel more evident than within the expansive walls of Hendrick Motorsports, currently the sport's most successful operation with seven championships in the past 13 years and 172 Cup victories since its inception in 1984. While carrying it out isn't simple, according to Hendrick Motorsports' executive vice president and general manager Marshall Carlson, the philosophy is, and it starts at the top.

"Rick [Hendrick] has got an expression that's kind of interesting," Carlson said. "It's that 'hardware is going to come and go, whether it's a new car or a new engine piece -- hardware is going to come and go. But what carries you through and makes the performance consistent; is the human capital and the people you've got in the organization.'

"I think that's really been a focus for this organization. It starts with Rick, and I think all of our people here believe in it, that at the end of the day, what's going to make the difference is the quality of the people you've got."

Pete Wright, who's one of many Sprint Cup garage dwellers who epitomizes an era when teams -- and their personnel -- learned to do more with less, loves to tell the story of how Billy Hagan Racing's 1984 Winston Cup championship team with Terry Labonte had fewer than 20 full-time employees.

Red Bull Racing Team's Pete Wright, who's one of many Sprint Cup garage dwellers who epitomizes an era when teams -- and their personnel -- learned to do more with less, loves to tell the story of how Billy Hagan Racing's 1984 Winston Cup championship team with Terry Labonte had fewer than 20 full-time employees.

That was then. The large multi-car teams that currently dominate the sport, winning every championship since 1994 -- when current multi-team conglomerate Richard Childress Racing had just one team, albeit for the late seven-time champion Dale Earnhardt -- number anywhere from 200 to 600 employees.

"It's always been a people business, and when you're all located within a central geographic area, unlike other sports businesses where you have different teams in different parts of the country, we're all pretty close and we all go to the same events," said Steve Lauletta, president of Chip Ganassi Racing with Felix Sabates. "So there are a lot of relationships that get built, not only with people on the same teams but also among people on opposing teams, so it's an interesting people business, and a lot different than other sports, so that means it has its own challenges."

Ganassi has championship teams in the Indy Racing League and Grand-Am Rolex Series for sports cars, as well as maintaining two full-time teams in Sprint Cup and another full-time Nationwide Series operation.

"Certainly the sport keeps getting more and more intricate, from all the different aspects, whether that's on the racing operations side or on the business side," Lauletta said. "And when you have a business that continues to grow and get more and more popular as NASCAR has, the teams have to react to that and the people involved become more and more important."

Joe Gibbs Racing, which currently fields three full-time cars in the Sprint Cup Series, has won 67 races since its inception in 1992, and three of the past eight championships. Former crew chief Jimmy Makar, who was one of Gibbs' first hires, learned the value of people when he worked with 1989 Winston Cup champion Rusty Wallace, and he said the personnel aspect only looms larger in 2008.

"It's probably more of a people sport, as far as the need for a larger number of people to come together," said Makar, now JGR's senior vice president of racing operations. "The teams have grown, there's more specialization inside the teams and there's more need for all of the people to do their jobs well.

"That's the difference between some of the better teams and some of the teams that don't perform quite as well, is [the better teams] have someone specialized in every little aspect of the game, compared to when you had guys in the past that did three or four different jobs, just because you had to."

"I would certainly think that right now the people are as important, or more important, than ever before," Gillett Evernham Motorsports general manager Keith Barnwell said. "You've got [driver/crew chief] combinations that have been together and are thriving. You've got to get everybody on the same page and with the new car, your people have maybe got to [be] willing to step out of the box and trust each other maybe more than you ever have."

Yates Racing could be considered a throwback in a lot of ways, considering it's running its two cars with less than 100 people. But co-owner and general manager Max Jones said it's no less an issue that the people matter most.

"It's about the people that have the passion to go race these cars," said Jones, a champion sports-car driver who has management experience across the sports car, IndyCar and stock car disciplines. "The more passion, the more dedication and the [better] work ethic you have, the better race team you'll have. Getting all the right people together and to get along and work together is a challenge, too."

Dale Earnhardt Inc. has won 24 Cup races this decade, and DEI's vice president of motorsports, John Story, said the equation remains virtually as simple as ever.

"We all get our equipment and our tools from the same place -- it's all a matter of what you do with it," Story said. "There's a tremendous investment in people, and a lot of that has led to the specialization we're all aware of."

A special landscape

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Today's NASCAR requires groups of engineers specialized in one area.

Just as many vehicle owners formerly changed their own oil and tuned their own personal vehicles, elaborate engine management systems have eliminated some of that; and in NASCAR racing, the evolution of equipment -- and also the need to compete -- has also led to more specialization, as Red Bull vice president and general manager Jay Frye pointed out.

"The only thing that's different than five or 10 years ago is the sport has become more specialized, so there are more specialists, obviously more technology and more degreed individuals," Frye said. "So the sport has changed, but it's still very much about all the people that you have in all those positions -- it's still a team sport and you're still building a team."

"Team" and "teamwork" mean the difference between winning and losing in NASCAR racing, and not surprisingly, Hendrick's Carlson said his vice president of competition, Ken Howes, shared a quote with him that Carlson has posted in his office: "Your value here is directly proportional to your ability to work well with other people."

"That is a pretty unique perspective in a competitive environment, if you think about it," Carlson said. "It says you can have all the talent or technical skills that anyone could ever want, but if you can't apply them in a team environment, they're not going to be much good to the organization."

"A lot of that [specialization in personnel] has been driven by this new car," Story said. "Because we've been put in a tighter box, and so we're spending more time and energy trying to find subtle differences between our cars and someone else's, and they're doing the same thing, too.

"You're working harder in smaller areas and trying to find really, really, really small improvements, and in order to do that you have to have better, smarter, brighter people. So finding those right people that can do the job is as hard as it ever has been."

"Specialization has been a significant change in the sport," Carlson said. "If you think about just 10 years ago, most teams had maybe a couple or a few engineers, and that's what they were called, 'engineers.' Today, we've got 60 engineers here and they're doing things that are so different from one another; everything from a race engineer to a shock engineer to a simulation engineer; program engineer, design engineer, kinematics engineer -- their specialties are very definitive.

"They all have to have the capacity to understand the entire system, but to really get a competitive advantage, we have to have people that are very focused on how they're trying to move the technology forward and that has resulted in tremendous specialization -- not only in engineering, but in every area.

"There was a day 10 years ago when a race mechanic could do anything on a car. Now we have brake mechanics and gear mechanics and top end mechanics -- everyone has a definitive role. I think that's driven by the need to constantly evolve a competitive advantage and in this environment, you have to have some core responsibility and accountability.

"If you have more people who can do everything, maybe they're more valuable, but nobody owns each piece of it. So it has affected the degree of specialization and the number of folks. We've got 550 folks out here supporting four Cup teams."

"Because these organizations have gotten larger, everybody's gotten a lot more detailed in a lot of different areas," Roush Fenway Racing general manager Robbie Reiser said. "So [using] the specialized person in certain areas has become greater because of that reason. You used to run these companies with 10 or 20 people, and now those organizations have 400 or 500 people; so those departments have changed, and the direction and the detail work of how you do things has changed because you try to get better in all the different areas."

Frye's interesting perspective on the sport goes back to the formation of MB2 Motorsports in the mid-1990s, through MBV Motorsports to Ginn Racing, a merger with DEI and then his switch at the beginning of this season to Red Bull, a second-year organization in Cup racing.

"It's funny, but when we started [MB2] in 1996, we had 10 people for a one-car team," Frye said. "Now, the Red Bull team is a two-car team and we basically, for a round number, have 200 people. So again, that goes back [to specialization], because back then you had one person do two or three jobs, where now you have two people do each of those jobs."

Barnwell, who ran a Busch Series team, ppc Racing, which finished first and second in the championship with drivers Jeff Green and Jason Keller and a total of about 26 employees; said specialization is good, but the loss comes when you have people who only know about their specific area of the racecar.

"Years ago, you had a guy standing in the pit area that if you had a guy twist an ankle on pit road, that [spare] guy grabbed a [air] gun and went," Barnwell said. "He might have been the car chief or even the crew chief. Now, you have backups for positions, just like in the NFL or NBA and that drives your [total] numbers up."

Earlier this season, Ganassi had to close one of its three Cup teams because of a sponsorship shortage, but while that affected the more than 70 people that had to be released, the big picture hasn't changed.

"Without a doubt, specialization has led to increases in both the number and caliber of people we have, particularly in the size of the teams," Lauletta said. "We have 250 people working now on our two Cup cars and our one Nationwide car, so as both a race team and a business it becomes more and more specialized, in dealing with more sponsors, human resources, finance and all the things that go along with a business, it gets more and more detailed; and therefore you need more people, and more specialized people to handle it."

Expansion has created an environment in which something as simple as knowing names to go with faces also becomes a challenge -- though Reiser said it's doable.

"In my world, I guess I do know who everyone's name is," Reiser said with a grin. "It's hard to do -- but you have to, to stay up with the company and all the things that you're doing. You've got to rely on a lot of the departments to be able to handle their departments [independently], and the managers will take care of that.

"It's run like a manufacturing plant -- like a lot of United States companies are. It's just what it is."

Here today, gone tomorrow

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Robbie Reiser has gone from overseeing one team to five at Roush Fenway Racing.

With the vast majority of the NASCAR racing industry located near its "hub" in Charlotte, N.C., legend had it that a team employee could leave for lunch working for you and after lunch, get his toolbox and go somewhere else.

The prevailing opinion is that better salaries, a desire for stability and to build a career in one place all make that more a part of that past. The size of organizations factors into the ease of retention, Story said, but like everything else in racing, it's never easy.

"I think we've had some of that," Carlson said with a laugh, "but not real recently, that I can recall. Rick does an incredible job of keeping all of us, throughout the whole organization, focused on the people aspects of this sport."

"Racing is like any business -- it's always been about the people," Michael Waltrip Racing vice president and general manager Ty Norris said. "It seems lately the available pool of people is a little less, but we've been fortunate. Andy Petree [current ESPN broadcaster and former car owner and champion crew chief] used to say 'you hire for attitude and you train for skill.' We've been able to upgrade in several areas with people who share the same vision and attitude."

"I think it's equally as hard, but in this sport you go through cycles where there are an abundance of teams, and when that type [thing] happens the competition becomes very keen for the right people," Frye said. "Then there's a correction factor every few years, and there are less teams [and more people available].

"But if you do the right thing and make it a great environment for people to work at, they don't want to leave and that's what you want -- you want people that want to be where they're at."

Jones said a few years ago, when Toyota came onto the NASCAR scene, first in the Craftsman Truck Series and then branching into Cup and the current Nationwide Series, that prompted a rash of changes.

"A few of the [Toyota] teams needed employees, and they were offering big money -- and there were guys jumping for money," Jones said. "I don't think you see that today in the sport as much because guys are looking for stability. And the employee-employer market is a little different than it was two or three years ago -- it's stabilized.

"If you're a skilled guy and you have a good work ethic, you have a good job where you're at, and you're not out on the market."

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We all get our equipment and our tools from the same place -- it's all a matter of what you do with it. ... Somebody better be taking care of your people, 24/7, or you'll fall behind.

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JOHN STORY, DEI

"Chip was one of the first, with our IndyCar team in Indianapolis, to use agreements with the employees to show that, if you're committed to us, we're going to be committed to you," Lauletta said. "We continue to do that with revisions in how we manage those agreements, but I think the times today and the way that you treat your employees are more a factor in retention than thinking a little more money or a better opportunity, as you say, the legend of packing up your toolbox and [suddenly] leaving.

"It's a tough business right now and a lot of challenges overall. A lot of that is due to the economy and the economy's effect on companies being willing to spend money on sponsorship, and obviously we're very reliant on sponsors in NASCAR. With teams having to tighten their belt, there may be fewer opportunities than a few years ago, but I feel like the culture of each individual race team and how each team takes care of their race team and makes them feel like it's a home rather than just a job drives that retention."

"There is definitely a higher prevalence today of contracts, but contracts are just kind of scratching the surface," Carlson said. "I think what you're seeing more of today, more than five or 10 years ago, are incentive-based compensation for folks, that when the organization does well, they're going to do well; and I think that drives a lot of loyalty to an organization.

"And I think that today, people are looking for a stable environment to make a career. I don't know if it's this way everywhere, but in our experience, there seems to be less jumping around than there was five years ago. People want to find a place where they fit and they can contribute and build a career over the longer term rather than being a free agent who's with a new group every two years."

"I think the bigger programs have an easier time keeping people," Story said. "Stability with your driver quorum and your sponsorship group is as important as anything else, but mainly it's just taking care of people, being honest with them, pay them a good wage for an honest day's work, and it's management 101: If you take care of people, people will take care of you -- and that part of it has never changed.

"We don't really have a big problem keeping our people. We have to communicate with them and we can always do a better job of communicating with them, but keeping good people is not as hard as some of the other parts of the business."

Diversity and competition, though, lead to challenges in other people's minds.

"If you go back 20 years ago, yeah, it's tougher [now], and if you go back five years, yeah, it's tougher," Reiser said. "If you look at how this is structured and all the companies that are involved, you have to stay up with the competition and pay attention to everything that's going on around you to make sure that everybody benefits in the best way possible and to be able to put the best teams together, and it becomes [more of] a challenge every year."

"Oh yeah -- it's much more difficult to retain people today [because] people have so many different choices of going to other teams that are strong and have the resources to bring them on and to give them the opportunity to win races," Makar said. "Years ago, there were half a dozen, or seven or eight teams that could win races and challenge for championships. That's doubled or tripled now, even though some of the car owners are the same owners of multiple teams. But you have a lot more choice just as a mechanic or just any member of a team in the sport today."

Makar was recently thrilled when he was able to take JGR's test team, with development driver Joey Logano, to some test sessions to actually get his hands back on a racecar, because personnel issues take up so much time these days.

"I think 80 percent of my time is spent on some kind of people part of the job," Makar said. "Whether it's planning work orders, or what we're going to be doing or working on, who's going to be doing what ... more than working on racecars -- the job description -- from where I've come from being a crew chief."

Whereas back in the day, someone to answer the phone might have been about the only person that wasn't related to the hands-on competition side of the business. That's changed these days.

At DEI, for example, Story said that people like director of motorsports operations Rex Garrett and recently hired vice president of competition Bobby Hutchens spend a vast amount of time on personnel matters; while all the large organizations now have complete human resources departments.

"I'd say 95 percent of Rex's day is spent dealing with people as he manages our day-to-day activity on the shop floor; not just trying to motivate people but making sure they stay on-point and doing things the way the company has chosen to do them," Story said. "There are a whole bunch of us [taking care of people], but somebody better be taking care of your people, 24/7, or you'll fall behind."

Reiser, who's made no secret of how much he enjoys a hands-on role with racecars, just laughed when asked how much time he deals with personnel matters.

"Probably 95 percent of the time I'm involved in personnel, because virtually everything that you do has people involved in it; and there's no way to sit here and say there's times during the day that we don't mess with people," Reiser said. "People are what drives the sport and what drives the company and people are what takes care of the cars and the teams.

"So when you look at all that, it functions with people, so you're dealing with people pretty much all the time."

Ranging far and wide

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Open-wheel talent stretches further than drivers.

Taking care of business in recent times has meant leaving no route unexplored when it comes to finding the best people to do the jobs at hand. Michael Waltrip Racing recently announced it had hired Steve Hallam, an engineering manager with more than 30 years experience with Lotus and McLaren in Formula One.

Makar said the diversification of personnel is a combination of things.

"We have more access to, and interaction with people worldwide than we ever had in the past," Makar said. "As we've grown and brought people in from other forms of racing, it's given us contacts with other forms of racing -- international situations. A lot of the parts and pieces we have built we get done overseas, so we've just naturally progressed to where we're a world-economy type of a company.

"So it doesn't surprise me that we're bringing people in from abroad. If you look at our company, we've probably brought in half of our people from somewhere other than southern stock-car racing."

"It's interesting that some Formula One people are coming [to NASCAR] and I think it's more that they're looking to come here more than NASCAR teams are looking to bring them over," Jones said. "They see our sport growing and being healthy and viable -- and that's intriguing."

"The larger the company is, the bigger the skill set is and you have to look at every facet of your team and where you could benefit," Reiser said. "The size that we are today, one person is not going to make that big a difference in what we do. What we have is set up in departments and we work together and try to balance all the teams as one. So we spend more attention to it as a global effort than on individual teams."

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Any time you can get a new idea or different ideas and a different approach to things that's part of the way that you get better. We have people from the Formula One world that are part of our team and it's great. It's all racing, it's all cars and it's all people -- all basically the same approach. Each series just has different tools to compete."

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JAY FRYE, Red Bull Racing Team

Red Bull, which has two two-car teams in Formula One, tried to inject some of those philosophies into NASCAR racing in 2007, and the results were not good. Frye came on board in the pre-season and the teams' results have been markedly better.

"Any time you can get a new idea or different ideas and a different approach to things that's part of the way that you get better," Frye, a former college-football player, said. "But what we did this year was take the team back to the basics -- we're talking about blocking and tackling and doing all the small things right; and any time you can improve a position, you improve the position.

"We have people from the Formula One world that are part of our team and it's great. It's all racing, it's all cars and it's all people -- all basically the same approach. Each series just has different tools to compete."

"We think [diversification] is certainly a positive, but we're also not naïve enough to think that what works in the IRL is, without specializing it a little bit, going to work in NASCAR and we know that," Lauletta said. "One of Chip's favorite sayings is, 'four patches of rubber connect the racing vehicle to the track and it doesn't know what it's connected to -- the idea is to make it go as fast as you can.'

"With that said, Mike Hull, who runs our IRL and sports-car programs and Steve Hmiel here in NASCAR talk all the time about motivating the employees and what they're doing competition-wise, to try to learn from each other.

"We have areas of our company that work across all of the disciplines in research and development and trying to understand how to make the cars go faster. So the more you're diversified with people in this sport, the more you're going to learn about how to make your organization a winning organization and make your cars go faster, to win races."

As with everything else in racing, there's a slight difference of opinion here, as well.

"Clearly, the right people are already in the sport," Story said. "Going to Formula One or NASA or MIT to find people that are bright, I don't think is any indication that they're brighter than anyone who's already here; it's just finding them a different way or with a different mind-set, and we're always looking ourselves at people like that.

"You always have to look and find people that are qualified, smart and willing to press the envelope a little bit, which is a motivator of the people that you already have."

In the case of a new team, or as is the case with Tony Stewart, who'll debut his own re-made Stewart-Haas Racing team next year as a reconfiguration of the current Haas CNC Racing team, assembling personnel is akin to putting together a million-piece jigsaw puzzle.

"Getting the right people in the right situation is what everyone is trying to do," Barnwell said. "Tony Stewart right now is out beating the bushes trying to bring in the very best people he can to make his team successful as quickly as he can. There's not a piece or a part that Tony's not capable of going out and buying, right now.

"But the thing that's going to make him win, sooner and more frequently, is going to be the caliber of people that he puts together to work on that race team."

Effective teams pull together

Rusty Jarrett/Getty Images

Jimmy Makar can impart some words of wisdom to new team owner Tony Stewart.

Drawing a consensus on anything in life is difficult, and what it takes to succeed in NASCAR racing is obviously elusive to more people than not. But if people are the key, most executives in the sport agree a mix of setting goals and achieving them, achieving results today and keeping everyone happy, from sponsors to owners to personnel, is critical.

"When you're succeeding, motivating people and retaining people is easy and it's hard," Frye said. "Obviously, managing success is hard, because a lot of times egos come into play and people think they're bigger than the team. As long as you have a very well-grounded team and you have the same goals; that's one of the ways that you keep a team together.

"And you look for self-motivated people, because those are the kind of people you want to have around your team [because] they're going to work just as hard no matter what they're doing, whether they're winning or losing, and that's very important."

"I tend to set my goals high, because if you set them lower and achieve them, that'd be kind of a hollow achievement, so I don't think that's so bad," Jones said. "And when you talk about performance, you've got to perform every day because this is a performance business. Nobody wants to work for your organization and nobody wants to sponsor your organization if you're not driven and you're not getting results.

"I struggle with keeping everybody happy, because you want a happy work environment and you want it pleasurable -- but you will not make everybody happy all the time and it's not a social outing -- it's a performance business and you get paid to do a job and you want to do that job [well].

"For everybody to be unhappy is definitely not what we want, but if you set up a great work environment and everybody gets along, and you achieve those goals and get results, then everybody is happy."

"I don't think you can put a priority on any of those, because with every situation, you have to work it out," Reiser said. "In some cases, a sponsor situation might be most important to that team, in some cases the people aspect might be the most important. You've just got to deal with it from day to day, whatever issues are in front of you and that becomes the priority for that day."

"Keeping people happy, whether it's your sponsor, your co-workers, your drivers or your employees is job 1, always," Story said. "As far as setting goals and objectives, the beautiful thing about this sport is that you're tested week-to-week, and you know exactly where you stand on a weekly basis.

"Sometimes it's people-related, whether it's the driver or mechanics having a good or a bad day, and if [a bad day] happens, you just hope it doesn't become a recurring issue."

"It's certainly a combination, because this is a tough business and things change quickly, and you have to react," Lauletta said. "In any sport, you're judged on what you do on the field of competition, and week-in and week-out we come home Sunday night knowing how we did; and that affects everybody in the shop, because everybody's here to win races, to be successful and to win championships.

"So a big piece of [success] is to have the employees believe that you're moving in the right direction, that there's a goal and that the team is a team; and whether the results come this weekend or 10 or 20 races from now, you want to believe that you are doing everything you can and that the owners and sponsors are supporting you and are on board. Every piece of that is a part of this team and keeping all those pieces moving towards the same goal is the biggest thing we need to do, day-in and day-out."

"You can't have one without the other," Makar said. "Because if you're not setting goals and achieving them and having success, then it's hard to keep sponsors happy and it's hard to keep your people happy and keep them working for you.

"So it's sort of a Catch-22 where you've got to have one to have the other and it all intertwines with each other -- but it really comes back to the people. Joe has said that a million times and he told me that when we started the company: 'It's all about people, it's not about equipment. It's not about X's and O's, it's about the people.'

"If you've got the right people and you put them in an atmosphere they're going to be successful."

Carlson cited another source, a European author whose name he couldn't pronounce, but whose take on "human capital" was that "the only sustainable competitive advantage was the ability to learn faster than your competition."

"I think NASCAR is the perfect incarnation of that principle," Carlson said. "And that is all about people, and very little about technology or widgets or systems. It's about the people that are involved and that's something that Rick has really built as a cornerstone of this organization."

In the 1970s, team owner Junior Johnson perhaps epitomized the old school take on team dynamics, when his organization, with driver Cale Yarborough, won three consecutive Cup championships.

Hendrick, with two-time defending champion Jimmie Johnson in the thick of this year's title race, will know in about 10 weeks if he's solved the team dynamic puzzle the best, in 2008.