CONCORD, N.C. — Two months ago, a radio interviewer asked crew chief Matt McCall to comment on how much Kurt Busch and the No. 1 team were struggling. The group was in the midst of going 12 straight weeks without a top-10 finish and, at least from the outside, it looked like the makings of a lost season.
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But McCall, a straight shooter who can’t fake anything, sincerely believed his group wasn’t that far off. So McCall went down to the Chip Ganassi Racing shop floor and gathered the team around.
“Am I missing something here?” he asked. “Are we really struggling?”
Every member of the No. 1 team said no. The results weren’t there, sure. But all along, the group felt it was closer to winning than the numbers showed.
“Sometimes you have to guide yourself to believe something that doesn’t seem like it’s out there,” McCall said. “It’s like, ‘How can you say you’re the best? You haven’t done jack crap this year.’ So when you can actually showcase it once in awhile, it’s like, ‘This is real.'”
That’s what Busch and the team did Sunday at Atlanta Motor Speedway, when they led a race-high 144 of the 267 laps and won their first race of the season. The day didn’t come as a shock to the No. 1 team; it was validation for what they already thought possible.
McCall wouldn’t dare have pushed a far-off fantasy on his crew. The son of boat salesman/karate instructor Danny McCall, Matt long ago mastered the discipline and structure it took to excel at martial arts — but never grasped the other part of his father’s business.
“I’m not a used car salesman,” McCall said with a laugh. “I never picked up the trade of selling bullsh*t.”
With a lack of a rah-rah leadership style, the quieter McCall uses different methods to extract the best possible performance from his group: He trusts them, proves his faith in them through actions and asks them to be accountable to themselves.
Those lessons didn’t come from reading a book or attending a leadership seminar, but from on-the-job studies and life lessons. While working in the old PPI Motorsports No. 32 car shop under crew chief Harold Holly, McCall admired how Holly didn’t micromanage his crew.
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When Holly gave someone a task, he expected it to be done. Holly trusted his crew members without needing to hover and double-check their work to see if they got it right.
McCall, in his seventh season as crew chief at Ganassi, has carried the same philosophy with the No. 1 team — something noticed and appreciated by those who work under him.
“He never second-guesses anything we say or do,” car chief Nick Case said. “If you tell him something, he doesn’t try to poke holes in it.”
“He lets everybody do their job and it feels like he’s always got your back,” engineer Josh Sell said.
“He’s just a natural-born leader,” said Bobby Dell, the team’s engine tuner. “It’s really easy for me to work for him, because he’s just leader by example and carries himself like that every day.”
McCall is as comfortable sitting in the corner of a room during meetings as he is leading them. Crew members said he’s not the type to raise his hand and take credit for what’s going on. At the same time, he’s willing to take the fall for mistakes or poor performance instead of blaming others.
“We have a good enough relationship where you’re up front about it with him,” Sell said. “Like, ‘Hey, this happened. It probably shouldn’t have.’ And his response is just always, ‘OK, how do we fix it? How do we move forward?’ The biggest thing is just empowering everybody to do whatever their particular job is.”
Sometimes McCall’s leadership goes beyond just trusting his crew. When the team needed a new car chief, McCall didn’t want to bring in an outsider and disrupt the team chemistry he’d worked so hard to build. So he urged Case — then the front-end mechanic — to go for the job.
Case was hesitant, unsure how well he’d handle the added responsiblity. But McCall put on a full-court press to show his belief in Case, even getting wife Meredith to text Case’s wife about taking the job.
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“Anytime I have self doubt or any questions about something, he’ll sit down and explain it to me,” Case said. “And it’s not like he has an ego about it. It’s just the way he helps people grow.”
The team has had very little turnover in recent years, and the pit crew was untouched since last year. That helped at Atlanta, where the group helped Busch beat younger brother Kyle Busch off pit road for the race lead.
Situations like that have led McCall to conclude it’s people who make the cars go fast, and his goal is for each person to get the most out of themselves. This season, he started a small-group initiative where team members came up with quarterly goals — both personal and professional — and held themselves accountable to the group.
Glenn Shano, the team’s hauler driver, began riding his bike every day. Dell, an avid runner who doesn’t like the gym, started doing pullups. Case started training for a personal record in the half-marathon.
McCall isn’t a runner himself, but has started participating in 5k races with the team to help push everyone else. Team members have responded positively to the accountability goals, which also include race-related objectives like getting stage points or a win.
“You care about the people here and you care about holding up your end of the bargain to them, whether it’s training or it’s something with the car,” Sell said. “If I tell you I’m going to do that, then I better make sure I’m doing it right.”
Goals are something Danny McCall always preached to his son, spurred on by the philosophy that flows through karate. Danny was bullied in high school and learned how to fight, then later opened his own karate studio — which he operated at the same time as running a successful boat business in Denver, N.C. for 30 years.
Matt’s sporting interests went beyond martial arts; he was (and still occasionally is) a successful Late Model driver before turning to the engineering side of racing. But karate still means so much to father and son that they plan to visit Okinawa, Japan soon — possibly this offseason, depending on COVID-19 restrictions — to explore its roots.
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In the meantime, McCall will spend the summer preparing for the playoffs and making sure those on his team remain upbeat — which can be one of racing’s biggest challenges.
“There’s not much to be happy about in this sport, honestly,” McCall said. “We just went almost a year without a win. But even winning doesn’t make me happy, as bad as that sounds, because my job is to win. Before, it’s been failure. Now it’s like, ‘OK, I’m just doing my job.'”
(Photo of Kurt Busch and Matt McCall: David J. Griffin / Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Jeff Gluck has been traveling on the NASCAR beat since 2007, with stops along the way at USA Today, SB Nation, NASCAR Scene magazine and a Patreon-funded site, JeffGluck.com. He's been hosting tweetups at NASCAR tracks around the country since 2009 and was named to SI's Twitter 100 (the top 100 Twitter accounts in sports) for five straight years.
