Story: Allison Collins, FOR INSIDE MOTORSPORTS
S
idney, New York, native Jon Carvin came to victory lane by way of the football field. The 39-year-old is head pit coach with Hendrick Motorsports, an organization he joined in 2015 after years spent playing and coaching college football. “I played at the University of Albany then really, from there, went right into coaching,” he said. “I was a collegiate football coach for 10 years. My first job was at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, then I went to Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, then University of Illinois. That’s when my wife and I got married — we’d met at the University of Albany — and we had our daughter there. From there I went to the University of Idaho, where our son was born, and that was where we decided to get out of football. I just needed more family time for myself and I didn’t want to look back and wish I’d had more, because football at that level is extremely time-consuming.”
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Inside Motorsports | April 2021
Driving Forward
Carvin said, though always a racing fan, his entry into the industry was happenstance. “I was never a racer myself; I never raced anything other than my own legs,” he said. “But I watched it growing up with my dad and then I became a fan and watched it when I could, but just casually on TV. “When I left football, my wife was actually the one who went on Hendrick’s website and found a job for a pit coach,” Carvin continued. “I didn’t know such a thing existed. We went through (the job description) and, line for line, it sounded just like a football coach.”
Carvin noted that, after leaving football in spring 2014, he returned to his hometown for roughly nine months, during which he coached Sidney football and basketball, before pursuing the position with Hendrick Motorsports. “The opportunity presented itself and, from the first phone call to actually visiting, within a month I was down here (in North Carolina),” he said. “It worked out that the organization I was the biggest fan of was the one with the job opening. I had an interest in the sport before I started, and to be able to work at the premiere motorsports team in the country, that was a huge bonus. “I started out as an assistant coach for the 48 and 88 teams — Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. at the time,” Carvin continued. “I came in and, even though I had a lot of training as a coach, I had to learn a different sport. March 27, 2015, was my first day, so this is my seventh season in NASCAR.”
Life in the Pits
Today, Carvin said, he oversees Hendrick Motorsports’ seven teams. The organization, he noted, employees roughly 600. “I’m a coach over all of our teams and we have seven, with five on a team,” he said. “There are four main teams — the 5 (Kyle Larson), the 9 (Chase Elliott), the 24 (William Byron) and the 48 (Alex Bowman) — and (each team) involves the car, the driver, all the people that build the cars and the pit crews. We have enough people to have three extra backup teams, so we have the four Hendrick Motorsports cars and teams, but in our pit department, we have those three other
Photo: Hendrick Motorsports
Sidney Native Finds his Passion in the Pits
