Home Depot Hot Spot:
Interview with Adam Stevens

Adam Stevens is perfectly suited for his role with the Home Depot Racing Team.

He's a racer who understands engineering, and as such, he's eminently qualified to be on the box beside crew chief Greg Zipadelli on race days.

As the race engineer, Stevens has a couple of jobs that seem to take up the majority of the factors involved in calling a race.

"That's going to depend team to team," Stevens said of his job description. "The engineer's job is to help the crew chief make decisions, any and all decisions, about the car during the race. I analyze wind tunnel data, front suspension geometry, tire data, everything that makes the car go.

"Team to team, through the garage, you have more responsibility where the crew chief is weak and less where the crew chief is strong. A guy from a different team will tell you a different story. It's very broad, very big-picture stuff. You have to wear many hats when you're the engineer."

Wearing hats is something Stevens does well. He used to be where driver Joey Logano is now.

"Growing up, I used to do a little driving in dirt late models," he said. "I started driving late models when I was 16 and drove through college. That put me through the year 2000 as the last year I raced full-time, and ran a couple of races in 2001 and that was it. It's nice to see the other side of it and it really is different from what you think it is.

"It [driving experience] helps. You can relate to the drivers a little and what they're saying and hear it in their voice a bit more when you've been there."

A graduate of Ohio University in Athens, the Portsmouth, Ohio native is a mechanical engineer. Another OU grad, one of Stevens' friends from school, is a team engineer on one of the other cars in the garage.

"There's a couple of us out here every week," he said with a smile.

As for what he does on race day, Stevens said he crunches numbers.

"The fuel mileage calls are the toughest, but it's really just using the numbers that are in front of you," he said. "It doesn't mean you're always going to be right. If it's 60 percent of the time, then you're good. If it's not, then it's still 40 percent, but it's not hard when you use the numbers.".

Stevens came to Joe Gibbs Racing at a very good time.

"I started Jan. 1, 2005," he said. "That was a good year. A lot of people don't realize it, and they say, Ôwell, you started in a championship year.' Well, I did, but a lot of people don't realize also that we weren't very good at the start of that year. The setups changed a lot that year, for everybody. Everyone was learning the coil-bind stuff, and we changed a lot of stuff that year and got competitive in the middle of that season. It was a good year, for sure."

It was the second championship season for the No. 20 Home Depot machine, and featured a streak of five victories in seven races through the summer that ultimately led to the title.

As an integral member of the team, Stevens has a lot of respect for Home Depot.

"It's great to work for Home Depot," he said. "They've been in the sport so long that they really understand what we do week to week and how hard it is to travel, being away from your family and the inconveniences of traveling all the time. The stuff they do for usÉit means a lot. You know they care and that they know what you're doing out here."

Stevens said Home Depot's other sports marketing initiatives are exciting for him, too.

"I enjoy the other associations they have, like with college football, and we got to meet some of the Olympians, which I thought was incredible. Going down to Home Depot and meeting some of the associatesÉit's fun. They really do back us and they really do follow it and enjoy it. You don't get a lot of that from the other sponsors around."

Now that Logano is the driver of the car, Stevens said that there's a bit of interpretation in using the feedback from his young charge.

"It hasn't changed my job, but it has changed week to week what we do," Stevens said. "You have to be on your toes a little more. The main thing is, while he's getting experience, you have to interpret his feedback a little more than you do with an experienced driver.

"Smoke [former driver Tony Stewart] could tell you. He knew what the car needed to feel like in practice to be fast in the race. It doesn't always have to feel good. It might have to be tight, it might be loose, it might have to do something different at a particular track. All Joey knows is what he's feeling in the car right now. He doesn't know whether the track is going to get tight or loose until he runs the race.

"There's a lot of a guessing game there, but that's when you rely on your teammates to make sure you're not doing something silly."

Stevens hasn't done much of anything silly since he started with the Home Depot team, and it's up to him and the rest of the crew to make sure Logano gets the best possible stuff to make his dreams come true.