Home Depot Hot Spot:
Interview with Jerold Shires
Jerold Shires is one of the three original Home Depot crew members, along with Jason Shapiro and Greg Zipadelli, and his tenure with the No. 20 Home Depot Toyota Camry has been one long string of successes.
Two championships with the No. 20 and a share of another with the No. 18 Joe Gibbs machine are the most visible reminders of that success, but as they say in the stick-and-ball world, it's the championships you leave with and the people you play with that truly matter.
"The first time I won one [a title], I was working on Bobby Labonte's team a lot," Shires said. "It was one of those deals you dream about. The biggest thing about that is, you get to go to New York City. I have always wanted to go to New York. It was a dream. I got to do something that not a lot of people get to do.
"There're a lot of people in this garage area that haven't been lucky enough to win a race. I've been lucky. I've won with several drivers, and I've won two championships and was involved in Bobby's championship. There are very few people in the garage area that can say that."
Shires is the team's tire specialist, which means anything to do with them falls under his purview. He's changed tires too, and been a mechanic for several teams, including those of NASCAR champions Alan Kulwicki and Bill Elliott, but his greatest success has come wearing Home Depot orange.
"I'm the tire specialist," he said. "Is there anything special about tires? Not as much as there used to be. Nowadays, it's 'here's your codes, your dates'Épretty much what your crew chief or engineer tells you to go by. Are there still some tricks out there? Yes, there are some tricks out there that you may have and your team might not have. It just depends on what your crew chief wants and what you do and what you can get by with and what NASCAR lets you get by with."
According to Shires, there are no "special matched sets of tires" like they refer to in the movie "Days of Thunder."
"You'll hear that said every so often," the Wakefield, W.Va. native said with a laugh. "We don't do it as much as we used to. Back in the old days, with the other teams, you could soak those tires. Nowadays, NASCAR checks your tires pretty close, and we have to turn them in at the end of the day."
Shires has a bunch of work to do before the rest of Big Orange gets to do theirs.
"I get six sets of tires at the start of the weekend, unless it's an impound race, and I have to get them ready for the start of practice. Then we go to get our race sets on Saturday afternoon, and I have 10, 11, sometimes 12 sets of tires to get ready for the race."
Once he gets his tires, he makes sure they're mounted correctly and inflated to the proper pressures. The tire changers take over from there.
"The crew is responsible for all cleaning and gluing of lug nuts," he said. "I sort of started that back when I was there, because I told them I wanted to glue my own. It sort of took over from there. When I quit changing tires, everybody said they wanted to glue their own, and that's when the tire changers and tire carriers started gluing their own lug nuts."
Shires left his home and came to Charlotte to be a mechanic. He'd always been interested in racing, and he wound up getting a big break in the form of a call from Kulwicki.
"I came to North Carolina to go to school to be a mechanic," he said. "At the time, I always followed racing and always wanted to be in it. Now, you have your NASCAR training schools, but we didn't have them then.
'As I went to school, I got to know a couple people who were involved in racing, and the guy I got to know was Slick Posten. He introduced me to Alan Kulwicki a couple of times, and one day, Alan asked me if I would be interested in coming to work for him while I was still going to school. I said yes. It was like one of those days you always hear about, having to be in the right place at the right time."
Shires worked for Kulwicki for nearly four years, beginning at the fall Charlotte race in 1988, and right away he was trusted to do important work on the low-budget team's cars.
"When I went in, I was stripping the car down, removing the parts, getting the motor packaged up, cleaning all the parts," Shires remembered. "Back then, Alan worked on a very small budget. We took the parts right off the car, cleaned them, repacked the bearings, and pretty much put stuff right back on the car that next week. We had five, six cars at the most in those days, and we just switched parts from one to the other. He had enough trust in me, even going to school, to let me come in, and it seemed like I was one of the few people who got to do what I got to do."
He left Kulwicki in the summer of 1991 and then joined Bahari Racing. Kranefuss-Haas and Bill Elliott Racing were other stops until the summer of 1998, when he went to work for Joe Gibbs Racing.
"I went over and had a couple of interviews, did some pit stop practice with those guys, and they said they were hiring for some young guy coming up to drive the car," Shires said with a smile. "I said I always wanted to work for Joe. They asked if I was interested, and it was a nice deal to come over here."
That began his relationship with The Home Depot, which has produced some fond memories.
"The photo shoot we did with Joey this year, it was fun to do that because there were so many people that said it was such a neat shoot, the one where he went out shopping," Shires said. "The most fun, really, was when we went out for KaBOOM! builds. I enjoyed that. As I've done all the builds, there were a lot of people who recognized me. I've done almost all the builds for about three or four years, except for one in Charlotte."
Logano's arrival as driver hasn't really changed Shires' job.
"There's not a lot of job changing with a new driver," he remarked. "He has a different feel. We try to look at the track. Does it tighten up? Does it go free? We try to set him up neutral most of the time, so if we need to go one way or the other, we can start swapping tires around. That takes your equation out. If you know your track gets tight as the night goes along, you might set him up a bit tighter or looser."
One of the toughest things that Shires has to do is change air pressures on pit stops. That can be a pretty big deal since air pressure is one of the primary tuning tools in Zipadelli's box.
If the crew chief calls for an air pressure adjustment, Shires has less than a lap most times to make the change.
"It depends on how quick he says it," Shires said. "If we're in pit stall 35 back to 43 (toward Turn 4), when Greg comes by me and shakes my hand and tells me to have a good day before the start of the race, I always tell him, 'hey, remember how close we are to the end of pit road because we don't have time to make last-minute changes.'
"It just depends. When we make a change, he'll look at me and say, 'can we get it done?' It just depends where we are on the track. Most of the big tracks, we can knock a pound of air out pretty quick. On the short tracksÉit takes a while to get a pound of air pressure out. If it's on the left sides, you might have a little bit more time, but you might have another job to do on that pit stop, and you have to think about what's more important, getting that air out or doing your other job. We'll sacrifice a little bit in the pits to get that done."
Like everyone, Shires has a budget for what he does. He is proud of the fact that he can compete at a high level and still not spend all the money he has.
Joe [team owner Joe Gibbs] treats us great," Shire said. "He says, "I don't mind spending money as long as it helps us go fast." I try to save money. I'm not a big spender. I don't spend a lot of my own money. I try to spend their money wisely when I'm buying tires. Our budget for a year for all three teams is like $3.8 million. Right now, we're $200,000 under budget for the year. There's very few people at JGR that can say, 'hey, we did our job and we were able to save this much money.'"
Team principals notice, he said.
"Last year at Christmas, I was having my 10-year anniversary and they gave us a Rolex watch for being there that long. When J.D. [team president J.D. Gibbs] does it, he tries to tell a little story about each one of us. It meant a lot to me that he said, 'if I had to put anyone in charge of this company that could save money, it would Jerold. He spends money like it's his own. He saves money and he's tight with what he does.' We've always been good."
That pretty much sums up Jerold Shires' career in NASCAR, too. He's always been good.
