Stock car racing as popularized by NASCAR has given us many insights into the world of competitive motorsports and, in some respects, into our day-to-day industrial environments.

Some race fans enjoy the sport racing for what it is—drivers and machines pushed to their limits. Others wait for bumping and banging and a big wreck coming out of turn four heading to the finish line. Race fan or not, however, we can learn much about planned/preventive maintenance execution from the modern-day race teams and their pit crews.

Racing passion
Stock car racing has always fascinated me. The movies Thunder Road (1958) and Days of Thunder (1990) have a cherished place in my heart, as do historic stock car racing films from the '50s through the '80s. My love for the sport is not a new thing; it spans my childhood days at dirt-track fairground races to more recent times in my professional career, in the pits at the Brickyard 400 in Indianapolis, in modern race shops and at pit crew training and practice sessions.

In fact, over the past 16 years, I’ve studied numerous NASCAR Cup-level teams and spent hundreds of hours behind the scenes, learning their secrets that we could apply to industrial maintenance and reliability. In the process, I’ve been fortunate to meet and learn from several true racing legends—Smokey Yunick, Leonard Wood, Donny Allison, Rick Hendrick, Benny Parsons, Ray Evernham, Jeff Hammond and Jeff Gordon to name a few. One thing that has stood out after every meeting, every conversation and every shop visit with these racing giants has been their "passion for competitiveness/their passion for winning." They know each race they are in and they strive to do their very best. While they all can’t

be winners, they know they have to be "excellent" to even qualify for a race. Then, it’s the best of the best that usually win. (OK, sometimes it’s luck, being in the right place at the right time that wins the race. But even with luck, it takes a high degree of excellence to be there in the first place.)

In the pit
Pit stops always have been important in auto racing in that they always have been intended as routine planned/preventive maintenance events: changing tires, adding fuel, making adjustments, cleaning and giving the drivers something to drink. Beyond...(Read whole article)