K E N T U C K Y S P E E D W A Y » S P A R T A , K E N T U C K Y26

By Len Glockner

B y the time the calendar turns to February, NASCAR teams and fans already

are counting down the final days before the start of another season.

For Adam Stevens, crew chief of the No. 18 Joe Gibbs Racing (JGR) Toyota driven by Kyle Busch in the Sprint Cup Series, this season started a new chapter in a racing journey that started in the small river town of Portsmouth, Ohio.

Located about two hours southeast of Cincinnati, it’s where local dirt racing teams like the Stevens family gathered to put on a show on the 3/8-mile clay track at Portsmouth Raceway Park.

Greg Stevens owned a dirt Late Model car and raced it. Adam, his son, got a taste of racing at an early age. By the time he was 3 years old, he and his father would get done eating dinner at the house and drive to the race shop to work on cars.

“When I was old enough to race, we put a car together that was the previous year’s chassis,” Adam Stevens said.

When he was old enough to race, he got behind the wheel of a 750-horsepower dirt Late Model car, before he even had his driver’s license,

and would travel throughout Ohio, Kentucky and West

Virginia to race.“It was my

passion - I lived and breathed it,” Stevens said. “At

one point, I

realized that this was all I ever wanted to do. It was a matter of how I thought I could make it happen.”

He drew up a plan in high school where he would continue his education and pursue a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering.

While attending Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, Stevens started making trips to Charlotte, North Carolina to train with buddies, visit with NASCAR teams and just meet people in the industry.

“My senior year in college, I started driving down to Charlotte and started making cold calls to race shops and beat on doors at all of the majors teams,” he said. “I probably went to each shop at least once during that time.”

In 2002, while on the path to earning his college degree Stevens realized his goal of becoming a professional driver wasn’t part of the plan.

After graduating college in the spring of 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering he landed a job at Petty Enterprises and that started him down the path that led him to where he is today.

Stevens worked at Petty Enterprises for three years. He started as a designer then began traveling to the racetrack on Sundays to calculate fuel mileage. He eventually moved into the positon of working on data systems and traveling to where the team would test its car.

Stevens received a phone call from the same person that hired him at Petty Enterprises in 2005 to inform him that JGR

was expanding from a two-car Sprint Cup Series team to a three-car operation with the No. 11 team.

Stevens worked with the No. 20 Sprint Cup Series team and driver Tony Stewart as a race engineer from 2005 to 2008. During that tenure Adam and the team raced to 18 wins and a Sprint Cup Series championship in 2006.

At the end of the 2008 season, Stewart decided to leave JGR to become a team owner, and the change led Stevens to a new opportunity.

The No. 20 NASCAR XFINITY Series team owned by JGR had a rotation of drivers that included Denny Hamlin, Drew Herring, Ryan Truex and Joey Logano, who was the primary driver for the car during the 2009 and 2010 season.

“I had a good relationship with Joey already,” Stevens said. “I went to his very first test for JGR in an ARCA Racing Series car at Kansas. He impressed me the very first day. Joey and I had a good relationship working together on the 20 car in his rookie and sophomore year at the Cup Series level.”

When Logano decided to move on to Penske Racing change was on the

horizon again.In 2013, Stevens moved

to a crew chief position when Busch decided to

move his Kyle Busch Motorsports No. 54

car back to JGR.

W W W . K E N T U C K Y S P E E D W A Y . C O M 27

That led JGR to pair Adam and Busch together in the XFINITY Series.

“The cool thing about him and I is we look at race cars the same way, and immediately when we started working together, his feedback and what I’m thinking and how I think race cars work just seemed to mesh really well,” Adam said in an interview with SIRUSXM NASCAR Radio.

The duo combined for 19 wins, 46 top-five finishes and 47 top-10 finishes in a total of 52 XFINITY Series starts together in 2013 and 2014.

For Stevens, the 2014 XFINITY season brought him seven series victories for a total of 31 wins.

Thirty-one is a significant number to his family.

Both Stevens and his father raced a No. 31 dirt Late Model car. Greg Stevens died in 2009 as his son was making his way through the sport as a race engineer. The elder Stevens didn’t have the opportunity to see him crew chief for a few of NASCAR’s finest drivers.

“In four years to win 31 races is pretty neat,” he said. “It was cool because it kind of felt like he was looking down on me.”

It was odd that the season ended on that number not only because of history behind the number but because of how the year went for the team.

“We had so many (wins) that got away from us and probably a couple we won that we probably shouldn’t of,” he said. “It was kind of neat to reach that when you’re in the middle of it, working and doing what you’re doing every day. You don’t pay too much attention to it.”

Though it’s difficult to truly evaluate Stevens XFINITY Series success as a stepping stone to move up to NASCAR’s top series, he knew that one day he would make it to the Cup series.

“From the very first meeting, Kyle hasn’t wavered from what we talked about at lunch at a restaurant in Cornelius (North Carolina), Stevens said. “We’re going to make it better in the race, we’re going

to make it worse at times, but we have to commit right now that it’s you and me against the car. In my experience he has never wavered from that. It gives me a lot of optimism that we already have that understanding as we learn together now on the Sprint Cup level.”

He entered the 2015 season knowing there was a lot of work to be done because JGR was coming off of what the team called “kind of a down year,” because the team did not win as many races as the previous year. Neither Stevens nor the team expected what was dealt to them February 21.

“I was eating dinner with my guys,” he said. “We immediately knew when he (Busch) started spinning he didn’t have any control of the car. That area of the racetrack he got to so soon and as soon as you hit the grass there is nothing you can do.”

Busch suffered a compound break in his right leg in addition to a broken left foot with nine laps remaining in the Daytona XFINITY Series race.

“I’d never really seen anyone wreck in that particular location and that wall was just at a horrible angle,” Stevens said. “Once we saw him hit the wall we knew it was big trouble.”

Following the injury, Busch was sidelined from competition for nearly three

months as he focused on the rehab and recovery process.

“He was all about all the rehab and the hard work that goes into it,” Stevens said. “There were multiple times texting back and forth when I’m at the racetrack while he’s at the house. It could be 11:30 a.m., or 12 p.m., and he’s doing rehab. Complete dedication. He immersed himself in everything he had to do to get better.”

Busch officially returned to Sprint Cup competition at Charlotte Motor Speedway for the May 24 race, his first points race after the injury, and grabbed an 11th-place finish.

A month later, Busch entered the Michigan International Speedway XFINITY Series race, the first time back in the series since the accident. He went on to lead 27 of the 125 race laps driving his way to Victory Lane and proving something to the racing community.

“It shows that Kyle is back, he is ready and it’s up to us (the team) to give him a good car so we can make it happen,” Stevens said after the race.

Stevens and the No. 18 JGR team enters the Quaker State 400 presented by Advance Auto Parts weekend looking to give Busch his second Sprint Cup victory and sixth Kentucky win on one of NASCAR’s most challenging tracks.

“The track itself is such a challenge,” Stevens said. “It’s so bumpy and really hard to make a driver comfortable there. It’s more of a compromise than any other place we go. It’s fun and will test your patience for sure.”

Patience may be tested even more this year as NASCAR announced June 16 that Sprint Cup teams will run a new rules package for the Quaker State 400.

Stevens will be on top of the pit box as crew chief for his seventh Kentucky race. He will have family and friends in attendance as he looks to grab what would be a memorable victory at NASCAR's roughest track - his first at Kentucky - not too far from where his racing journey started in the first place.

Aerial of Portsmouth Raceway Park in Portsmouth, Ohio.

Adam Stevens in the No. 31A racing side-by-side with his father Greg Stevens in the No. 31S.