My drive is peaceful. I travel from a populated area to rural surroundings, even by North Carolina standards. The very developed East Side of Lake Norman is crammed with nearly every food and retail chain available. To the north there are acres of land that reflect a lake region era of twenty years ago. My visit is with a New York native who makes his home on that open country property that is reflective of his home state. And he likes it that way.

“This is nice here. It’s like getting back to where I came from,” said Ryan Crellin, the front tire carrier on one of Red Bull Racing’s Sprint Cup Series teams.  The acreage he owns is occupied by his home and a large garage about a 500 foot walk off his deck.

Where he came from is Chatham, located about a half-hour from the state capital Albany and a fifteen-minute trip from a very successful and storied dirt track Lebanon Valley Speedway. “My father started taking me to ‘The Valley,’” Crellin explains about his dad Pete, “sort of a father-son thing.

“His father took him. My grandfather had his own generation of drivers he grew up with,” the Brian Vickers team member describes his introduction to auto racing.

“My dad worked for Frito Lay potato chips and Artie Collins worked for a lawn mower shop that was next door to the factory. And he (Collins) had a bay in which he worked on his racecar. He would wear my dad out for sponsorship. Artie was from the same hometown and gave us someone to cheer for.” Collins is a longtime Lebanon competitor and at the time was entering the track’s small block street stock class.

Crellin started helping on the Collins crew but harbored his own race driving goals. “When I got into helping Artie it was to learn. I was told, ‘You’ve got to learn the car. If you want to be a good racecar driver and a good mechanic you’ve got to learn every last little thing.’ (Those were) words that resonate with you the rest of your life.”

“You want to know how to build a good engine, build every last little element. So I bought (who knows) how many books on engine building,” Ryan continues. “I got to the point that I was living every moment of my day for racing. Just obsessed. I had more self-confidence in me that I could be a race car driver. Young and naive. All I needed was to get noticed and someone will say ‘wow look at that kid, let’s give him a shot.’”

A purchase of a 1974 Chevy Malibu for the dirt half-mile oval’s Pure Stock division was made.

“When I bought my first racecar, I remember rolling it over to Artie’s and it had a fiberglass seat and no fuel cell. He said,’We got to work on this thing.’ My Dad helped me get everything so he knew I would be safe,” as he recalls his father’s first sponsorship dollars.

“My father loved Dale Earnhardt . There was always sort of a disconnect there. He would sit down on Sundays and watch a race, and I would pop in, but I lived for the Saturday night racing stuff.”

Ryan went on, “I read (an issue of) Stock Car Racing Magazine and a five page article on Earnhardt, and it was all about how he grew up with nothing and struggled. And I said, ‘This is what I want to be, a Winston Cup racer,’ and I just kept working at it. I would get down and just keep trying.”

“In the early 1990s there were still not a lot of ‘young guns’ yet. Earnhardt didn’t get a shot with a quality ride until his late twenties. I think in his championship year he was around twenty nine.”

“As I grew older and matured, I started seeing I missed the window. Here I was twenty-two and still running dirt cars on Saturday night. But the inspiration of Dale Earnhardt, (was still there) having coming from nothing. He had the ability to do it and no one was going to stop him.”

“I drove for four years and my last race was in 2000,” Crellin explained. “Every year I would look back and wonder what kept me from winning the championship and winning the most races. Basically what it came down to was something Artie told me. Championships wear you down and weren’t fun. He has won some and a lot of times at the end they are anticlimactic. But the feeling of being the man to beat at the track is a pretty good feeling. It is not really something that is declared when you walk into the track, but when other guys look at you knowing you can win… well that’s what I was going for.”

The Sprint Cup tire carrier described pouring every penny he had into his final year. “I was all in with a new car and engine I started building the year before. I won my last race but finished second in points. At the end of the year I was looking at a car and engine that needed a lot of work again. I watched someone else push their car out (on Lebanon Valley’s frontstretch) and get his (championship) picture taken, and I thought, ‘I just can’t do this again,’ and that was what burned me out.”

He relocated to North Carolina after season’s end with his future wife Anita. “I didn’t know anybody when I came down. We visited in 1997. I liked it. She liked it. We took another trip in November of 2000 and picked up an apartment guide.” Shortly thereafter they were receiving mail in Concord.

After pounding the pavement, he found his first break in stock car country with, of all things, a Trans Am Series road racing team. Tom Gloy’s racing operation was located in Mooresville at the time with Brian Simo among the driver lineup. He agreed to a $400 per week salary and “they worked you like mules. I worked over 100 hours per week at times. But crazy enough, I was fine with it. Looking back I’ve got a lot of great stories. We drove everywhere, including West Coast races. I got to see the country like that.”

As his road-racing career continued, Crellin still was eyeing up a NASCAR position. “I wore out the shop foreman at FitzBradshaw for about five months. Finally he gave me a shot as a fabricator.” A skill he had refined and brought to the then Busch Series operation from his lessons with Gloy’s team.

“Kind of a cool thing was the driver was Kerry Earnhardt,” son of the man who had given him so much inspiration.

“I was always talking to the guys to find out how I could get on the pit crew. The guy who was the front tire carrier was also the car chief and looking to stop (his over the wall duties). So I said ‘show me what I have to do and I will try to earn your spot.’

“I never went to pit school, but all during the winter I practiced and that was my new obsession,” Ryan proudly stated. “When February rolled around I went to Daytona to pit an Earnhardt. That was very exciting.”

His resume reads stops on race teams BAM, BANG (he makes his own joke there), Yates, and Bill Davis Racing. BDR’s entry with Dave Blaney driving was the initial Cup pit crew job. “I was a Cup tire carrier and A.J. (Allmendinger) was getting his feet wet in the Truck Series there,” from the Champ Car Series.

“One of my long range career goals was to work with a driver from the beginning.” One of his friends had worked at Roush Racing with Matt Kenseth from his rookie year to his championship year. And he described Kenseth as a humble person who was thankful to have the ride he does.

“I did not really follow Champ Car racing but the more I heard about him (Allmendinger) he struck me as someone I wanted to get behind. I started making calls and wound up at Red Bull.

“When it (Red Bull Racing) first started we were missing races but A.J. was still cool. When we missed the first five or six races, I used to say ‘someday we will all laugh at this when we are sitting at the Waldorf Astoria.’

“I’ve been around racing for years and seen a lot of drivers. There are guys like Tony Stewart, Carl Edwards and Ken Schrader who will race anything seven days a week. If they said, ‘A.J. we need you to drive seven days a week,’ I guarantee you he would do it. He is a race car driver. He came and hung out at the shop, took you to lunch, joked with us at the trailer.”

Currently Allmendinger races for Richard Petty Motorsports and Crellin is carrying the front tires for Brian Vickers’ number eighty-three.

Some pit crew members have basic shop roles but a lot of their week is spent stretching, working out, practicing, and watching film. “Red Bull always tried to be different, so they have full time pit crew guys. They tried to break the mold of how pit crews trained from dedicating an hour a day to dedicating entire days to it.”

Ryan’s describes his young son Colton starting to play soccer when discussing his racing future. “I would like to take on a shop role someday. I will scratch and claw my way to stay in racing.”

“There are racers that will race anything, anytime; just give me something to race,” Crellin concluded. “You are always pushing for that next level. Racers just want to race.”

 

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