When I was the first female sports director in the San Francisco Bay Area, I had the first racing show on local television. Everyone on pit road wanted to talk about the cars and the drivers. I wanted to know about the people jumping the wall.
That’s where I first met Michael Lepp.
While most people covering NASCAR were chasing the story on the track, Michael was already asking a different question entirely. What would happen if you treated the pit crew like the elite athletes they actually were? Not the mechanics pulling double shifts under the car before coming out to practice tire changes. Not the guys whose names only got mentioned on the radio when something went wrong. The athletes. The ones whose foot speed and hand-eye coordination and ability to perform under pressure in a fire suit at 90 degrees were quietly winning and losing races while everyone watched the driver.
More than 20 years later, I finally got the whole story on the air. On a recent episode of The Heart of Innovations, live on AM 1220 KDOW, the number one healthcare innovation radio program in the San Francisco Bay Area and the number one Women in Innovation Podcast in the nation according to Feedspot 2025, Michael joined me and my co-host Interventional Cardiologist Dr. John Phillips for an hour that covered pit road, championships, bad days, and what performance under pressure actually looks like when you strip away everything that doesn’t matter.
Michael is an exercise physiologist. His company is Zone 1 Human Performance. He spent fifteen years on the road with Joe Gibbs Racing, thirty-two weeks a year, building something that didn’t exist before he arrived: a pit crew treated as a full-time athletic program. Joe Gibbs won three Super Bowls as an NFL head coach with three different quarterbacks, none of whom are going to the Hall of Fame, a fact Michael mentioned with the particular satisfaction of someone who has made that point many times. When Gibbs moved into NASCAR, his son JD ran the race team. JD rode his bicycle in the same office park where Michael had set up his cycling physiology practice. One day he walked over and made Michael an offer: free office space inside the 80,000-square-foot Joe Gibbs Racing facility if Michael could find a way to make pit stops faster.
“Free office space?” Michael told us. “Sure. Why not.”
That’s how the S-12 Project started.
When Michael arrived, pit stops were running fifteen to sixteen seconds. A full four-tire stop meant six men going over the wall simultaneously: two tire changers hitting five lug nuts each in under a second, two tire carriers moving 80-pound tires, a jackman lifting a 3,000-pound car on two pumps, and a fueler managing two 100-pound gas cans. The margin for error was measured in tenths of a second. Miss a single lug nut and you lost four-tenths on the stop. Miss two and you lost eight-tenths. In a sport where passing on the track had become nearly impossible because of aerodynamics, the pit stop had become the race within the race. Anywhere from five to twelve pit stops per race, and if you could pass cars on pit road with a faster stop, you came out ahead of drivers you couldn’t touch on the track.
Before Michael prescribed anything, he spent three months watching.
“I’m a big diagnose before you prescribe,” he said.
What he diagnosed wasn’t a training problem. The men doing the pit stops were also the mechanics building the cars, working eight to twelve hour days before coming out to practice. Nobody was treating this as a dedicated athletic job. Nobody had a plan. The first thing he told JD Gibbs was that had to stop. These men needed to be full-time athletes, nothing else. JD said yes.
The goal Michael set was under twelve seconds. People told him he was full of it.
What followed wasn’t one breakthrough. It was what Michael called marginal gains, meaning the accumulation of small improvements across every variable until the sum of them changes the outcome. New Balance developed a fireproof athletic shoe because the boots the crew had been wearing were costing them foot speed. The pit stalls got sprayed with adhesive so crew members could cut around the car without slipping. A massage therapist was hired. A two-hour pregame preparation process was built, the way professional sports teams warm up before a game. JD Gibbs handed Michael a company credit card with one instruction: use it to take care of these guys, dinner, their families, whatever they need on the road. Michael had learned from cycling physiologist Alan Lim that the most reliable predictor of whether an athlete was going to underperform had nothing to do with fitness numbers. It was whether they had broken up with their girlfriend or had a family crisis at home.
They got the stops under twelve seconds.
Then they won championships.
And when the pit crew started winning bonus money that JD distributed across the whole team rather than keeping it, the mechanics who had resented the outside athletes decided they loved them.
It was a long tough road to get to that point with trial and error.
At the end of the show, Michael recalled the early days…and one moment stands out:
Denny Hamlin was leading a race at Darlington, one of the old classic tracks, the one they were racing at again the weekend we recorded, when the crew had a disastrous final pit stop, what the team calls the money stop, and Hamlin went from first to thirteenth. Michael packed up with the crew, got in the car, and started the drive back to Charlotte. On the way he turned on NASCAR Radio. The crew chief was being interviewed. While the crew sat in Michael’s car listening, the crew chief announced on air that the pit crew had cost them the race and they would all be unemployed.
“They were sitting in my car,” Michael said. “We all just got fired on the radio.”
JD wouldn’t let the firing stand. And that same No. 11 crew, with Mike Ford as crew chief, went on to become what Michael called the fastest pit crew in the history of the sport. “I wish they could go to the Hall of Fame,” he said. “They don’t put pit crew guys in the Hall of Fame yet, but hopefully they will at some point.”
Dr. John asked Michael what he would say separates the fastest crews from everyone else. Michael didn’t hesitate. It wasn’t the training. It wasn’t the equipment. It was how they handled the bad days. How they recovered from the tough days and came back. He told the story of JD Gibbs walking out to the practice facility after a bad session to find an assistant coach in a tirade, threatening to run the crew into the ground as punishment. JD waited for it to end, stepped forward, and said to the seven men standing there: “Go home. Have dinner with your family. Hug your kids. We’ll get back at it tomorrow.” Michael said he never forgot it. “Not, I didn’t grind hard enough. Not, I’m a failure type of a thing.”
He said the same is true for the cardiac and PAD patients he has worked with throughout his career. The training program he writes for a cardiac patient or a PAD patient is no different in its structure from the program he wrote for the pit crew: multifactorial, individual, built around a plan, with a mental component alongside the physical one. The patients who improved most were the ones in his group program, the Dawn Patrol, where eventually he could sit in the bleachers because the group took care of itself. Long-term compliance, he said, is about the group you’re with. “Just because you’re walking,” he said, “doesn’t mean the pain and discomfort you have to tolerate to make improvements and develop that collateral circulation is any different than any athlete I work with.”
The number one topic Michael gets asked to speak on, now that he’s retired from the road, is performance under pressure. He has lived it at the highest level of a sport most people never think of as athletic, with people whose names only got mentioned when they failed, building something from nothing on a free desk in an office park in Charlotte. The key, he said, isn’t the good days. It never is.
The Heart of Innovations airs live every Saturday on AM 1220 KDOW in the San Francisco Bay Area and is available on demand at PADhelp.org. If you or someone you love is experiencing leg pain when walking that eases with rest, color changes in the feet or lower legs, wounds that won’t heal, or unexplained numbness or tingling, call our free Leg Saver Hotline at 1-833-PAD-LEGS. To connect with more than 12,000 PAD patients supporting each other every day, join our Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) Official Group on Facebook.
