Friday 5: Cup teams seek to keep crews fresh after ‘unprecedented’ offseason

One of the longest seasons in sports reaches its longest event this weekend with the Coca-Cola 600. As NASCAR heads into Sunday night’s race at Charlotte Motor Speedway, nearly 2/3 of the Cup season remains.

For fans, that’s great. The Cup Series will race 23 of the next 24 weekends through early November.

For team members, that can be daunting — even those accustomed to the grind of a 38-race season that includes two exhibition races.

This follows an offseason that Denny Hamlin’s crew chief, Chris Gabehart, describes as “unprecedented.” The switch to the Next Gen chassis forced teams to abandon the cars run last year and build a new fleet of vehicles. Teams did that work while also testing the new cars. NASCAR had four two-day organizational tests in the offseason.

“Most people don’t understand how much work was done over the winter … this is probably the most work in 15, 18 years,” Brian Pattie, crew chief for Ricky Stenhouse Jr., told NBC Sports earlier this month.

The work continued through the start of the season. With supply chain issues, some parts for the new car were harder to acquire. That forced teams to remove some parts from their cars after races and fly those pieces with the crew back to North Carolina to put on the car for the next race.

All that work took place with little relief for teams. They lost one of their traditional weekends off when Cup raced Easter night on the dirt at Bristol. With the return of practice and qualifying this season, Cup teams also are spending at least one more day a week at the track than last year.

“Now, the trucks are loading and leaving earlier,” said Adam Stevens, crew chief for Christopher Bell. “That means we as team guys are working longer hours. On top of that, we’re