Chris Newsome nudges a visitor and says, softly, "Look at that. Right there." He's pointing at a 4-foot-tall trophy that sits in the Hendrick Motorsports Museum in Charlotte, N.C., a long straightaway down the road from Lowe's Motor Speedway - the epicenter of NASCAR racing.

Pixar Animation Studios NASCAR's Hendrick Motorsports New England Patriots

The trophy belongs to Jeff Gordon, NASCAR's biggest star. It marks his 2001 championship in Winston Cup, NASCAR's premier division. It sets on a stand that lists Hendrick's 380 employees. That's what Newsome is pointing at - his name.

As Hendrick's IS manager, he is part of the team that won one of the sporting world's biggest championships. In his first season, no less. Newsome, 41, came to Hendrick in January 2001 - just in time to help Gordon win his fourth Winston Cup.

A lifelong North Carolinian, Newsome says, "I was a NASCAR fan, but not a huge fan" before he came to Hendrick. Baseball was actually his sport; a pitcher with a solid Roger Clemens build, Newsome played junior college ball and earned tryouts with the Cincinnati Reds and Toronto Blue Jays. But as his professional baseball dreams faded, Newsome took an entry-level computer operator job in 1981 - and gave birth to his IT career. (His baseball days lived on; until recently, Newsome played in an international 30-and-older league, and his team won the league's World Series in 1992.)

Before Newsome came on board at Hendrick, power users - dozens of world-class automotive engineers - were outstripping the IT organization. They were producing vast spreadsheets of test data but were crippled by a lagging infrastructure that prevented them from fully exploiting the information. Each of the campus' 13 immaculate buildings featured a rat's nest of cabling that didn't suit the state-of-the-art milling machines, engine dynamometers and other equipment used in building race cars. Because Hendrick lacked a cohesive network infrastructure, engineers had to jump through hoops to download and share data.

Newsome moved to standardize on IBM servers and Cisco network switches for the campus 10/100M bit/sec LAN; until then, Hendrick used servers and switches from a handful of vendors. Newsome says the shift was a no-brainer move to trusted vendors.

Security was his top priority. "There are people who'd give a lot for the data that rides on this," he says, patting a server. "And we stop eight viruses a day at the firewall," a Cisco PIX 515. Hendrick also uses GFI's Mail Essentials antivirus and e-mail filtering software.

The second priority was a wireless LAN for use at the tracks. In addition to Gordon, Hendrick fields Winston Cup competitors Terry Labonte, Jimmie Johnson and Joe Nemechek, and two racers in the Busch Grand National division, NASCAR's equivalent to Triple-A baseball. Because NASCAR limits teams' test time, multicar organizations such as Hendrick gain an advantage by sharing test data. Until recently, that meant engineers had to crowd around servers in the garage, competing to copy information to diskettes for use in their laptops.

Now each team has a transporter (a cross between a motor home, a trailer and a garage on wheels) in which Agere Systems wireless LAN access points and cabling are installed. At each trip to the track - 36 races plus seven test days per year - a globetrotting IT technician raises the transporters' wireless antennas, then roams the track to test signal strength. Newsome says he relies on Service Set Identifier to make sure no competitors, which have wireless LANs of their own, eavesdrop on Hendrick traffic.

Hendrick engineers love the wireless LAN because it untethers them from the servers in their often far-flung garage stalls. Now Gordon's crew chief can haul his laptop over to Labonte's garage, which may be a quarter-mile away, to share data. Moreover, specialist engineers (engine experts, for example) can gather data from all four Hendrick cars without scrambling for server time.

Newsome makes leading this unusual IT operation look effortless. He uses the same deferent tone whether addressing his IT team of six or a company receptionist. The closest he comes to bragging is when he discusses the organization's Bible Study group. "It started with half a dozen people. Now there are 50 or more of us every week," he says proudly.

And it's hard for Newsome to find a downside to his job. Not even the pressure of NASCAR, a multibillion-dollar sport fueled by sponsors who demand results each race, fazes him. Maybe pitching has inured him to all that. "Pressure? I don't really feel it," he says. "There's no pressure as long as you deliver."

Ulfelder is a freelance writer in Southborough, Mass. He can be reached at sulfelder@yahoo.com.

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