On any given workday at Niece Motorsports, Phil Gould might spend the morning sitting across from a General Motors representative and then walk straight back to the shop floor to make seat rails. A few steps away, his son Matt is building chassis. Matt started there in high school. After graduation, he joined the road crew full-time and has not left. No camera crew has shown up to document that. They stay on the famed drivers solely. Who’s looking at these peeps working in the background? We’ve got our eye on them.

NASCAR has always had dynasties. Everyone knows the Pettys, the Earnhardts, the Waltrips. Documentaries have been made. Museum wings have been dedicated to them. But the sport has another kind of dynasty inside it, one that exists in fabrication bays and engine rooms and on pit road. These are families who gave the same multi-decade commitment to this sport and collected none of that recognition. The Goulds are one example.

Phil described the culture at Niece as resembling the kind of family racing world he first knew when he was starting. The team has a dirt track on site that employees use on their own time, with families coming out to watch.

Matt said his father taught him early that racing means working on your own equipment. Not watching or pointing at the problem, but fixing it. That lesson, basic as it sounds, is the exact kind of thing that moves between generations without ever showing up in a press release.

The same shop, a generation later

Murray Timm joined Hendrick Motorsports in 1996. He started on car bodies, moved to Terry Labonte’s No. 5 pit crew as a tire changer, and later changed tires for Kyle Busch during his first Cup season in 2005.

After that, he came to fabrication to cut down on travel. Today, he prepares the body and underwing of the No. 24 Chevrolet to meet NASCAR’s specifications. Timm’s son Cole joined Hendrick in 2019 as a mechanic and eventually moved into an underneath mechanic role on Chase Elliott’s No. 9 team. Hendrick put it simply: father and son work within roughly 20 yards of each other on a regular day. Father on one part of the car, son on another, same building, all season long.

The proximity is just the surface of it, though. In 2015, Murray and Cole ran the inaugural CARS Pro Super Late Model Tour together as a family operation. Murray crew-chiefed the car. Cole won the championship at 16. Murray said the lessons from running that program fed back into his Hendrick work. So, to say, the exchange of knowledge was both ways. The son’s racing sharpened the father’s thinking just as much as the other way around.

Bobby Dell fills in another place on the list. Dell has been in the Cup garage since 2003 and joined Hendrick’s engine department in 2013. His father worked in an engine shop when Dell was growing up. He said that he would follow his father to work as a kid and spent that time around engines and cars.

He was more interested in the machinery than in driving it. Today, he is a lead engine tuner at Hendrick, the person the engine shop sends to races to work alongside individual team tuners and sort out mechanical problems as they happen.

What actually gets handed down

Brian Yerger is a fabrication foreman at Team Penske. He came from a Pennsylvania drag-racing family. His grandfather raced from the 1940s and his father kept competing after that. Yerger said his mechanical ability came largely from working beside them in the family garage as a kid. That background eventually brought him into one of the most respected organizations in the sport.

His story is a part of this because of where it starts. Not inside a Cup team, but in a home garage, doing local racing, picking up a trade. Greg Ives came up similarly when he was sweeping floors and cleaning tools in the shop his father and brother owned in Michigan at age 11.

He worked under the hood, raced Late Models, and eventually became a Cup crew chief. Both of them already knew what race preparation costs in real time and real effort long before anyone in NASCAR knew their names.

Chad Knaus is somebody most fans know of. Seven Cup Series championships as crew chief, most of them with Jimmie Johnson. What fewer people think about is where that started. Knaus followed his father John around Midwest short tracks as a kid. John Knaus won four straight Rockford Speedway track championships between 1987 and 1990.

By 14, Chad was already working as crew chief for him. He moved to North Carolina in the early 1990s, joined Hendrick Motorsports in 1993 starting in the body shop, and worked through fabrication and pit crew before landing where everyone now knows him.

He did not walk into a Cup job. He walked into a world he already half understood because he had grown up watching someone operate inside it, the family background helped him settle into the sport.

Jonathan Hassler, Ryan Blaney‘s crew chief at Team Penske, grew up around his grandfather’s, father’s, and uncle’s trucking company. Machinery was part of daily life well before racing entered the picture. He later got into go-karts and eventually worked his way into NASCAR.

A trucking company and a Cup garage seem nothing alike. But a kid who grows up around engines and schedules and the discipline of keeping equipment ready learns things that carry over, whether anyone planned it that way or not.

Three generations deep

For some other families, the time clock goes back further than two generations. When they do, the story gets genuinely interesting. Jeremy Clements’ grandfather, Crawford Clements, was crew chief for Junior Johnson, Buck Baker, and A.J. Foyt. His great-uncle Louis Clements was crew chief for Rex White’s 1960 Cup Series championship. The family moved toward engine building in the 1970s.

Jeremy’s father Tony, took over Clements Automotive at 18 and has run it for 52 years since. Clements Racing Engines built its own intake manifolds and cylinder heads and made most of its parts in-house. The waiting list for engines reportedly sat around 100 teams at its peak.

Jeremy drives the No. 51 Chevrolet for Jeremy Clements Racing, a team his father owns. The 2026 season is Jeremy’s 15th full-time O’Reilly Auto Parts Series season with the family operation.

The team entered a technical alliance with Haas Factory Team this year and moved from a 5,000-square-foot shop into a larger facility in Kannapolis, North Carolina. All of it stays in the family.

Tony talked about self-ownership as protection. If someone else controls the team, someone else’s financial situation or change of priorities can end the whole thing. The family went from crew chiefs in NASCAR’s earliest years to engine builders to owning the team their driver competes for. The job changed with each generation. The intention to stay in the sport did not.

Tim Sheets spent over 25 years in NASCAR across roles including tire changer, fabricator, mechanic, and machinist. He worked at Richard Childress Racing, Dale Earnhardt Inc., Joe Gibbs Racing, Richard Petty Enterprises, and Stewart-Haas Racing. He also developed RCR’s pit-gun program.

He later started Hellraizer Jacks in Mooresville, a company that machines, builds, tests, and sells aluminum garage jacks to racing teams from dirt to asphalt. His son Carter started drawing interest from Mooresville machine-shop owners at 15, landed an internship, and became lead machinist at the family business. He plans to take it over.

The Sheets family is no longer just employed by the sport. They are part of the supply network that keeps the sport moving. That is a different kind of legacy than winning a championship, and it lasts just as long.

Ryley Music rounds this out in a way worth mentioning. His grandfather Phil Warren was a seven-time Langley Speedway champion and crew chief for Brenden Queen. Music worked on Queen’s crew when Queen won the Hampton Heat in 2020. In 2026, Music was chasing that same race as a driver.

He said Warren taught him to understand the car, the money side of it, and what preparation actually takes. Music described knowing his own car inside out before it ever went into the trailer. The grandfather was driver and crew chief. The grandson became crew member and then driver. The job title shifted. The way of thinking came forward intact.

The people nobody interviews

The Baldwin family shows how this plays out across different roles and different rungs of the sport. Tommy Baldwin Sr. won two NASCAR Whelen Modified Tour races at Martinsville Speedway in 1988. His son Tommy Baldwin Jr. was crew chief for both of those wins. Tommy Jr. later became a Cup Series crew chief, then a team owner, and is now competition director at Rick Ware Racing.

His son Luke Baldwin made his O’Reilly Auto Parts Series debut at Martinsville Speedway in 2026, the same track his grandfather won at. Three generations. Three different jobs. One thread running through all of it.

Brian Wilson has been at Team Penske for 23 years and is the longest-tenured active road-crew member in the organization. He is crew chief for Austin Cindric’s No. 2 Cup Ford. His father Steve Wilson worked as a race engineer for the No. 33 Skoal Bandit Cup car in 1995.

Brian grew up around racing, studied mechanical engineering, and built his way up through Frank Kimmel’s ARCA team and a shock specialist role before getting his footing at Penske. His father later helped connect him with the organization. What that family story actually illustrates is this: a connection is not a career. Wilson still had to earn one. What the background gave him was a head start on understanding what he was walking into.

Hendrick profiled Danny Emerick in March 2026 as he was approaching 30 years with the organization. He came in through automotive schooling and local connections, apprenticed under engine builder Keith Dorton, and started at Hendrick from the bottom. Over three decades, he worked through teardown, dyno work, assembly, and tuning.

Since 2022, he has been teaching new engine builders coming into the team. Emerick did not grow up in a racing family. But 30 years inside the same organization turns a person into something the next generation learns from. When biology does not create the lineage, time does.

North Carolina is what makes this concentration possible. The state has more than 20,000 motorsports professionals working across engineering, technology, operations, and competition. Hendrick Motorsports is in Concord. Joe Gibbs Racing is in Huntersville. RFK Racing is in Concord.

Roush Yates Manufacturing, Spire Motorsports, and Stock Car Steel and Aluminum are all in or around Mooresville. A kid growing up in that part of the state does not have to go looking for the racing world. It is already there, in the shops and short tracks and suppliers filling the towns around Charlotte.

UTI’s Mooresville campus, which folded in the former NASCAR Technical Institute under its name in 2025, currently runs a 15-week motorsports program covering engines, fabrication, welding, aerodynamics, and pit-crew work. Engines built by students in that program have won more than 100 NASCAR-sanctioned races. The informal family path and the formal classroom track now exist side by side in the same region. They are not competing. They produce people who end up in the same shops.

NASCAR has been putting more effort lately into showing the people behind the cars. The “Work That Wins” content series has put a spotlight on long-tenured workers like Emerick. Hendrick recently recognized more than 500 teammates and put out a list of employees reaching 20 years of service, covering machinists, fabricators, engineers, tuners, mechanics, and assembly technicians. That list is what continuity actually looks like in this sport. Not a car number. Not a sponsor deal. People who show up to the same building for two decades and teach the next person what they know before they go.

The Pettys and Earnhardts built something genuine. Their names belong in any real conversation about what NASCAR is. But the families in this story built something too. They built the foundation that made those famous careers possible. They passed it through garages and engine rooms and local short-track programs that no broadcast crew ever filmed.

They are doing it right now in shops around Mooresville and Concord and Kannapolis, in jobs that will never appear on a television graphic. The name on the door gets the spotlight. The name under the hood just comes back next week and gets to work.