Meet Gary Nelson, Who Made NASCAR Safe

When Dale Earnhardt died in February 2001, the racing world thought they had the answers. After all, they built the cars. They drove the cars. Who knew racing better than they did? The data told a different story: Earnhardt was the 10th driver in 11 years to die in a NASCAR crash. One afternoon in early March, in desperation, NASCAR’s head of safety, Gary Nelson, called a meeting with three men. One was an expert in crash protection, another a USAF doctor, the third a civil engineer. I’ve got a limited budget and a limited amount of time, Nelson told them. What can I get to work on first to get the most progress? The men said they would go have dinner, and tomorrow they would tell Nelson what they came up with.

The next morning they stood in Nelson’s office and gave him their recommendations. And because Nelson took their advice, no one has died in NASCAR since Dale. “That’s the thing I’m most proud of,” says Nelson. “Going from 10 guys in 11 years to no guys in 23 years—I’m quite proud of that work we did.” 

Nelson has an unusual perspective on NASCAR, because he’s been on both sides of the fence. Before he worked at the R&D center, he served as director of NASCAR’s top series, Winston Cup. Before that, he worked for nine years as a crew chief for some of the biggest names in the sport: He was Bobby Allison’s crew chief, and their partnership produced Allison’s first championship win. Nelson was 30 years old, Allison was 45. In 1985, Nelson stood up a new team for Rick Hendrick, building the team and a car in less than two and a half months, a team that won the Daytona 500 on its first try. 

Now 71, Nelson is the team manager of a sports car racing effort, Action Express, that he started in 2010. They hold six team and six driver titles in the IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship, and seven North American Endurance Championship titles. For 2024, Action Express manages one of the factory teams for Cadillac’s Hypercar program. The partnership will continue next season—and probably as long as Gary Nelson is still hunting trophies.

“Going from 10 guys in 11 years to no guys in 23 years—I’m quite proud of that work we did.” 

Gary Nelson

A native of Southern California, Nelson has worked on race cars nearly his whole life, starting at the age of 16, when he followed the sound of a race car engine around the corner and struck up a conversation with the owner of the car, who offered him a job and $50 a week. He’s loved racing as long as he can remember. On Sundays, after his family came home from church and ate dinner, they would tune the TV to channel 5 and watch the dirt races at Ascot. His father was mechanically inclined, so he nurtured Nelson’s natural interest in how cars worked and how to fix them. 

DIY was often the only option. When Nelson was old enough to get his driver’s license, his family didn’t have money to buy him a car, so he built one himself: An abandoned UK-market 1959 Ford Thames. Undiscouraged by his meager budget, Nelson scrounged fancy wheels and a bigger engine out of a mid-’60s Chevy Nova, which he bought from a junkyard and installed with his buddies using a big pipe and a chain in a shop with a dirt floor. They didn’t get everything completely connected, so Nelson drove it the first six months or more without reverse gear. “I didn’t have the skill yet to figure out how to make the linkages all work. And finally I figured that out and I was really happy when I was able to back it up. I always had to park on a hill so I could roll back.”

Nelson quickly made a name for himself in the SoCal racing scene. In 1976, he got a phone call from a three-year-old NASCAR team called DiGard Racing, which had signed Darrell Waltrip. Nelson moved East. As a 23-year-old kid from California, he stuck out like a sore thumb—it was more of a southern sport then. He kept his head down, put in the work. In two years he was car chief. By 1982, he was crew chief. 

That year, DiGard signed Bobby Allison, a 44-year-old driver from Miami who had a reputation for being hard to get along with. “One of the things that followed Bobby around,” said Nelson, “was that he had raced for 21 years and he had raced for 21 different teams.” In nearly two decades of racing in the Cup series, Allison had never won a championship.

At first, Nelson was star-struck—Allison was one of his heroes, someone he had read about in the magazines as a teenager on the other side of the United States.

As he got to know Allison, Nelson realized that “everybody’s just the same—they just want to win races, everybody at that level. That’s contagious.” He discovered a driver who was ready to settle in longer term with a team. The pair won their very first race together—the 1982 Daytona 500. In 1983, at the age of 45, Allison won the NASCAR Cup championship that had eluded him for so long. 

What made Allison so special? His ability to feel the tires, says Nelson. “I mean, even the mid-pack guys or the back-of-the-pack guys are very good at that, but Bobby just seemed to excel in it. He could get more out of his tires, I believe, more speed for longer time than most other drivers. And it was just fun to watch him do that. I could sit there and take credit for all the wins, but it’s really the driver.” 

Like so many relationships, success came from trust. “A lot of times you get two guys who know exactly how they want to do something and they’re trying their best to convince the other person to sell their idea. And our magic really was that I could make a suggestion, but I wasn’t trying to sell it, and Bobby would make a suggestion and he wasn’t trying to sell it. And together we built our ideas into, ‘That makes the most sense, let’s go that way.’ And that means conversations were just like steps going up to perform better.”

That trust, says Nelson, is fragile. DiGard couldn’t keep the momentum that Nelson and Allison had found. In 1984, Allison started 30 races but won only twice, and DiGard finished sixth in the standings. As suddenly as their success had arrived, “as with everything, it kind of went away.” In 1985, the team added a second driver but DNF’d more than twice as often as it had in ’84. DiGard didn’t win a race in ’85 and slipped to 12th in the championship.

When you have a race team struggling to break a streak of poor finishes, the problem, says Nelson, typically isn’t too little effort, but too much. “That’s what I experienced [at DiGard],” he says. “We were all so determined to get back to winning regularly and competing for points that we found ourselves questioning things and each other, and the next thing you know, it’s harder to get it back.” 

Having a top team winning consistently, Nelson says, “is almost magical.”

Before he left DiGard, though, Nelson orchestrated a massive upset win, this time in the 1985 Firecracker 400, Daytona’s summer race. Nelson was given a blank slate and a clear mission by DiGard’s owner, Bill Gardner: Build a car that would beat Bill Elliot’s Ford on the superspeedways. Nelson was also given a driver with a modest resume, Greg Sacks, who had never won a NASCAR race. 

Nelson built the car to test a theory. “I had this idea that when the cars went around the track with a lot of load, especially on a banked track, there would be some flex in the car that would cause the wheels not to all agree on where they want to go.” He zeroed in on the phenomenon of bump steer: “As a car travels, the body of the car travels up and down from hitting bumps—the steering changes, the direction changes.” As it goes around the track, the car’s direction is essentially an average of all of those bumps plus the inputs of the driver. If he could eliminate that flex, along with bump steer, the car would go through the corner without trying to steer itself. 

Part of the solution, he suspected, was using softer springs. Nelson would choose a spot by the track near a crossover gate or a known bump in the surface and watch the cars go by. When the cars using stiff suspension settings drove over that bump, he saw a flash of daylight under their tires. “If [a tire is] not touching the track, it’s not going to give you any grip.” Nelson imagined a car whose wheels would travel up into the fender when the car hit a bump. “If the car traveled more, there was more opportunity for the four tires to each carry their share of the load rather than maybe you’re abusing a front tire or a rear tire on the outside of the turn and then there may be another tire that’s not doing near as much work.”

However, as he worked to choose shocks and springs that would keep the tires on the track, Nelson found that the steering would go crazy: The increased travel actually caused bump steer, the first problem he set out to solve. How could he keep the tires on the ground, going in the same direction even over bumps, while getting the stiffness of the chassis and the suspension right so that the alignment of the car didn’t change under load? 

Fixing those three things was what he did with the R&D car in 1985, to indisputable success. Greg Sacks dominated the Daytona 400 in the No. 10 car, which raced without sponsors, looking strangely naked. “I believe in his career, that’s the only race he’s ever won,” says Nelson. At first, everyone thought DiGard was cheating. But “it wasn’t long before everybody else then figured it out and started doing those kinds of things. So that became standard after that . . . you don’t hold secrets long in racing.

“That was a fun time.” 

When he got an offer to start a second race team for car dealer Rick Hendrick later that year, Nelson decided to leave DiGard. He arrived at Hendrick’s operation to discover “there was really nothing. Rick just had the idea and some kind of budget. We didn’t have any cars or any crew or anything.” They didn’t even have a building. All Nelson had was a driver—and not Tim Richmond, whom he was expecting to work with, but Geoff Bodine. Nelson got to work. 

It was Thanksgiving weekend, 1985. The first points race of the season was two months and two weeks away. Nelson and his new team worked day and night to put the car together. They worked Christmas Eve, Christmas morning, New Year’s Eve. “We went to a New Year’s party, I remember, and after midnight when everybody was celebrating, went back to the shop and worked for more—slept in the shop a lot.” On February 16, 1986, Geoff Bodine, driving the #5 Levi Garrett Chevrolet, took the win at the Daytona 500. Nelson had worked every day since Thanksgiving.

A year later, Felix Sabates struck a deal with Hendrick to buy one of his NASCAR teams. Nelson and his team moved to Sabates, who hired Kyle Petty, Richard Petty’s son, as the driver. “He is quite a character,” says Nelson. “Quite different than anything I’d worked with, because everybody I’ve worked with in the past had always been hands-on in getting to the racetrack and knowing everything about their car.” Petty was not “a Bobby Allison-type guy who would just sit and talk for hours about the car.” Instead, Petty would play guitar. He was “just a fun guy to hang out with,” Nelson says.

In his best years, Petty made it into the top 10 about half the time, but he only brought home three trophies in five seasons: one in ’87, one in ’90, and one in ’91. His seventh-place finish in the championship in 1987 would be the third best of his 29-year career in NASCAR. Four years later, he finished the season in 31st.

By 1991, Nelson was starting to wonder if he’d ever get back to collecting trophies, to winning on a regular basis. Right about then, NASCAR called, perhaps sensing an opportunity to convert its most avant garde participant from a bender to a writer of the rulebook. Would Nelson be interested in working for the sanctioning body?

“All I knew was I wanted trophies,” says Nelson, “and you don’t really get ’em on that side of the fence.” But he loved the sport, and he wasn’t getting trophies anyway, so he accepted the job. It was a big one: Winston Cup director.

For the second time in his racing career, he was a relative outsider—“kind of a fish out of water.” When Nelson saw NASCAR from the inside, he realized several things. He saw how much it cared for the sport. “The France family was first class; they really managed the sport very well.”

“All I knew was I wanted trophies, and you don’t really get ’em on that side of the fence.”

Gary Nelson

He also understood why NASCAR got so much heat from the teams. A competitive culture is necessarily one of conflict, and with “everybody down in the trenches, they trade punches all the time. They’re always scrapping around with each other and hiring each other’s people and hitting each other on the race track, and here’s NASCAR that never fights back.” The attitude made them an easy target, but the people at NASCAR just “went to work every day trying to make things better.” 

As Nelson showed up to work day after day, trying to make things better, it became clear to him that something was deeply wrong with the playbook, and everyone knew what it was: Drivers were dying in crashes. Between 1989 and 2001, ten drivers across NASCAR’s top three series lost their lives—half of them in practice sessions, not in races.

The real number of on-track fatalities—of all drivers across all of the multiple motorsports series, including IndyCar, IMSA, and NHRA—was also much higher than it is now. Thanks to those series’ safety advancements, many of them inspired by NASCAR, the figures have fallen across the board.

In 2000, NASCAR made Nelson vice president of research and development. “A big part of it was to find ways to make the sport safer. And so that was my job.” Its selection of him, a long-time former crew chief, was an extension of what everyone in NASCAR believed in the early and mid-1990s, the same philosophy that NASCAR had when they asked Nelson to leave the paddock for their office in ’91: That they knew more about safety than did people outside of their community. NASCAR had, in fact, already asked Nelson to investigate the crashes of Adcox and McDuffie.

By the time he was promoted to the R&D department, Nelson had spent 24 years in the world of NASCAR: nine with the sanctioning body and another 15 as a crew member. He knew that NASCAR’s approach wasn’t really working. “Insanity is doing the same thing the same way and expecting different results. Our way of doing it was looking at getting the best carbuilders and the best crew chiefs and the best minds in the business to stand around a wrecked car and try to figure out what happened, and what we could do to build them stronger or safer.” Under Nelson’s leadership, a new research and development center was built in Concord, North Carolina.

Nelson had the tools, but he needed a change in philosophy to make them work. It began when NASCAR’s R&D department hired three people in 2000. Each was an outsider, and each held a PhD. John Melvin graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1964 with a PhD in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics and had built a research career in the transportation sector, both in academia and at General Motors, where he studied head and neck injuries in race-car crashes to learn how to make passenger cars safer. The staff at NASCAR respected him but dismissed him as an automotive engineer who worked on restraints for drivers that crash at 60 miles an hour—theirs were going 200. 

The second person was Jim Raddin, a medical doctor who had worked for nine years as a surgeon in a U.S. Air Force medical center. He served for three years as the Vice Commander of the USAF School of Aerospace Medicine before leaving to direct the Biodynamic Research Corporation and be its principal consultant. His research included, among other things, what happened to pilots when they ejected through the canopy of a plane, the effects of various restraints on the human response to impact, and “an active neck protection system for crewmembers of high performance aircraft.” 

The final academic hired by NASCAR in 2000 was Dean Sicking. Unlike Melvin and Raddin, his background was in engineering, not medicine or biomechanics: He held a doctorate in civil engineering from Texas A&M. He was a researcher and a professor with a focus on transportation and had spent most of the ’90s highly involved in the Midwest Roadside Safety Facility at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. 

Nelson knew about that program in Lincoln because Tony George, one of the owners of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, had reached out to the Nebraska team to find an alternative to a concrete wall. Could NASCAR join that study, Nelson asked? 

“So, now we had one restraint guy, John Melvin, and one barrier guy, Dean Sicking, looking at our safety record, and they were actually investigating previous accidents with photogrammetry—they even looked at marks on the track and speed of the cars and camera angles, trying to get as much data as they could to figure out what happened.”

After Dale Earnhardt, NASCAR’s biggest draw, was killed in 2001 during the Daytona 500, NASCAR’s biggest race, the pressure to find a solution rose to a fever pitch. Everyone had an idea of what to do. Nelson was inundated by “every race fan, every so-called expert, and all of ’em meaning well, trying to give us ideas on how to make our race, our sport, or the sport of motorsport safe.”

A few ideas were—“I don’t want to say crazy,” says Nelson, but “there were some unique ideas.” One of the most inventive? A trailer hitch mounted on the ceiling of the car that received a ball attached to the top of the driver’s helmet, so he could turn his head left and right while being held in place. 

“The ideas were coming from inside the industry, outside the industry, just from everywhere. I was getting letters, emails, getting stopped at dinner or walking down the street. Someone was always pulling me to the side—‘Hey, here’s what we need to do to make these cars safer.’”

One of the most popular opinions was that the bumpers of the stock cars needed to absorb more energy. “There was a guy that took some cars and put ’em on a crane and dropped ’em on the ground to measure the strength of the bumpers, because [he thought] we would solve our safety problems if we put better bumpers on our cars.”

Melvin, Raddin, and Sicking told Nelson that the racing community was focused on the wrong thing. Think of driver safety like a pie chart, said the three doctors to Nelson: 65 percent is restraining the driver in the car, and 25 percent is the type of barrier they hit. “Everything else was in that final 10 percent,” said Nelson—crushability, fire intrusion, and, yes, bumpers. That morning in March 2001, after their presentation, Nelson had a choice: Keep doing what the increasingly desperate racing community said he should, and put NASCAR’s resources and energy into bumpers, or stake his job and the lives of the people in the sport he loved on the theory of three outsiders. 

Nelson believed those outsiders were right. Immediately, he told his team to work on restraint systems. NASCAR didn’t need to invent anything—it simply needed to catch up. The HANS (Head And Neck Support) device was invented in the ’80s and was in use in IndyCar, which had mandated it at ovals in ’99 and 2000, and the series had already begun to pour resources into redesigning its barriers. The Hutchens device, a system of straps designed, like the HANS, to protect the driver against whiplash, was then only a year or two old. Based on the findings of Melvin, Raddin, and Sicking, NASCAR recommended a HANS or a Hutchens, then required one or the other, by October 2001. NASCAR picked the HANS.

The solution was obvious. Changing the culture of NASCAR was far more complicated. 

“We had one driver who held out, I won’t say his name, but he really thought that if he held out—actually we had two, but this one in particular came all the way to the racetrack and said he was not going to wear a head or neck restraint system like a HANS device. And he actually thought that we would give in and let him race without it. And we told him, ‘No, you’re not racing. It’s been nice having you around, but if you’re going to race this weekend’—we were at Talladega—‘you’re going to wear one of these devices.’ And he stomped off and went out of the garage area over to his motorhome and nobody went to get him.

“We were going to go on without him. And once he figured that out, he came back and put it on. And then ironically, about two years later, I think the thing saved his life.”

The driver was likely Tony Stewart, who finished second in the race, despite insisting the device made him claustrophobic. He later became a believer and praised the work of the sanctioning body in improving safety since 2001. Stewart has done a lot himself in backing safety innovations in short-track, open-wheel cars.

NASCAR made many changes in concert with the HANS mandate, including widening the windows of the cars to compensate for decreased visibility. The racing seats evolved to hold the driver more securely. If you peek in any race car today, stocker or otherwise, you’ll see that the headrest has “wings” that nearly surround the head of the driver. Before, the driver was essentially just sitting in a bucket with his shoulders and head above the seat, with a pad for a headrest.

Belts were another area of extensive research, testing, and improvement. Five-point harnesses, which connect to the car’s cage and chassis in five spots, had been around for decades. Nelson and his team took a closer look at the material of the belts. “The Dale Earnhardt accident, where he lost his life—his lap belt broke, he was not restrained well in his car. So we did a lot of work to upgrade the specifications and the testing of all of the fabric and all of the hardware that makes a seatbelt.”

The R&D department contracted with the non-profit SFI Foundation to certify the belts—among other things, by pulling on the belts and measuring the amount of load they could take before they broke. “That sounds simple, that stress test,” Nelson says. “But there’s probably a hundred different ways of testing all the hardware and the fabric and the alignment, and the angles that you use them at.”

As NASCAR kept testing, it kept learning, kept discovering what it had been doing wrong, such as the geometry of the seat belts. In the 1970s and ’80s, Nelson says, teams simply bolted the belts to the nearest part of the car. What Nelson and the R&D department discovered was that some placements of those mounting points could do more harm than good. “What we found was that the shoulder belts, they didn’t need to go over your shoulder and then down behind your back to anchor to the roll cage, they needed to go over your shoulder and almost straight back, so when you had a forward load into your belts, it wasn’t compressing your spine.”

“But then when you do it that way, the lap belt tries to ride up on the hips toward the driver’s rib cage. So the fifth point [of the harness], the center strap, the angle of that was very important. And then we came up with a six-point harness system, because that angle had a big effect on how much the lap belt would ride up on a driver’s abdomen.”

Nelson had plenty of help from his team in spearheading the safety improvements at NASCAR: Raddin, Melvin, and Sicking were a huge part of the revolution as well. Raddin, one of the chief investigators of Dale Earnhardt’s crash, co-authored the police report with Sicking based on extensive analysis of simulations of the accident. Though once known as the guy who just worked on slow crashes, Melvin helped develop crash recorders, or “black boxes,” for the NASCAR stock cars and used them to study injuries. Sicking, who is on the list of 2025 NASCAR Hall of Fame inductees, received the National Medal of Technology and Innovation from President George W. Bush for his work on the SAFER barrier. Built of steel and foam (the S and F in the acronym), it was first installed at a racing facility in 2002, at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.

The sense of discovery pervades Nelson’s voice, even over the phone, decades later. So too does his humility. “It’s so funny that I was walking around thinking that we were the experts on racing safety, and turns out we only knew 10 percent.” He laughs. 

While Nelson was happy making racing safer, he wasn’t so happy that he wasn’t winning trophies. When the opportunity arose for him to step back from NASCAR and work as a consultant rather than as a full-time employee, he took it. He wasn’t retiring from the sport, just removing himself from being “in the middle of the grind on a full-time basis.” He hadn’t missed a race in years: “I mean, NASCAR runs 38 races a year, and I opened the gate and closed the gate for 20 years of that stuff.”

Nelson still consults for NASCAR; he enjoys the development of the race car and finding ways to save owners money and to help fans have a better experience. “To me, that still gets my attention. But rules and regulations and all of that, it’s a little . . . you know. Those days I don’t miss.”

It’s so funny that I was walking around thinking that we were the experts on racing safety, and turns out we only knew 10 percent.

Gary Nelson

In 2006, a friend called Nelson from Florida. It was Bob Snodgrass, president and CEO of the highly successful Brumos auto dealerships in Jacksonville and the owner of Brumos Racing, which campaigned in Grand-Am’s Daytona Prototype series. “I think they’d gone like five years and hadn’t won a race, and they were trying to figure out why.”

Nelson recognized the hunger. Sure, he said. “So I showed up and went through a lot of their things, and I think we started winning some races around 2008, and we won the 2009 Daytona 24 hours with the Brumos car.” The triumph was bittersweet for Brumos Racing; Bob Snodgrass had died, suddenly, in April of 2007. 

Snodgrass was the reason Gary Nelson got into sports car racing. After Brumos dropped one of its two prototypes, and many of the Brumos team members were looking for work, Nelson accepted the role as manager of the created-from-scratch Action Express Racing in 2010. He slapped together a team, headed to the big leagues, and hit a grand slam: an overall win at the Rolex 24 Hours of Daytona in their very first outing. 

What Nelson calls “our little race team” scored big. It claimed both driver and team championships for three years (2014–16), and again in 2018. An IMSA season includes both endurance (six hours and up) and sprint races (under three), and for six years straight (2014–19), Action Express dominated the longer events to secure the North American Endurance Championship, which is calculated by a team’s performance in the non-sprint races. 

When Covid came and threatened to shut the sport down, Nelson chafed. Surely there was a way to keep working, to keep the team together, to keep improving the car. “Luckily, the county that we’re in didn’t have a mandate of closing all businesses. So we were able to keep our staff here. I wanted our people to keep getting paid, and I wanted to keep making progress.” As it turned out, his role as a NASCAR consultant was part of the answer. 

NASCAR was in the middle of developing a new race car, which it called the Gen-7, when Covid reached the United States in 2020. The changes to the car were extensive and significant: independent rear suspension, five-speed sequential transmission, single-lug wheels, rearview camera. Testing was vital, but local regulations canceled the March testing session, the car’s fifth on-track outing, at Road Atlanta. The debut of the car was pushed back to 2022. In the meantime, NASCAR, whose headquarters are in Daytona Beach, Florida, reached out to Action Express. Could they run some tests? Nelson and his team took on one of the early cars, built it in their garage, and did some testing sessions. They worked closely with Richard Childress, the owner of a highly successful NASCAR team that did some of the 2019 testing, and took the “Next Gen” car to different tracks so that drivers could give their opinions. 

In February 2022, the new car debuted, wearing a new version of another safety feature that bore Nelson’s fingerprints. “Have you seen the NASCAR cars, when they turn around and the flaps pop up on the top of the car? Yeah, I invented those.” On U.S. Patent no. “US-5374098-A,” published 1994-12-20, Gary Nelson is listed as the inventor, NASCAR as the assignee. The series mandated them as early as 1994, in fact, and the Next Gen car not only wears larger ones than its predecessor, but adds one in the diffuser. The panels pop up when the car turns backwards—whether or not there’s an impact—and manipulate the air over the car to prevent it from leaving the ground and flying into the crowd, the infield, or onto other cars. 

Things like that—”trying to think of how to do something better”—get Nelson out of bed in the morning. His role now, established in his career, with major support from OEMs and big teams, is a far cry from his early days. 

“We couldn’t afford to buy anything when I first got into racing,” Nelson says. But “we could change a lot of things within the rules, and I was happy to always experiment with how to take something that everybody’s doing and try to do it a little bit better. And that’s how we would find performance. And so to me, it’s always been fun to try to innovate.”

Action Express didn’t miss a beat after Covid, winning its fourth set of driver and team championships in IMSA during 2021. That would be the last year before IMSA introduced a new recipe for its top class, in which Action Express competed, made up of prototype (scratch-built) race cars. Action Express had weathered such watershed moments before, having survived the switch from tube-frame to carbon-fiber-tub construction. It remained with Cadillac and worked to introduce a car to fit the new LMDh regulations, which called for custom powertrains with spec hybrid components, one of four spec chassis, and brand-specific bodywork. 

***

In 2023, on the heels of its sixth IMSA team championship, Action Express traveled to France with the new Cadillac for its first attempt at the world’s most prestigious endurance race, the 24 Hours of Le Mans. They finished 10th out of 16. For 2024, they returned to Le Mans with a better idea of what to expect.

On Saturday, June 15, the morning of race day, the Action Express team was relaxed, ready. Nelson sat in the Cadillac team lounge in a white-collared shirt, a silver pen in his pocket, a glass mug of coffee between his hands. 

What does he do during a 24-hour race? “I get to watch everybody do their job.” His main role, as he sees it, is “putting together a team of people that are smarter than me and [getting] ’em a job description that matches their skill set.” He views his people as assets—it’s one of the things that probably sets Action Express apart. “I think in racing, with all of the pressures of ‘perform now’ that every team is always feeling, the people become more of a commodity. Because of ‘You got to perform now, I got to perform, I got to have results, got to have results.’” 

Nelson knows that life goes on outside the race track. “Each person is going through all kinds of highs and lows in their personal lives, and somehow we’re supposed to just shut the door and walk in the gate at the racetrack and perform at the highest level?” He sees his people not only as assets, but investments.

“When a person makes a mistake and I believe that they learned from that mistake, I think of that as an investment that we made in that individual, and it’ll pay off later if we treat them properly. If I get the feeling, yeah, that person did learn something, that the person will never make that mistake again—that’s an investment. And obviously there’s people who keep repeating the mistakes. Either it’s my fault for putting them in the wrong position or hiring the wrong person, so it ends up with me anyway.”

At Le Mans, the team qualified poorly, because Nelson—as he explained in detail the morning of the race—thought they could show up a bit late on Wednesday for scrutineering, a process that doesn’t take long in IMSA. (As the 2023 champions of the WeatherTech series, Action Express automatically received an invite to the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the crown jewel of the FIA-sanctioned World Endurance Championship.)

The European series worked differently: By the time Action Express rolled its car up, they were 50th in line. The delay rippled through their entire schedule. They missed the free practice session, and their No. 311 qualified 18th in a class of 23 cars. “Failure in leadership—it’s all on me,” Nelson said with a wry smile. His voice, with its acquired North Carolina lilt, was gentle. His blue-eyed gaze was unrelenting. 

***

On Sunday afternoon, Nelson sat in the same lounge, in the same shirt, holding a beer. His eyes were bloodshot. The Action Express car had finished 15th in a class of 23, largely due to an incident that morning, around 10:40 a.m., when Pipo Derani, arguably the team’s premier driver, lost control of the No. 311 and spun it into a tire wall. “I was not happy,” Nelson says. The comment is offset with a chuckle, but his eyes do not waver. He fell silent. 

When the wrecked No. 311 pulled in front of their garage, Nelson’s people didn’t hesitate. They jacked up the car, put it on skates, and spun it around and into the tiny garage.

It was Nelson’s “disaster times two” plan in action: His team keeps not one, but two sets of spare parts at hand. The red car roared back onto track with a new nose, right side pod, engine cover, tail, right rear suspension, and radiator, 31 laps down. How long had it spent in the garage? On Sunday, Nelson couldn’t remember. “It was daylight, so it had to be 8:00 or 8:30 or something?” It was actually about 12:15 on Sunday afternoon; their car had been in the pits just over 90 minutes. About three and a half hours later, the red Cadillac crossed the finish line. Action Express hadn’t lost any more laps. The team had repaired the car properly. 

“I constantly remind my managers and my team when they explain that somebody did something dumb—‘one of our competitors, wow, look at what they did.’ And I say ‘We do plenty of dumb stuff. Don’t ever judge our competitors. They’re no different than us. We all have regrettable decisions and at the end of the day when they print out the results, that’s who beat us or who we beat.’”

Nelson never allows his team to cheer at somebody else’s misfortune. “If we’re running second and the guy in front of us has a flat tire, we don’t celebrate that. We thank the racing gods, but we don’t openly cheer and I never let our guys celebrate until the checkered flag. We’re leading on the last lap, we’ve had many”—he chuckles—” many incomplete final laps”—another wheezy laugh—“in my career.”

Outside of his work, Nelson doesn’t live with a plan. He doesn’t fish or hunt or golf or even watch much TV—he’s almost always on the move. These days, that usually means he’s on a motorcycle or on his boat, a recent purchase. “I’m single. My kids are grown and moved away, so I’m able to just call my own shots. Nobody’s asked me one time to be home for dinner. If I want corn flakes for dinner, that’s what I eat.” If he wants to get up and ride 1500 miles on his Yamaha 1300, he can—and he has, in 36 hours; he’s got the Iron Butt Plaque to show for it. 

His holidays aren’t spent in the shop but on the road: Between Christmas and New Year, he rides south from his home in North Carolina to the Florida Keys. “Been doing that for the last four or five years. And then I ride to the Keys down that long highway. That’s always good. On New Year’s Day, I ride back. That’s probably not as good, but I do it.” On X, formerly Twitter, he uses the handle @GaryNelsonRacer. He posts photos of tucked-away restaurants with one-sentence reviews of their BLTs or grilled cheeses or fried chicken, photos of signs identifying good driving routes, snapshots of scenic views, and the occasional throwback photo.

At times, the path to a Championship is difficult to see. pic.twitter.com/v7EDO1wUZv

— Gary Nelson (@GaryNelsonRacer) July 26, 2024

Nelson has few regrets.

“I don’t think I would change anything. The lows make you appreciate the highs more, and if you just win all the time, I think that wouldn’t seem as good as, man, this is hard to win. That’s why I like it.”

Though Action Express isn’t building race cars, Nelson’s still building cars—or motorcycles, or tractors, or trucks. One of his projects, a Honda 750 built into a café racer, won first place in a national show and second place in an international show. His current project is a 1983 Dodge Ramcharger, as it might have been had it been built in 2024: backup camera, 12-inch center touchscreen. “I bought it rust-free and mechanically deficient, and I’ve been building it up ever since, making it into a restorod, or restomod, I don’t know what you call ’em. I’m going to put an AC system in it this weekend.” 

What you won’t find, if you visit Nelson at his home, is memorabilia. Somehow, he has left his mark on motorsports while moving through it unencumbered. He doesn’t keep pictures, and he doesn’t have much in the way of mementos. Even his project cars, when complete, he sells or gives away. He’s only kept a couple trophies. People don’t understand that, he says.

“I just never thought much of saving things. I guess I’m weird about that. I don’t know. I say I’m after trophies but then I don’t even take them home.”

Gary Nelson is still onto the next one, all the time.