by F.J. Foster

Created on: March 01, 2010

“Our sport has lost one of its legends."

With those words, NASCAR informed the racing world that Jake “Suitcase Jake” Elder had, at the age of 73, passed away on Feb. 24, 2010. Elder, one of the early shade-tree mechanics - and some say the best - on whom the now high-tech world of stock car racing was built, was one of its most colorful and successful crew chiefs. He was also clearly a genius.

Calling Jake Elder a mechanic would be like calling Babe Ruth a guy who hit baseballs; technically correct, but vastly understated. Elder was far more than that. During his career, he worked with an astonishing 30 drivers, and those included some of the best. Among them were Richard Petty, David Pearson, Dale Earnhardt, and Darrell Waltrip. And wherever he popped up, he would produce a winner.

Elder began his career in 1960 at Petty Engineering, working on cars driven by Richard Petty. Eventually, Elder moved on to the powerhouse Holman-Moody Racing Team, and there his career really took off - and so did his legend.

In 1968 and 1969, he served as crew chief for David Pearson, and together they won the NASCAR championship both of those years. Prior to that, in 1967, Holman-Moody assigned him to Mario Andretti, a famous open-wheel racer slated to drive one of the team’s cars at the Daytona 500. With Elder in his pit, Andretti won the race.

As great as he was as a crew chief, however, Elder’s true genius lay in setting up the race car. No matter how much power a car had, it couldn’t win if it couldn’t be handled at high speed. Elder had the ability to set up suspensions that utterly baffled his peers. One of Elder’s later contemporaries, Jeff Hammond, himself an outstanding crew chief, was once asked by veteran racing reporter Tom Higgins to explain Elder’s seemingly superhuman abilities at setting up race cars. He answered the question with a question. Said Hammond, “Witchcraft?”

No, but it was an extraordinary gift, the sort that can’t be taught. You have to be born with it, and Jake Elder was. The people around him were fascinated because he never wrote anything down. It was all mental, and that was a good thing. Jake Elder could neither read nor write.

Elder had dropped out of school in the third grade. Yet, many of his peers and the drivers he taught didn’t know it. One was retired great Darrell Waltrip, who had Elder in his pit when he won his first race, and again when he won his last.

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