Michael McSwain

Michael “Fatback” McSwain (born January 17, 1967) is an American NASCAR crew chief who worked for Yates Racing as a NASCAR Cup Series crew chief for several drivers, including hall of famers Bill Elliott and Bobby Labonte Hall nominee Ricky Rudd, and teams like Wood Brothers Racing, Robert Yates Racing and Joe Gibbs Racing.

McSwain was a mechanical wizard who also wasn’t afraid to speak his mind, even if it sometimes meant conflicts with NASCAR and his own drivers.

Biography
McSwain admits he misses NASCAR “big time. I miss the people and the lifestyle, I enjoyed it. I worked my whole life to get there, but I was missing my kids more, so I felt I had to choose. I’m an all-in kind of guy so I didn’t think I had a choice, I had to choose one or the other.”

McSwain’s children are now 15, 13 and 10. As they grow, he admits he may entertain coming back to the sport at some point.

“I’m still pretty young, I’m only 53 years old,” he said. “So I’ve got time for one more shot.”

But he acknowledges that if he were to return, it would be a challenge.

“It’d be like starting over because everything has changed so much,” he said. “But maybe sometime in the next couple years, it’d be a good time (to return) because they’re changing cars again.

“My kids are old enough now where there’s still some things I don’t want to miss, but I don’t know if I would say no (to returning to NASCAR). It’d have to be the right situation, but it would be a challenge. I started out when I was young, worked my guts out to get there and then I walked away from it.”

Joe Gibbs Racing career
McSwain joined Joe Gibbs Racing in December 2002 and served as Bobby Labonte's crew chief for the 2003 season and the first 18 races of the 2004 season.

"Over the past two years, McSwain has worked extremely hard for Joe Gibbs Racing," J.D. Gibbs, president of JGR, said. "This was a difficult decision, but it was time to go in a different direction. We appreciate all that he has done for the team and wish him the best of luck in the future."

McSwain, 37, scored victories with Labonte in the 2003 Kobalt Tools 500 and the 2003 Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway, en route to an eighth-place finish in the point standings.

"Joe Gibbs Racing and I had a successful relationship," McSwain said. "I wish them the best the remainder of the year and in the future."

An interim crew chief was named in 2008.

Jimmy Makar, senior vice president of racing, will assist the team and the interim crew chief while team officials search for McSwain's replacement. Makar served as crew chief on the No. 18 Chevrolet from 1992-2002, winning the 1993 Daytona 500 with Dale Jarrett and the 2000 Pennzoil 400 with Bobby Labonte.

"We hope to make the decision on a permanent crew chief in the near future, but we are going to take our time to find the best person for the job," Gibbs said.

Labonte had 2,278 points and is sixth in the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series standings. He trailed leader Jimmie Johnson by 442 points and trailed fifth-place Matt Kenseth by 43 points.

"Michael did a great job when he came in and took over for Jimmy Makar after the 2002 season," Labonte said. "We won a couple of races in 2003 and won some poles. He works hard, and I wish him success down the road."

Wood Brothers Racing career
McSwain started with the NASCAR Nextel Cup Series team at Bristol Motor Speedway and after just two weeks Ricky Rudd's already feeling more comfortable behind the wheel. A 17th-place finish at California Speedway usually wouldn't mean much to the veteran, but this year it's a step in the right direction.

As the Chesapeake, Virginia, native heads to Richmond -- a track where he and McSwain have run well together in the past -- it's tempting to view Rudd as a contender in Saturday night's Chevy Rock & Roll 400, but that might be putting the cart in front of the horse. Or, in racing terms, a matter of expecting too much out of a car not handcrafted to McSwain's liking.

Each crew chief has certain things they want from a car and construct them accordingly. Cars, though, can't be built overnight, so McSwain is tinkering with the cars currently on hand while building new ones to his specification. Those should be available later this month, but Rudd's optimism isn't surprising.

"The bottom line is that I've got confidence knowing that I can see we've kind of turned the corner," Rudd says. "How quickly we get to where we can start talking about winning races again, I don't know.

"I don't want to rule out that it could happen [right away] but, realistically, I think we need to start getting top 10s and top 5s and then we'll talk about wins. I don't want to put that pressure on anybody, but I definitely think you'll see an immediate turnaround and we'll be a legitimate top 10 contender -- especially when we get Fatback's cars in the system."

While much of a driver's success depends on the car underneath him, the mental aspect can't be ruled out. Rudd and Leslie never quite developed the chemistry that's immediately evident when Rudd and McSwain get together. Rudd first hired him when he ran his own team, then they moved together to Robert Yates Racing.

That relationship flamed out in 2002, with Rudd heading to the Wood Brothers and McSwain joining Bobby Labonte's team. While McSwain and Labonte won twice last year, Rudd's tenure with the Wood Brothers has been a disappointment thus far. It remains to be seen whether McSwain can get the team to victory lane, but it wouldn't be wise to bet against him.

"We hadn't worked with each other for a couple of years, but [the chemistry] picked right up pretty quick," says Rudd, calling McSwain one of the handful of crew chiefs who can make something happen for a race team.

For whatever reason, a driver with 23 Cup victories hasn't made much of anything happen since leaving Roush. Needless to say, a man who turns 48 on Sunday knows that time's a wasting if he's going to making his remaining time in the sport successful.

And Rudd makes no secret of the fact the past two seasons have been, "real frustrating."

"You get kind of spoiled and you start taking a lot of things for granted," he says of past successes. "Probably about 50 percent of my career have been top 10s. It's very competitive now, but if you perform to your abilities and the team's abilities, top 10s are not easy to come by, but they should be there for you. We weren't making any progress; we weren't getting anywhere. It wasn't because a lack of trying ... the chemistry just wasn't clicking."

Rudd's willing to admit the struggles have played on his mind, but even at Bristol he started getting a better feel for things. Maybe it's the way McSwain sets up his car, maybe it's just the comfort of being with someone with whom he's won in the past, but Rudd's smiling a lot more at the track these days.

One of the few things that helped keep Rudd from really getting depressed is how hard he feels the team worked under Leslie.

"They haven't been sitting there twiddling their thumbs," Rudd says. "They've been trying to figure it out, but it seemed the more they tried the worse we got. Bristol was pretty encouraging. We had a good car and ended up getting wrecked, but it drove really well.

"The main thing I noticed was that in the previous year we ran in the top five and in the second race I think we broke something, but the first Bristol race this year was pretty disastrous. That's all I've got to compare it to, but [this time] things went a lot smoother and we were poised to have a pretty good run. From a positive standpoint the cars are starting to do what I want them to do. We need to get better and it's coming that direction pretty quick."

McSwain doesn't care to talk specifically about what led to his departure from Gibbs' operation, other than saying that he intends to have a lot more fun with his current team.

"You learn things from every situation you're in in life," McSwain says of his time with Gibbs' operation. "I'm not a corporate person. I'm just a plain old redneck from the hills of North Carolina and I enjoy life and I like to have fun in life. I'm not saying my situation was bad, I'm just not a suit and tie kind of guy."

Needless to say, the only time you'll see McSwain in a suit in a racing-related situation is if he's at the annual awards ceremony in New York City after a successful season.

McSwain, though, is the type of man who enjoys the celebrations after the formal ceremony much more than the ceremony itself. He plans to bring that spirit to Rudd and his new team. But don't take that to mean that it will be fun and games all the time.

"I demand a lot out of my people, but I also expect them to have a lot of fun," McSwain says. "We're gonna kid around and we're gonna work hard. If I've said it once I've said it a hundred times -- we're gonna work our guts out but we're gonna have fun. If you can't get up everyday and look forward to going to work, then you're not gonna do good at what you do. I don't care what it is. If it's a reporter, or if it's a TV analyst, or if it's a crew chief, or if it's a guy who builds shocks, you have to get up in the morning and say, 'Hey, I'm looking forward to going to work.'"