When I started at the Star four years ago and was offered the option of writing a NASCAR blog I never thought that I would ever be in the same room as Jeff Gordon or interview Ryan Newman. I certainly never thought I’d get to stand in the hauler of a top NASCAR Sprint Cup team as they joked about their driver and ate pasta and baby carrots. But that’s just what happened Saturday.

I spent the morning hanging out in the pits and the hauler with the 12 crew as they set up for the Subway Fresh Fit 500 at Phoenix International Raceway in Avondale on April 12, 2008.

They lay out rows of tires, check lug nuts, set up TV screens, measure the pit box. They all admit it’s pretty boring.

Music blares but no one seems happy about.

“What is this? Who picked this,” tire specialist Whit Satterwhite asks when he walks up. The songs vary from Third Eye Blind to AC/DC. Yeah, it’s weird. No one around knows how to work the radio so we’re stuck with it.

There’s a lot of sitting around, a lot of joking around, a lot of talk about how quiet I am, a lot of inappropriate conversations that you’d expect from guys who work with cars.

Most of the over-the-wall crew members, the guys that perform the pit stops during races, don’t know anything about cars, jackman Bryan White admits. Trent Cherry, rear tire carrier and pit crew coach, recruits former athletes, not mechanics.

These guys are former college football players and former college baseball players who spend the week working regular jobs.

“What they’ve done is recruited us to come in and pit the cars,” White says. “So we don’t have to have any knowledge of the car, the working parts of it. All we do is pit the car. So we pretty much set up the pit box and then we go and hang out until the race starts because they won’t allow us to touch the car.”

I grab a seat on the ground next to front tire changer Ben Brown as he paints the edges of lug nuts pink so he can see them better through brake dust and we talk about crazy fans, rednecks – “They pay our salary,” he says – and how different the crowd in Phoenix is compared to in places like Talladega and Charlotte.

Oh, I bet it is.

“You see things you wouldn’t think you’d see – Rebel flags, people with NASCAR tattoos, girls in bikini tops. It’s insane,” Brown says. “This place (Phoenix) and California, they’re tame compared to the East Coast.”

We just laugh as a guy stops in front of the pit box, calls someone on his cell phone, and yells, “You are not going to believe where I’m standing. Right in front of Ryan Newman’s pit!”

Brown says he was never a NASCAR fan before he started traveling with the Alltel team four years ago.

“I’m from Charlotte, where it’s huge, but I wasn’t that into it,” he says. “I’d go to races just to have a good time but I didn’t have a favorite driver or anything.”

After finishing the mundane pit road tasks, the crew heads back to the hauler for lunch. The conversation jumps from jokes about Ryan Newman’s weight to the NASCAR Pit Crew Challenge, which the #12 team won last year, to the Alltel MyCircle 500 Challenge where the guys compete against “regular people” who are trying to win $500,000 by putting up a better time in a pit stop.

Jokes about throwing the competition are made but they are told it’s impossible for them to lose. It seems that they are so good that everything could go wrong and us mere mortals still couldn’t beat them.

I stand in the corner and just take it all in as they complain about not getting to be in commercials on “real TV” and when things like, “I wouldn’t have any chicks on my (MyCircle 500) team,” “We should get seven midgets to come out on stage as us (at the pit crew challenge),” and “We can’t do that. It’s discrimination. We’d have Midgets of America after us,” are said.

Oh, I think I like these guys already.

I left the guys for a couple hours to get some work done. I make my way back to the pit box around 3 p.m. and more race preparations are under way. As exciting as gluing lug nuts onto tire rims looks I decide to head back to the air conditioning and rest my sunburned arms.

On my next trip out there are only a couple of guys hanging around with members of teammate Kurt Busch’s team.

The crew members are celebrities in their own right. People take pictures of them and ask for autographs. One man even stops and asks if they will pose for a picture with his wife.

When the last guy, rear tire changer Joe Piette, begins walking back to the garage he asks me to hold down the fort. I declare myself in charge. It seems that just sitting on the ground taking notes (in a notebook that I later lost – ugh!) is enough for people to think I was important enough to take pictures with. Even when I admit that I am “just a reporter” I still end up taking pictures with about three or four different people. (Those photos better not end up on MySpace.)

One woman asks me if I have any Ryan Newman pictures or anything else I can give her.

“Sorry, I don’t,” I say, and she walks away, dejected, saying something about how he is going to win.

Of course. I already told Brown that I was a Ryan Newman good luck charm because I interviewed him a week before the Daytona 500 and then he won the race.

“Good. We need it, “ he says. “The last time we started on the pole was the Coca-Cola 600. We crashed 20 laps in and finished dead last but had to stick around for the whole race before we could tear down because they wanted to make sure we hadn’t cheated. It was brutal.”

As the race nears, the crew reappears now dressed in fire suits. (How do I get my hands on one of those?) They toss a football around on pit road. They stretch. They practice tire changes.

All the drivers are introduced and take a lap around the track, standing in the back of a truck. Ryan Newman is last, of course, because he is on the pole.

They line up on pit road, take their hats off and bow their heads for the invocation and national anthem.

After some high-fives, it’s race time. Everyone huddles around the TV and the lights go off on the pace car, meaning the race will start on the next lap, and Fox is still showing the New York Yankees-Boston Red Sox game. A few comments are made about how a game that has no importance in this area of the country is obviously more important than the race.

On lap 12 there’s a caution for debris and the crew springs into action. But it’s a false alarm. Newman is staying out. I have to wait to see them do what they have prepared for all day.

During the race, they stay loose by running up and down the area behind the pit box and doing jumping jacks.

Another caution comes out on lap 42 and I get to see that up-close-and-personal pit stop. It happens so fast; I look down at my camera to check the shot and by the time I look up they are already high-fiving each other. Newman makes up two spots due to their quick work, moving from third back to first.

Every pit stop is recorded. Cherry plays and replays the footage at least five or six times and takes notes as other guys look over his shoulder at the TV.

The happiness of Newman regaining the lead is short-lived, though.

On lap 134, Newman experiences engine problems. He makes it to pit road but is unable to control the car as he approaches his box and spins out right as the team is set to go over the wall.

Cherry says he had one leg over but he pulled back just in time.

The race is red-flagged because Newman’s car dropped a lot of liquid on the track. With the cars sitting silent on the track, it’s eerily quiet.

Newman pulls his car behind the wall as his wife, Krissie, climbs down from the top of the box. Crew members race back and forth. Then, as the cars on track start their engines up again, the crew isn’t in such a rush anymore. That isn’t a good sign.

I look up at the scoring tower and the race is only at lap 138 and the team is already packing up.

A fan asks one of them, “Can you fix it?” He just shakes his head no.

Equipment is thrown to the ground and kicked, and all I can do is offer a sympathetic smile.

Their race is over and I head back to the media center with a head full of story ideas and surprisingly dirty fingernails.

Click here for video highlights of race day with the 12 team.