24 H. Le Mans 2023 - As Garage 56 ‘chief of staff,’ Jessica Hook follows her passion to fulfill racing dream

Sleep would come soon enough for Jessica Hook, but not before pizza. The time she had spent tracking the Garage 56 Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 test car on its first major endurance test at Sebring International Raceway had drawn to a close. The Hendrick Motorsports team had already checked a significant box on its two-day to-do list, reaching the goal of running for 24 hours straight with a day-night-day trial. With the session clipping along without a crease and the track still open for track time, the team opted to run the car for four more hours.

 

Hook had been up for all those waking moments, monitoring the car’s fuel consumption, recording lap times, and charting the duration of drivers’ seat time for 30-plus hours by the end of it. The car and crew had been pushed to their limits. “Pretty delirious” was one feeling, she said, but the others were a sense of achievement chased by a measure of relief.

 

The hours had pushed late into Tuesday afternoon when it came time to head home. Chad Knaus — Hendrick’s Vice President of Competition and one of the Garage 56 project leads — had ordered the pizza, which was waiting on the team’s private plane once the crew arrived. There hadn’t been high-fives all around after the success of the Sebring test, but well-timed comfort food in a cardboard box was reward enough.

 

As Hook settled into her seat, she took note of who else was on board. Across from her was Jimmie Johnson, the NASCAR legend recruited to add another layer of stock-car authenticity to the 24 Hours of Le Mans driver lineup. Knaus, Johnson’s crew chief all those years in a past career phase, was in the next row up. One of the later passengers to arrive for a seat nearer to the front was Jeff Gordon, now a team executive as Hendrick’s vice chairman. In earlier years, Gordon was the favorite driver of Hook’s older sister, Aimee. Jessica had gone the other direction growing up, pulling for Dale Earnhardt’s black No. 3 Chevrolet, the antithesis to Gordon’s rainbow-colored No. 24.

In both their past lives and current roles, Johnson, Knaus and Gordon remain three pillars of the Hendrick organization’s racing heritage. Though Hook now works alongside them on a regular basis, it was hard for her not to appreciate where she was. Sure, her gear said “Hendrick Motorsports” just the same as the rest of them, but here was a trio with 18 Cup Series championships collected among them.

 

“I could hear them all talking to each other, and I just kind of had this moment,” Hook says. “… Like, these are all guys I grew up watching. I mean, they’re the reason why I wanted to do this, I wanted to be there with them. And so I just remember, like, I kind of had forgotten that, when you’re in the day-to-day and you just are trying to get things done. I remember sitting there and it was kind of a zoomed-out moment of like, ‘Oh, I’m here. I’m doing it. Like I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do, and here I am on a plane sitting next to the three guys that I grew up watching them made me want to be here,’ and it was kind of just a surreal moment.”

 

By the next day after she’d caught up on rest, she also caught up on texts she’d missed. Hook responded to a question that her dad, Kraig Rowe, had about potential Coca-Cola 600 plans in May, but she also shared the experience she’d just had in the last 24 hours, including her zoomed-out moment. “He of all people totally understands that I feel like he’s been on this ride with me the whole time,” she said.

 

Back home in his northern Mississippi home in the town of Hernando, Rowe passed that on to anyone within sighting distance. “I’m like so proud of her and I get such a kick out of it,” he said. “I mean, it’s just amazing to know somebody that is doing what she’s doing, never mind the fact that she’s my daughter doing what she does.”

Rowe had his own zoom-out perspective. He’d watched Jessica follow the path he’d taken into engineering, betting on her future by treating out-of-state tuition in UNC Charlotte’s motorsports engineering program as an investment in herself. By his estimation, her work ethic and her ability in science, math and technology had earned her that spot.

 

“And I said, you know why you’re on that plane? Because you’re one of them. You’re one of those people. You belong with those people,” Rowe says. “And she told me, she said that’s probably the nicest thing anyone’s ever told her. And I believe it.”

 

Jessica Hook has found her place, now in her sixth year at Hendrick Motorsports and a critical part of the collaborative thrust to field a NASCAR-based entry in the 24 Hours of Le Mans. The 34-year-old mechanical engineer possesses a well-versed sports-car pedigree, which has already been a valuable resource and a fitting blend with the stock-car side of the project.

 

More sleepless nights surely are ahead, including the big one on June 10-11. That creeping familiar feeling of exhaustion from her Sebring flight will likely return, but so will the fulfilling thought she had after that February milestone: OK, this is why I’m doing it.

Carving her path

NASCAR was almost always in the background of Hook’s childhood. She and her siblings would return home from church, and the lap-by-lap banter from the airwaves would be the soundtrack to a typical Sunday afternoon.

 

Flat out ?‍? Just over two months until race day ? pic.twitter.com/LZVWRp3WTL

— NASCARG56 (@nascarg56) March 29, 2023

 

Hook became fast friends with a neighbor across the street whose father raced at a local dirt track, and she tagged along from time to time. But as Kansas Speedway sprouted and opened its doors when Hook was just 12 years old, it brought NASCAR’s major leagues to her home state.

 

“I think I went because neither of my other siblings wanted to go kind of thing,” Hook recalls. “And I remember being in the stands and hearing the cars turned on for the first time. And it was like, it lit something in me and hasn’t gone away since. So that’s when I saw them, I heard them and I remember telling my dad on the drive home, I wanted to be on the other side of the fence and working in and contributing to a team that could win a race. So that’s what started it. I was probably eighth-grade-ish in school. It just never went away.”

 

Rowe remembers it much the same way. He recalled being in one of the fan zones at the Kansas City track and lapsing into what he called “tourist mode” as he pointed toward a restricted area where the teams milled about. “She’d be like ‘Dad, you know one of these days, I’m going to be working with those people.’ ” he says. “I’d get all excited about seeing a driver, and she tried to calm me down because she’s like, ‘someday I’m going to be doing this.’ “How, then, to make that happen? She’d been a fan of fast cars, and her ownership of a series of Mustangs growing up backed that notion, but racing her way into the stock-car ladder system proved to be cost-prohibitive. Jessica had inherited her father’s fandom, and the family’s tradition of engineering didn’t skip her generation, either.

 

Her father worked his way into the trade, taking a pair of two-year degrees and an old-school approach into fieldwork with instrumentation for Cessna, and later with calibrating and servicing automotive testing applications for other companies before striking out on his own in 2011. Those connections run deeper for Hook – both her grandfathers worked as engineers with a background in tooling, one running a whole division for a large corporation and the other eventually working for Boeing. “Both of them were very innovative people,” Rowe says. “Problem solvers, hands-on, so she’s got the bloodline.”

 

By that time, Hook was already an A student who excelled at math. That would be her route.

“He was the one who gave me that idea,” she says. “Being an engineer, he recognized that in racing and motorsports and saw that it was going more in that engineering route versus kind of the grassroots. He kind of put the two ideas together, because I think I always was interested in math and science and engineering. He saw that in me and he also saw I had this passion for NASCAR and racing. He put the two together for me, and said, ‘hey, you know you can do both.’

 

“Her goals led to an internship at a local shop that offered some hands-on experience. But as her freshman year starting off at Kansas State University wound down, Jessica was ready to make a leap to UNC Charlotte and a clearer path to a career in racing. The cost of enrollment as an out-of-state student was a concern, but she was determined to chase the opportunity closer to NASCAR’s hub. “The smartest money you’ll ever spend is on yourself,” Rowe told her. He said the family helped with room and board, and student loans took care of the rest.

 

Hook says now that some of her friends “never really understood it or got it,” as she pursued her career goals. Her dedication made more of an impression on her friends’ fathers who counted themselves as car guys. Her peer group changed in Charlotte, however, with like-minded students after similar versions of her dream.

“All of a sudden, I felt like I was kind of with my own kind, which was amazing,” Hook says. “There were hundreds of us.”

 

What she may have lacked in first-hand experience at the grassroots level of racing, she made up for in drive. While still in college, Hook turned down a more lucrative job offer with Duke Energy to join Riley Motorsports’ SRT Viper program part-time. Rowe said with a chuckle that her reasoning was simple: She hadn’t moved halfway across the country to follow her racing aspirations to wind up working for the power company.

 

The job with Riley was entry-level at first, but became a full-time role as soon as she graduated. The opportunity to travel the sports-car circuit with the team also provided her first taste of Le Mans, and she became a key member of the organization’s design department.

When Riley’s number of design projects dried up in 2018, so did Hook’s position. Just a handful of months passed before Hendrick Motorsports came calling, and her childhood vision of working in NASCAR came full circle.

 

“I always encouraged the kids that they could achieve anything they set their mind to it, and I was really strong in that, because I didn’t … my parents didn’t do that with me,” Rowe says. “So, you know, I was just kind of floundering through life with no real direction because I didn’t get that encouragement to chase your dream, that if you chase it and put the work in, you’re gonna get there. So I tried to really kind of overcorrect maybe, or correct that with my kids. And so she had that dream, I was very much, you can get there, you know. You’ve just got to put in the work.”

Launch toward Le Mans

On the morning of March 2, 2022, a message popped up in Jessica Hook’s Microsoft Teams app. Chad Knaus asked her to come meet him at his office to talk about something, and he was purposely short on providing much initial detail.

There were still plenty of questions once she arrived, but Knaus held the main one.

“Basically, we’re wanting to take a Next Gen Cup car to Le Mans in 2023,” Hook recalled Knaus saying. “Would this be something you’d be interested in working on?”

 

“Oh, wow,” Hook said. “Yeah, definitely.”

 

“He’s like, ‘OK, great, because we’ve got a meeting in five minutes. Go get your laptop.’ And that’s how I got started,” Hook says. “Basically, he asked me at 8:55, and by 9 a.m., I was in my first technical meeting, talking about it.”

 

At that point, the Garage 56 project was 15 days away from its public unveil at Sebring, still hush-hush and a race car on paper only. But Knaus already knew about Hook’s background and skill set, which had grown from her role as a design engineer to a spot with Kevin Meendering’s competition development group. When Knaus dipped into IMSA competition with Johnson and the Action Express Racing team a couple of years back, it was Hook he called to bring him up to speed on the sports-car series’ distinct rules and regulations.

 

“I didn’t know about wave-arounds, I didn’t know about class splits, I didn’t know about any of that stuff, so she carried me through all of that,” Knaus says. “She’s basically our chief of staff. She’s helping us understand what we need from a personnel standpoint, and she’s helping us understand what we need from a logistical standpoint. She’s got a great understanding of the cadence of the race, and she’s been in it multiple times. So she’s fantastic. She’s going to be a huge asset to us, not only for this program but in future programs.”

NASCAR had initially stoked her passion for racing, and the sports-car world was her career’s entry point. “So to combine the two for me, it’s a dream-come-true project,” Hook says. And while Knaus brought her into the project with an ask and not a directive, “I think he knew from conversations we had before that it was going to be a yes,” Hook said, “that I would want to do it, and a pretty easy yes.”

Balancing it all would be another challenge. Hook’s husband, Tyler, still works on the sports-car side with Riley, and together, the couple has a 1 1/2-year-old son, Nicholas.

 

“You have to multitask, you have to work under pressure, trying to make dinner while he’s screaming, crying or trying to do anything,” Hook says. “I think I’m getting better at that because I have to do it at home with my son, and I think that just makes me stronger here working.”

 

Hook says that’s meant doing things she didn’t think she could – giving birth, caring for Nicholas after learning of his food allergies, and calming him during a severe reaction that required an Epi-Pen shot and a maze of monitors attached to him in the hospital. She took her son into the bathroom, turned off the light and sang to him. “That moment was just an eye-opening moment about, this is what matters, and I need to balance a little bit more.”

 

Since that scare, the Garage 56 project has grown, but so has the staff dedicated to the initiative – a development that has helped to reduce Hook’s workload. She’s still traveling, but says she and Tyler have a better understanding of their son’s condition. Both sides of the work-life balance have become slightly more manageable, even with the Sebring all-nighter in her recent rearview.

The testing has been a rewarding part of the work, seeing the car grow from an idea to a prototype to a test car and a finished product. And though Hook has been instrumental in bringing Garage 56 to life, she’s been content to work mostly behind the scenes, even though her position as one of the few women with hands on the project might make her stand out.

 

“I don’t like having any spotlights on me. I just want to be known for my work and not necessarily the fact that I’m a woman,” Hook says. “I hope that maybe I can pass that on, and if this helps a girl reading this to see, ‘OK, yeah, I can fill in the picture a little bit more about what I want to do because I’ve seen another woman do it,’ then that would be at the end of it what this is all about. I’m never gonna get a trophy. … You know, there’s no Hall of Fame for race engineers, right? It’s not why I’m doing it, but at the end of my career, if I know I’ve inspired someone else to do it and go beyond what I did, that’s what is I think most rewarding.”

 

The question of what’s next for Hook is an interesting one. She says she’s been so laser-focused on prepping for Le Mans that the concept of time after Garage 56 isn’t something she’s fully considered. The thought of expanding into a race engineer role with one of Hendrick’s Cup Series teams intrigues her. So does realizing the dream of driving that she deferred so many years, as she relayed to her husband at a ChampCar (formerly ChumpCar) amateur racing event at Virginia International Raceway last summer.

 

“I told him I’ve never wanted to get in the car more,” Hook says. “I don’t know if it’s because I’ve been building up a lot of aggression that I need to get out or what, but I have never wanted to get behind the seat more than I do now.”

 

In the meantime, Hook has at least two more flights in her future. One will take her back to Sebring for what’s scheduled to be the final Garage 56 test in a couple of weeks; the other will be Hook’s load-in with the rest of the team in France for the 100th anniversary of the endurance classic.

 

She’ll go with the assurance that she’s earned her seat on the plane, gliding easily alongside the household names on the Hendrick roster. As she relayed to her father by text after the marathon Sebring test in February, it occurred to her that I think maybe I’ve made it.

 

“Yeah, you’ve made it,” Rowe recalls telling her. “You’re just admiring the moon on your way to Mars.”