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NASCAR Nextel Cup Championship Team Has Roots, At Rockford Speedway
NEW YORK (Dec. 1, 2006) – A proud father watched his son receive the 2006
NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series championship crew chief award Thursday in New York,
and in accepting, the son thanked his father for teaching him the trade as a
youth, then allowing him to leave home to pursue his dream.
John Knaus is the father of Lowe’s Chevrolet crew chief Chad Knaus, who led
his driver, Jimmie Johnson, and his Hendrick Motorsports team to the 2006
NASCAR NEXTEL Cup Series championship. As a young boy, Chad was influenced by
his dad’s racing at an early age.
John Knaus is a seven-time NASCAR weekly series Late Model track champion at
Rockford (Ill.) Speedway near Chicago. He enjoyed one of the highlights of his
own great career in 1994, when he won the NASCAR Northern Region championship.
That year, Knaus scored 13 feature event wins, 19 top-fives and 20 top-10
finishes in 22 starts.
To compile such a record at Rockford was considered impossible. Big fields of
cars featuring inverted starts on a tough old quarter-mile banked asphalt oval
all factored in to keeping one driver from accumulating enough wins to contend
for a regional title. Knaus proved the theory wrong.
But Knaus sets his own accomplishments aside to enjoy those of his son.
“Obviously I’m very proud for Chad to come from a little town like
Rockford,” said the elder Knaus. “When he headed down south I told him
he’d probably come back. Back then, you didn’t head south from the north
and be accepted. I thought you had to be from the south.
“I’m very proud of what he’s accomplished. He went down there and set
his mind to it, and everybody knows about Chad’s determination to get his
job done. That’s paid off for him in the long run.
“Chad was probably 13 years old and he pretty well understood a race car
because he was around them all the time,” Knaus said. “He moved south
after I had won my third track championship and I won four more after he left.
He gave me good input on the race cars, but he I think I taught him a lot of
it, because I had to carry on after he left.”
A second son, Jason, worked with his dad, and now works in regional series
racing.
John retired from driving only two years ago, but says he remains “a blue
collar worker,” working at an automotive body shop in Rockford, where Chad
also worked for a couple of years.
Chad’s mom Carol has watched both husband and son toil in racing, and
succeed.
“It’s been a very interesting life,” Carol said. “I’ve been doing a
lot of following, with John for a number of years, and now watching Chad and
seeing everything he does. It’s been a lot of fun,” she said with a bright
smile.
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