Last week, a LinkedIn message popped up that urged friends of Dean “Guido” Antonelli, crew chief for Ron Capps’ NAPA Auto Care Toyota Funny Car, to congratulate him for his new position as the team’s “Coordinator of Fun.”
Curiously, Capps knew nothing of it at first: “I don’t know. Maybe there’s something I don’t know about. Obviously we have fun, and I think the success we’ve had is you walk in our pitarea and there’s good rock and roll playing. The crew’s loose. They’re having fun, and they put that car consistently together every time, flawlessly for Guido and [co-crew chief John] Medlen. I don’t know what the inside joke is there. I’ll probably get a note [about it now], but we do have a good time.”
Antonelli was a bit surprised himself to learn that it caught the attention of Competition Plus, and he downplayed it as “not really that cool of a story.” It turns out that he “realized that when I changed my work status last year to working at RCM [Ron Capps Motorsports], I never updated the email from DSR [Don Schumacher Racing] to current. So when I did that the other day, I saw it had a field for ‘position.’ I thought about how much fun I am having this year, with this owner, and the people on this team, racing and doing it as a career. So it must be that I am a ‘coordinator of fun.’ Not always – losing sucks. But in the scope of life, we live a dream.
“Looking back,” he said, “I grew up in racing. My dad raced my whole childhood. With a 10-year hiatus from [racing between ages] 18 to 28, I worked in the manufacturing / engineering world. When I came back to racing, it was at [John] Force’s at the end of ’94 – a one-car team then – and worked there 22 years. Wouldn’t trade that for anything. Then five years at DSR. Same thing: wouldn’t trade that for anything. Was mentored by absolutely the most brilliant people in racing. Met my wife [Kelly Antonelli, currently the vice-president of team operations at Tony Stewart Racing]. To me, I’ve been the Coordinator of Fun since 1994.”
Capps said, “We always like to have fun. I’ve had great crew chiefs that are bad-ass racers. You go back to Roland [Leong], and Ace [Ed McCulloch], and then [Dale] Armstrong and guys who have been around like that. Then you fast-forward to [Rahn] Tobler and now Guido. We like to race hard. We work hard, but we enjoy ourselves – good wine and just hanging out.”
