Jim Pohlman is happy to list off the highlights of his NASCAR resume, although he’ll tell you that the list of things he hasn’t done is certainly shorter. One thing that he does make sure to mention, however, is something special.
“One of the things you can put on there is I won the last World Pit Crew Challenge championship at Rockingham with the [No.] 9 car,” Pohlman tells RACER. “I call it the last real one because all the ones in the stadium weren’t really the same. We need to bring it back. But, anyway, that was a big pride thing.”
Pohlman was a tire changer at that time in 2003. As for the car, the No. 9, it was driven by Bill Elliott for owner Ray Evernham. That was one of many roles Pohlman has had over the years in the sport.
Most recently, Pohlman was a crew chief at JR Motorsports, where he won the Xfinity Series championship with Justin Allgaier in 2024. In three seasons together, the duo finished no worse than third in the championship and won nine races.
Beginning next season, Pohlman will become an even more recognizable face and name as he moves into the Cup Series with Richard Childress Racing. His assignment? Be the man who turns things around for Kyle Busch and the No. 8 team.
“We’re probably a lot alike,” Pohlman says. “I haven’t seen his analytical chart as to how his personality is, but having done the crew chief role and reading people, I’d say we’re probably identical. There might be some spats, I’m not going to lie. He’s passion ate. I’m passionate. The end goal is that he wants to win races, and he wants to win races at RCR, and he was crystal clear about that. I think I’m most excited about having a future Hall of Fame driver.”
Pohlman is familiar with the Cup Series and its Next Gen race car. There was a period when he was deeply involved in the design and testing of the car while at Chip Ganassi Racing – so much so that by the end of 2020, that was his sole focus, and he hardly worked on the sixth-generation race car anymore. The experience, Pohlman feels, helped him be a step ahead of everyone when he then moved to Richard Childress Racing for the year he spent there before moving to JR Motorsports.
But now, Pohlman knows he’s going to have to catch up again when he works with Busch. The sport evolves, and Pohlman is ready to dig. It’s a good trait for someone who describes himself as hands-on and who likes to lead by example.
Sunday racing has always been the goal. Pohlman, who moved to North Carolina to chase the NASCAR dream in 1998, has memories centered on events in the Cup Series, such as Jeff Gordon crying after winning the Brickyard 400 and following the careers of Evernham, Chad Knaus, and even Cliff Daniels.
Junior Johnson was another inspiration. Pohlman looked at Johnson and his place in the history books as someone who was a phenomenal mechanic and crew chief, and then even a car owner.
A third-generation racer, Pohlman grew up in the Chicagoland area. His grandfather raced in the 1950s around Chicago, including Soldier Field, and it was passed down to Pohlman’s dad, uncles, and cousins. By the time Pohlman caught the bug, he was growing up at Santa Fe Speedway and other local short and dirt tracks.
To say Pohlman took to racing, and did so quickly, would be an understatement. At five years old, when he was racing RC cars, he could tell his dad what wedge and cross weight was, and loose and tight.
“It’s hard to say you didn’t know what the path was going to be,” says Pohlman. “It was going to be something racing.”
Pohlman made it through one semester at the University of Illinois, where he realized football, which he’d been recruited for, wasn’t going to work out for him. After walking on his freshman year to play, Pohlman saw he wasn’t big, strong, fast, or talented enough to hang with the other guys. But the good news was that Pohlman loved both football and racing at that time in his life, so he reverted to the latter, where he was self-taught, learning through real-world experience.
The nudge to move south came from Roger Friedman, once the head of Federal-Mogul and now the owner of Dyer’s Top Rods. Friedman encouraged Pohlman to use his racing talent and made phone calls to help him get his foot in the door.
“I was always strong in school when it came to physics, and math wasn’t the strongest point, but there were things in math that when I could relate it to a race car, it was very strong for me,” Pohlman says. “When it wasn’t related to a race car, it became a problem in school. So, the real-world experience started at a young age with RC cars and understanding how things work, and the nature of fixing things.
“I was pretty mechanical at a young age.”
Bill Elliott Racing was the first place Pohlman landed, where he worked his way up from building suspensions to changing tires, being on the road crew, and then to car chief. Evernham took over the program, and eventually Elliott retired, which had Pohlman working with Kasey Kahne.
“Those young years with Ray (Evernham), Tommy (Baldwin), and Mike (Ford) were really important,” Pohlman says. “They shaped the hard work and work ethic, and I learned a whole bunch of new things. When you’re dirt racing, it’s all about tires. So, when I got here, the aero stuff was new to me, and a lot of development was happening, a lot of wind tunnels, and testing.”
Ganassi was Pohlman’s next stop, where he spent 15 years, moving into R&D as the sport evolved and engineering became more prominent. He “more or less” stopped working on race cars and entered the computer world.
Pohlman only moved on, feeling it was time for a change, when Ganassi sold his NASCAR operation to Justin Marks. It was then that Pohlman joined Childress, JR Motorsports, and is now back at Childress. And he knows the task ahead of him in 2026.
“We’ve got to get competitive on a weekly basis and then win races,” Pohlman says. “Then you can talk about championships and stuff like that. My main focus is to bring some consistency right out of the gate. Let’s try and make sure we know where we’re going to be, where the car needs to be, and try to bring some good race cars to the racetrack early on. If you get that mentality going, I think in the long haul the rest will start to take care of itself.”
