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Decades later, he's still having a gas on pit road

Henry Benfield got through a dangerous era as a NASCAR fuel filler.

By JOANNE KORTH, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published June 22, 2002

Henry Benfield strolls through the Winston Cup garage just hours before a race wearing his comfortable, everyday clothes: jeans, cowboy boots and a T-shirt.

They used to be his work clothes.

The gasoline ate right through them.

"When I first started you had a five-gallon bucket with a rubber hose on the dadgum end of it and you would take that hose and put it down the gas nozzle in the car and let gravity work," Benfield said of pit stops in the late 1960s. "It was real dangerous."

Benfield is a gas man.

Fuel is his friend.

"I'm not scared of it," he said.

Benfield has been in the business of filling Winston Cup cars for more than 30 years. He filled the tanks of Fred Lorenzen, Bobby Allison, Neil Bonnett, Dale Earnhardt, Darrell Waltrip, Cale Yarborough, Bill Elliott and Sterling Marlin, to name a few. Now, he works for the Wood Brothers team with driver Elliott Sadler.

His secret: "Don't spill."

Benfield, who is "a little over 50," quit the racing business a couple years ago, but Yellow Freight laid him off, so he's back making a living 13 seconds at a time, lugging 85-pound canisters of fuel over pit road walls and dodging rear tire changers.

He is one of the best.

"One time, I was leading a race and went in for a gas-and-go, and came out ninth," driver Jimmy Spencer said. "Another time, I had Henry gassing the car, and I won."

Of course, gurgling 22 gallons of 110 octane into a revving automobile is not for everyone. Benfield is big -- 6 feet 4 and 200 pounds -- and his strength comes in handy, along with his ability to stay calm in potentially explosive situations.

At the local station, pay-at-the-pumpers are warned not to leave the engine running. It's good advice, Benfield said, even though he gasses 800-horsepower stock cars several times a weekend standing inches from the exhaust pipe.

Disaster is a spark away.

"Anytime I see fire or smoke or anything, I do not gas that car," Benfield said. "Junior Johnson always told me, 'Anytime you see smoke, there is fire and don't even go near it with a gas can.' You just hope it doesn't backfire and catch that gas on fire. It's a chance you just take. But I've been very, very fortunate."

Benfield likes to talk about the old days when he worked for Johnson's team. In the 1970s and '80s, cars came barreling down pit road without speed limits and no one made him wear a fire suit and helmet to go over the wall.

"It was a 911 most of the time," he said.

There were no catch cans, the devices that collect overflow to minimize spillage. Gasoline splashed everywhere. If it soaked into his blue jeans -- 110 octane blisters the skin on contact -- Benfield put a hose down his britches to cool off.

Race teams were small in the 1970s and early '80s. Pit crews usually were made up of team members, not specialists flown in for race day. With Johnson, weekdays could be spent working on the cars, hauling chicken manure or herding cows on Johnson's farm.

No one practiced pit stops. No one worked out.

And pit stops lasted an eternity.

"You could eat a couple dadgum hot dogs," Benfield said.

Now, pit stops are choreographed, videotaped and down to 14 seconds for a four-tire change and full load of fuel. Benfield, however, rarely practices -- he usually is on the road driving Spencer's motorcoach from track to track -- and his only workouts involve lifting cans of liquid packaged by the ounce, not gallons.

Like Benfield, Sadler's No.21 Ford is always thirsty.

The fuel cell holds 22 gallons, which Benfield fills with two, 11-gallon canisters. When the car is a pit stall away, Benfield steps over the wall balancing the first 85-pound can.

If Sadler stops on his mark, Benfield is lined up with the opening on the left rear quarter panel. If not, he has to maneuver to make the connection.

Catch-can man Butch Moricle holds the first canister while it empties and Benfield turns to take the second from a team member on the other side of the wall. When the rear tire changer crosses in front of him, Benfield plugs in the second can. The car should be fully fueled in 13 seconds.

"Yeah, 99 percent of the time I'll be done before they finish changing the tires," Benfield said.

A gas man is in his glory when the final stop of the race calls for a gas-and-go, stopping to put in just enough fuel to make it to the checkered flag. No tires, no adjustments. Just fuel. A sloppy effort can lose the race, either by taking too long or spilling more gas on the ground than goes into the fuel cell.

Three seconds is speedy.

"They will usually tell you how much gas it needs," Benfield said. "If it's half a can, you count one-thousand-one, one-thousand-two and when you nod your head, he takes off.

"You need to be able to run with the car. There's nobody in your way, so when he takes off you can stay plugged up and run with the car and get a little more in there."

In a full sprint, it's hard not to spill.

If it wins the race, it's okay.

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