A Look Inside Garage 56, NASCAR's Le Mans Revolution
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It’s Sunday morning at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, and I’m standing in the garage stall for the race’s experimental class, Garage 56. This year, the Garage 56 entry belongs to NASCAR and one of its most famous teams, Hendrick Motorsports, who together brought a huge, loud, hilariously American V-8 Chevy Camaro to the French countryside. It’s roaring in the distance.
Soon, IMSA champion and Garage 56 driver coach Jordan Taylor emerges from a wall of screens wearing a black sweatshirt that says “COACH” on it in cracking white letters. Taylor looks almost rested for 17 hours in; he has a bounce in his step that I certainly don’t, pulling his headset around his neck just in time for me to ask: “Have you been up this whole time?”
“Yeah,” he responds.
“Did you plan on sleeping?” I ask.
“Oh yeah.”
“So what happened there?”
“I got peer-pressured into staying up all night.”
“Who peer-pressured you?”
“Greg and Chad.”
Greg and Chad, of course, are Hendrick Motorsports’ Greg Ives and Chad Knaus, the latter of whom won seven championships and 81 races as crew chief for Jimmie Johnson in the top-level NASCAR Cup Series. Ives was a race engineer on Johnson’s car from 2006 to 2012, which included Johnson’s record five-consecutive titles, then became a crew chief himself. Knaus became Hendrick’s vice president of competition, and Johnson retired from full-time Cup racing after the 2020 season.
Now, the gang's back together at the 8.5-mile Circuit de la Sarthe. They’re joined by Taylor, as well as Johnson’s co-drivers, Formula One champion Jenson Button and two-time Le Mans winner Mike Rockenfeller. The race has two main types of vehicles—prototypes and GTE sports cars, which have huge speed differentials—and the Garage 56 car falls in the middle.
“What am I doing?” Taylor tells me. “To begin, it was just kind of letting the guys know what to expect traffic wise—where cars pass you, where to be careful in the changing conditions, what to look out for in the rain and the dry, the dangerous spots.
“It's Jimmie's first time here, it's Jenson's first time here in a GT car, and we’re not the fastest class. So if we have a pack of prototypes coming up, [I] let them know.”
Garage 56 debuted in 2012 as a place to show off innovation, and the car in it can’t officially win because it doesn’t have to abide by technical regulations. The NASCAR entry is a highly modified version of the Cup Series’ new Next Gen car, with real headlights and taillights, dive planes, more downforce, less weight, paddle shifters, a huge fuel tank, and more. Garage 56 is effectively a publicity stunt for NASCAR—the goal is to show that the Next Gen is a versatile road-course vehicle that can compete around the world, not just one designed to turn left in America.
The result is a car that looks like a Suburban in a sea of Miatas and sounds like the Earth splitting in two. It’s so much louder than every other car on track that each time my head begins to droop from exhaustion, it thunders by and jolts me upright.
“It's a big car,” Johnson tells me at around 9 a.m. on Sunday. He’s fresh out of it, with Rockenfeller taking his place. “For me, it feels normal. The sound is pointed away from the driver, so you really can't hear all that bad.
“But I can sense we're bigger. When other cars are alongside, you actually have to look over the door top to see if they're there. They’re just so much lower profile.”
As Johnson says that, he lifts onto his toes and peers over an imaginary door, mimicking what he does in the car. Taylor tells me that’s a big part of his job: helping the drivers “see” who’s around them, even when they can’t.
“In NASCAR, you have spotters,” he says. “Here, it's 8 miles, so you can't have 20 spotters. I 'm mainly looking at timing and scoring. We call them the ‘marching ants’ as the cars go around the track. With our car, it's so hard to see when they're next to you. The marching ants help us let the drivers know what to look out for, then it's up to them to get through it.”
The drivers also have radar in the car.
“As faster cars are approaching, a little arrow pops up,” Johnson tells me. “First it's green, then it's orange, then it's red, depending on how close they are. At night, it's really tough to see with the bright headlights, so you have to pay attention to the arrows.
“It's really, really helpful. There are no other mirrors, so you have to completely depend on that. We had some concerns with it, but it's worked out fine.”
With seven hours left, Johnson is fatigued. By the end, he, Button, and Rockenfeller will drive more than 2400 miles total in 24 hours. But it’s not just about driving—Johnson tells me the car holds a lot of heat inside, and he’s doing strategy at every corner.
“You're trying to run the fastest lap time you can without hurting the car or overworking the brakes,” Johnson says. “This last stint I was in, we were trying to stretch it another lap of fuel around this big 8-and-a-half-mile track. I was needing to lift earlier than normal to coast for a while, then find a new braking reference deeper into the corner to make the turn and carry momentum around. When cars would overtake me, I was trying to fall in behind them, run partial throttle, and use the draft to save more fuel.
“It's funny how awake you feel in the car. When you get out and finally move around, now I can feel it in my face. I 'm exhausted. But in the car, I felt fine.”
In the car, Johnson says he has a “funny little steering wheel with a bunch of knobs on it for all the computer systems.” He has three pedals—gas, brake, clutch—and works the clutch to leave the pit box. From there, he just uses the paddle shifters behind the steering wheel.
Most of Johnson’s career came in a Cup car with a four-speed, H-pattern manual. The Next Gen car has a five-speed sequential shift lever, but due to his retirement, he’s only run it a few times since it debuted in 2022. It hasn’t been an easy shift for anyone, including him.
“It's interesting going back to a Cup car now with the sequential,” he tells me. “My two years in IndyCar, we used paddles on the steering wheel. But something I've never really used in a car, for that matter, is the sequential box.
“When I go back to the Cup car, it takes a little bit of getting used to, especially when you want to find neutral. It's very common in a NASCAR race to kick the car into neutral and coast to save fuel, and you can’t. You've got to go all the way down through the gears.”
Other changes for Le Mans are pit stops and driver swaps. While most driver swaps in endurance races happen through car doors, Garage 56 is a promotion—meaning the drivers go through the window like they do in NASCAR, even if it’s harder.
The pit crew also uses a manual jack and modified NASCAR choreography, which involves trained athletes changing all four tires in 10 seconds. By the end of the race, they’ll complete about 25 pit stops.
“It’s been about eight months [of training],” Evan Kureczka, the pit coach for Garage 56, tells me. He has a thick mustache and a bootcut NASCAR fire suit, and when I walk into the garage, he’s lying on the floor with his sleepy crew.
“We had to modify the choreography,” he continues. “The biggest difference, really, is in NASCAR, we jump in front of the car when it's coming. Here, we have to complete fueling before we can cross the line, so that takes a little bit more time.”
Garage 56 had mixed reactions at the beginning. Button tested the car at Daytona earlier this year, getting out for the first time and asking Johnson: “How can it have so much power and so little grip?” He also recently said joining the project felt like a "mistake" at first.
But everyone came to love it, especially when it showed up in France. The car was so much bigger and louder than everything else that it immediately went viral, and as the 24 hours wore on, no one’s reaction wore off. Every time it went by, spectators would point and do one of three things: yell “Hell yeah,” say “There it is again,” or simply laugh. I was one of them. Online, everyone posted photos and videos with the viral, jokingly patriotic phrase: “WHAT THE FUCK IS A KILOMETER?”
I saw people walking around the track in T-shirts from Johnson’s NASCAR days. Like a proud parent, Knaus filmed every second of the weekend on his phone, which had a map of Circuit de la Sarthe on the back. Taylor showed up to the Le Mans driver parade in his “Rodney Sandstorm” alter ego, wearing jorts, a rainbow Jeff Gordon jacket, and a shirt with a bald eagle on it. Gordon, now a Hendrick executive, watched the race from the garage.
“It's a hell of a car,” Aiden Read, a Garage 56 engineer, tells me near the end of the race. “I love it. Everyone loves it. This whole program has been really special for me.”
Read stayed up all night as well. His job is to monitor systems, take notes, and study how to make the car better as the race goes on, and that means using his energy wisely.
“For any job, there are times when you have to be really focused, and there are times when you can rest,” he says. “There are definitely still highs and lows of my day and week. It's about knowing when you’re needed for something.”
Johnson tells me since he’s been so focused on driving, he hasn’t gotten a good handle on the excitement around the car yet. But he’s certainly heard about it.
“I hope on the back end, we've had a good clean race and we can really soak it up,” he says. “I’ve had people telling me how much the locals and fans have enjoyed it. That's awesome.”
Taylor, meanwhile, is committed to staying awake until the end. ( “I've made it to morning,” he tells me. “If I went to bed now, it'd be a failure.”) He has a boyish smile as we talk, underscoring the thing I’d known since I arrived: Garage 56 isn’t just about racing—it’s fun.
“Everyone in this box has definitely not slept,” Taylor tells me. “It's been fun to work with everyone, and it went from, 'Let's have a good time,' to now, like, we want to beat the GT class. You see the intensity ramp up massively.”
A few hours after I leave the Garage 56 stall, the car pulls in with what was described as a “driveline issue.” It takes an hour to repair, then Rockenfeller drives it out before letting Johnson in for the final 96 minutes of the race.
Garage 56, which started 39th, was benchmarked with the GTE sports cars when it arrived at Le Mans. The thinking was that while the Camaro’s V-8 would rip down the straightaways, the GTEs would handle better in corners. It ran at the front of the GTE class for a while, putting it in the high-20s overall in the 62-car field. After its time in the garage, the car finished where it started: 39th. To finish was a win in itself.
As Taylor grabs his headset to return to work, I ask: “Is there anything I didn't bring up that you want to mention?”
“Just that I 'm really tired thanks to Chad and Greg,” he smiles.
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