How Sterling Chase Worked His Way Into Pit Crewing

Being a race car mechanic is to possess a skillset few can profess, and the experience to do so for the highest bidder is even rarer. A wrench-for-hire, though, is but one of multiple, unique hats Sterling Chase perches atop his silver-streaked Afro. You can also call him a Volkswagen expert extraordinaire and—unofficially—the Pikes Peak cowbell hype man. Before the green flag drops at the world’s most extreme hill climb race, Chase’s is often the last smile many racers see.

But while the journey from grandstand to pit lane looks like a matter of feet, it’s a divide that Chase found took years to cross. He had to forge a path himself, and now that he has, he hopes to light the way for younger generations of car and motorsport fans to follow.

The Desire To Be Unique

Like many car enthusiasts, the seeds of Chase’s interest were sown early in life by watching his father go four-wheeling and work on his 1979 Chevy LUV. Issues of Super Street watered these seeds, which germinated and flourished by the light of Colin McRae and Richard Burns butting heads on Speedvision. These instilled in him the desire to become a rally driver, and being a good rally driver to Chase meant technical literacy—knowing how to set the car up, and fix it if need be.

So, rather than computer science, Chase attended Universal Technical Institute, where hazing rituals not uncommon in automotive service programs unfortunately gave him second thoughts. He left UTI to sell cars for a period, during which The Fast and the Furious dropped. It both rekindled his interest in wrenching and ignited an entirely new one for VWs—not the in-vogue Hondas, Mitsubishis, and Toyotas of the day.

“I was like, ‘I want to be something unique and original,'” Chase told The Drive. “I was just like, ‘Volkswagen is kind of cool because I took German in high school for like three years.’ I [thought] that would probably be a good fit.”

Before long, Chase was back to wrenching, this time at a Firestone store, where he picked up hands-on experience with racing essentials, like performing alignments and replacing brakes. He returned to UTI, graduated, and was accepted to the Volkswagen Academy in Rancho Cucamonga, California, which sharpened his skills and landed him a job in the VW service network. But while he’d gathered the skills he’d sought as his ticket to go racing, he had no place to ply them, in part because there wasn’t any obvious racing scene where he lived in Colorado.

“One thing that’s really discouraging in Colorado is that the racing scene here is so underground and everything,” Chase said. “You wouldn’t hear [about] this on Channel 9 news or whatever, that sort of thing. It’s just going to be something that you’re going to have to know someone to get in. It’s like a secret club.”

An Opportunity Falls From the Sky

Yet as they sometimes do around VWs, an opportunity at long last fell out of the sky for Chase in 2007, when he was invited to crew on a VW Jetta at Rally Colorado on the Rally America calendar. This also presented the chance to psych up drivers from the sidelines, a habit he carried over from his participation in martial arts—but he wasn’t certain how his energy would be received by this new, wonderful—though overwhelmingly white—world of motorsport.

“There [were] a whole bunch of old white folks,” Chase recalled thinking. “I [hoped I wasn’t] going to piss them off because I [knew] that sometimes people in the car, they’re just imagining the road. They’re getting their zone and everything else. I [hope I wasn’t] ruining their zone.

“And the only thing I had,” he went on, “was this Volkswagen bell that I got from a Volkswagen show back in ’05. I was just like, ‘Aight, let’s do it.'”

As it turned out, though, the rallyists reacted to his cowbell like Christopher Walken in a certain SNL sketch.

“It was like a complete 180 [from what I expected],” Chase said. “Everybody on the grid was, like, super ecstatic about it. And it was not just for cheering for one individual like my driver, I was cheering for the whole grid and everything else. That just kind of snowballed into what we have nowadays.”

You can see Chase in action in the Instagram video below.

This was a tipping point for Chase, whose signature poof of hair has since been seen at races across Colorado from rallies to hill climb races, Formula Vee, rallycross, and even Pikes Peak, all on top of his full-time work at shops. As long as someone covered his fuel, food, and lodging, he’d be there with his bell and his tools, both to hype up the starting grid and keep his client’s car running right. 

There came a point in 2015, though, where a colleague in Formula Vee had to take him aside and remind him that he was a professional—and that his time was worth money.