In quest to push others to peak performance, Josh Wise finds his calling

The first clue to solving the mystery of Josh Wise came at dinner. I told him to pick his favorite restaurant, and I would meet him there. Wise, whose company, Wise Optimization, counts as clients some of NASCAR‘s top drivers, chose Masala Mastee in Davidson, North Carolina, where he lives, and then checked and double-checked with me to make sure I like Indian food.

I arrived a few minutes early and bounded up the stairs to find him already there. Tall and lanky, with a shaved head and blue eyes, he rose to greet me, clearly recognizing me even though we had never met. Starting with that dinner, I spent two days around Charlotte with Wise in pursuit of the secrets that have led his drivers to Victory Lane and the head table at the champion‘s banquet. This was no easy task. Wise is simultaneously well-known in the NASCAR garage and an elusive Svengali shrouded in mystery.

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He rarely gives interviews and would rather talk about his team of drivers and coaches and their results on the track than himself or the specific methods he uses to mold his clients into drivers capable of those accomplishments. His clients love working with him so much some won‘t talk about him for fear of revealing the advantage he gives them. They‘ve even resorted to subterfuge, with at least one driver giving others credit in interviews while privately acknowledging Wise actually deserved the praise.

What, I wanted to know, is Wise doing to create that mystique?

I flew to Charlotte to find out, and in several hours of conversation, I started to wonder who was profiling who. Wise asked me nearly as many questions as I asked him, and he listened to and engaged with my answers.

We discussed taking our daughters to see Taylor Swift, the Dunning-Kruger effect, how fear self-selects drivers out before they reach the Cup level, Comanches, glasses that track where drivers are looking, what he learned visiting with the Los Angeles Dodgers during spring training, and when we got around to it, racing, including the Hail Melon, Chili Bowl (we discovered he raced in it and I covered it in 2003), F1, and how the entire sport is maddening because the relationship between performance and results is not 1 to 1, a fact that, as much as anything, explains the need for Wise‘s services.

He is Aristotle of the asphalt, Socrates of stock cars, a simmering stew of a man who is best known for racing, endurance sports and coaching but whose interests run far wider. A world-class driver himself, he brings to Wise Optimization the listening ear of a therapist, the resilience of an endurance athlete and the wisdom gained by on-track failure. He has become NASCAR‘s Driver Whisperer, a man whose background in racing and fitness, education in psychology and deep study on optimization have given him unique insight into the human condition that he channels into teaching drivers how to go fast, turn (mostly) left, and live their best lives all the while.

But how does he do it?

The answer, it turns out, is as simple as passion, as complicated as human relationships, and as profound as redeeming pain.

A superstar in open-wheel cars in the 2000s, Wise arrived in the NASCAR Cup series in 2011 with a world of opportunity laid out in front of him. But from outside the garage it looked like his racing career turned hard right into the retaining wall. In 156 races across six Cup seasons, he had one top 10 and led just seven total laps. He spent untold mental, physical and emotional energy and gathered nothing to show for it.

That‘s what he thought at the time, at least. Because the second clue in solving the mystery of Josh Wise is that what he once viewed as failure he now sees as preparation.

When he decided to stop driving after the 2016 season, he dreamed up a business to help drivers optimize their results — to redirect their careers away from the proverbial retaining wall. He would become for others what he had needed himself. As an accomplished triathlete, he already had a reputation for marbling physical fitness with driver preparation. He pitched the idea to Max Jones, a friend and mentor who was an executive with Chip Ganassi Racing at the time.

“I‘m going to build a program to help these guys be way better than they even know they‘re capable of,” he told Jones as they talked in the garage area.

“Wait right here,” Jones said, and he hustled to the team hauler to round up other Ganassi officials so Wise could pitch them, too. That led to a formal presentation at Ganassi headquarters a few weeks later. Wise was soon working with Ganassi drivers Kyle Larson (now with Hendrick Motorsports) and Jamie McMurray.

Even in those early days, when Wise‘s one-man program was a faint shadow of the eight-person operation it is now, there were signs that something was changing, something deeper than Wise doling out lessons about fitness, braking points and resilience. Racing has had psychologists and exercise coaches and performance experts for many years. But nobody had ever done all of that in one holistic program, let alone the way Wise does — with a singular blend of 30,000-foot view expertise, barrel-through-the-corner-sideways experience and put-his-arm-around-you-and-say-man-it-sucks-to-try-so-hard-and-lose compassion.

“It comes down to his empathy and ability to connect with a driver as a person,” says Eric Warren, GM‘s executive director of global motorsports competition.

“I don‘t know how he‘s doing it, but he‘s convinced them and next thing you know, they‘re more into it than he is,” Jones says.

“Josh‘s most important goal is to read each driver and ask, where does he need help, and how can I help him the most?” said McMurray, who is now retired from racing and works as an analyst for FOX Sports.

Wise follows the answers to those questions wherever they lead. With McMurray, it was toward fitness. When Wise first suggested McMurray run to get in shape, McMurray gave him all the excuses in the world why he couldn‘t.

Just run for five minutes, Wise suggested, like a fisherman choosing the exact right fly and casting it to the exact right spot, then walk home.

Five minutes — that‘s it? McMurray thought, a trout unaware he was about to be hooked. I can do that.

McMurray tried it.
It wasn’t so bad.
He did it again.
And again.
And again.

Five minutes became 10, then 20, and by the end of that year McMurray had ran a marathon. Now McMurray says he doesn‘t feel right on days he does not run.

“It changed my life getting to be a part of that program,” said McMurray, who ran 10 miles the morning I interviewed him. “Forever.”

All of Wise‘s clients have stories like that, each marked by the fact that whatever change Wise initiated started with his passion for optimizing their lives. This is the third clue to solving the mystery of Josh Wise: No client of Wise Optimization ever has to wonder whether Wise cares. Helping other drivers has become his true calling.

“I love this more than I ever loved driving a race car,” Wise says. “Driving a race car is a very selfish activity. You are alone. It‘s all about you. I absolutely love making it about other people. It‘s the most fulfilling years of my life, for sure.”

It‘s that passion that‘s allowed Wise to look back on his racing career with new perspective.

“I feel like I only raced cars to prepare me to do this. That‘s really how I feel,” he says. “It was an important part of my life experience that allowed me to do something that I really love, and I feel like I‘m just made to do.”

He paused. He knows how that sounds, so he answered the obvious question before I asked it.

“Try telling me that 12 years ago when I was a race car driver,” he says. “I would have laughed in your face.”

As Wise‘s reputation grew, so did demands for his business, his sense of what was possible and his recognition of what more he could offer. His drivers shared with him problems from their personal lives, issues he was unqualified to comment on, let alone solve. He believes it‘s better to not say the right thing than to say the wrong thing.

“So I was just quiet a lot,” Wise said. “But in that silence, I knew, I couldn‘t help you if I wanted to.”

If he was going to optimize their lives, Wise realized, he had to help the whole person, not just the driver. So he earned a degree in psychology.

He also hired former F1 and NASCAR driver Scott Speed to teach driving skills, Olympic gold medal winning speed skater Dan Jansen to run Wise Optimization‘s physical training and former soccer coach Matt Spear to oversee mindfulness and resilience. All of that, he says, has energized his business and the quality and diversity of what it offers. The operation expanded beyond just Ganassi drivers: Wise now works with two dozen Chevrolet drivers ranging from Kyle Larson to aspiring young drivers he shepherds in a program akin to a driver academy.

That growth yielded stunning results for his clients. Larson won the Cup Series championship in 2021, and Sheldon Creed won the Craftsman Trucks championship in 2020. Tyler Reddick won the Xfinity Series championship in 2018 and 2019, though Wise doesn‘t count Reddick‘s titles because Wise “only” served as a consultant for Reddick back then and was not working with him full-time.

The morning after dinner, I met Wise at GM‘s Charlotte Tech Center, also the home of Wise Optimization headquarters. He gave me a tour of the pristine 130,000-square-foot facility that sits close to both Hendrick Motorsports and Charlotte Motor Speedway. I peeked into one room and saw a NextGen car painted with NASCAR‘s 75th anniversary logo sitting on a shaker rig. In another, Wise client Austin Dillon and others worked on simulators. In a third, mechanics fiddled with an open-wheel chassis.

Inside his headquarters, which Chevy provides as part of his deal to work exclusively with its drivers, a rowing machine and treadmills lined one side, with weights stacked along the other. The sauna contained books by Anthony de Mello (an Indian Jesuit priest), John Maxwell (an American pastor and business writer) and Don Miguel Ruiz, who writes about Toltec wisdom (the Toltecs ruled Mexico 1,000 years ago). Wise proudly pointed out a collage of pictures — one each of all the drivers who have won a race while working with him.

Inspirational quotes were also displayed prominently at the headquarters.

There was one from Danish-American journalist Jacob Riis: “When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before” …

It shared space with a quote from basketball superstar Kobe Bryant: “Everyone wants to be a beast, until it‘s time to do what beasts do” …

And there was one attributed to Albert Einstein that Wise says sums up his philosophy about racing and life and his attempts to optimize both: “Energy is everything. That‘s all there is to it.”

We talked far more about striving, failure and achievement in the context of racing than we did about the actual nuts and bolts of driving. Which makes sense, because the service he provides goes far beyond simple driving instructions. He seeks to optimize the whole person, starting with the space between their ears.

Before he works with a driver, he asks them to fill out a 13-page questionnaire, from which he builds a psychological profile that is at least as important as the person‘s ability to wheel a race car. He translates those questionnaires based on his formal education and his own ongoing quest to understand what makes drivers good at their jobs.

Reading is an important part of the process for Wise. He reads three times a day, including scientific literature three times a week, and writes at least once a week. He prefers to own hard copies of books and likes to keep them in sight because their presence sometimes kick-starts some serious deep-thinking sessions.

“I‘ll see it, and it‘ll bring a thought back to my mind — all these concepts and thoughts will come flooding in,” he says. “I like that experience.”

Wise is insatiably curious, and open to new ideas. During our interview he pulled out his phone and bought a book I recommended moments after I brought it up. He delights in discovering questions to ask at least as much as answering them. Let‘s assume, for simplicity‘s sake, that the most important question he asks in pursuit of driver optimization is, “What makes a driver good?”, an important but ultimately unanswerable question. But Wise loves trying anyway.

“I could scroll like this for four minutes and not run out,” he says, showing me a document on his phone that contains questions he wants to chase the answers to. “Every one I answer, I get three new ones.”

The fourth secret to solving the mystery of Josh Wise was sitting right across from me all this time. Our conversations about life and curiosity and passion and longing for that which is temporarily out of reach reveal at least as much about why he‘s successful as his coaching secrets would.

As Jones told me: “There‘s a lot of people who have tried to copy what he‘s doing. But the key to it is Josh.”

Or this from Warren: “I‘m here to tell you, I don‘t think (his coaching skill) is unique to just racing. I think he has a skill set to encourage any athlete.”

———-

After the tour of the tech center, Wise and I jumped in his SUV and drove to GoPro Motorplex in Mooresville, North Carolina, a karting track owned by Justin Marks, co-owner of Trackhouse Racing. There we met Speed and Creed, an Xfinity Series driver who won the 2020 Truck Series championship with a dash from ninth to first in the final three laps of the last race of the season.

Speed instructed Creed to run three kinds of laps: “wide-ass open,” in which he should push himself to the limits of control; “no slip” in which the car and tires should always be pointed in the same direction; and in between those two. I watched Speed and Wise as they watched Creed. Wise watched with an all-but blank mind, trying not to let any preconceived notions of what Creed should or shouldn‘t do cloud his assessment. Speed watched more like a batting coach assessing a hitter‘s swing.

During the “no slip” portion, Creed‘s squealing tires suggested there was plenty of slipping going on. His sawing of the wheel offered more proof. Creed‘s background is in off-road racing. He drove as if he defined “no slip” as in control, which he surely felt he was, as opposed to the more literal definition of the tires not slipping. No slip to him might be damn near rolling over for someone less experienced in off-road racing.

Making that discovery, and learning from it, was the point of this drill. As Creed prepared for another set of laps, Speed told him to over-exaggerate the no slip — to lean in to being deliberate about it. “If it‘s 7/10ths slower a lap, it doesn‘t matter,” Speed told him. “I want it to look like a slot car.”

“Slot car,” Creed repeated back, like a child ordered to eat broccoli.

It was at least as much of a mental exercise as it was a physical exercise for Creed. But the point was not that a no slip lap is fast or slow or that a wide-ass open lap is fast or slow. The point was for Creed to expand what he believes he is capable of. There should be a huge gap between no slip and wide-ass open. For Creed, before the exercise, there wasn‘t. Sometimes that gap is similarly narrow but it‘s the other way around, and a driver has to be pushed to be more wide-ass open.

“That‘s the beautiful thing about what we do,” Speed says. “Every one of our drivers has their own perspective on everything. I can tell them all the same thing, and they‘re all going to have their own perception on what that means. If they‘re biased in one direction, I try to build something that they can explore on the other side.”

Wise says he doesn‘t like to have his life depend on external input, so he occasionally quits drinking coffee. He told me on the way to a coffee shop that he ended his most recent fast the day before. “I had like three sips, and I was calling people, telling them how much I love them,” he said.

From this, he extrapolated deep meaning.

“I have this simple philosophy. Everything comes at a cost,” he says. “If I drink coffee, the cost to me is I become dependent on it. If I don‘t drink coffee, I miss the joy of drinking coffee.”

In a different form, he explores this topic when he meets with a new client.

“We have that talk right out of the gate: ‘What do you want? Be specific. What do you think that costs — your time, your energy, what do you have to give up, what do you have to be uncomfortable with?‘ There are a lot of things that spiral off of that conversation.”

He asks himself those same questions and builds his life around the answers. He has a system for everything — from where he puts his keys to the clothes he wears (only black, white, gray and blue). He created those systems to free his brain energy. He never has to think, what should I wear, or where did I put my keys, because he knows the answer to both questions.

“I want to do as little thinking about things that don‘t matter as possible so I can use my brain for things I care about,” he says.

What he cares about most in his professional life is right there in the name of his own company: optimization. And perhaps the best proof of the power of his program came when he became his own client.

One day a few years ago, two of his clients, Alex Bowman and Larson, pestered him about driving again. He had slammed that door shut … but left it unlocked. The most fun he ever had racing was a pavement midget at Indianapolis Raceway Park. Maybe — maybe — he‘d do that, but only that, he told Bowman and Larson. It was, he admits, a dodge. Pavement midget races at IRP were, as he put it, “extinct,” so it didn‘t matter.

And then they came back to life.

Bowman called to tell him he had ordered a midget for him before Wise had even heard the announcement.

He tried to back out but eventually decided to do it. He saw it as a chance to have fun, to show his kids what he used to do, and to validate his ideas about optimization. He wrote a system to prepare himself physically, mentally and technically, just like he would for any driver. That system called for him to study video of himself at IRP. One night, he watched an old race on YouTube while in bed. Like a seasoned artist aghast at an early painting, he recognized right away that he entered the corners all wrong.

He added to his system a plan to work with Speed — who has world-class braking and cornering skills — to learn how to drive deep into corners. After starting in the back during his first race, Wise used braking skills he learned as part of his system. Wise knifed his way to the front, dive-bombing the leader with four laps left to win the race.

For Wise, it was a mic-drop moment. He proved to his kids, and to himself, that he could still wheel a race car, and also that his systems work. And here, then, is the final clue to solving the mystery of Josh Wise. He has become for his clients what he wished he had for himself as he wrestled through 10 years of repeated failure as a driver.