Moniteau graduate Stephen Doran, left, has helped Shane van Gisbergen to three wins in the NASCAR Cup Series as his crew chief. Submitted photo

Stephen Doran didn’t think to reflect after his first win as a NASCAR crew chief.

A unique circumstance after an unusually comfortable finish didn’t really allow him to.

The 2003 Moniteau graduate was on radio communication last month as Trackhouse Racing team driver Shane van Gisbergen won the NASCAR Cup Series race in Mexico City, the association’s first international Cup Series points race in half a century.

The New Zealand native beat the second-place finisher, Christopher Bell, by almost 17 seconds, the largest margin of victory in any Cup race since 2009.

A whirlwind of excitement prevented any mental revisitation of what it took to achieve the career milestone. Doran, who’s been involved in racing since he was 10 years old, accomplished a career goal by becoming a crew chief last year.

“It’s not an easy job to get,” Doran said. “There’s essentially 40 of them out there at the Cup level.”

Doran and van Gisbergen won again July 6 in Chicago and July 13 at Sonoma.

Usually, after a race, Doran said his team packs up, heads straight to their plane and leaves for home. This time, however, it wasn’t scheduled to depart until the following day. After the win at Autódromo Hermanos Rodríguez, the celebration for Doran, van Gisbergen and their crew was much more remarkable.

“Normally you park the car in victory lane,” Doran said. “Mexico had more of a Formula 1-style podium ... a couple stories above the track, and did a podium celebration up there. It was different for us, but it was fun. We don’t spray champagne, we did Red Bull, which is one of our sponsors.”

The ensuing layover afforded the team a night on the town, which Doran used to get some tacos and have a few drinks at the hotel bar.

If he were to retrace his path, he’d tell a listener how his father’s side of the family were regulars in a modified racing division at local tracks such as Lernerville Speedway.

It was hard for him not to get involved, falling in love with “the cars and the speed and all the sensations of being at the racetrack,” he said. “What keeps you hooked and addicted to it is the competition aspect.”

He was around 12 or 13 when he started working on cars. He then worked for a team in Ohio and eventually moved to sprint cars and dirt track racing. In 2006, he moved to North Carolina and began as a mechanic at Petty Enterprises.

Doran climbed the ladder, setting his sights on first becoming a car chief, then a crew chief, a path, he said, everyone was taking.

“As NASCAR kind of evolved, the path became more clear that you probably needed to be a race engineer,” Doran said. “That was the more likely path to get there, so I kind of transitioned in 2016.”

He progressed from setup mechanic to secondary race engineer to lead race engineer of Kevin Harvick’s car. Doran was tasked with everything that goes into preparing a car for races, including “controlling what springs and shocks go in the car, how the geometry is set, the right heights that you hit the track with,” he said.

He was also involved in strategic approaches, working closely with the crew chief. Doran enjoyed his role with that team and waited to try to make the transition to crew chief until Harvick was through with racing. Team owner Justin Marks had the idea to pair Doran with van Gisbergen.

Doran likened a crew chief’s duties to those of a football team’s head coach, saying: “You have what’s the equivalent of assistant coaches. You have your lead engineer on the technical side and your car chief on the car side that are kind of managing their own smaller groups, but you’re trying to manage the whole team.”

He leads post-race meetings Monday and manager meetings the next day. Midway through Tuesday, focus turns to the next race and the car preparation that goes into it.

“It’s a lot, and the schedule’s grueling,” Doran said. “We’re in a stretch right now of 28 straight weekends of racing. Our last off-week was Easter, and we won’t have another until the second week of November. It is a grind, and it doesn’t stop and the competition pushes you to put maximum effort into every weekend.

“It’s an intense sport, for sure, but it’s so fun when you get to the top of it.”

Van Gisbergen finished 30th Sunday at Dover International Speedway. The next race is the Brickyard 400 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.