From shark survivor to Cup Series Playoffs, Dilly finds a home with Team Penske's pit-crew veterans

Joe Dilly’s summer vacation in 2016 was barely halfway through its first day when he’d already reached the ocean. The 14-year-old youngster had gone swimming in the saltwater at Ocean Isle Beach on the North Carolina coast, and when his family broke out a football, he was among those throwing spirals from the shallows.

Mischief, maybe a prank was Dilly’s first thought when he felt a sharp tug below the surface.

“I feel like a really hard pull under the water, kind of like someone grabs your foot to scare you,” Dilly recalls. “That’s exactly it, like it didn’t hurt — just a really strong pull. I’m looking around, and I don’t see anything.”

Dilly knew soon enough, though, that something was wrong, and a cousin saw a tall fin cresting the top of the water. Dilly quickly hobbled to the shore, admittedly “a little freaked out,” and saw blood everywhere as he reached the sand. A numbing feeling began to set in.

“I kind of knew it was a shark,” Dilly says.

So was born the mother of all conversation starters for the front-tire changer on Team Penske’s No. 22 Ford for driver Joey Logano. When FOX Sports introduced the No. 22 team’s over-the-wall crew to a TV audience during the April 21 broadcast of the Cup Series’ most recent race at Talladega Superspeedway, Dilly noted his rookie status in his five-second bio but threw in almost casually: “Also, shark attack survivor.”

The only thing missing was a record-scratch sound effect. “You know you’re a bad man when a shark bites into you and spits you out,” cracked FOX analyst Clint Bowyer. “Did you hear that guy?!”

Now 21 and in his first full season of Cup Series competition, Dilly and a veteran group of crew members are bracing for the playoffs that start with Sunday’s Quaker State 400 Available at Walmart (3 p.m. ET, USA, NBC Sports App, PRN, SiriusXM) at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Team Penske has won the last two championships, with Logano’s second title in 2022 preceding Ryan Blaney’s first in last season’s campaign.

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Dilly counts himself fortunate to have no long-term effects from his aquatic encounter eight summers ago, just the scars from near his toes to around his ankle. The wound, requiring more than 100 stitches to close, nicked one tendon but left others unblemished. Shark experts examined photos taken from the hospital, saying later that the bite marks were consistent with those made by a blacktip shark, which average nearly five feet in length. As pit-stop practice wound down last week at Team Penske’s campus, Dilly joked with his teammates that it must have been a great white.

Jake Seminara, Dilly’s opposite number on the rear-tire changes for the No. 22 team, was among those not buying it. The 38-year-old native of Steubenville, Ohio, has nearly two decades in the sport and two Cup Series championships to show for it, and he’s provided a valuable influence for Dilly and the rest of the crew. There’s a gap in age and experience between the two tire changers, but crew chief Paul Wolfe has enjoyed watching how they’ve blended into a cohesive group.

“He was a rookie coming in, and typically you wouldn’t see a guy with his experience level move up to a Cup car as quickly as he did,” Wolfe says of Dilly. “But he came in and we kind of put him through our training process and he got up to speed really fast. It’s really amazing. I think just the athletic side of it, he was able to adapt, and now you have a guy like Jake who’s been in the Cup garage for, I don’t know, 20 years or however long he’s been here, and you put some fresh guys like that with him, they’re able to balance each other out and help him progress a lot quicker.”

Both Dilly and Seminara were introduced to the sport by their fathers. Dilly’s father, Bryan, has worked at Penske for 25 years and was a car chief when Ryan Newman and Brad Keselowski drove for the organization. The younger Dilly would accompany his dad to races close to their home in Mooresville, North Carolina, growing up. He played one year of college football as a linebacker at North Greenville (S.C.) University, but spent his breaks training at Penske. When the opportunity arose on the racing side, he jumped.

Seminara, like Dilly, had also been immersed in stick-and-ball sports, but his welcome-to-NASCAR moment came in 1999 when his father took him to Pocono Raceway for his first race. He saw live pit stops, thought “I can do that,” and made it his mission as he finished high school to reach that goal. Seminara moved to North Carolina in 2004 — “people called me crazy,” he says — and split his time learning fabrication and mechanic duties, attending pit-crew school and working as a barback while fostering the right connections to make it all happen.

A year and a half later, Seminara reached the Cup Series on Mark Martin’s team for car owner Jack Roush, then pitted Kyle Busch’s Joe Gibbs Racing entries for 10 years before joining Team Penske in 2018. The full-circle twist: Less than a decade after he watched Bobby Labonte win the first race he attended, Seminara was executing pit stops for the same No. 18 JGR team. “I found that kind of ironic,” he says now.

Seminara has seen pit-stop techniques and equipment evolve, and has been a part of seven-person, six-person and five-person crews as the rules have changed throughout his career. He says the crew members with longer tenures who have adapted quickest still make up the best teams on pit road, but he’s also taken time to mentor Dilly and the newer guard, shaping the next generation.

“I think everyone else on the team has won two championships, and he’s won one race, so he’s very fortunate, I think, to follow and learn,” Seminara says. “I feel like we can kind of steer him and teach him the way we think things should be done, but it’s up to him if he wants to do that. But we told him, eventually, one day, five, six, seven years down the road, you’re going to be the older guy, so you’re going to be teaching these younger guys.”

One of the most consequential pit-road changes came when NASCAR’s Next Gen car was introduced in 2022, with a single, center-mounted wheel fastener replacing the five-lug system. While many veterans were forced to adapt to a new method for tire changes, Dilly was the first Team Penske crew member to train solely on the single-lug technique. “They never let me even touch a five-lug gun,” Dilly says.

“He didn’t have to unlearn anything, right?” Wolfe said. “I think that was somewhat of an advantage for him. You’ve got these guys like Jake that have been changing five lugs for how many years and get that muscle memory, and a new guy coming in doesn’t have to forget what he did for 15 years and can start fresh. He’s obviously a very talented guy, and he’s done a nice job. It’s one thing to be able to do it in pit practice and have the speed that we look for, but then when you bring him to the big time, bring him to the race track and he’s still able to perform under the pressure was exciting to see and obviously the reason why he’s still on our car.”

The “big time” that Wolfe references is about to shift to its prime time in the 10 playoff races that lay ahead. Logano reached the Cup Series’ biggest prize just two seasons ago, but was eliminated after a rocky first round last year. This season, he slots in as the ninth seed in the 16-driver field, having clinched title eligibility with a late June win at Nashville Superspeedway.

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For the No. 22 crew, the mechanics and general approach to pit service in the postseason may be unchanged, but the stakes are higher and margin for error even slimmer. Seminara has been through the playoff rigors before, but the hunger for his third championship burns inside.

“For me, it’s totally ramped up, but the butterflies will definitely get more intense,” Seminara says. “I think if you’re not getting nervous at this point, I don’t feel like you’re being competitive. For me, just this part of the year, you have to be flawless. You can make a mistake and you’re out of the playoffs, and then your season’s done and you just ride around for the next four, five, six, seven weeks. We got eliminated in the first round last year. It was terrible, and then you literally think, ‘Man, I’ve got seven more weeks of this. We’re irrelevant, basically.”

Seems there’s a high bar for stress already established for the tire changer who has survived a brush with a predator from the deep blue sea. Dilly says there’s no true comparison between the relative dangers of the ocean and the perils of popping over the wall into onrushing traffic, but the handful of close calls early in his young career haven’t slowed him.

“We kind of make fun of him, but I couldn’t imagine being bit by a shark,” Seminara says. “We always joke with him about it, right? No, I’ve never had anything traumatic to me happen like that, so I can’t put myself in those shoes.”

The bigger question is whether he’s been back in the water since. Dilly smiles and says his trips to the beach now come with an abundance of caution.

“I go to the ocean, but I go fishing now. I’ll go to my knee to cast, and I kind of walk out real quick,” he says. “Not the biggest fan of swimming anymore. If I can’t see my feet, I’m not a fan.”