The big budgets of teams like Hendrick Motorsports are changing the way NASCAR goes racingby Ed Hinton
Hendrick Motorsports master mechanic Gary DeHart held his tongue. It was the autumn of 1989 and the filmmakers producing the stock car racing movie Days of Thunder were bent on portraying an old barn out in North Carolina's farm country as a place where Winston Cup cars were built and maintained. DeHart, who was a technical adviser for the film, knew the setting was about as accurate as shooting an episode of St. Elsewhere in a Civil War surgical tent and said so. The producers used the barn anyway.
"I didn't approve of that," says DeHart today, as he sits in his state-of-the-art office, one of several dozen in the eight-building Hendrick Motorsports complex set on 50 acres in Harrisburg, N.C. Hendrick, one of NASCAR's most dominant teams, has a $29.4 million annual budget, maintains more than 30 Winston Cup cars and supports three drivers—Jeff Gordon, Terry Labonte and Ken Schrader (Ricky Craven will replace Schrader in 1997). There are 160 staffers, including seven engineers and a full-time aerodynamicist.
Some barn.
Not even the deep-pocketed Formula One teams of Europe have as organized and sophisticated an operation as Hendrick's. "We control our own destiny," says owner and president Rick Hendrick, the car-dealership magnate who has spent 13 years, and much of his personal fortune, building the motor sports company. "We do get Chevrolet engine blocks from Chevy's foundry, but we do all our own finish work on them. We make our own heads, pistons, cams, rocker arms, springs, shocks—everything." There are robotic devices imported from Germany that make minute refinements to pistons, and Hendrick engineers have reprogrammed a $1 million machine designed to forge human hip-joint replacements to fashion precision cylinder heads instead. The Hendrick team is so efficient that it can build a race-ready Chevrolet Monte Carlo from the ground up in just eight to 10 days. Besides the Chevy engine block, about all a so-called stock Monte Carlo has in common with a Monte Carlo on a car dealer's showroom floor is the name.
Labonte's team maintains a fleet of finely tuned cars, all with the same cereal number-5.
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Although the three drivers work for the same owner, they—and their crews—compete against each other every year for the same prize: the Winston Cup title. There is some cooperation between the crews, to be sure, but on race day they are opponents. DeHart is Labonte's crew chief. Ray Evernham is head of Gordon's and also oversees the revamping of Schrader's team, which, with only two top-five finishes in 1995, hasn't been running up to Hendrick standards. Schrader was given new cars and a new crew for '96, and Phil Hammer was appointed his crew chief.
Each chief has a bird's-eye view of his team's operations. A dozen of Labonte's Kellogg's Corn Flakes Monte Carlos sit just outside DeHart's office. From where Evernham sits, he can see nine of Gordon's rainbow-colored number 24 Du Pont Monte Carlos and 10 of Schrader's red Budweiser Chevys.
Why so many cars? Every Hendrick driver has one prime racer and at least one backup tailored to each of four types of tracks:
Hendrick Motorsports mills its cylinder heads in-house.
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"We know several weeks in advance which primary and backup cars we're going to send to a race," Evernham says. "The body and chassis are done a week or so before we're going to use them. On Monday of race week I'll talk with the engine department to see if they've come up with anything new. We'll decide on a qualifying engine on Monday afternoon, and it will go in the car on Tuesday morning. Tuesday afternoon I'll decide on a final qualifying setup: chassis weight distribution, body placement on the chassis, and spring and shock absorber combinations. Wednesday we put the car on a surface plate—a one-inch-thick steel sheet that has been leveled with a laser—and complete our setup. Thursday we load and ship the cars out."
Except for the guys driving the car haulers, most members of the Hendrick operation travel to races in one of six private planes the team operates. At the track, the mechanics work out of mammoth tractor-trailer rigs that, after ferrying the cars to the racetrack, become virtual factories on wheels. If, for example, the mechanics figure that the new pavement at Pocono requires a new type of shock absorber, they can design and manufacture it right on the truck.
Qualifying for most races is held on Friday. After unloading on Friday morning, teams try to get an hour or so of practice in before time trials. Practice allows the teams to see how much certain variables—from pavement to weather to the performance of the tires—may have changed since the last time the team was at that track. Using extensive records of how various spring and shock combinations have worked at a track over the years, Evernham can implement a new configuration between the first hour of practice on Friday morning and the qualifying session on Friday afternoon. And he and Gordon talk often.
"Jeff is as good at giving feedback as any computer system you could put on the race car," says Evernham. "If he tells you a car is doing a certain thing, you can bet a year's salary it is. He doesn't know what's causing the problem or how to fix it. But he does know what a car is doing, and he's on the money all the time."
Car-dealership magnate Rick Hendrick has made his 50-acre HQ almost self-sufficient.
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At Gordon's request, Hendrick hired Evernham from the late Alan Kulwicki's team in 1992. Evernham brought with him the revolutionary concept of using professional pit stop personnel. Historically, the same mechanics who worked on the cars all week also manned the pits on race days; many teams still do it that way. But not Evernham's team, the Rainbow Warriors, the national pit crew champions. "Pit crews can win or lose races for you," says Evernham. "So why shouldn't they receive as much attention as building a motor or a chassis?"
Evernham hired Andy Papathanassiou, a former Stanford offensive lineman with a master's degree in organizational behavior, to coach his pit crew and supervise the team's conditioning. The movements of the crewmen who scramble over the 2 1/2-foot concrete wall on every pit stop are not so different from those of offensive linemen surging off the line of scrimmage on the snap of the ball.
Papathanassiou breaks down pit practice into individual and small-group elements, much like football practice. He coaches his pupils on everything from how to come over the wall and hold their hands when they carry and change a tire to where to kneel beside the car and the most efficient way to grip an air gun.
Just as weakside tackle is the hardest position to play on the offensive line—the tackle has to protect the quarterback with no help from a tight end—"the most difficult position on a pit crew is rear tire changer," says Papathanassiou. "He and his tire carrier have to run out wide after the car has entered the pits and chase the car down. The car comes to the front people. The front guys, the gas guys and the jack man don't have any effect on speeding up the stop; they can just slow it down. The smoothness and consistency of the rear changer and his carrier determine how fast you can make the stop."
There's little that's stock about the customized Chevys built at the Hendrick shop in Harrisburg.
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To ensure that his charges are up to their task, Papathanassiou supervises two weekly run-throughs in Hendrick's practice pit and four workouts in the team's training and weight room, which is as well equipped as any in pro football.
As in the NFL, those who competed on Sunday are reviewed on Monday. Race-weary vehicles are stripped of their suspensions, engines and transmission components, and two dozen parts are magnafluxed—an electromagnetic process that involves searching for microscopic cracks in metal. Then the pair of cars for the next track is brought out, and the weekly process begins again.
Should one of the drivers demolish a car during a race or in practice, a replacement can be built with dimensions that are within a few thousandths of an inch of the original. "We can duplicate all the measurements, but we can't duplicate the personality in that car," says Evernham, pointing to one particular number 24 that is his and Gordon's favorite on the intermediate tracks. "If we could duplicate what happens with the energy when that chassis is welded together, we'd be billionaires, winning 20 times a season." The team's engineers believe the "energy" and "personality" of a car lie in what DeHart calls torsional stiffness—the degree to which the hundreds of welds in a chassis resist flexing or twisting under centrifugal force during a race.
DeHart and his colleagues are constantly at work on dozens of projects that could give them an advantage on race day. Team aerodynamicist Gary Eaker, hired from General Motors in 1994, searches for nuances in bodywork that might increase downforce or decrease drag. He also looks for efficient ways to cool oil, water and brakes. Eaker is a key player in Evernham's current pet project: cutting down on the carbon monoxide poisoning that all NASCAR drivers suffer to varying degrees during every race.
"I can tell immediately, by the way Jeff answers me on the radio, when the carbon monoxide is getting to him," says Evernham. "He becomes a smart-ass. When I started working with him, I thought he was a smart-ass. But the more I got to know him, and the more I learned about carbon monoxide, the more I realized what was happening. How many races are won or lost in the last 50 miles? If a driver feels fresher than the others during those last few miles, he's going to do better."
Thanks to Papathanassiou's coaching, Gordon's pit stops are a blur.
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DeHart's and Evernham's research takes money. The three Hendrick Winston Cup teams operate on about $7 million each per year, while another $7 million goes into the cooperative efforts: engineering, and chassis and engine design and construction. Where does the money come from? Each of the teams has a primary sponsor and four associate sponsors. Though nondisclosure agreements prohibit officials from revealing specific figures, NASCAR spokesman Kevin Triplett says that a primary sponsorship—the type that gets a sponsor's name on the hood of the car—ranges from $3 million to $6 million annually. Associate sponsorships, which get a company's name in smaller letters behind the rear wheels, run anywhere from $200,000 to $1 million a year.
Hendrick has a unique way of wooing sponsors. He is the biggest retailer of passenger cars in the U.S., with more than 89 franchises in 68 locations; in 1995 his dealerships had revenues of $2.2 billion. As part of the deal for Du Pont to become primary sponsor for Gordon's car, Hendrick agreed to buy Du Pont paint and mixing machinery for use in his dealerships' body shops. When Quaker State became an associate sponsor for all three of his teams this year, Hendrick began using the oil in all his passenger-car maintenance departments, which do more than 1 million oil changes every year.
Rick Hendrick
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Hendrick Motorsports general manager Jimmy Johnson says only 53% of Hendrick Motorsports' annual budget is covered by sponsorships. The rest is covered by fees earned from conducting tests for General Motors and royalties from souvenirs, collectibles and apparel, as well as from the team's winnings—in 1995 the Hendrick team won $6.8 million in prize money, half of which went to the drivers.
Still, says Johnson, "I don't think we're the best-financed team out there. Sponsorwise, I know we're not. On a per car basis I'd say Jack Roush [who fields cars for Mark Martin, Ted Musgrave and Jeff Burton] and Richard Childress [Dale Earnhardt's team owner] are at least equal to us. Robert Yates's [Ernie Irvan and Dale Jarrett's boss] is probably even higher."
"If you've got just one driver, you can't afford it," says Hendrick of his organization's high-tech work. "If you've got three teams and you plow all the profits back into the operation, you can."
Even if Hendrick Motorsports is not the richest outfit in NASCAR, it is probably the best organized. Long gone are the gaggles of good ol' boys wielding socket wrenches, jawing and spitting and grinning as they worked on one or two cars in some cramped, musty barn in North Carolina's farm country.
"That was good tradition, good heritage," says Evernham. "But Winston Cup racing has evolved. Now we're challenging at the highest level of auto racing in America. So why shouldn't we build an organization like the Yankees' or the 49ers'?"
It would appear that they have.
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