LDN - Sports

Hendrick Motorsports down but not out in Chase

[August 23, 2016] By Jonathan Ingram, The Sports Xchange

Rick Hendrick is one of the most impressive and accomplished team owners in all of American sports. But the 2016 season has not been his team's year in the NASCAR Sprint Cup.

Hendrick Motorsports, which has won 11 championships, hasn't won a race since the Fontana, Calif., event in March. The drivers of the Chevy entries of Hendrick have spent most of the summer looking through the windshield at other teams leading laps and winning races during an 18-race losing streak.

Headed into the postseason Chase, it's the teams of Joe Gibbs Racing, Team Penske and Stewart Haas Racing and their drivers who are the favorites. Hendrick's six-time champion Jimmie Johnson, a perennial pick to win a title by the pundits, has led all of five laps this summer and is now seen as an also-ran.

Hendrick, who refers to himself a "servant leader," has been able to walk the fine line between being supportive and demanding performance from his employees, whether in his car dealership empire or his racing team. But it's clear where Hendrick's greatest passion lies.

"People think I'm in racing because I'm a car dealer," he said early in his tenure as a NASCAR team owner, which began in 1984. "I'm in the car business so I can go racing."

Hendrick has weathered much more severe storms than this one. The American Honda scandal resulted in a single conviction for Hendrick, who was later pardoned by President Clinton. During his trial, he was taking interferon to beat a battle with leukemia. But those weren't the toughest battles. In 2004 he lost his brother, son, two nieces and longtime engine builder Randy Dorton, among the 10 who died in the crash of a Hendrick-owned plane while it was en route to a race in Martinsville, Va.

Hendrick has maintained his equilibrium due to a strong marriage, his Christian beliefs, his love of the car business and, above all, his passion for racing.

On Saturday afternoon, the team owner met with the media at the Bristol Motor Speedway to discuss the latest development for Hendrick Motorsports -- the signing of Camping World Truck Series driver William Byron to a contract and a seat next year in the Xfinity Series at JR Motorsports. But the problems facing his team and the ongoing absence of Dale Earnhardt Jr. due to concussion-related injuries inevitably came up.

Hendrick sees Byron as the next Chase Elliott for his organization but said he wasn't being added to the roster as a future replacement for Earnhardt.

"William has to do with our future, down the road," said Hendrick, who was in good form while recalling that he first met a 6-year-old Byron when he was trick-or-treating at the door of his house.

Earnhardt, said Hendrick, is "doing great, and he wants to get back in the car. Beyond that, I don't know anything I can tell you about him."

An announcement whether Earnhardt will drive at the Michigan International Raceway on Sunday will be made in the next two days.

As for his team, Hendrick offered no excuses in his usual low-key but confidant and direct manner.

"We're proud of our company, we're going to be better and we like the challenge," he said.

The temporary sidelining of Earnhardt was a major setback for the Hendrick Motorsports season. He had finished second four times and was likely to make the Chase either on points or by winning a race. But the biggest setback occurred early in the season when the Stewart Haas Racing team announced a switch to Ford in 2017.

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SHR has been affiliated with Hendrick since it was formed, which meant buying chassis and engines. In addition to catching Hendrick flatfooted, the switch meant a gradual move away from sharing chassis information as SHR began building more cars in-house to prepare for next season.

Earnhardt's replacement, four-time champion Jeff Gordon, has been slow to adapt to the new low downforce chassis in the four races he has competed in. Elliott, who appears set to make the Chase on points, is in his first full Sprint Cup season. Kasey Kahne has not adapted well to the low downforce because he likes to be so aggressive on corner entry, which doesn't work well with the new generation of cars.

That leaves Johnson as the key source for chassis information where a year ago the information also came from Earnhardt and the soon-to-retire Gordon, plus the four Stewart Haas Racing drivers.

Evidently, the Hendrick team is behind on aerodynamics, an area where SHR -- which owns a moving ground plane, full-scale wind tunnel -- has always been independent. That helps explain why SHR has three drivers in the Chase on victories -- co-owner Stewart, Kurt Busch and Sunday's winner at Bristol, Kevin Harvick. Those three account for four victories this year.

Hendrick, in his "servant leader" role, recently spent 20 hours with his team at the Aerodyn wind tunnel in Mooresville, N.C., working on the aerodynamics.

"When you're not winning, you can walk away from it and point fingers, or you can jump in it," Hendrick said.

The accountability runs deep in the Hendrick organization. Like everyone in the sport, the team keeps a close eye on competitors, in part to be sure all the teams are playing by the same rules. Doug Duchardt, the executive vice president and general manager of Hendrick Motorsports, said the competing teams that are performing well have "worked on improving a lot of different things on the car over time."

In other words, there is no silver bullet -- or a cheating scandal looming.

Duchardt said Hendrick is best at assessing whether people are getting along and working well together or if changes need to be made. One change already made for this season was the hiring of a new computational fluid dynamics specialist to work on wind tunnel scale models, which then results in simulation programs on computers and eventually to testing at full scale in wind tunnels such as Aerodyn.

But time is running short with the start of the Chase looming on Sept. 18 at the Chicagoland Speedway. Last year, Hendrick rallied his troops from summer doldrums with exhortations to work harder. This year, he has gotten into the action up to his elbows.

At this point, it pays to remember that last year's champion, Kyle Busch, advanced through the Chase on points before winning the title by winning the final race at Homestead Miami Speedway, a track Johnson likes.

So it's still too early to count out the Hendrick team and its resident genius, who also happens to be the team owner.

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