Hendrick is man behind NASCAR'S dream team

[Schwartz Fan]

Hendrick is man behind NASCAR'S dream team
By Thomas Pope
Motor sports editor


The last car dealer you’ll ever see in a TV commercial is Rick Hendrick. No screaming, no bogus claims of being “the undisputed price leader,” no pets as accessories, no grandchildren cajoling you to hurry down and buy a new Corvette.

Understated is more Hendrick’s style, and, boy, does it sell. From his start in the car business at 26 with a single Chevrolet dealership in Bennettsville, S.C., Hendrick now serves as chairman of an auto conglomerate. Last year, the 80-plus dealerships that comprise Hendrick Automotive Group generated nearly $4 billion in sales.

He’s just as successful on the racetrack. Entering the 2008 season with the Feb. 17 Daytona 500, Hendrick Motorsports has seven NASCAR Sprint Cup championship trophies in its Harrisburg museum. Since the team’s formation in 1984, Hendrick drivers — Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, Terry Labonte and Darrell Waltrip among them — have won 167 times and earned more than $257 million. Hendrick’s drivers took the checkered flag in half of the 36 races last year, and the ’08 driver roster includes new arrival Dale Earnhardt Jr., the sport’s most popular driver.

Hendrick, a 58-year-old native of Palmer Springs, Va. — a town so small it doesn’t have its own zip code — has accomplished all this despite several personal setbacks. He spent three years defeating a form of leukemia that claims 95 percent of its victims. A major legal battle saw him plead guilty to a federal mail fraud charge. A plane crash killed his son, his brother and eight other people.

Still, Hendrick forges ahead. While selling cars is his bread and butter, racing is his greater passion.

“I don’t think I could walk away from it. I don’t believe my heart would let me,” he said last month. “I don’t think I could turn my back on the people that built this place.”

Browbeating not allowed

The key to Hendrick’s business and racing success is simple, said Humpy Wheeler, the president and general manager of Lowe’s Motor Speedway, located barely a mile from Hendrick’s sprawling racing headquarters.

“He knows how to get people together and working toward one goal. That’s all there is to it,” Wheeler said. “He’s a humble person. People like him, they want to work for him, they want to try that extra 10 percent. And he’s not overbearing — the kind of thing that drives people away and disjoints group efforts.

“He would have been a great football coach,” Wheeler said. “He would’ve won Super Bowls.”

On the track, that’s exactly what Hendrick has accomplished.

More than 550 employees refine the Chevrolets that are hauled from track to track for Gordon, Johnson, Earnhardt Jr. and Casey Mears, and a good portion of those mechanics and engineers are paid to concentrate solely on staying ahead of the competiton. Hendrick drivers have captured seven of the past 13 Cup titles and six Daytona 500 victories.

All of the resources in the world — and Hendrick Motorsports lacks for nothing — are useless without the proper leadership, Gordon said.

“When you look at how he runs a business and what type of person Rick is, to me that’s the thing that separates us from the competition,” said Gordon, who has a lifetime contract to drive for Hendrick.

“He expects for us to be competitive and do well because he gives us the equipment and the resources, but the way he goes about putting the pressure on you, it’s kind of like a soft sell. It’s very impactful, but at the same you feel like, ‘Wow, that’s the nicest guy I ever met,’ and ‘That’s the nicest way anybody’s ever told me I’d better go out there and win.’”

According to Fayetteville native Jimmy Johnson, who ran Hendrick’s racing operation from 1986-98, Hendrick’s greatest gift is toleration; the trait Helen Keller called “the greatest gift of the mind.”

“Rick believes that being able to get 60 percent good out of a person is worth putting up with the 40 percent bad,” Johnson said.

“Sometimes, Rick would do things and I would question them: ‘Rick, why are you doing this?’ ” he said. “Like, a crew chief would want to do something crazy that would cost the company a lot of money, and Rick would say, ‘Jimmy, I want to take away all the excuses in case it doesn’t work.’ ”

Tragedy and triumph

Hendrick’s credo of going the extra mile to reach his goals occasionally has a backlash.

In November 1996, two weeks after he was diagnosed with cancer, Hendrick was accused by federal prosecutors of sending money and gifts to Honda executives to gain favorable treatment in the allocation of cars and awarding of dealerships.

In August of the following year, Hendrick, weakened by twice-daily injections to treat his disease, pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud. He was given a one-year sentence, which he served inside his Charlotte home. In 2000, he was pardoned by President Clinton.

On Oct. 24, 2004, Hendrick endured the worst blow of all. Too sick to travel to the Cup race at Martinsville, Va., he stayed home. The plane in which he would have traveled crashed into a fog-shrouded mountainside, killing all 10 persons aboard. Hendrick lost his son Ricky, his brother and twin nieces, the race team’s general manager and its chief engine builder.

Hendrick was crushed, but he persevered.

Last year, Hendrick said his automotive company had its most profitable year ever. On the track, Gordon led the standings most of the season, only to see one of his teammates (Johnson) finish stronger and repeat as champion with the aid of 10 victories — the most since Gordon’s 13 triumphs in ’98.

“Well, I hope the horseshoe hasn’t fallen out,” Hendrick joked, when asked out his team’s 2008 prospects. “There’s going to be a lot of pressure on us because of what we did last year, but that isn’t going to pay the bills, it’s not going to get us to the Chase, and it’s not going to get us onstage in New York” for the championship banquet.

“We’ve got to work hard. We’ve got to work smart.”

That’s a tall order considering how high Hendrick Motorsports has raised the bar. It’s Jimmy Johnson’s opinion that ’08 might be the greatest challenge his former boss has ever faced.

“He already had two big egos to manage, and you don’t get where Jimmie and Jeff are in this sport, or any sport, if you don’t have a little bit of ego. And now he’s bringing another superstar into that with ‘Junior’ — and he is that; a superstar — and Casey’s team could make this thing a four-way battle,” Johnson said. “We went through this with (Geoffrey) Bodine and Tim (Richmond) 20 years ago, and whenever one team wins, the others feels like it lost. We had to deal with that with two teams, and now you’ve doubled that with what Rick’s got now.”

Leadership from the top

While Hendrick has enough of an ego to boast that every other NASCAR team has to beat his to rise to the top of the heap, he’s quick to put the greater load on his own organization: “We’ve got ourselves in the crosshairs,” he said.

That’s part of what makes him “the ultimate competitor,” according to Marshall Carlson, who took over as Hendrick Motorsports’ general manager after the plane crash.

“He looks like a real gentle guy and he is,” Carlson said. “But inside of him there’s a fire burning hotter than anyone out there. If we don’t win, he wants to figure out immediately why we didn’t. At the same time, he’s got this incredible focus on unity and individual people. He wants to know what makes every person tick, how we can take care of that person, and how we can give them opportunities for growth.”

That’s leadership from the top, said Gordon, whose entire Cup career has been spent with Hendrick.

“Rick is the best boss, the best motivator, the best partner you can ever have,” he said. “He handles so much from sponsors, to teams to drivers to crew chiefs. That’s a lot of personalities to handle, and nobody handles it better than he does.”



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