Rick Hendrick will tell you people laughed at him. But mainly they just smiled and shook their heads: what a nice guy, but how naive.
He meant to field multi-car teams in NASCAR. Owners as savvy as the Pettys and Junior Johnson told him it couldn’t work — they’d tried it themselves.
And now, 22 seasons, 156 wins, six Cup championships and 12 tragic deaths later — not to mention his own life-threatening ordeal — Rick Hendrick may be the least naive man in all of American motor racing.
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But he remains the nicest.
And that, believe it or not, is precisely what drives the juggernaut that has won seven of the last eight Nextel Cup races, including all four events run with the new Car of Tomorrow design that has other teams tearing their hair out.
That is also what makes him the frontrunner to sign the all-time top free agent in NASCAR history, Dale Earnhardt Jr., if Hendrick can find room.
“Rick Hendrick will take care of you,” Darrell Waltrip, one of Hendrick’s early drivers, said Thursday. “He’ll treat him like a son. And that would be important to me.”
It’s important to Junior, too, after all the years of strife with his stepmother, Teresa Earnhardt, which ended with his announcement that he’s leaving Dale Earnhardt Inc. and will be a free agent for 2008.
Imagine this lineup in one stable: Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Jr., young Kyle Busch and the developing Casey Mears.
All Hendrick has endured might have made another man bitter, mean, ruthless, self-centered, even reclusive — assuming anyone else even could have survived it all.
When he named his first two drivers and crew chiefs, for the 1986 season, people did laugh. This wasn’t a team, this was a tag-team match: Tim Richmond and Harry Hyde vs. Geoff Bodine and Gary Nelson.
They fought like four wildcats in the same gunnysack, but Hendrick made it work, until the first tragedy in the saga. The wild-partying Richmond contracted AIDS, and died of it in 1989.
Just as Hendrick Motorsports hit the pinnacle with Gordon and Terry Labonte, in November of ’96, Hendrick was diagnosed with leukemia. The next month he was hit with various federal charges stemming from his car-dealership empire and the Honda bribery scandal. Friends swore he was unjustly targeted as the highest-profile car dealer U.S. attorneys could find.
He was gravely ill and legally beleaguered at home when, in February of 1997, his team sent him a virtually impossible get-well card. Gordon, Labonte and Ricky Craven finished 1-2-3 in the Daytona 500.
That was the first inkling just how loyal, how bonded, how resilient Hendrick Motorsports was.
On October 24, 2004, Hendrick was still grieving from the loss of his father, “Papa Joe,” and had a touch of flu that morning.
Considering the havoc the leukemia treatments had wreaked on his system, Hendrick decided not to get on the private plane that would carry 10 people — family members, employees and friends — to the race at Martinsville, Va., that morning.
All 10 died in the plane crash, including his only son, Ricky, and his only brother, John — who’d run the team in ’97 and ’98, while Rick underwent treatment and served a year of house arrest with a plea-bargain.
Jimmie Johnson won the race that day, before learning of the tragedy. The grieving team returned the very next week to send Johnson to another win at Atlanta. He would wind up winning four of the last six races of ’04.
Through it all, Rick Hendrick has only grown kinder, more decent. And his team has only grown stronger.
He has taken his team concept to yet another level — other owners have long since adopted his multi-car concept, or withered — by spreading the competitiveness around among the units.
Johnson has four wins; Gordon has two and leads the point standings; Busch has one and is barreling toward more. Even junior driver Mears is running stronger.
Those resentful of the Hendrick onslaught cite all those billions of dollars spent over the years, all those pristine buildings on that sprawling compound near Charlotte, all that computer-driven machinery, all those dozens of engineers and hundreds of the best technicians.
But none of that would matter without the essence of Hendrick success.
It’s the way the man treats people.
“I completely screwed up Atlanta,” confesses Steve Letarte, the hottest, boldest, most authoritative young crew chief in NASCAR, who has returned Gordon to the top. Only twice this season has Gordon finished out of the top four. He was 10th in the Daytona 500 after getting shuffled back in the draft, and 12th at Atlanta due to a mistake by Letarte in the pits.
But afterward, “the only person who was disappointed with me was me,” says Letarte, 27, who started out sweeping floors at Hendrick at age 16. “I don’t feel I’m going to be Monday morning quarterbacked by anybody at the company. They know I’m doing the best I can.”
To accept with certainty that his people are doing the best they can is Hendrick’s master touch. But first he makes certain he has the right people.
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“Rick told me a long time ago, ‘You get the people first,’ ” Waltrip said. “He has always surrounded himself with people who have passion for the game. A lot of people are in racing for what the game can do for them.”
Not since Waltrip in ’87 has Hendrick gone out and bought the best. Since then he has grown his own — the prime example being the kid he spotted in ’92, Jeff Gordon — and nurtured them and left them alone to do their best, and given each the most important word in Letarte’s vocabulary: “Confidence.”
An owner who has been whipped down harder in his life than anyone in NASCAR understands, as Letarte puts it, that “If you’re afraid to get beat, you’ll never win.”
Hendrick Motorsports is the best team in NASCAR because it is the happiest.
His drivers are the best-paid in NASCAR, but “there are things you can’t get for money,” Earnhardt said. “Peace of mind, satisfaction, what you’re doing and who you’re doing it for.”
He would find it all in Rick Hendrick’s family.
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