300 Wins and Counting for Hendrick Motorsports

Credit: FORT WORTH, TEXAS - SEPTEMBER 24: NASCAR Hall of Famer Rick Hendrick team owner of Hendrick Motorsport (L) and William Byron, driver of the #24 Liberty University Chevrolet, celebrate Hendrick Motorsports' 300th NASCAR Cup Series win after winning the NASCAR Cup Series Autotrader EchoPark Automotive 400 at Texas Motor Speedway on September 24, 2023 in Fort Worth, Texas. (Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images)

300.

It’s a nice round number.

In bowling, it’s a perfect game.

In baseball, it’s the gold standard for batters.

Thanks to William Byron’s win, Sunday, in the Autotrader EchoPark Automotive 400 at Texas Motor Speedway, Hendrick Motorsports three-digit win total in NASCAR’s Cup Series now begins with a 3 instead of a 2.

Over the four decades team owner Rick Hendrick has fielded cars in the Cup series, the important win numbers were 1, 100, 200, 269 and now 300. But Hendrick maintains 300 was never a goal.

“The 300 wasn’t a goal. 269 was a goal to tie and beat Petty Motorsports’s record. That was a goal, and I never thought we’d get there, so we started counting down until we got to break that record.

“Once we got to 269, then everybody started talking about 300.

“We had a heck of a year in 2021, won a lot of races, and I guess we’ve won 10 this year with the Million Dollar Race. But it’s hard.

“I’m not thinking about 350, I’ll tell you that. I’m going to enjoy 300 and see what happens. I’d like to win another championship.”

For Byron, who has a career high six wins in the Cup series this season and leads the playoff standings heading to Talladega Superspeedway this weekend, it was special to get No. 300 for Hendrick.

“Yeah, it’s really special. Growing up a Hendrick Motorsports fan, I watched win No. 200 on TV when Jimmie won that race. I always felt like obviously the gold standard was Hendrick Motorsports, so if I could ever drive for them, once I started having success in my own career, that was the goal.

“When I met Mr. Hendrick when I was 14 at JR Motorsports I told him that, that that was a goal to drive for him. I didn’t have a lot of confidence that that would work out, but I was going to put it out there, and when we met again when I was 18 and running the Truck Series and sat down, I just had the confidence that he was going to take care of me and he was going to put me in the right places to succeed.

“He committed to me, and even through my rookie season and 2019 and all those years that I was kind of struggling, he just committed and kept encouraging me.

“I’m super thankful to him, and to give him 300 is really cool.”

Credit: FORT WORTH, TEXAS - SEPTEMBER 24: William Byron, driver of the #24 Liberty University Chevrolet, takes the checkered flag to win the NASCAR Cup Series Autotrader EchoPark Automotive 400 at Texas Motor Speedway on September 24, 2023 in Fort Worth, Texas. (Photo by Jonathan Bachman/Getty Images)

While it seems unimaginable now, there was a time when Hendrick considered dropping out of the sport. But that all changed at Martinsville Speedway in 1984 when Geoff Bodine scored the first win for the team.

“Yeah, we didn’t have a sponsor, and the deal was Ritchie Petty was going to drive, and Kenny Rogers and everybody left me with no driver and no sponsor, so (crew chief) Harry (Hyde) — we talked to Geoff Bodine, and I think we wrecked at Darlington, and I said, Harry, we’ve got to quit. We don’t have any money. We’ll start back when we get some help.

“You know once you shut down you’re not going to come back. He said, let’s go to Martinsville because Bodine is good there, and we went to Martinsville, and I wasn’t at the race that day.

“Yeah, I think about that a lot. The twists and turns in life that if you’d not been in the right place or hadn’t been in Atlanta to see (Jeff) Gordon, if I hadn’t been at JRM (JR Motorsports) and William and then my next door neighbor who’s a friend of his dad’s calling me and said, hey, have you been watching this kid.

“So life is — we’ve been blessed. I think about it a lot, the drivers that I’ve had, and I really think the most rewarding thing to me is to see guys like Chase (Elliott) when I think I met him at 14 become a champion and William and Jeff (Gordon) and Jimmie Johnson and the crew chiefs.

“Yeah, I’m very, very — I think about it all the time, had we not won that race, it wouldn’t be a Hendrick Motorsports, and it wouldn’t be 300 wins.

“I’m very, very thankful for that.

Even though he was now a winning team owner in NASCAR, Hendrick admits he still didn’t think he was now good to go after the Martinsville breakthrough.

“No, I’ll tell you, Randy Dorton — I wish Randy was here to see all this because his engine shop was going bust right beside us, and Harry’s, and we won three races that year. It was amazing. I went to Daytona, and the year before I went to Daytona, I think we finished 10th. I was standing on top of a motor home and couldn’t go in the garage area with (team owner) Raymond Beadle. Then the next year I’m there.

“But when we won three races and we won that last race, I think, and we got — after we got a partial sponsor and then we got Levi Garrett and they came on board, and then we got a call wanting me to run another car, and I knew Tim Richmond.

“Once we started clicking like that and did some innovative things with two-car team sharing — yeah, I think about how close we were, but then I think about if you could come in the sport today with five employees, and Harry Hyde was making $500 a week and two of the other guys were volunteers, and that’s what we went to Daytona with.

“From a very humble start, you think about what it takes today to come into this sport and be able to compete or win a race in your first year, let alone three races.

“I’m glad I don’t have to start now.”

What started out as a dream in 1984 with his father has grown into the most successful team in NASCAR history. Hendrick credits that success to the people he has surrounded himself with.

“Well, you know, I’m in the automobile business and I started that exactly like the racing. I had five or six employees of a little deal that was busted, and today we’ve got 11,000 employees and 100 dealerships. I don’t know how that happened, either, other than it’s people.

“The secret to any business you’re in is people. If you surround yourself with good people and take care of them, my top six guys in the automobile side have been with me a minimum of 25 years, and when I look at guys like Jeff Andrews (President and General Manager of Hendrick Motorsports) and like I said, Randy Dorton — Randy Dorton had so much to do with building this organization because he was more than an engine builder. We attract good people, and we try to hire people and — we like to promote from within. Chad (Knaus, former crew chief, now Vice President of Competition) started on the 24 car as a tire changer. Alan (Gustafson) has been with me, that’s the crew chief on the 9, he was an engineer with (former crew chief) Gary DeHart. So our guys have kind of grown up in the company, and we’ve kind of got a character and a way they work together.

“It’s not easy to have four cars race each other, and when I went out on the pavement to take a picture with all the teams, I felt for the other three guys because they wanted to win, but only one guy, and then I reminded them, all of you guys have contributed to 300. I mean, you’ve all — we wouldn’t have it without you.

“So I think any business that you’re in, it’s about people. We take care of our people, and we treat everybody like a family. I grew up on a farm, and that’s one thing my dad taught me is you have to depend on your neighbors.

“I’ve had that philosophy all of my adult working life.

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