Hendrick team off to quick start with two wins

CHARLOTTE, N.C.

Hendrick Motorsports celebrates each race win with a Victory Bell that is carted across the campus for every employee to ring.

If not for the pandemic, the bell would have made two trips so far this season.

The Hendrick folks believe the count should actually be at four.

Hendrick Motorsports is off to a blazing start this season with two wins through NASCAR’s first four races, a marked uptick for an organization that went deep into the schedule the last few years before its program found a rhythm.

William Byron and Kyle Larson have Hendrick on a two-race streak heading into this weekend’s race at Phoenix Raceway, where Chase Elliott won in November to clinch his first Cup Series championship. Elliott and Alex Bowman are winless through the first month, but Bowman won the pole for the Daytona 500 and Elliott, a week after a runner-up finish in that marquee event, had the field covered at Daytona’s road course until a questionable caution jumbled the end of the race.

“I mean, certainly the Hendrick guys have come to play,” said Kyle Busch, a former Hendrick driver who has since won two Cup championships with Joe Gibbs Racing.

The momentum is a carryover from last season when Elliott gave Rick Hendrick his first title since Jimmie Johnson won it in 2016. The team had failed to advance a driver into the championship round in the three years between titles, a stretch that included an embarrassing 2018 season in which Elliott accounted for the only three wins for the entire organization.

The slow rebuild has focused on behind-thescenes reorganizations and improving performance on 1.5-mile tracks.

Hendrick Motorsports trailed its rivals in nearly every statistical category, including victories, at those tracks last season.

But after two stops at the bread-and-butter NASCAR circuits, Hendrick Motorsports is undefeated on intermediate tracks. NASCAR this year has diversified the schedule but there are still two 1.5-mile tracks in the third round of the playoffs, where a win earns an automatic berth into the championship finale.

“We’ve delved in pretty deep as a group to try to get our collective knowledge base higher,” said Chad Knaus, who moved this year to vice president of competition at Hendrick after nearly two decades as a crew chief. “Each team has its own identity, for sure, and the leeway to do whatever it is that they need to do, but they really collectively work together.”

This quick start has given Hendrick 265 victories, just three short of the record held by Petty Enterprises.