Motorsports

Hendrick gives team metallic motivation

By BRANT JAMES
Published January 26, 2006

CONCORD, N.C. - Rick Hendrick puts great emphasis on "human capital" and takes pride in his ability to motivate. On Monday, during a quarterly meeting with his 550 race team employees, he distributed boxes of metal medallions.

Weighty, shiny, rimmed in red and stamped with the numbers of his four Nextel Cup race cars, they bore two messages. On one side "Four Chasers, Two Championships" referring to his goal to put drivers Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, Kyle Busch and Brian Vickers in the Chase for the Championship (only Johnson qualified as a top-10 driver last season, finishing fifth), and his desire for Busch to win a Busch Series title.

On the other side "HMS, 2006 goals."

Everyone got one, from the drivers to the men who sweep the floors in the fabrication shop. All the coins had serial numbers in case they end up on eBay. Oh, and then Hendrick, who won four Cup titles with Gordon and one with the semiretired Terry Labonte, upped the ante: offering a total bonus of $1,248,525 if the team reaches the goal. The odd figure is a mash of his four drivers' car numbers: Gordon (24), Johnson (48), Busch (5) and Vickers (25).

"We asked everybody to put their stamp on what we're trying to do here this year," Hendrick said.

A year after his youngest drivers, Busch, 20, and Vickers, 22, moved into their own shop on the Hendrick campus, and 16 months since several key employees and relatives were killed in a team plane crash outside Martinsville, Va., Hendrick thinks his team has finally steadied itself.

Busch won twice last year en route to being named rookie of the year and Vickers, though still winless, was competitive more often in his second full year in Cup. Johnson qualified for the Chase. Gordon did not, but raced better after Steve Letarte took over as crew chief for the final 10 races.

This, Hendrick said, is his best team ever - on paper. So he had it stamped in metal.

Team general manager Marshall Carlson, medallion serial No. 500, said the team became more cohesive after working through its collective grief following the plane crash.

"We've got cooperative efforts going on maybe you didn't see here a few years ago," he said. "And maybe it goes back to crisis. A crisis moment can do two things to an organization. Either it can pull you together or it can pull them apart. This organization has grown tighter and tighter, more cohesive, doing more together, we're more cooperative, more consensus, more communication. Today Hendrick is winners working together and I don't think winners will ever lose."

OTHER SIDE: The entrance next year of Toyota into Nextel Cup and the Busch Series worried Dodge, Ford and Chevrolet, especially after Tuesday when Toyota executives stressed their desire to help their new teams as much as possible. That approach is in line with the centralized approach that helped the manufacturer dominate Champ Car and the Indy Racing League before leaving. It was not in line with the more traditional manufacturer-team model in Nextel Cup - which NASCAR executives insisted Toyota understood.

Chip Ganassi, who owns a three-car Nextel Cup team and two-car IRL entry, has seen both sides of the Toyota experience and had a unique insight into what the company could mean for NASCAR. He won the 2003 IRL title with Toyota but was frustrated when the company was thoroughly throttled by rival Honda in 2004 and '05.

Toyota offered Ganassi the chance to be a factory team this year though it closed its IRL program to other teams, but Ganassi switched to Honda, which is now the IRL's lone manufacturer.

"If they make their mind up to do well at it," Ganassi said via teleconference, "they will. In series past it seems that once they win it appears they might lose a lot of interest. But they try very hard trying to win in the first place."

Toyota's initial team lineup of the experienced but recently unsuccessful Bill Davis Racing and new programs by Michael Waltrip and Red Bull would appear to make a Toyota onslaught unlikely. But, warned Ganassi, "Whoever they go with, they've made winners out of teams who otherwise had not."

Felix Sabates said he and partner Ganassi have no plans to switch to Toyota once their contract with Dodge expires. Ganassi has not won a Nextel Cup race since Jamie McMurray in 2002.

"When we bought these 60 acres (for the current Cup shop), Chip said he didn't want to be tied in with one manufacturer for everything he's got and that would not be healthy," Sabates said. "I think we have the best of both worlds. We have our situation with Dodge, and he has his situation over there with Honda. I don't think it's smart for us to be tied up with Toyota or Honda with both sides, because if you're doing well over here and bad over here, they have the hammer over your head. Spread the risk."

[Last modified January 26, 2006, 12:47:12]