Bob Pockrass: Behind-the-scenes tour of Hendrick Motorsports reveals secret to success – no special treatment for Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Jr.

COMMENTARY

CHARLOTTE – My mission when I got to Hendrick Motorsports last week was to find the special batch of parts set aside to help Jimmie Johnson beat teammates Jeff Gordon and Mark Martin and win four straight Sprint Cup championships.

Or the equipment designated for Dale Earnhardt Jr. that many fans believe is so different than the equipment of the more successful Hendrick drivers.

I didn’t find any Dale Earnhardt Jr. parts room, of course. Maybe they are in a shed behind a building I didn’t get to see. But I’ve got to think they don’t exist.

A behind-the-scenes tour of the Hendrick complex was designed to help me understand how one of the most dominant organizations in Sprint Cup racing is set up.

It’s not much unlike other shops, except it’s bigger and maybe a little cleaner. There are 30 CNC machines to make parts and pieces (about 60 percent for engines, 40 percent for chassis), not just two or five or 10 like at some other shops. There are more signs warning “no cameras” and “no video equipment” than at other race shops as well.

But this is the place that has produced nine Cup championships in the last 15 years, including the last four with Johnson. It’s the organization that won 18 of 36 points races in 2007, eight in 2008 and 13 in 2009. It’s the place that revived the career of Martin last year and has sustained the incredible career of four-time champ Gordon.

It also is the organization designed to rejuvenate Earnhardt Jr., who had a solid first six months with the organization in 2008 but hasn’t won a race since June of that year.

So what is behind the fences at Hendrick?

The initial chassis manufacturing area is in one building with 16 employees. There’s no markings to designate which chassis goes to which team, although a crew chief can ask for a certain tubing or spindle. In Hendrick Motorsports history, there have been 621 chassis built.

In the body shop, the No. 48 (Johnson) and No. 24 (Gordon) teams share one plate where car bodies are hung and the 5 and 88 teams share another. Typically fabricators are dedicated to work on the bodies for a specific teams. That way a crew chief can ask for something specific and oversee the work schedule. The body shop employs 22 fabricators. And it has two very important pieces of machinery – two roaming arms that measure the bodies and make sure that the cars meet NASCAR specifications.

The engine department includes 105 employees and can build and rebuild 600 engines during a season, all within 4-5 horsepower of each other. The engines are not built for a specific team nor designated for a certain team. The workers there – all wearing generic Hendrick Motorsports shirts – don’t know which team will get which engines, which typically are on a six-week cycle from race to teardown to rebuild. The engineers assigned to each team (as well as the Stewart-Haas Racing teams) are stationed in the middle of the building.

“The chassis and body area, we feel like we have a good balance of nice facilities and giving people what they need to get the job done,” said Doug Duchardt, Vice President of Development. “On the engine side, we’re state-of-the-art. The thing that we do better than the other racing series is the volume. In Formula One, they can use only nine engines a year.”

The seven-post rig, designed to determine how a car will react as it goes around a certain track, is not team specific as well. Each team has designated time in the area, and they all have the ability to use the same equipment and same personnel to diagnose how a car will perform on a specific track.

There’s a dyno area, as in most shops, and Hendrick has four dynos testing the durability of engines.

The 48 and 24 teams are housed in one building and the 5 (Mark Martin) and 88 (Earnhardt Jr.) in another. Each team has a 14-car stable, and this is where any tweaks to the car are more team specific. Each building has 85-86 employees divided among two teams. It’s up to each building manager to decide how to divide the personnel. Each driver and team has the same number of people working on their cars.

So what makes the difference in performance? Hendrick Motorsports general manager Marshall Carlson, the son-in-law of Rick Hendrick, thinks it could be the increase in communication among the employees.

“The operational tempo you have to maintain to be successful is incredibly high,” Carlson said. “We’re talking about one-week cycle times on significant changes, whether that’s a technology change, a personnel change, a new specification on engine design. If you’ve got the brightest people that you can have working together and helping come to the right answer together, … they’re 100 percent aligned going back to their different areas.”

Hendrick uses the philosophy that its teams win as an organization and lose as an organization.

Since 2007, any employee who works on a piece on a car gets a 1 percent bonus when any Hendrick car wins a Cup race. There also is a bonus structure that takes into account where each of the four Cup drivers finish. That means a crewmen working on Earnhardt Jr.’s team gets a bonus if Johnson wins, and vice versa. It doesn’t matter if they built an axle or rebuilt an engine or worked on the crew at the track.

“It doesn’t matter if you’re an engineer on the 5 or an engineer on the 24, if the 48 wins, you get paid the same,” Duchardt said. “Everyone is treated the same. That helps reinforce we’re all in this together.”

Carlson said such a system encourages the four teams to not only work together, but to help each other.

“They want to win. Everyone wants to win,” he said. “The difference is when one of these cars wrecks out, instead of the crew chief telling the tire guy to go check with the other teams to see who needs what tires, it’s automatic. … It just happens. They’re all in it together.”