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Hendrick Always Bearing Down

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By TONY FABRIZIO, The Tampa Tribune

Published: November 18, 2007

Updated: 11/18/2007 12:19 am

HOMESTEAD - First came the battle with leukemia he fought and won after being diagnosed in 1996.

Then came the plane crash in 2004 - his plane - in which his son, brother, two nieces, two key executives and four other people were killed.

It's a wonder Rick Hendrick can find any contentment and happiness in life, let alone press on as the most successful team owner in NASCAR.

"Well, that shows you the character of the man," said good friend Felix Sabates, part owner of Chip Ganassi Racing. "Most people who've gone through what he has gone through would have folded. Rather than fold, he bore down."

Hendrick has clinched a seventh Winston/Nextel Cup championship entering today's season-ending Ford 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway. Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon are the only drivers still in contention, and both are part of the powerful Hendrick Motorsports organization.

Besides winning a second consecutive championship, Hendrick has dominated NASCAR's top circuit in 2007. The team's four drivers have combined to win 18 of the 35 races, with Johnson posting the first double-digit win season (10) of any driver since 1998, Gordon winning six times and Kyle Busch and Casey Mears each winning once.

Hendrick, 58, grew up on a farm near the small town of South Hill, Va. He learned to build engines and race cars at a young age and set records at a local drag strip at age 14 with a 1931 Chevrolet.

Starting with a used car lot in Raleigh, N.C., and then a struggling Chevrolet dealership in Bennettsville, S.C., he has built an automobile empire that includes 65 dealerships in 10 states and nets more than $3 billion annually.

In motorsports, Hendrick founded a drag boat racing team that won three consecutive national championships in the early 1980s. He came to NASCAR in 1984 with a team called All-Star Racing and driver Geoff Bodine.

Now Hendrick Motorsports has seven titles in Cup (four with Gordon, one each with Terry Labonte and Johnson and the one that will be won today), three in the Craftsman Truck Series and one on the Busch Series.

Within the organization, drivers and other key members universally point to Hendrick.

"I think Rick should probably be a mentor to everybody in life," said Chad Knaus, Johnson's crew chief. "With the things he's had to deal with, the way he has modeled his life is pretty phenomenal."

Said Hendrick: "It's all about the people; it's not anything about me. It's the guys, whether it's Jim Wall and Jeff Anderson in the engine shop or the chassis guys or Ken Howes vice president or Marshall Carlson general manager. It takes so many qualified people to make this thing happen."

Rarely discussed in NASCAR circles is the legal trouble Hendrick faced around the time of his leukemia diagnosis. In 1997, he was fined $250,000 and sentenced to 12 months of home confinement and three years of probation for mail fraud in connection with a bribery scandal involving his Honda dealerships.

He received a full pardon from President Clinton in 2000.

Hendrick's closest friends in motorsports have been saying for years that Hendrick was made a scapegoat for actions that involved many people.

"If you go back and do research, you had a couple of Honda dealers that were not as successful as Rick," Jack Bickford, Gordon's stepfather and business manager, told ESPN.com's David Newton for a story that ran this week. "They were envious of his success. It inflated what was going on and exaggerated a lot of situations.

"For the most part, it was bogus."

The worst day of Hendrick's life was Oct. 24, 2004, when a Beach 200 King Air he owned crashed into the side of mountain near Martinsville Speedway in Virginia.

Killed were Hendrick's son, Ricky, 24; his brother, John, 53; John Hendrick's twin daughters, Kimberly and Jennifer, 22; Jeff Turner, 45, a team executive; Randy Dorton, 50, head of the team's engine shop; Joe Jackson, 58, an executive with corporate sponsor DuPont; Scott Latham, 38, a pilot for Tony Stewart; and Hendrick pilots Richard Tracy, 51, and Elizabeth Morrison, 31.

Hendrick and Sabates were supposed to be on the plane but made other plans that morning.

"Everybody on that plane was special," Hendrick said some time afterward. "And there will always be a hole in your heart for all of them."

Hendrick avoids talking about the tragedy now, instead turning any reference to it to how the Hendrick organization has "pulled together" and even strengthened itself competitively.

Others wonder how Hendrick has been able to forge ahead.

"For a guy like him to have gone through everything he's gone through in the last few years and be his age and have been in it for this long to still come to the racetracks, still come to our test at Atlanta a few weeks ago, still travel around to see all his dealerships, it says a lot," said Gordon's crew chief, Steve Letarte. "He does it because he loves it."

Reporter Tony Fabrizio can be reached at (813) 259-7994 or afabrizio@tampatrib.com.

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