Hendrick Motorsports Has Started Off A Season For The Ages
But will NASCAR burst their bubble?
It takes a lot for Rick Hendrick’s team to set a brand-new benchmark for excellence. This is, after all, the winningest organization in NASCAR Cup Series history — the longtime home to such massive stars as Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Jr., Terry Labonte, Chase Elliott and others. But even by their own standards, those Hendrick boys are really outdoing themselves this year.
Through four races, Hendrick drivers have combined for 2 poles, 2 wins, 5 podiums, 7 Top 5s and 10 Top 10s. No. 24 car driver William Byron has won back-to-back races: The first as part of a 1-2-3 Hendrick finish at Las Vegas, and the second of which saw teammate Kyle Larson rank first in practice and qualifying and then combine with Byron to lead 265 out of a possible 317 laps at Phoenix. (Even inexperienced fill-in Josh Berry, who’s driving the No. 9 car with Elliott injured, grabbed a Top 10 in the latter race.)
Based on how well the team has started in 2023, the only thing that might be able to stop Hendrick this year is itself — or at least NASCAR officials, depending on whatever modifications Hendrick may have made to the Next Gen car.
For now, Hendrick drivers are running at an absurd pace. Through Round 4 at Phoenix, they’ve led 54.2% of all laps in the season so far, which blows away all other teams in 2023 (No. 2 is our friend Trackhouse Racing, at 10.1%) and is on pace to shatter the all-time single-season record of 44.8% … which was also set by Hendrick, in 2021.
No team in Cup Series history has ever seen its drivers lead more than half of all available laps in a season, so what Hendrick has already done so far is pretty special. That goes double because the team has done it as part of what racing YouTuber The Iceberg calls the “perfect NASCAR rebuild”.
During the mid-2010s, Hendrick was looking at a full-time lineup of Johnson, Gordon, Earnhardt Jr. and Kasey Kahne — all of whom were in their late 30s or 40s. They’d been wildly successful earlier in the decade, but a changing of the guard was rapidly approaching. So Hendrick turned over its entire driver lineup in the span of just a few seasons, pivoting to 20-somethings Elliott, Byron and Alex Bowman alongside the veteran Johnson by 2018, and slotting in the younger Larson for 2021 after Johnson retired (the first time).
The results have been dynamite from top to bottom with this revamped lineup. Every member of the Elliott/Larson/Byron/Bowman quartet has already won at least 6 races with Hendrick; half have already won championships. And despite losing Elliott to a broken leg after 2 races this year, 2023 might be Hendrick’s best year yet, improbable as that sounds.
Will they keep leading more than half of all laps? That part is unlikely. If we look at the other historical teams with the highest rates of laps led through the first 4 races of a Cup Series season, they only tended to lead around a quarter of possible laps (if not slightly less) over the remainder of the season, on average.
And then there’s the question of what kind of penalty the team will receive after NASCAR officials confiscated the louvers from the hoods of all four Hendrick cars after practice at Phoenix. We don’t know yet if punishments will come down, much less how stiff they will be. But there is this bit from Bob Pockrass’ column that might hint at the degree of the discipline:
Last year, NASCAR penalized three teams 100 points, $100,000 and suspended crew chiefs for four races for modifying pieces that are supposed to be used as is from the supplier. Playoff points also could be part of the potential penalty.
We know NASCAR hates when teams modify the parts they supply, so it’s hard to imagine Hendrick will skate by without any kind of consequence if the louvers were indeed tinkered with. And in turn, the scope of the penalty could damage the incredible momentum Hendrick has built over the first month of the season.
Right now, though, this is just about as strong a start as we’ve ever seen a team have to a season in the Cup Series. It’s really saying something if a performance is overwhelmingly dominant even by Hendrick standards, but that’s the only way you can describe how well they’ve run so far.
Filed under: NASCAR