Championship culture’s one thing. They also have big, loud, fast race cars, and all kinds of cool tools that make them go faster.
And that show is what the Panthers came to see, so when the first race car roared into position, it got everyone’s attention.
The football players split into teams of five and headed out to Hendrick’s pit pad, where the pros practice each day to shave critical thousandths of a second off their times. (In NASCAR, a tenth of a second is two car lengths on the track, evidence of small margins making big differences.)
Hendrick has four Cup Series teams, each with five pit crew members, but they have over 50 “athletes” in their pit crew program. Part of that is so they have contingency plans — every team needs backups — but they also lease four crews to other race teams that don’t have the same operational gravity of Hendrick, which sprawls across 18 buildings on the Cabarrus County campus near Charlotte Motor Speedway. That creates some internal competition, because if you’re in the Hendrick program, you want to be on one of those four crews for either Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson, William Byron, or Alex Bowman.
“We feel like if you’re P1 at Hendrick, you’re P1 at the track on Sunday,” said Jacob Claborn, the head pit coach for the Hendrick teams. “And I’m a firm believer that competition breeds success.
“So when we practice together, we build in competition throughout the season to continue to push everyone on our team.”