Hendrick Motorsports is on the verge of securing its 15th Cup Series championship ever. William Byron and Kyle Larson are two of the Championship 4 drivers who will battle for the title at the Phoenix Raceway on November 2. Looking back at the season at this juncture, team owner Rick Hendrick has no qualms about the performances of any of his four drivers.
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Speaking to the press this week, he stood behind them all and defended their results strongly. “Two of the cars have led the most laps. William with the most and Kyle second,” he said. “If you can lead laps and be competitive – Chase [Elliott] won the Shootout, the Clash, and he’s won two races. Alex [Bowman] was in the points battle right up there toward the middle to the end of the year. He just had horrible luck.”
Hendrick and the others in the team had known that they weren’t great on short tracks. But somehow, they have worked through the season and did the best they could. This is notably impressive considering how the Chevrolet Camaro that the team uses is an outdated version compared to the Ford Mustangs and the Toyota Camrys that its rivals like Team Penske and Joe Gibbs Racing use.
Hendrick continued, “When we look back and we have a car that’s two or three years old, and Ford and Toyota had a shot at making their stuff better, and we had to work our butts off to be competitive and look at areas where we thought we needed to improve, and our guys did it. I think that’s all you can ask. It’s a very competitive series.”
A team cannot win every single race in a season. The field is filled with cars that are largely identical and drivers whose skills are all of the highest order.
Hendrick, as a team owner, realizes this and maintains his expectations of his drivers accordingly. He underlined that mishaps with the tires, the engine, or other accidents are bound to happen.
He said, “I look at it like if you can lead — and you’re not going to win races. You can be lucky sometimes, but you have to be able to run up front and lead and win stages. I think we won more stages than anybody.”
The team has won 21 stages this season, which is the second-highest ever, trailing its own record of 25 stage wins in 2021. This number could very well go further up at the end of the finale this weekend.
