October 24, 2004, is one of the saddest days in American Motorsports. A Hendrick Motorsports airplane that was bound for Martinsville crashed in the Virginia Mountains and killed all ten people on board. Among those lost was the son of team owner Rick Hendrick. What followed a week later in Atlanta was an incredible race from HMS icon Jimmie Johnson.
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The performance gave the champion his third straight win and alleviated the pain of the Hendrick family to a great extent, for it was in honor of the lost ones. The victory made it into the list 40-race list that Hendrick Motorsports has been curating as its greatest ever on account of its 40th anniversary in 2024.
Following the crash, there had been doubts about whether the team would travel to Atlanta for the race at all. Drivers and employees were attending services all around and were in no state to prepare for racing. But Rick Hendrick and his wife, Linda, became the pillars on which the organization leaned in the tough hour.
Johnson remembers, “Rick and Linda stood up in front of all of us at Hendrick Motorsports and gave us an authentic and real point of view of where their hearts were, the pain they were going through, what the company meant to them … they let us know that the ones we lost would’ve wanted us to go to the track.”
“To this day, I don’t know how they found the courage to be there, but we went down to Atlanta on a mission.” The driver knew what he had to do on his part to get the team that he loved so much back on track. He led 17 laps that Sunday, including the final one, and reached victory lane.
The impact of Johnson’s timely win in Atlanta on October 31, 2004
The organization got a bit of normalcy only when it got to the track and went ahead with the usual proceedings. When Johnson reached victory lane, everyone on the team wore their hats backward in honor of the ones they’d lost. Johnson added, “It really put a smile back on a lot of faces.”
“For me, it was more about the unity of the group. Every team member, every driver, anyone in Hendrick Motorsports apparel, we just stood there, cried and hugged.” The team’s cars featured images of the ones in the crash for the remainder of the season along with the words, “Always in our hearts.”
A service was recently held at the memorial fountain on the team’s campus during which Rick Hendrick shared some emotional words that summed up the sentiments about the tragedy. He said, “Never to be replaced and never to be forgotten but to always be loved and remembered.”
