When Jeff Gordon retired and Jimmie Johnson followed him a few years later, Hendrick Motorsports had to go back to the drawing board to rebuild with yet another youth movement.
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It was that way when team owner Rick Hendrick needed some young talent in 1993, choosing Gordon to lead the team going forward, eventually winning four Cup championships and 93 race wins.
Hendrick did the same thing nine years later, bringing in Johnson, who would go on to win a NASCAR record-tying seven Cup championships and 83 race wins.
As Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. began closing toward their respective retirements, Hendrick returned to HMS’s Fountain of Youth by bringing in the likes of Chase Elliott, Alex Bowman, Kyle Larson, and William Byron.
“If we go back a number of years, (HMS) basically revamped everything,” former NASCAR driver and current NASCAR TV analyst Kyle Petty said on this week’s edition of the Performance Racing Network’s “Fast Talk” show.
“(Hendrick) put a group of young drivers in there and said we’re committed to William Byron, we’re committed to Alex Bowman, we’re committed to these guys, and we’re going to ride this horse until it starts to pay off.”
“And it has quietly paid off. They have a couple of championships with Chase (Elliott in 2020) and Kyle Larson (2021). They’ve got tons of wins and continue to get it done, not in a flashy way like we think of Jimmie Johnson and Jeff Gordon. It’s just been that workmanlike process, but they’re right on that cusp of really being able to explode,” he continued.
HMS Has Been Short On Cup Crowns of Late, But Not On Wins
While HMS has not been short on wins, including capturing nearly a third (11) of last season’s 36 races, that the organization has not won a Cup crown in more than three years makes some fans wonder if maybe it needs to bring in some new faces.
That’s not needed, though, Petty said. It’s more a matter of fans and the sport seeing organizations like Team Penske, which has won the last three Cup titles, maybe not winning as many races, but winning the most important prize when needed, namely, the Cup championship.
“You talk about winning 11 races or doing all this stuff, but (because HMS) didn’t win the championship, so you think they had a terrible year,” Petty said. “That’s because (it’s) the standard we hold Hendrick Motorsports to.”
“We used to talk about that with Jimmie (Johnson) all the time. We held him to such a high standard that when he would run second or third, that’s a huge disappointment.”
“And for them to put in those 11-win seasons, to win a third of the season’s races, (or) for a guy to win five or six races in a season and not win the championship, that’s a disappointment to that team – not to any other team – but to that team.”
Will HMS End Its Three-Year Cup Championship Drought This Year?
However, Team Hendrick appears well on its way to a championship-winning rebound. The organization has already won one-third of this season’s first six races: William Byron won the season-opening Daytona 500 for the second straight year, and most recently, Kyle Larson won last weekend at Homestead-Miami Speedway.
What’s more, HMS enters this weekend’s race at Martinsville, which is one of the team’s most successful tracks during the organization’s 40-plus year history, with Byron, Larson, and Bowman ranked 1-2-3 in the standings (and Elliott a close sixth in the rankings).
Sure, Joe Gibbs Racing’s Christopher Bell leads the season with three wins, but he’s fifth in the standings.
Meanwhile, there’s no question that when you add up all the performance statistics from the first six races of this season, all four HMS drivers have been the most consistent of all Cup drivers thus far in 2025.
That trend is likely to continue in the next 30 races as Team Hendrick looks to regain the championship lead.
