Hendrick Motorsports Looks to Cap 40th Anniversary Season with Title
Hendrick Motorsports, which has been celebrating its 40th anniversary season throughout the year, has had a phenomenal year on track. The 14-time NASCAR Cup Series championship-winning organization has collected 11 race wins, and all four of the team's drivers advanced to the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs this season.
Following the gauntlet that was the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs, only one Hendrick Motorsports driver remains in the fight for the championship this weekend at Phoenix Raceway as William Byron locked into the Championship 4 by four points over Christopher Bell, who was penalized for a last-lap move at Martinsville Speedway last weekend.
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While Hendrick Motorsports hopes to cap off it's ruby-anniversary season with it's 15th Bill France Cup, the organization knows it has had some truly special moments in 2024 regardless of how this weekend's race at Phoenix Raceway turns out.
"We just look at the year overall. Coming into this year, our 40th anniversary, celebrate such a huge year for us and our history," Jeff Gordon, Vice Chairman of Hendrick Motorsports said in a Monday media teleconference. "To start the season off with winning the Daytona 500, and to follow that up with the 1-2-3 and the win at Martinsville in our 40th anniversary celebration race, and then [to win] the Brickyard [400], and now here we are. We've had all four of our cars this year win a race, get into the Playoffs, get deep into the Playoffs, and now we have one opportunity to still win the championship. It's been a great year, it's one that we're going to celebrate no matter what."
The competitive Gordon, who won four championships and 93 races as a driver himself, continued, "But at the same time, certainly nothing would cap off this amazing year better than a championship."
If Byron, 26, is going to capture his first NASCAR Cup Series championship Sunday afternoon in Avondale, Arizona it'll likely take winning the race to do it. While Byron has shown a penchant for finding Victory Lane throughout his young NASCAR Cup Series racing career, he has 13 wins in his career and won three of the opening eight races this season, it's been 28 races since the North Carolina native has collected a checkered flag.
The losing streak is troubling at first glance, as you want your driver and team firing on all cylinders heading into the Championship Race, but Gordon says Byron and the No. 24 team, led by crew chief Rudy Fugle, have been in contention a lot in recent weeks. However, the Playoff elimination format led to them not going over the edge from a risk standpoint to try to win a race. Now, Byron and Fugle will have the freedom to run aggressively this weekend.
"This is a team that when they're on, they're at the top of the game out there," Gordon explained. "And I think they're going to show that this week, and step up. And we're excited to root them on, and see how they bring it on a high level. There's no doubt in my mind they can do that. I still think they probably had opportunities to win more races, even here recently, but you've got to race differently when you're in the Playoffs as you're trying to advance through the rounds.
"Of course, you want to win, but at the same time sometimes you get yourself in a position where you've got to figure out what do I need to do to advance to the next round? Sometimes, doing that takes you out of taking some of the risks to put yourself in a position to win. This weekend, it's just all or nothing. It's throw it all out there, make the aggressive calls, aggressive set ups, and be aggressive on the race track as well if you're going to win the championship. And they're ready to do that."
Not only will Byron have to likely overcome his current losing skid in order to hoist the cup, but he'll also have to further defy the odds as a Daytona 500 winner has not gone on to win the NASCAR Cup Series championship in the current Playoff era (established in 2014), and it's happened just twice (Jimmie Johnson in 2006 and 2013) since the adaptation of The Chase for the Cup in 2004.
Gordon, who won the Daytona 500, and NASCAR Cup Series championship in his magical 1997 NASCAR Cup Series season as a driver, acknowledges that pulling off the two achievements in the same season is perhaps the most difficult thing to do in modern NASCAR.
"[The Daytona 500] is a very difficult race to win," Gordon admitted. "You have to have a lot of things go your way to be able to pull that off. I mean, we talk about the big one, and staying out of the wrecks, but there's a whole lot more to executing that race and winning. So, that in itself is difficult, then you take on the difficulty of going through the rounds of the Playoffs, advancing through each of these rounds and getting yourself in a position to go race for a championship.
"Then you're going to be at a tough racetrack against three of the fiercest competitors and teams that are out there. To be able to do the bookend as you mentioned, I don't know if there's a more difficult thing to pull off in our sport than those two things in one season. And that's why it's rarely been done."
Adding to the laundry list of reasons why it feels the deck is stacked against Byron, and Hendrick Motorsports heading into this weekend's race is the fact that in the Spring, the team put in one of its worst performances of the season at Phoenix Raceway. In the Shriners Children's 500 at Phoenix in March, the highest-finishing Hendrick Motorsports driver was Kyle Larson, who came home in the 14th position.
Byron finished 18th that day, and he was followed by teammates Chase Elliott and Alex Bowman in 19th and 20th.
Gordon didn't shy away from how bad Phoenix was for HMS in the Spring, but he does feel optimism that this time around will be a different story. The team executive says Hendrick Motorsports unlocked some speed in its short track package at Richmond, which, like Phoenix, is a short flat track.
"I think our short track program, one key moment [was] we got a lot better at Richmond," Gordon noted. "And Richmond, while its not Phoenix, it's still a short track where we've been hit-or-miss-there. And we've found some good improvements, and we hope that some of that, as well as some of the other things we've learned since then, transfers over to Phoenix."
While HMS did perform excellently at Richmond in the Spring, as Kyle Larson led 144 laps en route to a third-place finish, while Chase Elliott finished fifth, and Byron was seventh, the team's last outing at Richmond -- the Cook Out 400 -- didn't go as smoothly. However, HMS did put a couple of cars inside the back half of the top-10 in that race. But it'll take more than back-half iof the top-10 to achieve the ultimate goal of winning the championship on Sunday at Phoenix.
Despite all of the above, Gordon feels that Byron is in a prime position to capture the championship this season. Last year, Byron made it into the Championship 4 for the first time after a six-win season, but he faltered in the Championship Race. While he didn't capture the championship last season, Byron got to experience the pressure, and the uniqueness to the scheduling surrounding Championship week. Gordon feels like his driver will be much better prepared for the distractions of the Championship Race this time around.
"As a driver, it's so important to have a routine, and stay in that routine and know what your schedule is. And you have a regimen that is year-long. And there's a lot of benefit to that, but when you get into a rhythm as a driver you don't want to get out of that rhythm," Gordon explained. "It's just like making laps around Martinsville or around these tracks. You get into this rhythm, and you get into a groove, and it's almost like automatic. So, anything that disrupts that is a distraction and can take you off of your peak performance. I think last year, him going into that Championship 4 being the first time, you know it's overwhelming for anybody. But we gotta remember, he's still young and pretty new to the Cup level and performing at this high level."
Can Byron and the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports team take home the NASCAR Cup Series championship in the team's 40th anniversary season? Byron will face off against Team Penske's Joey Logano, and Ryan Blaney as well as 23XI Racing's Tyler Reddick for the championship this weekend in the NASCAR Cup Series Championship Race at Phoenix Raceway. That race is scheduled for Sunday, November 10, and will be televised on NBC with coverage beginning at 3:00 PM ET. The Motor Racing Network (MRN) and SiriusXM NASCAR Radio will provide the radio broadcast of the event.
Toby Christie is the Editor-in-Chief of Racing America. He has 15 years of experience as a motorsports journalist and has been with Racing America since 2023.