Even though Chase Elliott and Kyle Larson look like potential championship contenders, this has not been an overall banner campaign for Hendrick Motorsports.
- Larson is amidst a 39-race winless streak
- William Byron is 12th in the standings and it’s a fight to crack the top-10 every week
- Alex Bowman suffered a bout of vertigo earlier this year but hasn’t been competitive consistently either
So, all told, Hendrick Motorsports is not in a great place this year and their two wins (both by Elliott) has been matched by their satellite partners, Spire Motorsports. Dale Earnhardt Jr. spent a decade driving for Rick Hendrick and detailed exactly what happens during team meetings with the boss has seen enough.
He explained Mr. H’s process on this week’s episode of the Dale Jr. Download podcast.
“I’ve been with HMS when they sort of get into these ruts, or these little phases,” said Earnhardt. “I’m not concerned, because what happens is they’ll have a competition meeting, which they’ll have one this week. They’ll have one every week.
“Rick is in a lot of those, and Jeff Gordon is now in this position as well, which I haven’t experienced Jeff Gordon as a part owner, that type of personality in the competition meetings.
“But, man, when they’re not doing what they want to be doing, those meetings will get really fucking serious, and Rick would basically say to everybody in the room, y’all better freaking figure it out.
“It’s pretty damn serious. Rick rarely ever gets stern, but when he does, it gets your attention, because you don’t see it often, and you know that he means fix it or else, or there’s going to be some consequences.”
Earnhardt also said Hendrick makes it clear that he has had enough based on him choosing to be the first to speak during a competition meeting.
“And when things weren’t good enough, he was the first one to talk. When you go into the competition meeting and Rick talked first, you knew talking about last week’s race wasn’t the most fucking important thing on the table that day.
“They’ll figure it out, and they might figure it out this year. It might be next year, whatever, but Jeff Gordon, when I think about his personality, I feel like he could be convincing as well.
“You know, I think if Rick isn’t in those meetings as much, I would probably imagine that Jeff can carry that similar weight when things need to get better. I wouldn’t want to get on Jeff Gordon’s bad side either.”
Earnhardt explained that Hendrick’s reaction to adversity gets results too.
“When everybody hears that, they’re all tasked with finding solutions,” Earnhardt said. “They leave the room. They go off to their part of the business, and they dial up the freaking effort.
“And what happens is everybody wants to be the one that runs back to Rick with the token. ‘Look what I found, we worked hard, and we got this.’ They want to go, ‘Hey, you said work. We worked. We found three horsepower. We’re taking some badass shit to the next race.
“And when everybody’s doing that, and everybody brings a little bit of something back to the table, you go to the racetrack, and you see it. You see the results start happening.”
And again, there’s still a pathway for both Elliott and Larson to win the championship this year, so it’s not exactly a lost season.
“I don’t know that Byron is in a position to even worry about a championship this year,” Earnhardt said. “I think that they just need to get better.
“They need some momentum. But Chase and Larson, they are in a position to think championship. They just need to be careful over the next handful of weeks to not have that—you know, you talked about that one bad race.
“They just don’t need to have that one bad race. They need to get what they can get while the company’s trying to find more speed. Just don’t stub your toe and wait.”
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