“It takes a lot to make me mad and I am (ticked) off,” said Jeff Gordon after the Winston 500. This of course came after perhaps the wildest raceday NASCAR has ever seen, certainly in decades, with 850 miles of racing, 121 official lead changes, a bevy of additional ones, and the task of counting who didn’t lead being easier than tabulating who did. Gordon and Jimmie Johnson led, then got into a late-race scrap when Johnson chopped off Gordon and then Gordon got drilled by a spinning Jeff Burton. Johnson then got his comeuppance courtesy of Greg Biffle.
It came a week after the two got into it at the Texas 500. Some are calling this a feud, and while it certainly qualifies as such there is more to this – it’s a return to the “good ol’ days” at Hendrick Motorsports.
The past sixteen seasons have been by far the greatest in the organization’s history between nonstop wins, titles, and a reputation for team unity that stood in contrast to the chaos permeating other outfits. Yet in the 27 seasons that J. Riddick Hendrick has fielded NASCAR stock car teams, it has been substantially forgotten how this team’s reputation was the exact opposite of that it created with nine driver titles.
One need recall the tumultuous opening ten seasons of Hendrick Motorsports – the “good ol’ days” when Charlotte-based car dealership magnate Rick Hendrick put together his team, hiring Harry Hyde to field Chevrolets. Geoff Bodine, the 1982 Winston Cup rookie of the year, was hired to drive the new cars. The team won three times in 1984, but it wasn’t particularly harmonious, as Bodine and Hyde engaged in the classic new school-old school showdown; the team didn’t win in 1985, and then Hendrick got the idea to field a second car, this despite the widespread reputation that two cars meant a divided and diluted effort for a team.
It proved itself even as Hendrick Motorsports exploded in 1986. Tim Richmond was hired to drive Hendrick’s #25, and Hyde was moved from Bodine’s car to Richmond’s. It took considerable bad blood to flow before Hyde and Richmond figured each other out, and as they surged to superstardom it came at the expense of teammates Bodine and new crew chief Gary Nelson, as Richmond’s #25 took precedence over Bodine’s #5 in the team’s parts and horsepower totem poles.
When Hendrick expanded to three cars in 1987 chemistry and other internal issues quite seperate from Tim Richmond’s near-fatal illness affected the team, as the war for parts continued and Darrell Waltrip clashed with crew chief Waddell Wilson. Hendrick wound up running four cars for much of that summer before Richmond’s illness and the controversies it wound up spawning ended his career there, leading to the cutback to three cars.
When Ricky Rudd replaced Geoff Bodine at Hendrick Motorsports in 1990 the team hit the beginning of a four-year span where it won just six races even though by then it had become the largest team in Chevrolet’s fleet with the biggest engine shop. Hendrick financed the making of the ill-advised racing movie Days Of Thunder and fielded a fourth car for Greg Sacks for a part-time 1990 season; the organization won one race and at Martinsville Rudd and teammate Ken Schrader plowed into the wall racing for first. Hendrick cut back to two cars but maintained engine lease deals with other teams, and in 1991 Schrader won twice while Rudd won once and challenged for the title, but never had enough to win more than once and was at times excessively vocal about supposed rules shortcomings.
Rudd won once in 1992 but in 1993 he suffered through a meltdown of a season, illustrated by the fight he picked with Brett Bodine at North Wilkesboro and a general surliness he carried throughout the season. He finally left the Hendrick team, livid at Chevrolet, while in the meantime a Ford project in youngster Jeff Gordon got hired by Hendrick and lavished with the best of the best in the Hendrick fleet and Terry Labonte, seen as finished as a driver, was hired to replace Rudd.
Harmony was something not found in such great quantity at Hendrick Motorsports in the first ten years of the team’s existence, and even after it won titles internal clashes continued, leading to the public ending of crew chief Gary DeHart’s tenure as Terry Labonte’s crew chief in latter 1997. The success the organization has enjoyed after 1994 has made a lot of people forget the squabbles that ate at the organization for so much of its history, and the recent feud between Gordon and Johnson has brought this history back to the fore.