A Volume Dealer, Rick Hendrick Sells and Races Cars in Big Way

Stock car owner Rick Hendrick, who will have Darrell Waltrip, Geoff Bodine, Benny Parsons and Tim Richmond--four of the biggest names in the National Assn. for Stock Car Auto Racing--in next Sunday’s Budweiser 400 at Riverside International Raceway seems just too good to be true.

Item: Hendrick wanted to know how his drivers felt when running on a high-banked super-speedway, so he took Parsons’ Chevy out for a practice spin at Charlotte. Hendrick lapped the big oval at 164.784 m.p.h.--faster than the World 600 qualifying speed a year earlier.

Item: Hendrick was working as a mechanic in Raleigh, N.C., when his boss needed a new clutch for an Opel so he could sell the car for $300. Hendrick offered his boss $325, fixed the clutch himself and sold the car for $700.

“That’s when I learned that you could make more money selling cars than working on them,” Hendrick said.

Thus was launched an automobile sales career that today includes 21 dealerships in eight states, including three in Southern California. According to Automotive Age, Hendrick’s JRH, Inc., which last year did $400 million in sales, is the fifth-largest dealer in the country--and he is only 37 years old.

Item: Hendrick lettered in football, basketball and baseball at Parkview High School in South Hill, Va., and was voted most popular student in his graduating class. His .500 batting average resulted in a contract offer from the Pittsburgh Pirates, but he turned it down to study engineering at North Carolina State.

The school retired his No. 9 baseball jersey.

Item: When he was 25, Hendrick left a prospering used car business to take over a struggling Chevy-Honda dealership in Bennettsville, S.C.

It had been selling 20 to 25 cars a month. In Hendrick’s first year, he sold 1,200. That caught the eye of General Motors and two years later Hendrick took over City Chevrolet in Charlotte, which remains headquarters of his automotive empire.

Item: At 14, Rick lived on a 350-acre farm near the Virginia-North Carolina line, where he and his dad built a ’31 Chevy that Rick took drag racing before he was old enough to get a driver’s license. Two years later, he built a V-8 engine to compete in a nation-wide Plymouth trouble-shooting contest and won the state championship.

Item: When he was old enough to race a late model sportsman car on an oval, his mother considered it too dangerous and asked him to quit.

Rick turned to racing drag boats and piloted one of his boats, Nitro Fever, to a record 222.2 m.p.h. In 1982, when a close friend was killed in a boating accident, Hendrick gave up the sport. But he had already won three national blown-fuel championships.

“I liked racing boats because there are no speed limits on water,” he said.

Item: When Hendrick quit drag boat racing, he needed a place to store his equipment. He found an old warehouse in Harrisburg, N.C., that was owned by Harry Hyde, an unemployed race car builder and one-time crew chief for Neil Bonnett and the late Bobby Isaac, who won the NASCAR championship with Hyde in 1970.

One rainy day in 1983, Hyde said to Hendrick: “If somebody gave me a chance (in Winston Cup racing), I could kick some butts again. I know I could do it. All I need is a chance.”

Hendrick recalled: “I looked around at the walls in his garage, with all the great old cars he’d built and the pictures of Bobby Isaac in the winner’s circle, and I decided to give him a try.”

Hyde built him a Chevrolet for the 1984 season, and Hendrick tried to get Richard Petty or Dale Earnhardt to drive it. They turned him down so he hired little-known Geoff Bodine and the fledgling team went racing. In April, barely six months later, Bodine won the Sovran Bank 500 at Martinsville, Va. It was only the team’s eighth race.

Later that season, Bodine also won at Nashville and Riverside.

Item: Hendrick was at the 1984 NASCAR banquet in New York City, chatting with Herb Fishel of Chevrolet when Fishel asked him if he’d like to campaign a Corvette--with factory assistance--on the International Motor Racing Assn. road racing circuit in an attempt to stop IMSA’s parade of Porsche wins.

“I went to Miami the next year and saw how technology in IMSA cars could carry over to our stock cars,” he said. “I felt that Chevy’s development of the new V-6 engine for the Corvette and running on road courses would put us on a kind of leading edge for NASCAR when they decided to go to the smaller engine and more road courses.”

Hendrick took over the Corvette and signed Sarel van der Merwe and Doc Bundy as drivers. In its seventh race, the car won at Road Atlanta.

A super-team roster of drivers the caliber of Waltrip, Bodine, Parsons and Richmond is an unusual situation in NASCAR, where even two-driver teams have rarely been successful.

“We didn’t really plan it this way,” Hendrick said. “We had Geoff (Bodine) and Tim (Richmond) last year and when the opportunity came to get Darrell (Waltrip), it was too good to turn down.

“It’s sort of like having two pretty women, and then you find another one you want, too. If you aren’t careful, you’ll have a harem.”

Waltrip, a three-time Winston Cup champion, had soured on his relationship with car owner Junior Johnson and announced he wanted to run his own team in 1987. When he began to realize the expense and effort involved, however, Waltrip talked with Hendrick.

“It’s funny, how things happen,” Hendrick said. “Darrell first came to me for advice about getting into the auto business with a dealership. I suggested we start a joint venture in Nashville, which we did.

“About that time, Darrell was talking with (engine builder) Waddell Wilson about forming their own team. Well, I’d built a boat for Waddell a few years back, so I knew him pretty good. Darrell and Waddell had been talking for some time, Darrell and I had been talking. Waddell told me he wanted to quit building Ford engines and get back to Chevies. Next thing you knew, we had ourselves another team.”

Before Hendrick would form the third team, however, he contacted Bodine and Richmond to see if there would be any problems.

“When they both said no problem, we signed with Waltrip,” Hendrick said. “Then came the blow that Tim had double pneumonia and would miss half the season or more. That left Harry (Hyde) without a driver for his cars, so we signed up Benny (Parsons) to fill in for Tim.

“Now, Tim’s ready to drive again and we can’t let Benny down, so we’ll run all of them.”

Parsons, who hasn’t run a full season since 1981, has been the most productive of Hendrick’s drivers. None of them have won a race, but Parsons has three top-five finishes, including close seconds to Bill Elliott in the Daytona 500 and to Ricky Rudd in the Motorcraft 500 at Atlanta.

Richmond, who missed the first 11 Winston Cup races, will make his comeback debut today in the Miller 500 at Pocono. He finished third in the Winston, a nonpoints all-star event on May 17, but has not been in a series race since he won the Winston Western 500 last November at Riverside.

Juggling different teams, with different components, is nothing new to Hendrick.

Among his 22 dealerships are 15 different makes, as diverse as Nissan, Toyota, Volkswagen, Porsche-Audi, Buick, BMW, Mercedes, and Kenworth trucks.

“The way I look at it, if one make fails, we’ll still have the others,” Hendrick said. “There’s no way they’ll all go under at one time.”

Corona Honda was Hendrick’s first Southern California dealership.

“Honda called me sometime in 1984 about taking over their Corona store,” he said. “They’d only sold about 300 cars in ’83 and wanted it built up. I took it over and last year we sold about 2,000 units.”

Hendrick’s other dealerships are in Long Beach and Pomona. He is also involved with the city of Anaheim in developing an automotive center.

“Our approach is like that of McDonald’s,” he said. “You go to a McDonald’s in California or Florida or anywhere and you can be sure you’ll get the same quality hamburger, the same fries, the same treatment. Our dealerships are set up the same way, and so is our racing team.”

Each team is entirely separate--except for Hendrick. Each has its own crew chief, its own mechanics, sponsor, CPA and financial statement. Even its own quarters.

Hyde’s garage is in Harrisburg, next to the Charlotte Motor Speedway. Bodine and crew chief Gary Nelson, who directed Bobby Allison’s championship year in 1983, have theirs a couple of miles away. Waltrip and Wilson are on the other side of Charlotte, about 10 miles distant.

“They even make their own travel arrangements,” Hendrick said.

“People, and how they work together, is important to me. My most important contribution may be in shifting people around to get better personality blends. A good example is how we changed our teams. Richmond needed a strong and dominating figure, so I put him with Harry Hyde. Bodine, who had been with Hyde earlier, is more of an inquisitive type and he blends in better with Nelson. The switch paid off for everyone.”

Hendrick’s two cars won 16 poles and 9 races last year, including the two most prestigious ones--the Daytona 500 with Bodine and the Southern 500 with Richmond.

One thing the teams did together was have a Christmas party.

“I called the guys separately and asked if each wanted a private party, or if we should have one big get-together. All the guys wanted one big bash.

“It turned out terrific. Everyone got a gag gift. Darrell got a muzzle. Geoff got a six pack of Busch beer. (Bodine lost a $30,000 Busch pole bonus to Richmond in a tie-breaker after each had won eight poles last season).

“Harry got a book called ‘All I Know About Building Ford Engines.’ All the pages were blank.”

The team could expand to five by the time Hendrick comes back to Riverside in November for the Winston Western 500. He’s making his stock car driving debut June 28 at Road Atlanta in the Firestone Firehawk endurance race. Hendrick will share a turbocharged Nissan 300ZX with actor Tom Cruise.