This weekend’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Martinsville Speedway marks 40 years since the mighty Hendrick Motorsports celebrated its first win at the Virginia short track. Back then, they were All-Star Racing, and the rocky start to the team foreshadowed a possible quick demise… Then came the miracle at Martinsville. Mike Hembree penned this captivating tale for the latest (Apr/May 2024) issue of Vintage Motorsport.
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Among the many beneficiaries of Geoffrey Bodine’s first NASCAR Cup Series win in April 1984 was a small convenience store in Greensboro, North Carolina. The store didn’t have an appearance scheduled for Bodine, and sponsorship was not involved. No, this was all about toilet paper…
It’s an odd sort of story – clearly – but it’s one that ultimately led to the survival and growth of what became the best team in NASCAR history, Hendrick Motorsports.
The start of the team, says owner Rick Hendrick, “was not rational, was not smart.” But no one can deny it was fruitful.
In 1983, Hendrick owned several car dealerships, the first building blocks of what would become an automotive empire. An automobile and high-speed junkie, he’d grown up working on hotrods, and that passion would leak into drag-boat racing, And so, in the early 1980s, Hendrick started a drag-boat racing team. That effort ended in tragedy in 1982 when Jimmy Wright, a friend and pilot of one of the team’s drag boats, died in a crash in competition. Soon after, Hendrick shuttered the operation.
A year later, Hendrick discussed an opportunity to jump into Cup racing with country music superstar Kenny Rogers and C.K. Spurlock, a Nashville businessman and music promoter and owner of Gambler Chassis, a builder of sprint cars.
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Those talks reached a point that resulted in the interest of Richard Petty, NASCAR’s all-time victory king. Petty was looking for a new ride and almost signed on with Hendrick and company before joining California businessman Mike Curb. Petty drove on to score his 199th and 200th Cup wins. Rogers and Spurlock soon disappeared from the racing landscape, but Hendrick held on to his dream of competing in the big time.
Despite early success in selling cars, Hendrick was not flush with money, but found enough to kickstart a team with veteran mechanic Harry Hyde and Bodine, a successful Modified driver and a terror on short tracks in the Northeast.
Yet as they arrived in Daytona Beach, Fla., in February 1984 to begin this new adventure, Hendrick watched his bank account dwindle. Major league auto racing demanded the investment of cubic dollars.
Bodine finished a surprising eighth in the season-opening Daytona 500 and followed that with ninth at Richmond and sixth at Rockingham, putting some cash into All-Star Racing, the team name Hendrick had chosen back when it appeared “stars” would be on board…
Still, no sponsor had signed on to fuel the operation. He was renting transmissions and gears and a shop, had only two racecars, and remained in the sport largely because of the enthusiasm of Hyde, who was working for $500 per week, and Bodine, who, at 34, wanted a serious chance to prove himself at NASCAR’s top level. Finishes over the next four weeks were not promising, and the team hit a low at Darlington Raceway in April when Bodine was involved in a crash that left him 35th. The team limped home with damaged fenders and crushed dreams.
For Hendrick, this could have been the day the racing died. But Hyde – the prototype for Harry Hogge, the grizzled crew chief played by Robert Duvall in the movie “Days of Thunder” – urged Hendrick to send his team to one more race. He knew the sport’s ins and outs and respected Bodine’s track record at Martinsville, next stop on the schedule.
“He’s good there,” Hyde told Hendrick. “We’ve got a good car and a good engine. Let’s go.” Hendrick agreed, holding his breath. There was no Plan B.
The Sovran Bank 500 proved to be the race that saved Hendrick. Relying on years of experience at one of NASCAR’s shortest tracks, Bodine qualified the All-Star Racing Chevrolet Monte Carlo in sixth place at the Virginia half-miler and was in the lead pack or within striking distance virtually all afternoon, first hitting the front just before half-distance.
But brakes are always a key to strong runs at Martinsville’s paperclip of a track, and Bodine, making his 69th Cup start, pampered his until the final 100 laps of 500.
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With 49 to go, Bodine, running second, went around the outside of Bobby Allison, who’d led 266 laps, and hit the front for good. He won by six seconds over Ron Bouchard, with Darrell Waltrip third and Allison fourth.
On a normal Sunday, Bodine would have driven to victory lane for a joyous celebration with his team owner. But Hendrick was an hour away in Greensboro, North Carolina, where he and his wife, Linda, had attended a worship service. They got the news when Hendrick stopped at a pay phone to call his mother, Mary, to enquire about Bodine’s run.
“Rick called his mother, and she told him the car blew up,” Linda says. “Then she said, ‘I’m joking. You won!’ We couldn’t believe it. We were ecstatic. It was a day that was bigger than life. There were a lot of emotions. Grateful. Thankful. Just couldn’t believe it.”
There they were, on the side of the road with no one to share the joy of the moment. Then Hendrick had an idea. Bodine lived near Greensboro. While he and the team were celebrating in Martinsville, the Hendricks stopped at a convenience store, bought most of the store’s supply of toilet paper and drove to Bodine’s home, where they expertly rolled the lawn and house. It was an expense they now could afford. Hendrick’s gamble – and it truly was a gamble on that Sunday at Martinsville – had paid off handsomely.
Forty years later, Hendrick Motorsports’ Cup Series victory total has passed 300, he owns 14 Cup championships, and his racing operation is respected internationally.
Hendrick said he jumped into Cup Series racing with about $200,000 to spend. As Bodine and Hyde raced through a difficult spring that first season, the dollars fell away like leaves in the wind. Staying in the hunt was irrational, admitted Hendrick, a man not accustomed to risky moves.
“There wasn’t anything rational about it,” he says with 40 years of hindsight. “Part of it was that I was so pumped up about being in NASCAR and maybe being involved with Rogers and Spurlock and with Richard Petty as a driver. When all that fell apart, we still had the cars. I was still wanting to do it and hoping we could find a sponsor.
“It was pure love of automobiles. I didn’t have the money to do it. You wouldn’t believe how cheap we did that, renting transmissions, renting the shop, renting the equipment.
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“Then it didn’t go well. I told Harry that I was in jeopardy of putting my [automobile] company in a bind. I couldn’t risk what I had built. But it was hard because you don’t want to fail. At that point in my life, I hadn’t had a disappointment where I had to say I failed.”
So they raced on, unloading at Martinsville with a bright red and white No. 5 Chevrolet, the skills of Bodine and the race smarts of Hyde, who had traveled these rough roads before. Northwestern Security Life insurance provided a lifeline with sponsorship for the race and, after the win, kicked in $450,000 to carry the team forward.
“I was throwing deep, but it all worked out,” Hendrick said. “I never thought I’d win a race. I went to Daytona and looked around and saw Junior Johnson and Richard Petty and those guys and wondered why I was even there.”
Bodine would go on to win two more Cup races that season – at Nashville and on the Riverside road course – and finished the season a thoroughly respectable ninth in points. The team had run all 30 races, and now the Hendrick operation had stability.
Bodine and Hyde had effectively opened the Hendrick doors for the likes of Jeff Gordon, Chad Knaus, Jimmie Johnson, Ray Evernham, Terry Labonte, Darrell Waltrip, Kyle Larson, Tim Richmond, Chase Elliott and all the success that would follow.
In 1995, Gordon gave Hendrick his first Cup Series championship. Once starving for support, Hendrick eventually attracted some of the biggest sponsors in the history of NASCAR and built a racing campus near Charlotte Motor Speedway that now employs more than 500 people.
“We thought Martinsville would be our last race,” Linda Hendrick confirms. “We were having to come up with the money to race out of our pockets. The race before that we were at a stopping point. We said, ‘OK, one more race.’ That [win] kept us going. Sponsors wanted to come on board and be a part of it.
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“That first race at Daytona, Rick and Harry were doing it for fun. There was no grand design to have a racing team. They just wanted to put a car on the track at Daytona and run it. Then one race led to another.
“It has been a lot of work and sacrifice.”
Long retired, Bodine enjoys reminding Hendrick that he “saved” the team with the win at Martinsville. During a February press conference announcing plans for the 40th anniversary celebration this season, Bodine repeated the line that he was still waiting for his “big check” for the role he played. Gordon, now the team’s vice chairman, was ready, pulling $40 from his pocket. “One for each year since then,” he said, smiling. Bodine accepted, shoving the cash in his pocket before Gordon could change his mind.
On that Sunday night in Martinsville, hours after the victory celebration had ended, Bodine and several family members toasted the day with a dinner at Clarence’s Steak House, a Martinsville area institution. In addition to bolstering Hendrick’s fledgling team, Bodine’s win was his first in Cup, too.
“To save Hendrick Motorsports was a bonus,” says Bodine who eventually retired with 18 wins. “We knew it was important for that reason. But, hey, it was also the first Cup win for a punk kid from Chemung, New York. And it couldn’t happen at a better place since I had run so well at Martinsville in Modifieds.”
Bodine was also responsible for Hendrick Motorsports’ first Daytona 500 victory in 1986. And some 38 years later, Hendrick scored a 1-2 in the 2024 season-opener thanks to William Byron and Alex Bowman, thereby tying Petty Enterprises on nine victories in NASCAR’s marquee race.