Team owner Rick Hendrick made a radical choice for his Hendrick Motorsports team heading into the 1986 season. After two years and three wins as a single-car team, Hendrick Motorsports became a two-car operation.
The reasoning behind the move was simple: Hendrick had a sponsor who wanted to enter the sport, and a driver and crew chief who were no longer working well together, so he saw a second car as the logical way to grow his team and improve team chemistry.
The No. 32 Pontiac owned by...
The No. 32 Pontiac owned by Cal Wells had set itself apart from theone-car pack by winning at Darlington and maintaining aTop-10 points position for several weeks.
There was one small problem with the choice, though, as nothing in NASCAR's recent history told Hendrick the concept would work. Quite the contrary was true, because two-car teams were notorious for upsetting drivers and upending team chemistry. Junior Johnson had the sport's only sustained two-car effort at the time, and his team's performance was waning, despite Darrell Waltrip's Winston Cup title in 1985.
Now, 19 years after Hendrick formed Hendrick Motorsports and 17 years after he chose the two-car concept, Hendrick has become one of the sport's most successful owners, with five Winston Cup championships, more than 100 wins, a showcase complex near Charlotte, North Carolina, and four cars competing full-time on the circuit. The concept not only worked, but multi-car teams have become the preferred method of doing battle in Winston Cup.
So did Hendrick's peers see him as a visionary who foresaw the future of the sport?
"No, because I spent so many years with people telling me how dumb I was and that I would never win a champion-ship by running multi-car teams," he says.
However, the number of one-car teams running the circuit full-time today has diminished. And only one single-car team reached victory lane in the first part of this season, after single-car operations were winless in 2002.