CONCORD, N.C. -- Rick Hendrick has continued to make history this season after Hendrick Motorsports became the winningest NASCAR Cup Series race team in history, posting its 269th victory Sunday off of Kyle Larson’s dominant performance at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
Larson’s win comes just one week after Chase Elliott tied Petty Enterprises for the all-time wins record at Circuit of The Americas. While Hendrick is having one of his best seasons to date in the Cup Series, he lauded his wife Linda for being by his side through the stellar and tough times.
“She’s the rock. We used to go to boat races and she would sell T-shirts out the back of the van, and we just so happened to have the most popular boat out there,” Hendrick recalled of their modest racing beginnings. “But she took care of the kids and did that part of the business, and she put up with it.”
The Hendricks already were married when Rick Hendrick started his first car dealership in South Carolina. After a stint in boat racing, Hendrick started his first race team in 1984 with Geoff Bodine in the No. 5 Chevrolet. Hendrick put in much of his own money to run the No. 5 and was getting close to shutting down the team before Bodine won the organization's first race in April 1984.
Despite the strains from the first several months of fielding a Cup Series team, Rick Hendrick said Linda was always in his corner.
“Maybe I didn’t have the money to do it but she never said, ‘Hey, you shouldn’t be doing this. It’s putting us in a financial jam’ or ‘You could be and you need to be with the kids more,’” he said. “We’ve always been able to work the balance, and I give her a ton of credit for supporting me all those years.”
Soon racing was ingrained in the Hendrick household. Both of Rick and Linda’s children, Ricky and Lynn, grew up surrounded by some form of racing and were young when Hendrick Motorsports officially started.
“Ricky was, I don’t know, I think he was 4 years old, he said that racing ran through his blood like water through a stream,” Hendrick said. “It’s been in the family and when I grew up, my dad raced and I raced, Ricky raced. (Linda has) been around it forever.”
Aside from owning the most wins in the Cup Series, Hendrick Motorsports has the most championships (13), most top-five finishes (1,126) most top-10s (1,938) and has led for the most laps (72,338). For every championship, all 269 wins and each lap that Hendrick Motorsports has run, Linda Hendrick has been by her husband’s side.
“I was in school and she was cleaning up cars that I would sell in the paper back in those days and still found time to race,” Hendrick said. “She deserves as much, if not more, than I do in what the company has been able to do.”