CONCORD, N.C. — This weekend, the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series race is hitting the track “Too Tough To Tame” – Darlington Raceway.
And for Jaysen Greenhill, fabricator at Hendrick Motorsports, the track takes him back down memory lane.
“We went to Darlington a few times when I was a kid,” Greenhill said. “It was always a good time, and sitting on Turn 4 was always the coolest thing. Watching those guys come off the wall like they do there is really impressive.”
Greenhill was born and raised in Summerville, South Carolina, which is roughly 40 miles away from the city of Charleston. While the beach was a favorite spot for Greenhill, he would rather be working on race cars.
“I started to work on cars when I was 13 at Summerville Speedway, a local track,” Greenhill said. “We started racing in Myrtle Beach, racing late models there.”
South Carolina had racing, but North Carolina had a little more to offer for Greenhill’s career.
“I moved up in 2002, chasing the dream,” Greenhill said. “I finally just got to know a lot of people and finally got a job changing tires. That’s kind of how I got into racing.”
Racing was in Greenhill’s family blood. His older brother was into go-kart racing and he had a cousin that ran street stocks and late models. Even his 63-year-old uncle still races today.
But getting behind the wheel was not of any interest to the fabricator.
“The mechanics of it is my biggest passion – understanding all that is a lot by all means,” Greenhill explained. “It’s challenging. I think it’s that chase, I guess, to understand everything you can that enables us to do what we do in regards to the geometry, the setups, the body builds, the chassis builds. I mean, all that stuff is just really, really cool to try and figure out how those things work.”
The South Carolina native has worked at Hendrick Motorsports for over a year and is proud to visit a track from so close to his hometown, especially for the #NASCARthowback weekend.
“Every time you go there, it’s nostalgic,” Greenhill said. “It still looks that way, which is really cool. Darlington still has that old feel, that old look. It’s a really cool place to go from a racing standpoint and a fan’s standpoint.”