CONCORD, N.C. – With more than 600 team members in the organization, there are stories all across the Hendrick Motorsports campus.
With that in mind, we’re taking the chance to give fans a glimpse at all of the many sides of Hendrick Motorsports.
Below, you’ll meet Travis Gordon, a former pit crew athlete and current sub-assembly supervisor.
How did you get your start at Hendrick Motorsports?
“I actually started at Hendrick Motorsports in 2004 as an intern and I, just like every other 18-year-old kid, applied for an internship. It was actually funny. I called every day for about three weeks because I was trying to figure out if I was going to have a job or not. Alan Gustafson, when they approached him and asked, ‘Do they need an intern?’ He said, ‘Well, yeah, we could use one.’ ‘I’ve got this kid that calls every day’ and he’s like, ‘That’s the guy I want.’
I started in the old No. 5 shop with Terry Labonte and I worked in the shock room doing some data entry for Alan and learning how to do shocks. That first summer it was an internship and then the next summer it really turned from an internship more into just a part-time job and I worked through the summer and just continued working and never really stopped. When I graduated in 2007, I finished that year out and then in 2008 I got hired on full-time.”
What is your current role?
“My title right now would be sub-assembly supervisor. I’m essentially over all the parts and pieces that come through the race shops that get bolted onto the race cars. I think there’s probably 20-some-odd people that work under me now. So basically if its anything from headers to rear-end housings to radiators, all that stuff falls under my realm. I’m in charge of managing inventory of all that stuff, making sure that parts and pieces are ready to go on the cars, forecasting product, that kind of stuff.”
Can you tell us a little about your other venture outside of Hendrick Motorsports?
“My wife’s family farms for a living and they have had buffalo for about 15 years now. My wife and I actually bought into the farm a couple years ago, so we own 17 animals up in Wisconsin. The buffalo, you think of it in terms of like a beef cow. So, we raise them, they’re all grass fed, no hormones, everything’s natural about it. Basically, it’s an organic animal. We slaughter them up here and then a lot of times what we’ll do is we’ve come up in the summer and we’ll bring a bunch of coolers and I’ll bring 400 or 500 pounds of meat back with me and we actually sell it back home. This is my father-in-law’s full-time job. That’s what he does for a living. Buffalo has come back. It’s starting to become more of a big ticket seller for us. It has less cholesterol than beef, higher protein, less fat. It’s more of a trendy healthy food.”
How often do you visit the farm?
“This year, since I’m not traveling with the pit crew this year, we’ve come up here in June and we’ll come back up in the fall. We came up here this week to try and help my father-in-law with hay and some of the other stuff around the farm just to try to help out where we can. We usually get up here once or twice a year and they usually come down and see us three or four times a year. That’s how we get our meat back and forth.”
Is it tough to balance with your job at Hendrick Motorsports?
“This side of it is not as tough. The biggest challenge I have is just finding time to meet customers to deliver meat and deliver food to them. My father-in-law does a great job up here and he really takes care of everything while I’m not here, which is 99 percent of the time. Our ultimate goal is to get enough property in Stanley County, where we live now, and be able to bring some of the animals down so we can actually have our own small herd there. Which, now, at that point, that would require a lot of extra time. We’re not quite there yet.”
Are you also involved in a boating club?
“Yes, sir. Among the other things, my wife and I are part owners in Destination Boat Clubs in North Carolina. We have my business partner, who runs the day-to-day operations. We have two locations on Lake Norman and two locations on Lake Wylie. We have roughly 60 members right now and about 14 boats and that does take up more of my time. That’s a lot of the weekends. I’m out helping clean boats and moving stuff around. We go to boat shows to promote the club and all that kind of stuff. It’s definitely more involved than the buffalo side, mainly just because of the physical location. If I were closer to the buffalo, I would help more with that, but being 900 miles away, it makes it tough.”
What’s the stress level of that versus working in NASCAR?
“It’s completely different. NASCAR you’re working for a company and you’re working for a big team and you have defined goals and then when you step away from that, now I’m the business owner. A lot it, there is stress within that but there’s only as much stress as I want there to be because it’s completely self-induced. I manage all that and I have other people I rely on to manage a lot of that as well. With the boat club, my business partner that does most of the day-to-day, we have a daily phone call just to see how stuff’s going but it’s typically very quick. I’ll call him at lunch and just see how the day’s going and what we’re looking like.
“Really, it’s not bad until we have an issue, if we have a boat break down or we have a member unhappy for some reason, which we don’t get very often. It’s like, ‘Hey, we’ve got to get a boat from here to here. We’ve got to go pick this up, we’ve got to go do this, we’ve got to meet these guys.’ It gets to be more of a time crunch. It’s tough, too, with my son – he is 19 months old, so it’s tough trying to balance, well, if I go meet these people or go do this after work, I’m trying to get home before he goes to bed so I can see him. You put the effort and time in now so you can reap the benefits of it later in life.”
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