Josh Gibson from Hendrick Motorsports: “We can go from the steel rack to the race track in a month.”
Every team in NASCAR is currently busy working on their Daytona 500 machines. But, what does it take to get there?
For the employee’s at Hendrick Motorsports, there is no off-season. From Homestead to Daytona, the work is underway. That work is amplified for a super team like Hendrick Motorsports who fields 4 cars, 10% of the entire field in the 2018 Daytona 500.
Hendrick Motorsports is taking you behind the scenes of the chassis shop in Charlotte, NC. Josh Gibson, head of the Hendrick chassis shop, sat down to detail the process.
Watch the first episode below.
“When the flag drops at Homestead, your window’s so small to get ready for next year. Daytona’s coming,” Gibson says, “no matter what.”
“When we start to prepare for Daytona, we usually get the numbers on the speedway cars. Each team gets a primary and a backup, brand new, every year.”
“We can go from the steel rack to the race track in a month. It’s loud, you get a lot of burnt metal. Ziz wheel grindin’ dust and that kinda thing.”
“The logistics is a big part of it. It’s pretty important that everybody understand the process. Because that car’s going to do 200 mph. If we screw up, something bad could happen, very quickly.”
“I feel confident in the group of people that we have from designing the race cars to the group that’s building these race cars,” he said. “We build safe, fast, winning race cars.”
Blue Cross and Blue Shield of North Carolina has compiled a six-part video series —“Stronger / Faster / Fearless” — the mini-series takes an inside look at everything that goes into preparing a NASCAR race car for the start of a new season.
Yesterday, that series aired the first episode. You can watch the clip below.
The first show details the chassis shop. Future episodes will highlight the pit crews, the engine shop, the race shop and the crew chiefs.
Stay tuned to HendrickMotorsports.com for all six episodes over the next few weeks, and watch the first episode above.
