Hendrick Motorsports: Drivers, History, Museum & Everything Else You Need to Know

If you’ve spent any time following NASCAR, you’ve run into the name Hendrick Motorsports more than any other team on the grid, and for good reason. It’s not just one of the sport’s biggest organizations — it’s the winningest team in NASCAR Cup Series history, full stop, and it’s not particularly close. Here’s a full rundown of who owns it, who drives for it, what it’s accomplished, and the various side projects — from a Le Mans stock car to a private aircraft fleet — that make this team as interesting off the track as it is on it.

Who Owns Hendrick Motorsports?

Rick Hendrick founded the team in 1984, originally under the name All-Star Racing, and he’s remained at the helm ever since. Hendrick’s background is actually in car dealerships rather than racing itself — he built the Hendrick Automotive Group, now one of the largest privately held dealership groups in the United States, starting from a single dealership he opened in Bennettsville, South Carolina back in 1976. That business success is what eventually funded his entry into NASCAR ownership, and the two operations have grown side by side ever since.

Jeff Gordon, who drove for the team for over two decades and won four championships behind the wheel, now serves as Vice Chairman of the organization, giving Hendrick Motorsports a genuinely rare blend of ownership experience and hands-on former-driver leadership at the top of the organization.

How It All Started

The origin story is worth knowing, because it explains a lot about the culture the team still has today. Rick Hendrick was a drag racer long before he was a NASCAR owner, setting speed records as a teenager in a 1931 Chevrolet he built himself. That hands-on, mechanically obsessed streak carried through into his business career and eventually into racing, where he partnered with veteran crew chief Harry Hyde to launch what was then called All-Star Racing in 1984, with Geoff Bodine behind the wheel of the No. 5 car.

Bodine picked up the organization’s first win just months later, at Martinsville Speedway on April 29, 1984 — a result that, at the time, nobody could have guessed would be the first of over 320 Cup Series victories to come. The team’s early years also included a partnership with driver Tim Richmond, whose career and life were cut short by illness, and whose story remains one of the more poignant chapters in Hendrick’s history. It would be nearly a decade after the team’s founding before its first championship arrived, with Terry Labonte winning it in 1996, followed by a run of Jeff Gordon titles that turned Hendrick into the dominant force it’s been ever since.

A Team Built on Records

Calling Hendrick Motorsports successful almost undersells it. The organization holds the all-time NASCAR Cup Series record for race wins, sitting at 322 points-paying victories — comfortably ahead of any other team in the sport’s history. It’s also collected 15 Cup Series owner and driver championships, the most of any team, spread across different eras and different star drivers: Terry Labonte, Jeff Gordon, Jimmie Johnson, and most recently Kyle Larson, who claimed his second championship with the team in 2025.

Johnson alone accounts for seven of those titles, including a run of five consecutive championships from 2006 to 2010 that remains one of the most dominant stretches by any driver in the sport’s history. Add in three championships in what’s now the NASCAR Truck Series and a drivers’ title in the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series, and Hendrick Motorsports has won championships across every level NASCAR runs at its top divisions — a feat only a handful of ownership groups in the sport’s history can claim.

The 2026 Driver Lineup

Hendrick fields four full-time Cup Series entries, and the lineup has been remarkably stable in recent years:

Car No.	Driver	Crew Chief
5	Kyle Larson	Cliff Daniels
9	Chase Elliott	Alan Gustafson
24	William Byron	Rudy Fugle
48	Alex Bowman	Blake Harris

Every one of those driver-crew chief pairings has been in place since 2023, which is unusually stable by modern NASCAR standards and speaks to how the organization prefers to build long-term chemistry rather than shuffle personnel after a difficult season. Larson enters 2026 as the reigning champion, defending the title he won in 2025 — his second with the team, following his first championship not long after joining Hendrick.

Beyond the Cup Series, Hendrick also fields the No. 17 car full-time in the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series with rising talent Corey Day, and in an unusual arrangement for 2026, all four Cup drivers are sharing time in JR Motorsports’ No. 88 car in that same series alongside newcomer Rajah Caruth, giving fans a chance to see Larson, Elliott, Byron and Bowman all behind the wheel of the same car at different points in the season.

The JR Motorsports Connection

That crossover with JR Motorsports isn’t a coincidence — Rick Hendrick has a long-running business relationship with Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Kelley Earnhardt Miller, who co-own that separate organization. It’s a partnership built on decades of trust between the two camps, and it’s part of why an arrangement as unusual as four different Cup Series stars rotating through a single lower-series car could come together as smoothly as it has. For fans, it’s also a genuinely useful pipeline — a way to watch drivers who might eventually make their way onto a full-time Hendrick Cup roster down the line, the way Chase Elliott himself once came up through JR Motorsports before joining the main Hendrick lineup.

Larson’s own path to a second championship in 2025 is worth a mention too. After winning his first title in his debut season with the team, he went through a stretch of strong-but-not-dominant seasons before putting together the campaign that got him back to the top, finishing the 2025 season with three wins and a series-best mark in the final standings. That kind of up-and-down journey to a second title, rather than a straightforward run of dominance, is often what fans find more compelling to follow than a driver who simply wins every year without any adversity in between.

The Le Mans Project That Surprised Everyone

One of the more unusual chapters in Hendrick Motorsports history has nothing to do with NASCAR ovals at all. In 2023, the team partnered with NASCAR, Chevrolet, Goodyear and IMSA to build a heavily modified Next Gen Chevrolet Camaro ZL1 for the Garage 56 entry at the 24 Hours of Le Mans — a special single-car class reserved for innovative, one-off entries that don’t compete for the overall win.

The car, carrying the No. 24 as a tribute to one of the most storied numbers in Hendrick’s own history, was piloted by seven-time Cup champion Jimmie Johnson, 2009 Formula One world champion Jenson Button, and two-time Le Mans winner Mike Rockenfeller. Despite running a NASCAR-spec 5.8-liter V8 against purpose-built endurance prototypes, the car finished the race in 39th position out of 62 entries — exactly the kind of “finish what we start” result the team had targeted going in.

The project became one of the more talked-about stories of that year’s race, largely because of how differently the stock car sounded and behaved compared to everything else on the Circuit de la Sarthe. The car has since made its way back to North Carolina and is now part of the permanent display at the Hendrick Motorsports Museum.

Visiting the Hendrick Motorsports Museum and Facility

Hendrick’s home base sits on more than 150 acres in Concord, North Carolina, just outside Charlotte, with roughly 500,000 square feet of workspace supporting close to 500 employees across the team’s various race shops. The complex includes a museum that’s open to the public, showcasing decades of championship-winning cars, trophies and memorabilia — including, for a time, the Garage 56 Le Mans car itself.

Beyond the museum, Hendrick also runs organized tours of the broader campus for fans who want a closer look at how a modern Cup Series operation is actually built and run day to day, from the fabrication shops to the engine department.

Shopping the Team Collection

For fans looking to support their favorite driver or the organization as a whole, Hendrick Motorsports and its individual teams sell an extensive range of official merchandise — everything from driver-specific shirts and jackets to a broader “team collection” line that includes more general apparel like tops, jeans and outerwear rather than just driver-branded racewear. Official team stores, along with the individual driver shops for Larson, Elliott, Byron and Bowman, carry the full range of current-season gear, and it’s generally the most reliable place to find authentic merchandise rather than third-party reproductions.

Careers at Hendrick Motorsports

With around 500 employees supporting four full-time Cup teams, Hendrick Motorsports isn’t just hiring drivers and crew chiefs — the organization regularly posts openings across engineering, fabrication, data analysis, marketing and even aviation. That last one might sound unusual for a race team, but it makes more sense once you understand how Hendrick actually gets its people to the track.

The Private Aircraft Fleet

Because NASCAR teams don’t fly their cars to races the way Formula One does — those still go by truck — but they absolutely fly their people, and Hendrick Motorsports operates its own small fleet to do it. The flagship aircraft is a Gulfstream G650, an ultra-long-range jet registered to HMS Holdings and based at Concord-Padgett Regional Airport, close to the team’s main campus. The organization also operates a Dassault Falcon 2000 and, at various points, larger regional jets used to move bigger groups of crew and staff across the country during the season’s busiest stretches.

It’s a genuinely large operation — Hendrick has posted job listings specifically for experienced Gulfstream G650 pilots, requiring thousands of hours of flight time, which gives some sense of how seriously the logistics side of running a modern four-car Cup team is actually taken behind the scenes.

Where to Find Official Information

For the most current schedule, standings and driver news, Hendrick Motorsports’ official site is the best primary source, covering everything from race weekend schedules to the team’s history and museum details. NASCAR’s official season preview offers a useful breakdown of how each of the four Hendrick cars is expected to perform heading into a new season, and ESPN’s NASCAR driver database is a reliable way to cross-check current team and sponsor information across the whole Cup Series field.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who owns Hendrick Motorsports? Rick Hendrick, who founded the team in 1984. Jeff Gordon, a former Hendrick driver and four-time champion, now serves as Vice Chairman.

Who are the current Hendrick Motorsports drivers? Kyle Larson (No. 5), Chase Elliott (No. 9), William Byron (No. 24) and Alex Bowman (No. 48) in the Cup Series, with Corey Day driving the No. 17 full-time in the O’Reilly Auto Parts Series.

How many championships has Hendrick Motorsports won? 15 NASCAR Cup Series owner and driver championships — the most of any team in NASCAR history — along with three Truck Series titles and one O’Reilly Auto Parts Series title.

Did Hendrick Motorsports really race at Le Mans? Yes — in 2023, the team built and ran a modified NASCAR Cup car as the Garage 56 entry at the 24 Hours of Le Mans, finishing 39th out of 62 cars.

Where is Hendrick Motorsports based? Concord, North Carolina, on a campus of more than 150 acres that includes the team’s race shops and a public museum.

Is there a Hendrick Motorsports museum you can visit? Yes, the museum in Concord is open to the public and displays championship-winning cars and memorabilia from across the team’s history, along with organized campus tours.

How did Hendrick Motorsports get its start? Rick Hendrick founded the team as All-Star Racing in 1984 with driver Geoff Bodine, who picked up the organization’s first win that same year at Martinsville Speedway. The team’s first championship didn’t arrive until 1996, with Terry Labonte behind the wheel.