Joe Gibbs Bows in Gratitude for HMS Counterpart Rick Hendrick’s Role in Creating JGR

The 2024 season has been majorly a two-team show so far. Joe Gibbs Racing and Hendrick Motorsports are the talk of the town in NASCAR’s premier series. These teams have won six of the seven races since Daytona in February. They dominated last night’s Richmond race in the top five, although Team Penske’s Joey Logano had a slice of the cake and clinched a runner-up spot.

And quite naturally, the two teams’ owners are on cloud nine as well. Life is good for Joe Gibbs and Rick Hendrick. As their drivers lock horns in tight rivalries on the race track, it turns out the team owners have a warm camaraderie.

Joe Gibbs tips his hat to NASCAR rival

Hendrick and JGR drivers are on fire this season. They have led 1,013 of the 2,014 total laps. Currently, Denny Hamlin is the only driver to lead a lap in every race and is tied with William Byron for the most wins. The on-track rivalry between the two powerhouses continued at Richmond. Kyle Larson and Martin Truex Jr made contact on the final lap as sparks and smoke emitted from the collision.

But their team owners are on a different plane, maintaining peaceful ties. Not only are tyhe duo good friends, but the HMS mogul reportedly also had a role to play in JGR’s inception. Joe Gibbs recently acknowledged Joe Gibbs’ immense help in turning his JGR dreams into reality. “So Rick played a key role in getting us started. We also bought some stuff from him. We also had a motor package with him for quite a while. So Rick was instrumental…To come into the sport, it really does help to have an alliance. In those days, it wasn’t called an alliance but that’s really what he was for us. Because we had 17 people, our first year.”

Joe Gibbs elucidated that a legendary racer saw through his initiation into NASCAR in 1992. “Everybody had told me the person you need to call is Rick. Well, when I called Rick, he said, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna put my general manager with you’. And that was Jimmie Johnson. That’s how we started out. Jimmie Johnson was taking me around to everybody, at that point Chevrolet, then he went with me to Interstate.”

This is not the first time the two team owners have openly demonstrated their fuzzy dynamic. Last year before the Championship race, they even took sly digs at each other over their team performances. At that time, the Hendrick team sported a whopping ten wins, while JGR trailed close behind with eight wins. However, the NASCAR tracks aren’t the only places where the veteran team owners cross paths. In fact, their friendship extends way beyond that which was evident from the hilarious story that Joe Gibbs shared/

Gibbs and Hendrick spent time beyond race tracks

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Known as the “Master Motivator”, Joe Gibbs served as a powerful coach both on race tracks as well as on football grounds. Before venturing into racing full-time, Gibbs had brought in three Superbowl championships. Gibbs was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1996. After his successful football career, he then went on to leave trailblazing memories in NASCAR.

Yet Gibbs stayed in touch with his old sport and even brought his NASCAR friends to events. Recently ,he recalled how he called Rick Hendrick to a football match, but the latter was ill-prepared for the game. “I invited him to a football game…and he wore these boots. These fancy big boots, and they came apart on the sideline. It was freezing cold, and he almost died on the sideline the night he came. So that was a side story.”

While it’s safe to say that Hendriick and Gibbs maintain a good relationship, will their drivers be able to maintain that same camaraderie in the upcoming race weekends? We’ll have to wait to find out!

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