Hendrick Motorsports

You’ve been training for this exact moment for months. Your heart is pounding as you step up to the line, ready and in position.  You visualize the perfect run – staring down the A-zone of the paper target in front of you. The one phrase flashing through your head is, “Trust in your training and follow it.” Then you hear the high-pitched buzzer, signaling you to begin.

I grew up in Fort Valley, Georgia, a small town with just three stoplights and less than 10,000 people.  It’s the kind of place where life is slower, the peaches are sweeter and everyone makes time to attend the local high school football games on Friday nights in the fall. A close-knit community, there’s a deep sense of camaraderie in Fort Valley, which is a quality that has been important to me for as long as I can remember. So when I walked into Hendrick Motorsports for my first day of work on June 15, 2013, and saw the solidarity among the team, I knew it was meant to be my new home.

Building a speedway car for a track like Talladega (Alabama) Superspeedway is like putting together a giant puzzle with tiny pieces – if you were doing it in slow motion. The process is a crawl; a slow and gradual evolution.  Little by little, the car is assembled and perfected. And from step one until the finishing touches, not one stone is left unturned and nothing goes on the car until it’s proven that it works.