Hendrick Motorsports and Richard Childress Racing will be joining pact in the 2021 NASCAR Cup season so as to improve the Chevy engine performance.
Hendrick and Childress racing teams have been the most successful teams in the 2019 NASCAR Cup season, and following its end they will be joining ventures which will be highly focussed on engine research and development and eventually come up with a common specification Chevrolet engine.
“While our two championship-winning organizations will collaborate on research and development, our respective engine shop operations will continue to function independently as they currently do.”
“We look forward to working together to fully leverage the knowledge and intellectual property of our two successful programs to advance Chevrolet’s engine for NASCAR.” Hendrick Motorsport and Richard Childress said in a joint statement.
The new joint effort will be overseen on joint basis by Richie Gilmore(RCR) and Jeff Andrews from HMS who will also be joined by a steering comitee. Jeff Andrews recently received a promotion and is now the executive vice president and general manager Hendrick Mototrsports. Richie Gilmore on the other hand is the president ECR engines.
The engines that has been produced by the collaboration of the two entities have earned a combined 39 wins at NASCAR national series championships 20 of which have been from the NASCAR elite series.
The Chevrolet cars that have been taken to races by the two companies have won a combined 369 cup series which have all gained them points. However, Chevrolet have not gotten any championship win for the last three years. Jimmie Johnson was the last driver to win a championship for the team back in 2016, but this season the Chevrolet drivers have been able to get 4 out of the 12 remaining playoff slots and have achieved 5 combined victories. The remaining 8 Ford and Toyota drivers have gotten 22 victories of the season.
The move by the two teams has followed Totota and Ford common venture to have an unified common engine builders over the recent years and they have been proving to be very competitive in the NASCAR series.
“We started talking about this, Richie Gilmore at RCR and I, that the day was going to come when we really needed to figure out how to get these two programs together,” Andrews said in an interview on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
“There’s a tremendous amount of talent and people, a tremendous amount of equipment and resources between the two programs, so how could we do this? how could we take the long-standing heritage between the two companies and get that together and start to work on an alliance that would produce the ultimate power train for Chevrolet NASCAR?
“So, we have entered into that with them. We will maintain two separate facilities. When you step back and look at it, ultimately, when you have these resources and you have these people, you have to do what’s right for Chevrolet, first and foremost, to get them back to the front of the field and to get wins and championships.”
