Each weekend, wherever NASCAR visits, the spotlight is on it. And it was no different this weekend in the French countryside.
NASCAR and Hendrick Motorsports raced the prestigious 24 Hours of Le Mans with a Garage 56 stock car entry. Although the highly-modified NASCAR vehicle wasn’t participating for any class wins at the world’s most famous sports car race, it showcased all the technology and swagger America’s most popular racing series has to offer.
Seven-time NASCAR Cup champion Jimmie Johnson, 2009 Formula 1 world champion Jenson Button, and 2010 overall Le Mans winner Mike Rockenfeller drove the No. 24 Hendrick car to a 39th overall finish. Had the vehicle not had a driveline issue that took it out for just over an hour on Sunday morning, it likely would have finished in the 20s and head of many GTE entries.
The goal the team had was to complete the race. And that is what it did. Aside from the three start drivers, Rick and Linda Hendrick, Jeff Gordon, Chad Knaus, and NASCAR CEO Jim France were in the paddock.
The innovative entry piqued the interest of the entire paddock. Team members from up and down the grid checked out the car and took photos before the race, as many had probably never seen a NASCAR car in person before.
No points were on the line, and no trophies were there for the taking, but it was a triumph for NASCAR and Hendrick to complete the race. After the checkered flag, the drivers received cheers and applause from fans in the paddock. As Johnson took the flag, France raised his hat to salute the car and the driver, who drove the final stint.
I honestly can’t put this into words. So I’m not gonna try. pic.twitter.com/F9KMLFYW7b
— Josh Hamilton (@joshahamilton) June 11, 2023
“That was unbelievable,” France said. “That was thousands of hours of hard work by hundreds of people that went into making this thing happen. And then the way the team and the pit crews and everybody performed all week, it was just fantastic.
“I hope my dad and my brother are somewhere up there looking down and smiling, but the goal when we set out was to try and finish the race running at the end and not be last. And we accomplished that.”
Hendrick was excited about the race but worried about the car failing to meet expectations. He didn’t want to see the team “fall on our nose.”
“From the very beginning with Chad and Greg (Ives), I said we’ve got to do this right,” the team owner said. “We don’t spare any expense. Our NASCAR teams can do any kind of race they want to do. I mean, they got the talent, they’ve got the engineers, and they got a lot of smart people, and they can do whatever.”
Meanwhile, Martin Truex Jr. won his fourth career Sonoma Cup race in Northern California. He led 51 of 110 laps after starting eighth on Sunday.
The circumstances differed when Truex last won at the wine country road course in 2019. The track had used the longer configuration that included the “Chute,” which was part of the layout NASCAR used in the 1990s. And like this most recent event, Kyle Busch finished second, leaving the rest of the field in the dust.
Sunday was different, though, as Sonoma’s layout was the shorter configuration, including the tight Turn 7, an excellent passing zone on the track. And when Busch was runner-up in 2019, he was Truex’s Joe Gibbs Racing teammate. Four years ago, they ran away from the field, and it was comparable to what F1’s Mercedes team was doing regularly with Lewis Hamilton and Valtteri Bottas at every Grand Prix then. The top-two cars from the fastest team dominated the day, creating a boring show, but nonetheless asserted their dominance and took the win.
Busch now drives for Richard Childress Racing, but he hasn’t lost a step as he already has three wins in 2023, including last week’s running at WWTR Gateway in the St. Louis area.
Truex has two wins on the season now (three if you count the LA Clash exhibition race), and for the last year or so, there has been speculation about when he might retire from Cup racing.
It doesn’t appear imminent as long as he keeps winning.
During his post-race interview on the frontstretch, Truex noted how he is having fun again after a winless 2022 campaign. Winning, of course, is all it takes to keep a driver and his team happy.
“I think, honestly, just a lot of hard work in the off-season. NASCAR obviously let everybody do some redesigning on the front end with the louvers and the nose and that stuff,” Truex said. “I think we were able to get our cars to where the other guys’ were, closer to the Chevrolets that were super fast on the road courses last year.
“James (Small, crew chief) and my engineers and our team working hard to figure out a good setup that I would like, something that would work for me here that was like what we used to run in the past.”
Sonoma was the second road course race of the season and the second to have stages without stage break cautions. The race didn’t produce fireworks and chaos but allowed teams to use varying strategies. It was an organic race that didn’t predetermine when teams would have to make pit stops, and that is the beauty of motorsport. There were only cautions when they were warranted, and it felt like the NASCAR fans used to know before 2017.
On two occasions, Truex had to work through traffic on a restart after several cars elected not to pit during a caution, and it proved that sometimes in NASCAR, the best car-driver combination can still get the job done even through adversity.
Sonoma hasn’t been the most fantastic place to see great stock car racing over the years, but at least Sunday provided a show without a fabricated entertainment factor. Driver talent was on display, and the best team deservedly won.
