At the forefront of NASCAR’s tech arms race with Hendrick Motorsports

40 years is a long time to be around. Just ask Hendrick Motorsports.

Rick Hendrick still stands tall with his four-car dream team of young talent. Even as many champion and highly successful owners like Junior Johnson, Harry Ranier, Harry Melling, Robert Yates, are gone.

The NASCAR Cup Series has always been an arms race among bright brains outsmarting each other with ingenuity and technology.

A race that became magnified as the sport experienced an influx of cash in the early-2000s boom and two massive platform shifts in the 17 years since that boom cooled off.

No shift has arguably been as big as the Gen 7 car.

Gone are parts specially designed to go up to the minuscule edge of the tolerances and in are single-sourced parts everyone buys from the same place.

“We’re now racing in the margins. We’re trying to find those tens of thousands of an inch so more focus is on the metrology side,” said Brian Campe, the technical director at Hendrick Motorsports.

Gone are shifting parts from week to week and developing through the season. In is the reuse of parts.

“Whereas the previous car was build parts, throw it, build it better next week, there’s a reliability side we have to keep track of. We’re measuring more parts and doing more quality control on the metrology side,” Campe said. “On our old cars, the method was string and tape measure. That’s no longer good enough.”

Campe has been around since the 2000s and the days of Dale Earnhardt Inc. when teams prepared for the claw-and-shell inspection with hand-fabricated parts and hand work in the shop.

“Now, we don’t tolerate anything that doesn’t get measured by, you know, one of the Hexagon products if it has performance or rules implications,” Campe said.

Last year, Hendrick Motorsports signed a 10-year deal with Hexagon. It continues a partnership that has been going on for over 20 years.

Hexagon has around 24,500 employees in 50 countries with net sales of around $6 billion. They work with various industries, from aerospace to forestry to health care to utilities and communications, and help businesses harness data and technology to stand out.

“We develop our product a lot. How we work with our product and all customers is because of the engineers at Hendrick challenged us to do things differently. And there’s stuff that’s in our software today, that was only there because of Hendrick Motorsports,” Scott Grumbles said.

Scott Grumbles has worked for Hexagon for around 20 years. He has spent many of those years working closely with HMS.

“We have the high-accuracy stuff for things like engine building, toe and camber but also portable arms and laser trackers that measure less accurately but larger and more portable when they’re doing the building and the final configurations,” Grumbles said.

“We use the absolute arms on the setup plate for mechanical elements like toes, cambers and ride heights. With an AS1 quick scanner, we scan the outer body and underbody. Those technologies are used the most and most frequently. Metrology engineers to mechanics are trained on it,” Campe said.

Campe says every department of the organization uses these tools.

“There’s not a department here that doesn’t interact with a Hexagon product, from our machine shop to the engine shop to checking those parts as they came off, to as the chassis gets built to as the body gets put on to how the car is set up to how the teams interact with the scans they get in comparison to NASCAR.” Campe said.

They all play a role in measuring each part before putting them together in a stack.

“They say, ‘Well now that we’ve got all these parts, let’s pick and choose from the best mathematicals and the stack-up.’ Stack up as in part A, B and C, if they were made to the top of the tolerance, to the plus side, you might get a certain assembly. It might be in tolerance but it might not be the desired assembly. So you might go get part A, then you might get part B that had minus tolerances and this part C has a minus tolerance. You’ve scanned them and put them together virtually. Then I know this is the part for the best assembly so you can get the best advantage,” Grumbles said.

Perfecting the stack and dialing in the car in-shop is the difference between immediately running well on a weekend with 20 minutes of practice plus 1-2 laps of track time – and struggling.

Grumbles said these capabilities separate a big organization like HMS from smaller organizations.

“If you were at a smaller team, they’re not doing that. They don’t have the same manpower to be doing this on that level. They take all the parts, they’re all in tolerance and put it together to see what they get for the final result,” Grumbles said.

Once the race weekend is done, the work has only begun on the parts. The parts often expand and contract by fine margins due to the elements they face.

“When it comes back from the race, how did it change? Is it changing in a way that we can use that part again? Is it in the manufacturer’s tolerance? In the past, you could run them one race but now you’re running them over and over again,” Campe said.

Additionally, teams don’t have access to NASCAR’s Hawkeye system. That puts it on them to pay close attention during tech inspection to know what they need to work on in the shop.

“We’re constantly trying to correlate back to the NASCAR tool. And that’s where the Hexagon tool needs to be accurate. It needs to be consistent. You know, week to week, month to month, it needs to be the same measurement in the same way. We get that with the tools we have, we know we can count on that. We’re just chasing the correlation to the NASCAR scrutineering tools,” Campe said.

Scrutinizing every part, piece and bit to the damnedest nth still takes manpower, even with this technology. It takes time, a resource precious for the hearts and souls powering the brains of the organization.

Hearts and souls who have been in turnover, in the face of a grinding 40 weeks of 24/7 work with seemingly fewer off-weeks each year.

Campe says their new technology, while doubling their accuracy, also cut a two-hour process down to 20 minutes.

“You’ve got the best of the best here. So they’ll try their hardest, and they’ll work their guts out until sometimes very, very late at night or early early in the morning. If working with Hexagon can take a process and cut it by, you know, 75%, that’s time that I’m giving time back to them and time back to his family, hopefully. That helps the quality of life too so it has bigger impacts than just what’s on track,” Campe said.

Campe has been on the ground floor of working with these technologies since his days in IndyCar. He propelled Team Penske to win the Indianapolis 500 and the championship within the confines of the spec parts and pieces model now common in NASCAR.

“I think F1 gets a lot of attention. But I’d be hard-pressed to say we don’t look like that. A lot of the same technology that NASCAR uses is likely in the Formula One shops as well. It has come a long way. Where we were two years ago, compared to now is maybe even a bigger jump than the previous 10 years,” Campe said.

With this type of technology and advantages already down to the slimmest microscopic levels, where does it go next?

Campe says it’s all about leveraging the data to make parts better. That improves performance in certain areas and speeds up the process.

“Because if you can get data set, maybe you can scan that thing twice in the same amount of time, that gives you an opportunity to make a change, scan it again, and then decide do I need to make another change?” Grumbles added.