Rick Hendrick has been a General Motors guy from the start. He’s always talked about being a Chevy fan since he was a kid. So, when the chance to start his own NASCAR team came up in 1984, he didn’t have to think twice. It was Chevy all the way. Even when GM hit rock bottom in 2009 and was filing for bankruptcy, Hendrick stuck by them. He famously said, “My Plan A is Chevrolet, my Plan B is Chevrolet, and my Plan C is Chevrolet.” They’ve only grown from there, and now, with GM diving into Formula 1, they’re turning to Hendrick for help.
Starting in the 2026 Formula 1 season, we’ll see an 11th team on the grid: General Motors, bringing Cadillac into the world of open-wheel racing. But running an F1 team isn’t a walk in the park, even if you’re GM. The infrastructure demands are huge. That’s where Rick Hendrick comes in!
Is Cadillac coming to Rick Hendrick’s property?
For those who might not be familiar with Rick Hendrick’s other ventures, he owns Hendrick Cars, a company with several GM dealerships across the country. It makes him a partner to GM both in and out of NASCAR. So when Cadillac needed space to set up their F1 operations, what better place to do it than on the Hendrick Motorsports campus?
Recently, AP journalist Jenna Fryer dropped the news. According to her post on X, “The City of Concord has a scheduled meeting on 2/13 and among the agenda items is a proposed Cadillac F1 facility on 10 acres of Hendrick Motorsports property.” The proposal is going to be budgeted between $65M and $70M to develop a 204,045-square-foot building.”
The City of Concord has a scheduled meeting on 2/13 and among the agenda items is a proposed Cadillac F1 facility on 10 acres of Hendrick Motorsports property
— Jenna Fryer (@JennaFryer) February 10, 2025
How cool would it be to have both a NASCAR and a Formula 1 facility in the same place? And this wouldn’t be the first GM facility on Hendrick’s property. Back in 2021, GM opened a 130,000-square-foot tech center at the Concord location to help with resource-sharing and faster innovation. Maybe we’ll see some crossover between the F1 and NASCAR teams too… who knows?
There’s even a possibility that Hendrick Cars could potentially sponsor the F1 team, and maybe, just maybe, we could see Kyle Larson behind the wheel of that car. Imagine the ultimate showdown between him and Max Verstappen! Or, with the Camaro now out of production, Hendrick could push for GM to bring a new car into NASCAR. Cadillac could be next, swapping out Chevy.
However, before we get our hopes up, this is still in the proposal phase and no confirmations have come on acceptance. And not just from HMS. Apparently, when it comes to race shops, Formula One has its own strict rules. One of them is, ‘cannot run other racing programs out of the shop that houses their F1 program.’ So with HMS being so close by, it’s uncertain if F1 would have a problem with that or not. We won’t know for sure until the City of Concord’s meeting on February 13.
And whether the F1 team comes to the Concord facility or not, big things are happening there!
Hendrick Motorsports might have an edge in 2025
The team, which holds a record 14 NASCAR Cup Championships, is looking to make that number even bigger with their latest investment – the Hexagon Metrology Lab at their Concord, NC shop. This new tech lets the team laser-scan parts to a tenth of a thousandth of an inch, giving them a competitive edge. In a time when NASCAR’s next-gen cars have brought a lot more parity, that extra precision could make all the difference.
With their new robotic arms, Hendrick Motorsports can now build race cars with incredible precision. The team’s vice president of competition explained it best: “It’s not only getting our tolerances where we need it and making sure we’re putting the best pieces together, it’s also making us tremendously more efficient. We’ve got a machine back there that we can stack up parts, and this robotic arm will pull the parts out of a shelf, lock it into the scanner. It will come through. It will measure this whole part. It will pick it back up, sort it, and put it where it needs to be. And we don’t have to do anything. All we have to do is program it. That saves hours and hours and hours of labor. There’s one thing in life you can’t replace and that’s time, right? So we have to get efficiencies.”
Maybe this is also part of HMS’s 2025 mission statement: ‘Thrive in 25.’ So, Rick Hendrick, in their annual pre-season luncheon, revealed this tagline. Probably after three years of Penske’s dominance, HMS wants to reclaim its throne. And they are already thriving in 25 as Chase Elliott spectacularly won ‘The Clash’ at Bowman Gray Stadium. He led 171 laps out of 200. That’s a good start to the season for a team that barely made the championship 4 in 2024, with William Byron being their only entrant following all that race manipulation fiasco in Martinsville.
Let’s hope this year is a better one for HMS. What do you think HMS’s chances are to bag a title this season? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.
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