The NASCAR season kicked off this year with a race at the historic Bowman Gray Stadium, which had not seen a NASCAR Cup Series race since 1971. While the parking lot paddock behind the fieldhouse hearkened back to those early days of stock car racing, some 40-plus years before, the cars in the garage that day were far from those that might have been assembled in the backyard garages of the 1970s.
The differences were further apparent in my time spent with Hendrick Motorsports just a few days later. Entering a shop on the Hendrick campus already feels like being granted access to NASA’s production facility — complete with pristine epoxy floors and stainless steel plates laid out for car assembly (rather than rockets). And as you travel deeper into the shop you'll find the metrology lab which houses an array of robots that are measuring the best parts for a car down to the thousandths (0.000) for use in their next set of cars for the next race.
