CUP: Frye Lands At Hendrick

Sprint Cup

CUP: Frye Lands At Hendrick

Former Red Bull Vice President and General Manager Jay Frye will work with Hendrick Motorsports this year...

Tom Jensen | Posted January 04, 2012 Charlotte, NC

Former Red Bull Racing Team General Manager Jay Frye will join Hendrick Motorsports for the 2012 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series season. (Photo: Getty Images)

Jay Frye and Rick Hendrick have been friends since the 1980s, when Frye was a rep for first Budweiser and then Valvoline, and Hendrick was an ambitious car dealer trying to gain a toehold in NASCAR.

So when Red Bull Racing closed its doors at the end of 2011, it made sense that Frye, the former team’s vice president and general manager, would turn to Hendrick. On Wednesday, Hendrick Motorsports announced that Frye will work with the team as a consultant for 2012, focusing on business development.

“Jay is one of the most well-connected people in the sport, and he's going to be a great resource to help develop strong partnerships,” said Marshall Carlson, president of Hendrick Motorsports. “We've known him for a long time, so there's an immense level of trust and respect between us. The opportunity to work with Jay again and have the benefit of his experience is something we're excited about.”

In NASCAR parlance, “business development” means helping the team find sponsorship and build relationship with sponsors. Frye’s long friendship with Hendrick, as well as his familiarity with former Red Bull driver Kasey Kahne should benefit the team hugely in that department.

Red Bull operated in NASCAR from 2007-11 and announced over the summer that it would leave the sport this year. Frye tried to put together a new ownership group to buy the team, but was unsuccessful. Rumored suitors to buy Red Bull included Canadian brewer Molson, which purportedly was interested in putting Jacques Villeneuve in one of the cars. But the deal never materialized.

Frye, a former tight end and offensive tackle at the University of Missouri, has a long background in NASCAR. He started with the old MB2 Motorsports team in 1996, the squad that began with the Skittles-sponsored No. 36 Pontiac driven first by Derikke Cope and then a succession of drivers, including Ernie Irvan, Jerry Nadeau and Ken Schrader.

In 2006, MB2 was sold to real estate and resort entrepreneur Bobby Ginn, who lasted only a year before selling out to Dale Earnhardt Inc. in what at the time was termed a merger but in reality was a liquidation. Frye had the unfortunate task of laying off more than 100 Ginn Racing employees before being let go himself by DEI after he had handled the terminations.

Frye came to Red Bull in 2008 and was credited with stabilizing a team that had a disastrous first NASCAR Sprint Cup campaign in 2007. His emphasis on the fundamentals of racing — what Frye liked to term “blocking and tackling” — was in sharp contrast to some of the esoteric and ultimately unsuccessful theories the Austrian-based Red Bull team brought into NASCAR.

Red Bull’s high point came in 2009, when Brian Vickers won the team’s first Sprint Cup race at Michigan International Speedway and made the Chase for the Sprint Cup as well. But in the end, Red Bull’s parent company pulled the plug, paving the way for Frye to move to Hendrick.

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief of SPEED.com, Senior NASCAR Editor at RACER and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. You can follow him online at twitter.com/tomjensen100.

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Tom Jensen

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