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NASCAR Sprint-Cup Series
JENSEN: “Together” A Powerful Tale
The best thing about my job and seeing NASCAR up close and personal isn’t what you learn about cars or about strategy or about technology...
Tom Jensen  |  Posted September 30, 2009   Charlotte, NC
SPEED.com's Editor-in-Chief Tom Jensen. (Image: SPEED)

The best thing about my job and seeing NASCAR up close and personal isn’t what you learn about cars or about strategy or about technology. It’s what you learn about life.

Spend most of 38 weekends a year on the road for 15 years and you will learn some of the most valuable life lessons that you can. It’s inevitable.

You learn that even the best teams and the best drivers finish last some weeks.

You learn that what separates the champions from the also-rans is not that champions face less adversity or never make mistakes, it’s that they are better at overcoming those mistakes and adversity.

You learn money alone doesn’t win races, people do. And that not having money guarantees you will lose, but having it does not guarantee you will win.

You figure out back-up plans for your back-up plans, because far away from home, anything that can go wrong does.

If you have any sense at all, you try to learn humility, because some time when you’re on the road in Anniston, Ala., or Dover, Del., or Martinsville, Va., you will need help. And you will need to offer it, too, sometimes to your fiercest rival. But that’s just what you do and what you expect others to do as well.

And you learn about life and death, too.

I saw Dale Earnhardt die in the last turn in Daytona in 2001, and I was sitting in the press box in Martinsville five years ago when the late Charlotte Observer NASCAR reporter David Poole walked up to me midway through the race and whispered in my ear, “Don’t tell anyone I told this, but I just got a call from the desk. A plane is missing and it’s registered to Hendrick Motorsports.” Little did I know the horrible news that would follow an hour or so later.

That incident, the Hendrick plane crash that killed 10 people, including Rick Hendrick’s only son, his brother and his two nieces, is the emotional fulcrum of a new documentary entitled, “Together: The Hendrick Motorsports Story,” that will air Oct. 11 at 1:30 p.m. ET, on ABC.

There was a private screening for the movie Tuesday in Charlotte and it’s safe to say there wasn’t a dry eye in the house afterwards.

Ostensibly a story chronicling the 25-year history of Hendrick Motorsports, “Together” certainly covers the big moments on and off the track for the team, all narrated by Tom Cruise. There are times of absolute joy, from the team’s first Daytona 500 victory with Geoff Bodine in 1986 to Jimmie Johnson’s three-peat. And there is a little bit of dirty laundry aired, too, including Tim Richmond’s death from AIDS and Hendrick’s battles with cancer and federal authorities over the Honda scandal of the mid-1990s.

But the most gripping parts of the story by far, one way or another deal with the plane crash and how Rick and the team carried on in the wake of the kind of tragedy few of us could ever even imagine being confronted with.

Interviews with Linda Hendrick, Rick’s wife, and daughter Lynn Carlson are as raw-edged and emotional as you would expect them to be, while some of the most illuminating insights come from hard-edged racers, tough guys like Jack Sprague, Alan Gustafson and Brian Vickers who were deeply affected by what happened.

Above all else, “Together” is a very human drama of how people push through tragedy, in this case working for a common goal.

After the movie, I asked Hendrick what kept him going in the dark times after the crash. He told me he spent about a month at home after the crash and didn’t even know if he could go back to the shop, let alone the race track. But he pushed on, because if you’re a racer, that’s who you are and what you do.

“I care about those folks that are over there,” Hendrick said of the 500 or so employees at Hendrick Motorsports. “And I care about the people we lost. And I got motivated … I mean, I couldn’t turn my back on those people left over there, and that would not honor the ones we lost. When I went over there, I actually didn’t know if I could go back. And when I walked in and everybody — I mean it was the most emotional thing I’ve ever been through. It was worse than the (funeral) service, because I’d had a few weeks to accept it. And when I walked in there and Jeff (Gordon) was crying and all the guys, Alan (Gustafson) … it just kind of fired me up to the point of when I went back to Homestead, I said, ‘We’ve got to do this.’”

And do it they did.

Hendrick and his minions took an already top-notch organization, circled the wagons and went out and won three more championships. But the real victory that makes “Together” such a good piece is the victory of human spirit, of toiling through tears and tragedy.

Like in racing, there are a lot of life lessons to be learned from watching “Together.”

Tom Jensen is the Editor in Chief for SPEEDtv.com, the former Executive Editor of NASCAR Scene and a contributing Editor for TruckSeries.com. He is the author of ?Cheating: The Bad Things Good NASCAR Nextel Cup Racers Do In Pursuit of SPEED,? and has appeared on television and radio shows to discuss NASCAR racing. Jensen is the past President of the National Motorsports Press Association. Jensen is the 1997 National Motorsports Press Association Writer of the Year and has won numerous national and state awards for news reporting, columns and feature writing. The Answer Man is back at SPEEDtv.com. Tom Jensen answers your questions during every race week and looks forward to hearing from you - please e-mail it to



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