Hendrick Motorsports unveils Hexagon Metrology Lab
Hendrick Motorsports has always been on the forefront of technology in NASCAR Cup Series racing.
The 14-time champions reinforced that Wednesday when the company unveiled its latest addition, the Hexagon Metrology Lab, at its shop in Concord, North Carolina.
Hendrick has utilized Hexagon’s coordinate measuring machines (CMMs) since 2002. But the latest influx of machinery allows Hendrick employees to laser-scan parts to the ten-thousandths of an inch, giving the team, it believes, an edge over its competition during the Next Gen era in which 85% of the vehicle is built from supplier-sourced parts.
As Hendrick employees demonstrated Wednesday morning, the machine’s robotic arms can be used to scan and create three-dimensional models of anything placed in front of it — from the stud in a wheel the lug nut attaches to the car itself. In total — and not exclusive to its metrology lab — Hendrick has 33 absolute arms, 13 scanners, a Leica Absolute Tracker, and seven CMMs.
As Hendrick employees demonstrated Wednesday morning, the machine’s robotic arms can be used to scan and create three-dimensional models of anything placed in front of it — from the stud in a wheel the lug nut attaches to the car itself. In total — and not exclusive to its metrology lab — Hendrick has 33 absolute arms, 13 scanners, a Leica Absolute Tracker, and seven CMMs.
“What happens is the data gets output into an Excel file and a PDF file,” explained Roy Crump, Hendrick Motorsports’ quality control supervisor. “So the Excel file is ingested into our database, and that feeds our simulation. The way that works is we’ve worked with Microsoft to set up just some pretty simple flows. So once that file shows up in the folder, it automatically gets fed to an Azure Blob storage account, and then that gets uploaded into our database. And then once that data gets updated, essentially the race engineers can then go and can pick and choose whatever parts are in there to essentially assemble their car virtually.”
NASCAR’s vendor-supplied parts are assigned to teams with each piece intended to be the same for each competing car across the Cup Series. Crump’s job as the head of Hendrick’s quality control is to ensure the parts the Nos. 5, 9, 24 and 48 teams receive are up to par upon receipt.
With such an advanced system in house now since November, the speed and efficiency of those processes allows Hendrick more time to focus its efforts elsewhere and build vehicles quicker with more assurances than ever in the Next Gen era since 2022.
“All the data is readily available,” Crump said. “We have all sorts of tools set up, all sorts of reporting set up where you can look top to bottom, look at the bell curve of all the parts that we have to say: ‘Look at this. Why do we have this outlier? Is it a bad part? Is it actually just a different part? Was there something wrong with it?’ And so it helps us be able to catalog that, and sometimes it does allow the race teams to say, ‘You know what, maybe that’s a good idea. Maybe we should use that part for a certain event.'”
NASCAR Hall-of-Famer and seven-time Cup championship-winning crew chief Chad Knaus now serves as the team’s vice president of competition. He and his teams benefitted significantly from this type of technology when Hendrick Motorsports was building its cars from the ground up. In a new world of stock-car racing has come a home and redefined purpose for this tech.
“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,” Knaus said. “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.”
The season is young but Hendrick Motorsports is already 1-for-1 after Chase Elliott won the exhibition Cook Out Clash at Bowman Gray Stadium on Feb. 2. That only helped validate the group back at the shop that the team is moving the right direction.
“It’s just a great start to the season,” Crump said. “We always believe that everything we’re doing here helps drive the performance of the race cars. And seeing Chase go out there and get the W already makes us feel a lot better, that what we’re doing is the right thing. We’re already seeing results.”
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