Chad Knaus Reveals Hendrick Motorsports’ Secret Sauce to Beat JGR & Team Penske in the NASCAR Next Gen Era

In an era where most of the parts for every team come from the same supplier, competition between each other remains tough. So recently, the Vice President of Competition for Hendrick Motorsports; Chad Knaus was asked how they find the speed to stay competitive and win races.

Knaus answered by stating, “I feel like that, everybody asks is the way the racecar’s built, and how you gather parts, and you know you’re buying a lot of the components now, where do you race? And I think its the exact same as it’s always been, it’s just from the moment that component is built to the time that it makes its way down to the race car, from the moment the guys go to the gym and start to training for their pit stops, from the moment the guys are creating their simulation programs, all the way through the end of the race, it’s all the same.”

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“You never stop, you race in every facet of this organization if you want to go win, and it’s the only way to do it. If you put away and disregard the way that a component is assembled, if you go away and disregarded the way a component is QC’d, you at that point are making your race car slower. So you have to race in every little inch of that race car front and back.”

Chad Knaus once stated how they used to get around NASCAR’s rules

Before the next-gen cars came into effect, Knaus stated that rules used to be a little laxer and that they would always have plans set in to outsmart the officials before they can catch them.

While on a podcast episode with Dale Earnhardt Jr, Knaus stated, “We were so fortunate back then that we would have things stacked up and we’d bring them out, okay we’ll run this for a while until they catch it and when they catch it alright, close that door brings in his new item alright and we’ll run that.”

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One might say that sounds like borderline cheating but in the world of motorsports, where every second and every gram counts it’s quite fair to assume that every team on the grid would have been trying to figure out grey zones in order to gain a slight advantage over the competition.