Welcome back to the top of the motorsports world, Hendrick Motorsports. Two consecutive wins by the team, first by Jeff Gordon at Martinsville and then by Jimmie Johnson at Texas, helps reverse a troubling trend for the multi-time champion team, which has struggled for pace against Joe Gibbs Racing and Team Penske in the second half of the season.
The 2015 season started out strong for HMS, with wins at Atlanta, Martinsville, Talladega, Texas, and Kansas. However, that strength, led by the teams of Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jimmie Johnson, was not uniform. Throughout the beginning of the year, Jeff Gordon and Kasey Kahne struggled for speed and consistency, a problem that would spread into the second half of the schedule.
Following Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s victory at Daytona in July, Hendrick Motorsports went on a big drought for them. From Kentucky through Richmond, a span of nearly three months, no single HMS driver led more than ten laps in a race. Furthermore, none of those races turn into wins for the team, with Joe Gibbs Racing and Team Penske winning the overwhelming majority of those races.
Questions began to abound – has Hendrick Motorsports lost its mojo? Are they even going to be contenders in the title hunt in 2015? The team would be able to secure spots in the championship chase for three of their four drivers, but then the carnage continued. Jimmie Johnson was eliminated at Dover from the Chase, and Dale Earnhardt Jr. faced the same fate at Talladega. This would leave only Jeff Gordon in the hunt.
But then, fortunes changed. With a little bit of luck, and some help from his competitors, Jeff Gordon would break a winless drought of his own, and clinch a spot for his team into the Championship Four at Homestead. Then, after a race that was dominated by Brad Keselowski of Team Penske, Jimmie Johnson took the fight straight to the strong car and passed him for the lead and the win at Texas.
At one point this season, many pointed to Team Penske and Joe Gibbs Racing as “the teams to beat” and the one “peaking at the right time”. But yet, with just two races to go in the Chase for the Sprint Cup, its beginning to look like Hendrick Motorsports wins again, and hasn’t lost their championship mojo quite yet.
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