What the Military Gave to Motorsports
- Camille D. Ford | Founder & Editor-in-Chief
- Apr 30
- 13 min read
Summary
Matt Mauldin is thirty-two years old, the son of a Hendrick Motorsports institution, and the assistant strength and conditioning coach behind one of NASCAR’s most sophisticated athlete performance facilities. He is not a veteran. But when he went to Fort Bragg looking for ideas, the military gave him something no sports program had thought to take. He brought it back to Concord, North Carolina, built it into the walls of the Atrium Health Motorsports Athletic Center, and now trains the athletes who decide whether a race is won or lost in eight seconds.
The Eight-Second Standard
The driver comes down pit road at 55 miles an hour. There are thirty-nine cars behind him. The air guns are already screaming before he stops. In the seconds that follow, the over-the-wall crew will execute one of the most physically precise sequences in professional sports: tires changed, fuel loaded, car released, all of it done before most people can finish a sentence. The stall is a rectangle of painted concrete, maybe as wide as two parking spaces. The crew already knows their marks. They have run this sequence hundreds of times in practice. None of that is a guarantee.
The noise is the first thing that registers. Not the crowd noise of a stadium but something closer and more mechanical, air guns torquing at nearly 600 pounds per square inch, the low roar of the engine, and forty other cars cycling down pit road in choreographed sequence, each one timed to its own crew, its own window. The carrier is already moving before the car is fully stopped, sprinting in front of a vehicle still decelerating, holding two 55-pound tires by the spokes, threading between teammates who are themselves moving at full speed in opposite directions. From the outside, it looks like controlled chaos. From inside the stall, it is something more precise than that: a system built on trust, repetition, and bodies trained to do one thing impossibly well.
When it goes perfectly, nobody notices. When it doesn’t, a race is lost.
“I take a huge amount of responsibility to maintain the reputation of the Mauldin name here at Hendrick Motorsports. They paved the way.”
Matt Mauldin has spent his entire life inside this world. His father, Mark Mauldin, arrived at Hendrick Motorsports in 2002 and became one of the first coaches in NASCAR to train pit crew members like the athletes they actually were. His mother, Corinne, worked the road with Jeff Gordon, helping him through injuries at a time when performance care on the NASCAR circuit was still being invented. “I’ve been immersed in the NASCAR world since I was born,” Mauldin says. “I’ve been in the sporting world ever since.” He started playing T-ball at three. Growing up, he would come to pit practice with his father and got behind the wheel of the pit practice car once or twice. “That ended pretty quick,” he says. The driving was never the point.
He played outfield at Winston-Salem State, built his career in collegiate strength and conditioning, then came home to Hendrick Motorsports in January 2025. When he walked in, everyone already knew his last name. “Everyone calls my dad coach,” he says. “They refer to me as coach’s son.” He understood exactly what that meant and exactly what it would cost him to change it. “I take a huge amount of responsibility to maintain the reputation of the Mauldin name here at Hendrick Motorsports,” he says. “They paved the way.” His father had paved the road he was walking, and had been one of the first coaches in the sport to train shop guys like athletes at all. The name he carried was not simply a gift. It was a standard.
He has a joke he tells his father, the same one every time. He says it like a promise dressed up as a punchline. One day, he tells him, people in this building are going to stop calling you coach and start calling you something else entirely. One day, you’re gonna be Matt’s dad. He means it as comedy. He also means it as a destination.
The Gap Nobody Had Named
To understand what Mauldin was building toward, you have to understand what a pit stop actually demands of a body. The average NFL play lasts five to seven seconds. A pit stop runs about the same. The energy system is identical, the phosphocreatine pathway, maximum output, the body’s most explosive gear. “There’s no aerobic buffer to draw on, no second wind,” he says. “The stop either happens at full speed or it doesn’t happen right.” That shared biology is why his roster looks like a college football depth chart. Offensive linemen became fuelers, carrying 100-pound cans. Linebackers and tight ends became jackmen and tire carriers. Receivers and defensive backs became tire changers. These are athletes who already understood, at a cellular level, what it costs to execute inside a compressed window of time.
What those athletes had to learn was that pit road is different from anything a football field prepares you for. A football play ends. The whistle blows, the players reset, the next snap is coming. On pit road under caution, forty cars are running at 55 miles an hour in a single lane, and the crew is jumping into that lane on purpose, timed by instinct and practiced rhythm. When the driver overshoots his mark or comes in nose-first instead of square, the whole sequence has to adjust without a word spoken. There is no huddle, no timeout, no second attempt. “It only takes one tenth of a second,” Mauldin says, “to go from first place to third or fourth. You’re losing track position and making your driver work harder.”
“They turn over every stone to find an advantage and they’re constantly learning and adapting.”
Race day compounds every demand. The stop is eight seconds, but the day is eight hours on the feet: running tires, setting up the pit box, warming up between stops, staying sharp across the long middle distance of a race that has not yet reached its final stage. A pit crew athlete who generates explosive output but cannot sustain it across a full race weekend is only half-built. That understanding comes naturally to Mauldin. Most of the athletes he works with came from the same world he played in. “Because of my experience in collegiate athletics,” he says, “it allows me to connect with them in a different way.” What Hendrick Motorsports did not have when Mauldin arrived was a facility built specifically around those demands. “We had the leadership, we had the staff, we had the athletes,” he says. “The only piece of the puzzle that wasn’t there was the facility.”
Fort Bragg
Hendrick Motorsports and the military share a long history. Rick Hendrick is known for his patriotism, and NASCAR as a sport has always maintained a deep institutional connection to service. Races are dedicated to service members. Veterans walk the infield. Military groups have been coming to the Concord campus for leadership training for years, moving through the same halls as championship-winning drivers and mechanics who have spent careers building cars nobody else can keep up with. Through those visits, Mauldin and his staff had begun to see the parallels. “They turn over every stone to find an advantage,” he says, “and they’re constantly learning and adapting. That’s our whole MO as well.”
The difference is that the military has been refining that logic for centuries. When Mauldin and his colleagues made the trip to Fort Bragg, they went looking for grip work and recovery modalities. What they found was a performance culture built on a level of specificity that stopped them cold. Nothing general. Nothing approximate. Every protocol tailored to what the mission actually requires of the body, at its hardest, in its worst conditions.
They toured the weight room first, which felt immediately familiar. Then came the recovery question. The Fort Bragg team had recently moved away from dry float tanks, the sensory deprivation approach Mauldin’s staff had been considering, and replaced them with infrared recovery beds because the infrared beds were seeing far more use. That single observation changed the recovery room plan back in Concord before a single piece of equipment was ordered.
“If grip is not strong enough, it’s going to be a limiting factor.”
And then, in a corner of the training facility, there was a climbing wall. None of the other high-performance programs the Hendrick Motorsports staff had visited across collegiate and professional sports had one. “What we weren’t expecting was to find a climbing wall in there,” he says. “That really shocked us.” But once the Fort Bragg performance team finished explaining why it was there, the conversation in his head had already moved from whether to how, and he knew they had to have one.
The Logic of the Wall
Grip is the through line of every position on pit road. The carrier sprints in front of an incoming car holding two 55-pound tires by the spokes. The tire changer runs an air gun at nearly 590 pounds per square inch, fighting the torque of every lug nut on every wheel. The fuel can weighs 100 pounds when full. The jack weighs 25. “Every position on pit road relies heavily on grip,” Mauldin says. “If grip is not strong enough, it’s going to be a limiting factor. We’re going to lose positions on the track.”
A fumbled tire at the wrong moment means the stop is broken before it’s half over. But the Fort Bragg performance team had also identified something Mauldin had not fully accounted for: soldiers who built serious grip strength had significantly fewer back injuries. “A weak grip is an indicator of poor posterior chain development,” he explains. “And if grip is a limiting factor, you’ll change the way you complete the task. It could put your back in a disadvantageous position.” He recognized the same pattern in his athletes immediately. The connection was not theoretical. It was visible in how bodies move under load.
What made the climbing wall the right answer was not only that it built grip. It was that it built grip while requiring the athlete to think. Traditional grip training is predictable by design. You know the implement, you know the movement, you do the work. On a rock wall, force alone solves nothing. “You have to strategize every part of your body, including your grip, to navigate that wall,” Mauldin says. “And a lot of times on pit road, things don’t go as planned. If the driver comes in wide or nosed in, the whole choreography of the stop is thrown off and you have to problem-solve.” The wall trains for exactly that, physical demand and decision-making happening at the same time.
“A pit stop is the closest thing they have seen in the athletic world to clearing a room or a building.”
The wall in the Atrium Health Motorsports Athletic Center stands sixteen feet tall, the precise maximum that keeps it classified as a bouldering wall rather than a full climbing wall requiring harnesses. That classification was deliberate. It had to be accessible and programmable, something athletes engage with in regular rotation, not a showpiece. Military groups that tour the facility see it the moment they walk in. They recognize it before anyone says a word about where it came from.
The Veteran Who Started It All
Before Matt Mauldin ever made the trip to Fort Bragg, the military was already present at Hendrick Motorsports.
Joseph Riddick Hendrick Jr., known to everyone at Hendrick Motorsports simply as Papa Joe, served in World War II as a flight engineer and gunner in the Army Air Forces (USAAF). His plane was shot down twice. He came home both times, decorated, and went on to become one of the most beloved figures in the history of the organization his son Rick would build into NASCAR’s most dominant dynasty.
He was not a man who came home and stopped. After the war, Papa Joe farmed 500 acres of southern Virginia land, worked a second job as a supervisor at Burlington Mills, and raced cars on the side with a passion that never left him. When Rick founded Hendrick Motorsports in 1984, Papa Joe became a fixture, not a figurehead. He co-owned teams, spearheaded show-car operations, and was present for nine NASCAR championships and more than 100 victories. The State of North Carolina honored him and his wife Mary with the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, the highest honor the state bestows on a citizen. He was still showing up when he died in 2004 at 84, still part of the organization he had helped build from the beginning.
His uniform, his medals, his photographs, and the artifacts of a distinguished military career are displayed in a case inside the Atrium Health Motorsports Athletic Center, visible to every athlete, every coach, and every military group that walks through the door.
The climbing wall Mauldin brought back from Fort Bragg stands sixteen feet tall a short distance away. Two pieces of military history in the same space, one inherited, and one earned, both pointing at the same thing. Mauldin did not invent the connection between this organization and the military. He deepened it.
What the Military Understood First
Several military groups, across separate visits to Hendrick Motorsports, have made the same observation independently. A pit stop is the closest thing they have seen in the athletic world to clearing a room. The noise, the proximity of moving vehicles, the compressed choreography inside an environment that never fully matches the plan, the necessity of executing precisely when the conditions are working against you. Mauldin is careful about the comparison. The stakes are not equivalent. Combat is combat. A pit stop is a sport. The people who make that sport go are not putting their lives at risk the way soldiers do, and that distinction matters and should be stated plainly. But the description they kept offering was always the same: that a pit stop was the closest thing they had seen in the athletic world to clearing a room or a building.
But the performance architecture underneath both is built on the same foundation, and the people who carry that knowledge in their bodies recognized it before Mauldin had to articulate it. There is something in that recognition that goes beyond flattery. It means the work translates.
NASCAR only began recruiting elite athletes specifically for pit crew roles about seven or eight years ago. Before that, shop mechanics trained up for the job: regular guys who worked on the cars and went out on pit road and did what they could in twenty-five or thirty seconds. Mauldin’s father was among the first coaches to change that. “About seven or eight years ago,” Mauldin says, “it went from training shop guys to recruiting high-level athletes to come and do this job. That’s when things completely shifted.” Because of that shift, “we’re very new to the athletic space,” he says. “We’re amateurs in the physical development space.” The gap between where motorsports performance science stands today and where military performance science has already been is enormous. “We have so much to learn from their knowledge of developing humans,” he says, “because they’ve been doing it for so long.”
What He Is Building Toward
Mark Morrison has been laying the foundation at Hendrick Motorsports for twenty-four years. Mauldin came in alongside assistant strength coach Mike Rivera not to displace what Morrison built but to carry it forward, taking those decades of institutional knowledge and combining them with the latest developments in performance science. “What we’re hoping to do within the next five to ten years,” he says, “is create a streamlined system that will help us adapt quickly to the latest and greatest as new information on strength and conditioning comes out.” In a field still being written, the team that evolves fastest holds the advantage.
“We want to serve and not just be served.”
The recruiting process reflects the same philosophy. The physical combine tests the baseline, power, speed, and body mechanics. But Mauldin takes recruits to Topgolf once they reach mini camp and watches everything the combine cannot measure: how they move through a room full of strangers, how they treat the people serving them, how they carry themselves when no formal evaluation is underway. “How do they interact with our guys? How do they interact with the wait staff as they’re getting food and drinks?” he says. Character is not a supplement to athletic ability here. It is a requirement, because on pit road, character is what holds the sequence together when everything else is breaking down.
He did not serve. He will not claim a bond with service that he has not earned. But he went to Fort Bragg, paid attention, and came home and built something that honors what he found there. “It only enhances our approach,” he says. “It improves the motivation to do what we do and pushes us every day, because we see what our military is doing to keep our country safe.” He means that in a specific way. “We want to serve and not just be served.” For Mauldin, the trip made the relationship between motorsports and the military something more than institutional, something that now has a physical form and a permanent address.
That permanence sits in the building, sixteen feet tall, bolted to the wall of a training facility in Concord, North Carolina, visible to every service member who walks through the door. He can point to it and say without qualification: that came from Fort Bragg. When military visitors see it, they see their own knowledge reflected back, not borrowed casually but received with intention and built into something that will outlast the season.
One day, people in this building will call Mark Mauldin something other than coach. They will stop saying it the way they’ve said it for thirty years, the title that came first and the name that followed. They will reverse it. They will say Matt’s dad. The wall will still be standing when that happens, sixteen feet of military knowledge embedded in the architecture of a racing organization, a permanent record of what it cost to ask the right questions and the generosity of the people who answered them.
Resources
Hendrick Motorsports │ hendrickmotorsports.com
Home of four NASCAR Cup Series teams and the Atrium Health Motorsports Athletic Center, one of the sport’s premier athlete performance facilities.
Atrium Health │ atriumhealth.org
One of the nation’s leading nonprofit health systems and naming partner of the Motorsports Athletic Center at Hendrick Motorsports in Concord, North Carolina.
Veterans Crisis Line │ Dial 988, then press 1 │ veteranscrisisline.net
Free, confidential support for veterans and their families, available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
The Honor Foundation │ honor.org
Fellowship program supporting special operations veterans in transition through coaching, curriculum, and professional community.
About Matt Mauldin
Matt Mauldin is an assistant strength and conditioning coach at Hendrick Motorsports, where he works within the Atrium Health Motorsports Athletic Center in Concord, North Carolina. A Certified Strength and Conditioning Specialist, he played outfield at Winston-Salem State University before building his career in collegiate athletics. He joined Hendrick Motorsports in January 2025, following in the footsteps of his father, Mark Mauldin, a longtime pit crew performance coach with the organization. He is based in the Charlotte, North Carolina area.
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