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Hendrick Motorsports recently unveiled its Hexagon Center for Quality Excellence, a new 3,000-sq.-ft. advanced quality control lab located on its 140-acre campus in Concord, NC.

One of the reasons for Hendrick Motorsports' growing use of Hexagon metrology solutions and resulting QC lab is due to significant requirement changes to the latest generation of the NASCAR Cup Series racecar, the Next Gen car (Gen-7). With previous generations, around 80% of racecar components could be made in-house by Hendrick Motorsports. With the current generation car, those components now come from specific suppliers chosen by NASCAR. Hendrick Motorsports depends on Hexagon technology to verify everything from the smallest components to the entire body to ensure top race performance.

"One of the reasons Hendrick Motorsports is the elite team that they are is because they take the parts everyone else has and make better products out of them. That is where quality comes into play," said Scott Grumbles, Hexagon Metrology Commercial Operations Manager, Carolinas & Virginias.

Roy Crump, Hendrick Motorsports Quality Control Engineer, said: "Although we do not build all of the car anymore, we spend a lot of our time checking, measuring and logging the data of all these components that we buy from single source suppliers. We want to be able to find any performance potential. We take those measurements, upload them to our database and use that data to assemble the cars virtually with our simulation tools. That gives us an idea of what kind of performance we can expect with the parts we are using. Depending on what event we are going to, we will pick different parts, assemblies and combinations of parts in order to bring the best product to those race tracks."

Hendrick Motorsports uses a variety of Hexagon solutions, including:

• Absolute Arms with AS1 and AS1-XL Scanners: Used for manual probing of purchased suspension parts and Hendrick Motorsports manufactured parts; scanning of complete underwings, outer bodies and individual body components; reverse engineering projects using scanners and manual probing; and setting up and validating racecar set-ups
• Hexagon GridLok and TooLok System: Hexagon's proprietary system used with Absolute Arms to expand measurement envelope on set-up and body hanging plates
• Global S Scan+ 7.10.7 CMM: Used to measure critical parts designed and manufactured at Hendrick that require a higher level of precision
• Tempo with Global S Touch+ 5.7.5 CMM: Automated precision measurement of critical parts designed and manufactured at Hendrick Motorsports; capture more accurate and precise suspension part measurement data
• Hexagon Leica Absolute Tracker: Used to measure large parts/areas without access to a set-up plate; level set-up and body hanging plates
• PC-DMIS software: Used for capturing measured data on CMMs
• Inspire software: Used to collect and evaluate measurement and 3D scan data from Absolute Arms.

Crump said: "We race every week and usually need four to five cars built and ready to go per team every week, so there are usually 20 cars being assembled. Depending on what parts we are looking at, sometimes we have a small supply to pull from. We have to measure the parts, and when the cars come back from the racetrack, we have to make sure there are no issues, measure them again, get them into the simulation tool to make sure everything looks good there, and then put them in the lineup for the next car that week. There will be instances where we have 600 parts coming through our QC lab per week, and those parts get used the very next week. The tighter tolerance parts that we machine ourselves go through the same process."

While NASCAR dictates the majority of components used, Hendrick Motorsports still designs and manufactures a number of its own unique items in-house. These include seats, bracketry, driver comfort items, safety items, seat packages, body, grill screens and more.

Hendrick Motorsports and Hexagon have a symbiotic partnership. Hendrick benefits from Hexagon's advanced technology, and even provides feedback for new developments, and Hexagon innovates and fine tunes its products to meet real-world demands.

"There is also the customer service side of this partnership that is very important," noted Alba Colon, Hendrick Motorsports Director of Technical Partnerships. "With our schedule, we cannot afford to have equipment down. The response of the Hexagon team to help us to fix the issues is what makes this relationship great."

For more information contact:

Hexagon Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»­ Intelligence

250 Circuit Drive

North Kingstown, RI 02852

401-886-2000

Hendrick Motorsports

4400 Papa Joe Hendrick Blvd.

Charlotte, NC 28262

877-467-4890