Plane Crash
On October 24, 2004, ten people associated with Hendrick Motorsports lost their lives in a plane crash while en route from Concord, North Carolina, to a small airport near the Martinsville Speedway. The plane crashed in heavy fog into Bull Mountain, seven miles (11 km) from the Blue Ridge Airport in Stuart, Virginia, after a failed attempt to land. Ten people aboard the Beechcraft King Air 200 died. Six were Hendrick family members and/or Hendrick Motorsports employees: John Hendrick, the owner's brother and president of Hendrick Motorsports; Jeff Turner, general manager of Hendrick Motorsports; Ricky Hendrick, a Hendrick Motorsports driver and its owner's son; Kimberly and Jennifer Hendrick, John Hendrick's twin daughters; and Randy Dorton, chief engine builder. Also dead were the plane's pilots, Richard Tracy and Elizabeth Morrison, Joe Jackson, director of the DuPont Motorsports program, and Scott Lathram, who worked for Joe Gibbs Racing as a helicopter pilot.
NASCAR officials learned of the crash during that day's Subway 500 race in Martinsville, Virginia; they withheld the information from drivers until the end of the race, which was won by Hendrick driver Jimmie Johnson. For the rest of the 2004 season, all Hendrick Motorsports cars and the #0 Haas CNC Racing car featured pictures of the crash victims on the hood, accompanied by the phrase "Always in our hearts."
Read more about this topic: Hendrick Motorsports
Famous quotes containing the words plane and/or crash:
“At the moment when a man openly makes known his difference of opinion from a well-known party leader, the whole world thinks that he must be angry with the latter. Sometimes, however, he is just on the point of ceasing to be angry with him. He ventures to put himself on the same plane as his opponent, and is free from the tortures of suppressed envy.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“At the crash of economic collapse of which the rumblings can already be heard, the sleeping soldiers of the proletariat will awake as at the fanfare of the Last Judgment and the corpses of the victims of the struggle will arise and demand an accounting from those who are loaded down with curses.”
—Karl Liebknecht (1871–1919)