It takes approximately 45 to 50 seconds for car #24, fielded by Hendrick Motorsports, to complete a 2.5-mile lap at Daytona 500, the premier race in the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series. During the race, Tom Gray, #24 Team Engineer at Hendrick Motorsports, communicates from on top of the pit box with the fueler, Travis Gordon, down in the pit. As #24 comes down the pit lane, Gray and Gordon have a couple of seconds to make a fueling decision that could mean winning the race—or not. They scan their screens’ fuel consumption data and chat in real time about the relationship between the fuel’s weight and volume and the car’s speed and race strategy. Gordon quickly weighs and pumps the fuel, and in seconds, the car is back on the track.

A tool to make winning decisions

High-octane decision making in the screaming-loud environs of the pit requires a special tool for teamwork. Hendrick Motorsports uses Microsoft Teams, the new chat-based workspace in Microsoft Office 365, as the digital communication hub for teams at the track and across the organization.

“It’s too noisy to talk during the race, so we use Microsoft Teams in the pit as our direct line of communication,” says Gray. “I share graphs and data and chat quickly with Travis to say, ‘Hey, can we add this much fuel in this many seconds?’ That’s where the power of Teams comes in—keeping the conversation focused and immediate. Sometimes we use emoji and GIFs to add levity to the situation, but it’s the real-time data analysis and discussion that help us make the decisions that give us an advantage on the track.”

To date, Hendrick Motorsports has an enviable race record. As of 2016, it has won 12 Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series owners and drivers championships. It has also won three Camping World Truck Series owners and drivers titles and one Xfinity Series drivers crown. But according to Matthew Cochran, Manager of Information Technologies at Hendrick Motorsports, there is always room for improvement.

“We always want to enhance collaboration across the organization to find out how we can win more championships and drive the business forward,” he says. “With Microsoft Teams, people can easily spin up a collaboration workspace and accelerate decision making—without going to IT. In fact, we’ve made Microsoft Teams a critical part of our digital transformation, which includes investing in Microsoft technologies such as Windows 10 and Microsoft Azure to be more agile and competitive.”

Hendrick Motorsports had been using Slack for some communications but never fully adopted the solution. “Having yet another client up on our screens and creating user accounts in a third-party system was aggravating,” says Cochran. “When we learned about Microsoft Teams, we were excited because it offers persistent chat and interoperability with collaboration tools that we already use in the Office 365 environment.”

The organization saw that it could give employees a collaboration hub that includes a built-in Microsoft SharePoint Online team site, OneNote notebook, and the ability to use Microsoft Planner and Power BI within each workspace. But it was the enterprise-grade security that really impressed Hendrick Motorsports. “Slack did not provide the level of security we need for a sports organization where your competitors are right next to you on the track and everyone is talking on the radio,” says Cochran. “Having enterprise-level security and compliance, plus all the tools that Office 365 provides—that was the key for us.”

Gray describes team-based communications at Hendrick Motorsports prior to adopting Microsoft Teams as “a shotgun blast of paperwork, emails, and files all over the place” that made it difficult for employees to organize their thoughts and keep their teammates focused on the issue at hand. Today, teams have everything they need at their fingertips to get work done faster. At the Hendrick Motorsports campus, L.Bryce Whitson Jr., Aerodynamics Engineer for Hendrick Motorsports, uses Microsoft Teams as a central location for the computational analysis of the organization’s aerodynamics, including the data collected by engineers running tests on the car at the organization’s wind tunnel.

“We conduct simultaneous tests, sharing and syncing large Microsoft Excel files through Microsoft Teams and SharePoint Online to compare results in almost real time,” Whitson says. “We create a worklist to keep everything organized by using the Microsoft Planner and OneNote features inside Microsoft Teams. Now we don’t have to wait until the engineers come back from the wind tunnel to review the data. We refine our analyses of the car’s aerodynamic capabilities on the fly, get more tests done before the race, and build a faster car.”

Wherever we have people working together to help our drivers win more races, there’s a place for Microsoft Teams.

Matthew Cochran, Manager of Information Technologies Hendrick Motorsports

Teamwork that wins races

Teamwork is the foundation of stock car racing success. Behind the hard-won chemistry between car and driver lies the concerted effort of many groups, all working single-mindedly toward one goal: winning more races. Using Microsoft Teams for centralized teamwork is one way that everyone gains access to the information they need, right in Office 365.

Hendrick Motorsports fields four cars for the Monster Energy NASCAR Cup Series. During the racing season, each car’s team follows the same weekly cycle of constant collaboration that reaches across the organization—set up, test, practice, race, and follow up—for 38 straight weeks. During the entire racing season, employees use Microsoft Teams as a dedicated hub for teamwork, with chat history, engineering data, and the logistics required to navigate the unique characteristics of 38 different venues.

“Each week, we wipe the slate clean and start over for the next event,” says Gray. “We might go to a 2-mile superspeedway one week and a 0.5-mile racetrack the next. Every week, the setup is different. And that’s when the engineering teams work with the drivers to fine-tune the springs, shock absorbers, and aerodynamics of the car for optimum performance at the coming event.”

The organization constructs all its racecars at the approximately 100-acre Hendrick Motorsports complex in Concord, North Carolina. It builds or rebuilds more than 550 engines onsite each year. Those efforts demand a lot of coordination and teamwork among the engineers and mechanics scattered across the campus’s 19 buildings. They must not only work together to set up each car efficiently, but also coordinate with each car’s race team at every event, sending last-minute data that could have an impact on the car’s performance that weekend. “We could test a car’s aerodynamics in the wind tunnel on Friday and find something that we would call a big gain. If the car is already at the racetrack, we can load the data into our Microsoft Teams workspace and chat with the crew chiefs and race engineers to help the teams implement what we discovered before the race, potentially giving us an advantage,” says Whitson. “We could not accomplish this as seamlessly through emails and phone calls.”

Transporting cars and people between events also requires orchestration among teams. “We’re like a moving circus, tearing down and rebuilding every week, jogging across the country in an eighteen‑wheeler,” says Cochran. “We use Microsoft Teams to coordinate our moves and make sure we are never without a part we need, come race day. Everyone involved with transporting gear between races has access to an updated parts list on a Microsoft Teams workspace, so they can quickly load the hauler when it comes back to campus for one day before it’s off on the road again.”

Even the organization’s developers use Microsoft Teams to share code snippets and bounce ideas off each other. Mechanical and electrical engineers work with software developers across the United States to design pit guns, used to unscrew a tire’s lug nuts, and build simulations that analyze their performance metrics. On campus, the process engineer collaborates with all teammates to fine-tune a system they have developed to help manage and improve their car-build workflow.

“Wherever we have people working together to help our drivers win more races, there’s a place for Microsoft Teams,” says Cochran. “Adoption is high across the organization because it’s so easy to use and customize. I can’t wait to see our physical training department start using Microsoft Teams to coordinate the delivery of strength, agility, and nutrition programs to keep our pit crews in top condition. After all, shaving a fraction of a second off a pit stop could translate to gaining several positions on the track at race speed.”

Mobile access to consolidated data

Because data is consolidated in Microsoft Teams, employees easily access the organization’s valuable legacy information to fine-tune the setups for each car every week. And now that Microsoft Teams is also available as a mobile app, each team’s data, files, and conversations are readily available at the track, on the road, at home, or even under a car.

“Receiving updates from my team, whether I happen to be crawling underneath a car or running between buildings, means a lot,” says Travis Peterson, #88 Race Engineer at Hendrick Motorsports. “Now I can respond to something important right away and not be responsible for slowing down the work.”

Improved productivity on campus

It’s not all high-speed decision making at Hendrick Motorsports, however. For the process engineer who works on long-term projects, the big benefit of Microsoft Teams is its flexibility. Megan Horn, Process Engineer at Hendrick Motorsports, uses Microsoft Teams to create unique collaboration hubs for the teams on each of her six concurrent projects. She focuses on implementing process improvements to help each work process meet the varying needs of its downstream processes, ultimately leading to more efficient car builds between race events.

“Each team has a different style of collaborating, depending on the project,” Horn says. “For one team, I tailor the workspace to use Power BI dashboards to communicate data visually. I designed a workspace for another team that relies almost exclusively on OneNote to share meeting notes and data. And some teams like to coauthor Excel spreadsheets in real time, which Microsoft Teams can also accommodate.”

The one common denominator for Horn and her teams is improved productivity, thanks to a reduction in the many face-to-face meetings that used to be the mainstay of collaboration on campus. Today, everyone uses chat-based teamwork and threaded conversations to communicate in the moment—without leaving their desks.

Holistic race strategies

The preparation at Hendrick Motorsports for the 2017 Daytona 500 involved an accelerated setup for each car crew, because everyone used Microsoft Teams to share and discuss the massive amount of data that had accumulated during the off season. According to Cochran, prior to the biggest race of the year, adoption of the collaboration software went viral. “A lot of us wear multiple hats, and as soon as we’d create a workspace in Microsoft Teams for one role, we’d get requests from teammates to set up additional workspaces for different projects,” he says. “We found that Microsoft Teams is contagious because it makes it so easy to collaborate.”

As for the opening race of the 2017 season, it could herald a new era of coordinated race strategies, where car crews use Microsoft Teams to make good on a new Hendrick Motorsports goal. “I think our organization as a whole is making a big push to share ideas and information better,” says Peterson. “On the racetrack, this means better communication among the four teams that compete together every weekend. We have to remember that all four Hendrick Motorsports teams are working together to beat the competition. Using Microsoft Teams to share data among our teams will be invaluable in building race strategies that see more of our cars cross the finish line ahead of the pack.”