Inside MICHAEL JORDAN and DENNY HAMLIN’s 23XI NASCAR Racing Facility | Royal Key

Hey, what's up guys? It's your host, Sidney Staples, and we're going to check out all things to 2311. We're with Denny Hamlin. You are the co-owner of 2311 alongside Michael Jordan, but I want to take you back to your younger racing days, if you will. What would you say to your younger self about now? Could he have even believed this? No, I just aspired to be a local short track racer that would win on Friday night at your local little tiny short track. Never would I envision making it to the Cup Series and then winning as many races as I have in the Cup Series and now owning a race team. Just all those things is wild, far beyond my imagination. So, what is AirSpeed, what we're standing in right now, the headquarters of 2311? AirSpeed is essentially kind of what 2311 is. Michael is 23, I'm 11. Obviously, air is him on the speed. So, AirSpeed is not your normal race shop. We created an environment here for our employees that is unmatched by any other race team. You know, it's state-of-the-art. All the technology that we have here is just second to none and it's hopefully going to give us the edge on the racetrack. Denny, so there's a legend, okay, that there was a sketchbook. There were sketches of your mind creating all of this. Can you talk me through that a little bit? It took a few years. I mean, a few iterations to say the least. I mean, I think there were probably two to three full redos of this place. And I actually have, you know, kind of a big cardboard sheet and basically says, all right, how much space does each room need to be? How many square foot? And I just started moving these blocks all around to try to configure the right way to do it. And then on top of that, you got to add efficiency, right? There's a lot of things that went into, you know, making sure everything is at the right place, but ultimately, you know, it turned out really well and really happy with how it all turned out. What were some of the intentional design choices made throughout here? And we can start with the Jordan brand side of things. There's little things everywhere. One side is Chicago Bulls red. One is Carolina blue. That relates because the Carolina blue is from where it all starts. And the competition, Chicago Bulls red is where it ends. So, you know, just little things here. You got 23 degree angle windows. There's a 23 wall with a lot of shoes on it. Apparently yours weren't good enough to make the cut. Yes. Take me through that. Yeah. So I had my own personal collection there. I think he didn't like the size more than anything, but it is symbolic because you have the 23 wall there with all the Jordan 11 shoes. So it makes sense to have the 23 11 shoes. What about your flair? Where are you present within the space? Rooms like this. These are kind of the tones that I've always been attracted to. The light wood, the dark walls. That's something that both me and Michael share in our style. And if you ever look at his golf clubhouse design, it's very, very similar to this. Denny, what room are we standing in right now? So this is the cafe. This is one of the few things when you asked me earlier about what the other teams wish they had. This is one of the key things. You know, we want people to eat lunch here. You know, we want to have people from the business side and the competition side coming together and intermingling when they don't normally do that. And so give them a platform here to, you know, play some shuffleboard, ping pong, pool, get on the racing simulator, whatever it might be. It gives them an opportunity to have fun with each other. In this space, I'm seeing greenery above us. And that is something you literally had a direct hand in doing. Tell me the story behind that. There was a breakfast place in Scottsdale, Arizona that I visited, and I was like, man, I love the greenery in the ceiling. I was like, okay, so put that in the memory bank of something that I want to include. So I just wanted to create that cafe feeling, and I felt like the greenery helped with that. We are with CJ Walker, the athletic trainer here at 2311. Take me through what you guys do in terms of the whole body of a NASCAR driver and what that looks like for them. Yeah, so we really try to individualize as much as possible, identifying both what forces they're absorbing in the car, so a track-to-track basis, how they're supported in their seats. We take that and kind of put them in positions to create a more general body strengthening and conditioning across the board. You know, some guys we focus a little bit more on, you know, head and neck support, hip complex. Low back is always a popular one with all of our drivers that we work on day in and day out. And just creating just a general core strengthening program that just allows them to absorb a lot more forces over the course of a race. You spent time at LSU, at Georgia. How would you say people would react when they see a place like this when it comes to a race team? Yeah, I think it definitely surprised them. I think it's something 2311's really made an intentional approach at, both with how they designed this. This facility is very similar to what I experienced my time at Georgia and LSU that time, too. But I think specifically when they brought in someone like me who comes from that collegiate realm with an emphasis on the elite athlete model, you know, both with our drivers and our pit crew, they really wanted to take that outside approach of not necessarily how NASCAR has done things before, but really kind of be innovative and take that next level step. And take that same approach from a recovery and performance standpoint with the support staff, that's myself, our strength coach who was with an NBA team previously, to apply that same model approach to our pit crews and our drivers. How different or similar would you say the recovery process for a driver is in comparison to, let's say, athletes that are playing football, baseball, soccer? I'd say it's very similar, honestly. I know sometimes NASCAR can get that stereotype of all they do is just turn left. There's really a lot more to that. You know, they're battling heat conditions in the car. Sometimes, you know, their air system happens to fail, which does happen occasionally. But usually they're going to be fighting the similar things that anybody is. Dehydration, you know, muscle strains, excessive fatigue, chronic issues from overuse things. So a lot of it is very, very similar to what you would see in a football or track and field or some other sport that you, you know, think of. All right, Wheels, down here, everything is in a loop. Intentionally done that way in terms of your guys' flow of work. So take me through that. Yeah, so we intentionally made this a good flow to the building. We're one of the last teams to build a new facility, so we want to make sure it flowed well for our workers. So in here we have our, we call it transaxle room. Our transaxles from X-Track, single source supplier, they're about $42,000 each. They're housed in here and semi-serviced. They have to be actually taken apart outside of this place for NASCAR rules. To our left, we have interior parts, electrical seats, dash panels, interior goods. Next to that, we have our wet systems room, which is radiators, oil coolers, fuel cells, same thing. They get taken apart and serviced every week. In here, we have basically suspension rooms. So we have our shock room, our steering rack room. This is where the brakes get put together. This is where the suspension gets assembled. Obviously, with all the people we have down here and we have their managers, so we did put a centralized location for the managers that help run downstairs. So now we're really starting to see all the parts come together. Yeah, so this is assembly, the assembly area. A bunch of parts and pieces become a car. As you can see there right now, they're wrapping the 45 car for a few weeks out. This will take basically a half a day in order to get the car from a raw shell to a wrapped race car. But in here is where the engine goes in the car, the driveline goes in the car, the suspension gets mounted on the car, the interior goes in, and it goes from a bunch of pieces to actually a running race car. Now, all throughout this downstairs area, we're seeing white floors, and of course, it's really noticeable here in the final assembly area. Is there a reason why it's such a light color? Yeah, I mean, honestly, we like to be pure white, but obviously, it's pretty dirty. We actually thought about doing gray, and we, with Danny and myself, picked out grays. We realized it was kind of dark. This is actually Olympus white. It's a nice tone for reality of you can have lights above you, and it actually is bright enough underneath the car. There's enough light to help reflect off there to see it in the car. It's pretty good. This area is open to the public to be able to look down here. How important is it to include them when it comes to this race team? Well, I mean, honestly, we rely on our fans so much to basically generate everything for our racing. It's enjoyable. Yes, everyone likes the fans, but they help run what makes us successful as a race team. So, fans and people can't see into this part of this downstairs facility. Where are we at? Yeah, so this is what we have as our fab shop, one of those dirty areas where actually work is done. Down this hallway that's completely parallel than the one that we were just in, what happens here? As the car comes off the haulers, it'll come into teardown. So, this is our teardown area where it's a giant dirty area. The car comes completely apart here. Every nut and bolt, every part and piece comes off here. It gets washed, it gets crack checked, and then it rolls down the hallway to the QC lab to be remeasured. I want to ask, how many cars do you guys go through in a season, being that you have a fresh one every single race? Yeah, I mean, honestly, last year, I know this, we went through 16 front clips between the two teams that we had at the time. We only went through, I think, three or four center sections, but yeah, we'll end up killing a few cars a year for sure. So, this is the QC lab. After the parts come from the car, get washed, crack checked, we make sure they come back into the QC lab and get measured on the CMM to verify they're still within tolerance of what NASCAR needs them to be as well as what we want them to be. Sometimes you'll get an accident and you wonder if the part can be reused. It's an easy way to check to make sure it didn't actually migrate from where its design spec was. And this is the final stop on our loop, am I correct? Yeah, this is the last quadrant that we're in. From here, the engines get kind of dressed, whether they have to do any spec changes, intakes, belts, updates they might have. From there, the engine gets wheeled down into assembly to get put in the race car. Josh, you're the pit coach and we're in the pit barn. What takes place here? How often are you here during the week? So, every week, we're here Tuesday through Thursday. The staff's here Monday through Friday, but the pit crew guys come in Tuesday through Thursday. And Tuesday through Thursday, we're practicing out here. Tell me how practice would go down. I'm seeing a long slab of concrete and pavement leading into this place. What goes on? Yeah, so we designed that specifically so that our drivers, when they come in and practice, we can get to pit road speed for that weekend. So, if pit road speed is 55, then we have enough runway that they hit 55 miles an hour in our practice car before they get here. And that helps the guys visually see how fast that's going to be over the weekend. So, we'll tape out that pit box every week and then the guys know, hey, I can jump at this point, the car's coming in this fast, and they can kind of get a feel for that before they actually get to the racetrack. So, we'll consider this the pit crew meeting room, but technical verbiage behind you, the Xfinity Speed Center. Why is this so important for all the pit crew teams? Yeah, so it gives us a place to come on Tuesdays whenever the guys get back here. So, Mondays, the coaching staff gets together, we look at all the film, collaborate with our notes, and then we kind of prepare for the guys on Tuesday the film that we want them to watch. We'll go over all the race film, all the footage, and then from that, we look at things that maybe they did well or they didn't do so well. That's how we come up with our practice plan for the week. During the race weekends, during practice, qualifying, and the race, we have basically any engineer here that doesn't travel to the racetrack will come sit in this room and they look at all sorts of different data that they are communicating to the track directly through intercom systems. They're communicating with crew chiefs and engineers at the racetrack on strategy or things the drivers need to be doing different or ideas to make the car better. They're focused on that in here. All righty, Decker, what was your role in this project when you were working on 2311? So, I was the superintendent for choke construction. We're the general contractor that shows up and goes from trees to handing the owner the keys. How long was that process and what are the challenges that came with it? The process was way quicker than what normally we would do. We cleared the site and then we started with slabs. All the walls are actually built on the ground on the slab and then stood up with a crane. The most challenging thing was trying to keep 200 people working on top of each other. Denny and Michael decided they wanted the windows at a 23 degree angle. They wanted 23 paint colors. They wanted all kinds of 11 or 23 or 45 elements to this building. So, it's much harder working at a 23 degree angle versus horizontally and vertically. What were the must-haves in this space? The must-have was them getting in by December 1st because, like I said, they wouldn't have a team functioning out of this space. But, I mean, some of Denny's things that he really wanted was the shroud, all the black shroud around the building, the LED lights that shine down at night. He really wanted the outside to be like a wow factor to where you wanted to walk in and then it goes to another level, not just be a boring box. So, between the Jordan speed camo and the elephant print to the LED lights, when you walk in you're expecting it to get worse and it only gets better. I think it's kind of cool. So, where else in the racing world do you want to see us go next? Leave a comment down below.