When Rick Hendrick sat down with his family for Christmas dinner a few weeks ago, he noticed a small wooden sailboat sitting in the center of the table.

He immediately recognized it as a memento that his wife, Linda, had brought home 10 years ago from a mission trip to Haiti.

"We started talking about how poor they were there and how she wanted to bring them all home," Hendrick recalls.

Three weeks later, Hendrick remembered the Haitian sailboat when he heard the news that a savage earthquake had rocked Port-Au-Prince, destroying the city, killing an estimated 200,000 people, injuring another 250,000 and leaving 1.5 million homeless.

Driven by his family's connection to the country and his compassion for the people there – the kind of compassion he seems to have for people everywhere – Rick Hendrick, NASCAR's preeminent team owner, sprung into action.

He immediately called Marshall Carlson, his son-in-law and the general manager of Hendrick Motorsports, and instructed him to see if the company could send the team planes to Haiti to help with rescue missions and relief efforts.

For the past week, Hendrick has been sending two planes a day to Haiti, transporting medical personnel, search and rescue crews and supplies to the ravaged nation.

With the 2010 season less than a month away, NASCAR's top organization has been as busy helping people in Haiti as it has been preparing cars for the Daytona 500. Pilots have worked around the clock, mechanics have been servicing planes and administrators have coordinated the logistics of Hendrick's relief efforts.

Carlson estimates that the company has already spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending planes to Haiti, and the efforts will continue long after the engines fire at Daytona next month.

"[And] Rick is paying for every bit of it," Carlson says.

That's Rick Hendrick and Hendrick Motorsports, one of the most charitable organizations in NASCAR. They are as quick to respond to a call for help as they are to NASCAR's latest rules change.

As the Sprint Media Tour descended on Hendrick Motorsports Wednesday, reporters prepared to talk about Jimmie Johnson's quest for a fifth consecutive championship and Dale Earnhardt Jr.'s efforts to salvage his sagging career, it was the people in Haiti there that were on Hendrick's mind.

It was the devastation in the country that struck an emotional chord with the proud team owner, and the efforts of his own people that brought a tearful smile to his face.

The day after the Jan. 12 earthquake, Hendrick and his people immediately began looking for ways to help. Hendrick planes had flown medical personnel to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, so its pilots and flight crews were used to responding to tragedy.

Dave Dudley, Hendrick's aviation director, contacted Missionary Flights International, a relief agency in Fort Pierce, Fla., that was one of the first to send people to Haiti.

The organization was flying DC-3 cargo planes with supplies into the country but needed a bigger plane for 30 search and rescue people that needed to get into the area.

The following day, Hendrick Motorsports sent its 45-seat Saab 2000 to Fort Pierce. Then it sent a second plane. Since then, the team planes have made two round-trip flights a day into Port-Au-Prince.

One flight carried a 33-person trauma team with surgeons, internists, anesthesiologists, EMTs and nurses.

"By the time that first plane got back to Fort Pierce, word had come back that they had set up operating tables in the street outside the airport and every one of those people were operating on people," Carlson says.

On one return trip, the Hendrick plane brought 26 orphans to the United States. The children, from 6 months to 8 years old, were being adopted by American families but their adoptions had not yet been finalized. After the earthquake, the adoptions were expedited but the children had no way out of the country.

"Literally five minutes before they had to be off the ground out of Port-au-Prince, the van showed up with these children," Carlson says. "They were traumatized, some of them very hungry, don't have shoes, never had been on an airplane before.

"Can you imagine? These are our colleagues that work in NASCAR racing that are standing there receiving these people and bringing them back."

Once word spread about the team's relief efforts, Hendrick said his organization began getting calls from churches all over the United States who have missionaries still trapped in Haiti.

One e-mail begged for help for an orphanage that had no food or water because rescue workers had not been able to reach it. Dudley located the coordinates for the orphanage and helped send a helicopter with supplies to the victims.

"It's been phenomenal to read the letters from people who lost their family down there, who went down there with their wife and kids and two of [the family members] are missing," Hendrick says. "They know they are dead, but we have to bring them back."

Unfortunately, Hendrick can relate to them. In 2004, a Hendrick Motorsports plane crashed on the way to Martinsville Speedway, killing all 10 passengers, including Hendrick's son, Ricky, his brother, John, and two nieces.

As Hendrick helps people stranded in Haiti, or families with missing relatives, he can feel their pain.

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"I think this was meant to be," he says. "I hate to say this, but I have been in a situation where you have lost family and you can't get to them, and there is nothing any worse than that. You know that something has happened but you can't get to them. I'm glad we could help."

Hendrick says many of his employees have volunteered to fly to Haiti or help with the mission.

"I'm so proud of our people that stood up," Carlson says. "Here we are in January, typically this is when these flight crews are catching their breath, getting things set, getting ready for the season to ramp up. We had pilots, operations manager, attendants, mechanics all step forward and say, ‘Let's go.'"

The Hendrick planes will continue making daily trips to Haiti through Jan. 23, then fly once a week. Carlson says the efforts will continue into the 2010 racing season.

"After the folks come home after a race, before we send out the early crews, we'll be able to go down and take a load in and load out," he says.

Hendrick, a cancer survivor who has dealt with his share of tragedy throughout his life and career, smiles and swallows a lump in his throat as he talks about what his organization is doing. He swells with pride as he thinks about how his organization and his people respond to others in need.

"It has probably done more to make us think about how lucky we are, how fortunate we are," he says. "It's brought our company together even tighter.

"I feel like we've won the championship already."

For more racing news, visit SceneDaily.com.

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