NASCAR: How much money will Rick Hendrick be donating?

Following Alex Bowman’s win in Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Rick Hendrick is set to make a massive donation to support Ukraine relief efforts.

Prior to Sunday’s NASCAR Cup Series race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, Hendrick Motorsports team owner Rick Hendrick and sponsor Hendrick Automotive Group committed $200,000 to Samaritan’s Purse in order to support disaster assistance amid the ongoing humanitarian crisis in Ukraine caused by the Russian invasion.

Samaritan’s Purse is run by Christian evangelist and missionary Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham.

Franklin Graham has past ties to NASCAR, having given the invocation ahead of the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte Motor Speedway in May 2020, and in February 2018, he heaped praise on Hendrick Motorsports driver William Byron for expressing his faith. Byron, a rookie at the time, responding by inviting him to a race.

The Samaritan’s Purse website, where fans can make donations that directly support the relief efforts, appeared prominently on Kyle Larson’s #5 HendrickCars.com-sponsored Chevrolet in Sunday afternoon’s race.

However, Hendrick and the team didn’t stop there with their philanthropy.

They also committed to donating an additional $2,000 to these relief efforts for each lap led by one of their four drivers in Sunday’s Pennzoil 400: Larson, Byron, Chase Elliott, and Alex Bowman.

Bowman won the race, leading 16 of 274 laps around the four-turn, 1.5-mile (2.414-kilometer) oval in Las Vegas, Nevada, while Larson finished in second place after leading 27 laps. Byron finished in fifth after leading eight. Elliott finished in ninth but did not lead any laps.

These 51 laps mean that Hendrick plans to donate an additional $102,000 to the relief efforts, and the final $14,000 of that $102,000 interestingly came thanks to Richard Petty Motorsports’ Erik Jones.

On lap 265, Joe Gibbs Racing’s Kyle Busch appeared to have the win locked up, leading teammate Martin Truex Jr. However, a crash by Jones, which also led to a spin and wreck by 23XI Racing’s Bubba Wallace, led to overtime, extending the race, which was initially scheduled for 267 laps.

This led to pit stops for new tires ahead of the overtime restart with two laps remaining. Larson, Bowman and Byron all took two tires, while Busch, Truex, and Trackhouse Racing Team’s Ross Chastain, who was running in third place behind the Joe Gibbs Racing teammates at the time of the crash, took four.

As a result, the three Hendrick Motorsports teammates all exited the pits in the top three, ahead of the former top three. The race didn’t restart for another five laps, netting an additional $10,000 in donations, and Bowman didn’t relinquish the lead after the final restart, netting an additional $4,000.

Had the race ended at 267 laps, as originally scheduled, the additional donations would have totaled $88,000, with Larson leading 23 laps, Bowman leading 13, and Byron leading eight.

With the $102,000 in additional donations, Hendrick is donating a total of $302,000 to these worthwhile relief efforts.