Labor Day special: Hendrick honors longtime auto technician, assists next generation

HANAHAN, S.C. — Kelly Brandt’s love affair with tinkering began at a young age. It’s stuck with him ever since.

“I was always intrigued by vehicles, by mechanical things. I took apart my toys as a kid,” says Brandt, a 43-year-old Wisconsin transplant now making the Charleston area his home. “We had go-karts and dirt bikes as kids growing up, so we liked to take those apart and put them back together, make ’em faster. Snowmobiles, you name it — if it had an engine in it, I was interested.”

Tweaking on toys, go-karts and dirt bikes naturally evolved into wrenching on cars. “That just kept going from there,” says Brandt, who started working at a dealership service department while still a junior in high school.

Fast-forward some 25 years later and Brandt’s lifelong passion for all things automotive is also his career. Brandt is the technical team lead and shop foreman at Rick Hendrick Chevrolet in Charleston, reaching his trade’s proficiency pinnacle as a General Motors World Class Technician.

Hendrick’s automotive group and motorsports operations will intersect this weekend as the NASCAR Cup Series Playoffs get underway at Darlington Raceway. But before Sunday’s Cook Out Southern 500 (6 p.m. ET, USA Network, NBC Sports App, MRN, SiriusXM) goes green, the NASCAR industry plans to recognize outstanding employees within each team’s partnerships as part of Workforce Appreciation Weekend, an initiative with close ties to the Labor Day holiday.

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Hendrick Motorsports’ No. 5 Chevrolet team and driver Kyle Larson will begin their Cup Series title defense as they pay tribute to Brandt for his 16 years of dedicated service on Hendrick’s automotive side. Brandt will serve as an honorary pit crew member for the No. 5 team this weekend, and he’s already made an impression on the motorsports side as the 2017 winner of the Randy Dorton Hendrick Engine Builder Showdown.

His role has meant oversight of tech operations, but it’s also led to mentoring opportunities for the next generation of automotive technicians — another shared value that aligns with Hendrick’s emphasis on STEM initiatives. So it was natural that Brandt was on hand Friday when Larson and crew chief Cliff Daniels joined several Charleston-area dealers in presenting a $25,000 grant to Hanahan High School’s auto tech program, a needed boost for the new breed learning the craft.

It’s already been a Labor Day with special meaning.

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Painted slogans in the hallways of Hanahan High read, “Through these doors soar Hawks.” When a deep blue No. 5 Camaro with Cup Series bona fides rolled through the doors to the secondary school’s tidy auto service bay, the spirits of the eager students enrolled in auto tech studies soared as well.

“This is big. We’ve never had anything like this in our school,” says David Van Maanan, the director of Hanahan’s auto program. “So this is exciting. You should have seen the kids’ faces whenever the car rolled out. They bombarded the window, and I wouldn’t have been able to stop them. It’s just fun. It’s great. It’s all kinds of surreal.”

Van Maanan — affectionately known as Mr. V to his students — has some context for what’s precedented in Hanahan’s auto shop. He’s a 2011 graduate of the school, and he turned his experience with the auto tech program into a job at a Chevrolet dealership. When his former teacher retired a few years back, he asked if his former student was interested in being his successor. Van Maanan jumped.

Now Mr. V’s efforts are getting a spark, through the “Hendrick, Get Set. Go!” grant program. Van Maanan said the funds will go toward updating the school’s equipment, helping his students keep pace in a field where technology is ever-evolving.

“It’s so important, and it’s really awesome to be part of a company that’s committed to trying to open the doors for these kids and develop them into the future of our automotive industry,” Brandt says. “When we get these kids in here, with the kind of experience they get starting here before they even go off to technical schools, they get a really good base. But what I like about the kids that are here is a lot of them are passionate about cars. And that’s the first step.”

The passion mixed with intrigue not long after Daniels popped the hood to reveal the No. 5 Chevy’s powerplant. Students had already pored over the car’s exterior details, but here was Daniels — as a mechanical maestro with a championship pedigree — providing a masterclass.

“All relevant questions — every single one of them,” Daniels said of the hands-on interaction. “That was impressive to me. Like, my own experience with kids that I went to high school with, they would have never been capable of asking some of those questions. So already these kids have a decent base of knowledge that it was cool to see them be that excited about it, because the only way you’re going to be passionate about something is you got to know a little bit about it. They had relevant questions, meaning they knew.”

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The groundwork for those more specific questions had been established in an assembly for nearly 150 Hanahan students focusing on STEM studies — Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. At Hanahan, roughly half of those are concentrated in auto tech studies.

The trappings of a high school auditorium were all present — balloons in school colors, a stage and a projector screen among them. What wasn’t there was the usual twiddling of thumbs and vacant stares that school assemblies sometimes produce.

“I didn’t get that vibe at all, so that just makes it more fun for us, too, to see the energy that they have and what they bring to the questions that they’re asking,” Larson said. “We signed a lot of autographs, took a lot of pictures, so it was a good interaction for everybody, and I think that’s going to have a long-lasting effect on those kids. Who knows, you may reshape or shape their career path.”

Signed hats made the rounds and shared selfies launched into the socials as the visit neared its end. In one student’s case, Daniels was called upon to autograph a shoe — an unusual request, but one that the crew chief fulfilled before the student returned it to his foot.

Their Labor Day bonds will continue to grow come Sunday at Darlington, where Brandt, Van Maanan and a select group of Hanahan students will experience the racing side of the automotive spectrum as the No. 5 team’s guests.

“So then the tie-in of all this to me is pretty powerful,” Daniels says, “because yes, there is a parallel to racing that is relevant if somebody wants to go to the racing path but at the same time, you can have a fantastic career, make good money at a great place that is a Hendrick dealership and have a huge impact on the bottom line for the dealership and set yourself up really well.

“To me that is a very powerful formula to be able to teach students, hey, yes if you want to go into racing, great, but it doesn’t have to be racing. You can come work for us. You’re gonna be a huge part of our company and yes, our goal is to sell cars but it’s way more than that. And to have a family like Hendrick behind them like this, it’s pretty cool.”