Though millions of sponsorship dollars now course through the racing veins of the NASCAR empire he built over the past 20 years, Rick Hendrick still feels pangs of empathy when he sees a team trying to make a go of it alone.

“I had my back to the wall, no different from some of these guys who are unsponsored today,” Hendrick says. “It was a lot of fun, but pressure is pressure.”

Things have moved beyond that.

After enjoying the kind of success its owner only could have dreamed of when he started, survival no longer is the prime directive at Hendrick Motorsports.

Superiority is.

Nothing short of that meets expectations any more, expectations set by a track record that puts what now is a four-car Nextel Cup operation squarely among the all-time greatest operations in NASCAR history.

Hendrick-owned teams have won 120 Cup races over the past 20-plus seasons. It has been home to some of the greatest drivers and crew chiefs in stock-car racing history. Geoffrey Bodine, Tim Richmond, Darrell Waltrip, Ken Schrader, Ricky Rudd, Terry Labonte, Jeff Gordon, Jerry Nadeau, Jimmie Johnson and Joe Nemechek all have Cup victories in Hendrick’s Chevrolets.

It wasn’t until 1995, the operation’s 12th season, before Gordon brought the team its first championship. But that began a run of five titles in seven seasons, four for Gordon and one for Terry Labonte.

It’s a long way from the days when Hendrick was trying to hold together a deal that basically had fallen apart before it got off the ground.

“I was going to do a deal with C.K. Spurlock and Kenny Rogers where we tied country music to our team,” Hendrick says of the team that was called All-Star Racing. There were big plans for the driver, too — Richard Petty at one point was on the hook.

Although the deal fell through, Hendrick kept going. He hired Bodine, a driver from New York. He had five or six employees, one of them a crew chief that nearly everybody in the sport thought already had seen the best days of his career — the legendary Harry Hyde.

All-Star Racing had no sponsor. Just when it looked like the team might not make it, Bodine won a race in April 1984 at Martinsville Speedway.

That victory convinced Levi Garrett to sign on as the sponsor for Bodine’s team. Bodine won three poles and three races that year. In 1986, Hendrick added a second team, pairing Hyde with Richmond and hiring Gary Nelson to be Bodine’s crew chief.

The next year, however, Richmond sat out most of the year with an illness that later was revealed to be AIDS. Hendrick lured Waltrip to his team, and he won six races in 1989. But it wasn’t until 1992, when Hendrick saw Gordon running in a Busch Series race at Atlanta Motor Speedway and decided to look into hiring him, that the team’s ultimate climb to the top would really begin.

“It’s all about the chemistry,” Hendrick says. “Most every everyone has good equipment, the difference is the people. If you get a bad seed in there you have to get them out right away to make sure you have a team who is all working with the same philosophy.”