Jeff Gordon doesn’t feel alone at the top of NASCAR. But he is.
And he’s climbing.
He has 58 victories going into Sunday’s Daytona 500 and four Winston Cup championships at 30. The closest any active driver comes is Rusty Wallace with 54 victories and one championship, and he’s 45.
Gordon ascended to the pinnacle after Dale Earnhardt died on it–last Feb. 18 in the Daytona 500, forever sealing his career statistics at seven championships (tied with Richard Petty atop the all-time list) and 76 victories (sixth on the all-time list).
Disclaiming his singular status, Gordon maintains, politely as usual, “There are so many superstars and personalities in this sport.”
Well, let’s see: There’s the tempestuous Tony Stewart, who has 12 victories and no Cups, but is also 30, 2 1/2 months older than Gordon. There’s the MTV generation’s own Dale Earnhardt Jr., rushing up alongside Gordon in popularity, but with only five victories and no Cups, at 27.
There’s the polished, polite, candid Dale Jarrett, who has 28 victories and one championship and is the only active driver who tops Gordon in any significant category (Daytona 500 victories, three to two), but is 45. The gritty, nice–but moody–Mark Martin has just turned 42, with 32 victories and no titles. Soft-spoken, down-home Bill Elliott, at 46 with 41 victories and one Cup, is even further into the twilight of his career than Wallace.
What about Kevin Harvick, Earnhardt Jr.’s fellow MTVer, who climbed into Earnhardt Sr.’s Chevrolet after Feb. 18 and went on to two Cup victories, rookie-of-the-year honors and a Busch Series title on the side?
Well, Harvick is 26. By that age, Gordon had two Cups and 29 victories after having been rookie of the year at 22.
How high does the 5-foot-7-inch, 150-pound Gordon tower? Richard Childress, Earnhardt Sr.’s longtime car owner and now Harvick’s mentor, puts it this way: “Any attempt to say how good Jeff Gordon really is would be an understatement. He will go down in history as one of the greats in NASCAR. He just gets better every year.”
Indeed, if Gordon follows the pattern of every other great NASCAR driver, he hasn’t even seen his best years yet. And so no one currently is in position to catch him in the record books.
There are simply no more Wonder Boys, as Gordon was dubbed early on. Not even Gordon himself–who is beginning to shed the rap his legions of boo-birds gave him, as something of a whiner, too successful, too quickly, too handsome, too polite, just to good to be true–fills the bill anymore.
Gordon is beginning, believe it or not, to show a tough-guy side that long has been latent.
What Earnhardt left, most of all, is a void of iron-ruling persona at the top–gruff in conversation, forceful on the track, charismatically in charge of every garage area he walked through.
“I don’t know if anybody is going to fill that void,” says Gordon, just before unwittingly giving indications that he might.
“We need a guy in black,” Gordon says. “But you can’t make yourself that type of image. It has to be in you. It has to be the way you go about things, the way you drive. Dale didn’t just wake up one day and say, `I’m going to be the Intimidator.’ That’s just the way he drove that car.
“In my mind, I’m a different type of person. Everybody always knew I had a totally opposite type of personality.”
But Gordon tried on a black hat briefly in the last race of last season, Nov. 23 at New Hampshire International Speedway. And he looked far better in it, to fans, than he could have imagined.
He had dominated most of the race, but as the laps waned, Robby Gordon (no relation) came up and shoved him out of the way to take the lead. Under an ensuing caution, Jeff Gordon drove up and knocked the bejesus out of Robby Gordon from behind.
For this, Jeff Gordon was sent, so very atypically, to the back of the field for rough driving by NASCAR officials and lost the race.
“[But] I gained more fans from what I did at New Hampshire than I did from winning the championship (which he had clinched the previous Sunday at Atlanta),” he says, with a little smile that isn’t quite Earnhardt’s old wicked one–but does betray a sort of unfamiliar, mischievous satisfaction.
“[During the off-season,] I had more people telling me, `That was just great to see you do that!’
“I thought it was awful. I lost control.
“But a lot of people said, `No, it’s OK to lose control once in a while. It shows you’re human.’
“Hey, I got mad. There’s no doubt about it. . . . And I had people who didn’t pull for me say, `Hey, man, I kind of liked that. I’d like to see some more of that.’ And I said, `Well, that’s not necessarily what you’re going to see all [this] year. But if somebody rubs me the wrong way, you’re going to see more of it.’
“Was I sending a message? Well, I see this sport in some ways getting more physical. As it gets more competitive, and harder to pass, it pushes us to be more physical on the race track with one another.
“I’ve been racing for a lot of years (since age 5, when he began winning championships in quarter-midgets). My first approach is to do it the right way.”
And right here, Jeff Gordon delivers the most Earnhardtian message he ever has uttered to his peers and public in his life:
“My second approach is to do whatever it takes.”
Is that a 5 o’clock shadow of black beard emerging on the face of the former Wonder Boy?
Nobody is less surprised than John Bickford, the Earl Woods of auto racing, the stepfather who mentored Gordon up through racing from his pre-school years.
“Jeff has a temper,” Bickford says. “When he was little, he used to get into fights [as Jeff rose through the ranks of quarter-midgets and go-karts].”
Says Gordon: “However a guy races me is how I race him back. Most guys race me pretty clean because they know I race them clean. But if a guy bumps and bangs on me, he’s going to get it back.”
The unrelated Gordons–Jeff from the San Francisco Bay Area, Robby from Orange County–put the New Hampshire run-in behind them during Daytona testing in January.
“We laughed about it,” Jeff says. “I put that stuff aside. There have been guys who wrecked me, rubbed me the wrong way, said the wrong thing.
“But I’ve never said, `OK, I’m setting a date [for payback]. Here’s where it’s going to happen.’ I race that person, I race him hard, and if it happens it happens. I don’t plan it.
“[For example,] Dale Earnhardt and I got together when I was a rookie [in 1993] and I hit the wall really hard. But I never stopped racing him the same way.
“[In 1997,] there was the time at Daytona when I was passing him and he got into the wall and flipped upside down . . . things are going to come full circle.”
For all the years they ran in the same races, and polarized the race fans, the incident late in the ’97 Daytona 500 was the only high-profile, nose-to-nose confrontation Jeff Gordon and the late Dale Earnhardt ever had.
Late in the race, they were vying for second place–and virtual certainty of blasting past leader Bill Elliott for the victory. Exiting Turn 2, Earnhardt roared up alongside Gordon, but Gordon wouldn’t flinch. Side-by-side they roared onto the backstretch. Earnhardt later claimed that “Gordon got a little impatient,” but actually it was Earnhardt who acted precipitously.
Earnhardt’s car was “pushing,” or understeering, as it came off Turn 2. Earnhardt fans claim to this day that Gordon hit Earnhardt. Truth is, Earnhardt’s car bounced off the wall and slammed Gordon’s broadside to broadside. Gordon’s car wiggled, but he gathered it up and drove on, while Earnhardt’s car tumbled down the backstretch.
Gordon won the race, but Earnhardt stole the show. Impulsively the Man in Black jumped out of the ambulance and back into his Chevy, which had come to rest right-side-up with the tires still inflated. And Earnhardt drove it on around, to finish the race and save a lot of face.
That was how Earnhardt could overpower a scenario, even when he didn’t win.
But Earnhardt is gone.
And Jeff Gordon stands, staunchly, alone at the top.
