by Joe Garner
FROM THE TIME HE WAS A TEEN, Jeff Gordon wanted to be a racecar driver. Racing filled his daydreams, even if it no longer filled his weekends. “I wasn’t being challenged,” he recalls. “In 1983 and 1984, we didn’t do a lot of racing because there was no place to transition to.”
He waterskied, skateboarded, and competed in the odd quarter-midget race from time to time, just to knock the cobwebs off. He watched Indy car racing, thumbed through his copies of Open Wheel magazine, and marveled at the exploits of A.J. Foyt, Johnny Rutherford, and Rick Mears. He went to local sprint races and became a huge fan of Steve Kinser, reading everything he could get his hands on about his new idol. It was then he came across a story about another sprint racer, Sport Allen, who was just fifteen years old—older than Jeff, but it got him thinking.
In October of 1984, Jeff raced an event in Indianapolis, where he handily won both races. Following the victories, John and Jeff drove to see Lee Osborne, a former modified-racer and sprint car champion who had opened a business building sprint chassis. John told him he was in the market. “Aren’t you a little bit old to be starting sprint car racing?” Osborne asked. It’s not for me, John told him. It’s for Jeff. “Picture it,” John chuckles. “Jeff’s standing there, and even soaking wet with a hundred dollars’ worth of quarters in his pockets, he didn’t weigh a hundred pounds.”
“There’s no way,” John remembers Osborne saying. “He’s too little.” Jeff stood quietly the whole time. Finally, Osborne addressed the thirteen-year-old directly. “You think you can drive a race car?” “Yes, sir.” “What makes you think that?”
Jeff gave a humble rundown of his quarter-midget and go-kart successes and mentioned the article he’d read on Sport Allen. “[Osborne] just shook his head as if to say, ‘Please leave, you’re both crazy and I don’t deal with crazy people,’ ” John remembers. John continued to butter up Osborne by phone after they flew back to California. After several weeks, Osborne relented.
At the end of November, a crate arrived in Vallejo. Inside was their new Osborne sprint chassis. It took a frenetic few months of bartering and building; locating a used motor, wheels, a rear end, a front axle, and other parts; designing a custom undersized seat for Jeff; and cobbling the whole thing together. Most nights, Jeff would finish his homework and come down to the shop to help out. “I saw this car being built and I saw the engine,” he says. “And I was nervous.”
Jeff’s friend Rod Sherry remembers coming down to John’s machine shop to take a look. “He had this sprint car with the big wing on top. I don’t even think he’d driven it at that point, but next to Jeff, it was just a massive, massive car. And I remember saying, ‘Dude, you’re crazy if you’re going to drive that thing. You’re going to kill yourself.’ It just looked really intimidating.”
When it was ready, Jeff, John, Carol, and friends Vern Kornburst and George Brown loaded the newly built car into a trailer and drove out to rural Dixon, California—twenty-five miles southeast of Sacramento. They rolled the car out of the trailer and strapped Jeff in. While the truck got in position to push start the car, John gave him the instructions: Put the car in gear, turn the fuel lever to ‘open.’ The wheels will lock up for a split second as the truck starts to push the car. As the tires turn over watch the oil pressure. As the pressure rises above twenty to thirty pounds, flip the starter switch on, and boom the engine will fire immediately. Then pop it out of gear and keep it running to let the engine warm up.
Jeff in his red driving suit, 1985.
“So he hits the switch,” John recalls, “and suddenly he has six hundred fifty horsepower coming off that alcohol-powered motor with no flywheel. Just vrrroooom! The exhausts coming out and making all these fumes, and he’s just sitting there, rocking back and forth, and his eyes are as big as saucers. So were his mother’s.”
“It scared the crap out of me,” Jeff recalls. “I was petrified. I thought, ‘I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do this.’ ” Moving up from quarter midgets to sprints was like giving up roller skates for a rocket. Jeff may have been competing against older, bigger kids most of his life, but this was a man’s sport. These cars went from zero to sixty in three seconds and topped out at 150 mph. Wrecks were serious. People lost their lives. For all his competitiveness and zeal, this was something beyond. “We had this trip planned to Florida, and at that point John was fully committed,” he recalls. “There was no backing out.”
Jeff may have bitten down hard, realizing how much his stepfather had poured into the looming pilgrimage to Speedweek—a series of professional sprint events that would mark Jeff’s first chance to pilot the machine—but Carol was having a tough time. “When they went off to Florida,” she says, “Jeff was scared to death. Literally. He was thirteen years old and he was scared to death.”
“She goes, ‘Is he going to be all right?’ ” John says, smiling. “ ‘Oh, he’s going to be fine, dear,’ I told her. ‘Don’t worry about it. He’ll be good.’ And she said okay.”
“It’s not because there was a lack of trust for what John was doing,” Carol says. “I have all the trust in the world in him, and he’s just amazing when it comes to looking down the road. It’s just that I react to what Jeff reacts to because he’s my son.”
Carol stayed behind, which she admits was a good thing. During that first week of February 1985—just after Jeff, John, and Brian Bell, one of John’s eighteen-year-old employees, set out from Vallejo for Jacksonville, Florida—a freak storm hit the Southwest, dropping snow, sleet, and ice from the California border clear across Texas. In the midst of a storm, John was maneuvering the Ford pickup and a thirty-eight-foot trailer containing the sprint car while mollifying his two teenage passengers, who had the fear of God stamped across their faces. “There were so many accidents and spinouts,” he remembers. “We had people crash in front of us. We had a car flip by us.” At one point, John nearly lost control of the rig but managed to lock up the breaks and slide to safety down an ice-covered off-ramp. “The whole trailer jackknifed,” Jeff recalls, “and John panicked a little bit because it caught him off guard. But he straightened it out. We may have even gone into the intersection a bit. That was pretty scary.”
Jeff proudly standing next to his sprint car in the Red Roof Inn parking lot in Tampa, Florida, just before heading to East Bay Raceway for his very first track race, February 1985.
“Jeff and Brian were patting me on the back and telling me it was the greatest piece of driving they’d ever seen,” John laughs.
With temperatures dipping to thirty below, motels were either filled up or closed. The only place to stay was in the pickup. The three of them hunkered down in the cab and kept the motor running all night, a piece of cardboard wedged in front of the radiator to redirect the engine heat inside. “We froze our asses off,” John remembers.
It took two days to get to Houston, but by then the storm had dissipated, and they decided to make a quick afternoon detour to Gilley’s, the legendary honky-tonk from the 1980 film Urban Cowboy. Jeff quickly found something that piqued his interest. “He just kept hitting me up for quarters,” says John, who figured Jeff was probably in the back playing video games. He was half right. “I did play video games,” Jeff confesses, “but one of the games was like five card draw poker, and there was this image of a girl. Every time you won a hand, her top would come off, and you know, I was just mesmerized. It was the coolest thing I’d seen. ‘Can I have more quarters?’ ”
After John managed to tear Jeff away from the strip poker machine, they sailed through the South. A day later, they rolled into Florida, ready for what would be the biggest challenge of Jeff’s young life. The All Star Circuit of Champions Speedweek, which featured five nights of racing on two tracks—Jax Raceways in Jacksonville and East Bay Raceway in Tampa. And most importantly, unlike in California, there was no official age limit. John had used his powers of persuasion to convince the track owners and officials that a kid who looked even younger than his actual years s
hould be given a shot. Younger drivers existed—Sport Allen, who was almost sixteen at the time, showed up to race in Tampa—but no one was quite prepared for just how tiny Jeff was.
“I mean, he wasn’t just thirteen years old—he was a runt, you know? He was a small little dude,” recalls legendary open-wheel racer Jack Hewitt, who had come to stake his claim in Florida along with other top-flight drivers like Doug Wolfgang, Dave Blaney, Rick Ferkel, and Brad Doty. None of the guys wanted some scrawny, untested waif wrecking them and robbing their payday. “I didn’t agree with it,” Hewitt says bluntly. “Nobody agreed with it.”
Bill Holder, who wrote for Open Wheel magazine at the time, concurred. “You’ve got a kid that weighs about ninety pounds, with no upper-body strength, in a powerful, six-hundred-horsepower race car, and I just didn’t think it was safe.”
Even the fans were shocked. Dave Heitmeyer, who later became close friends with John, Jeff, and Carol, remembers sitting in the stands. “First, I couldn’t believe that a thirteen-year-old was racing one of these cars. But then I was in awe when I saw him. I thought, ‘Wow, this kid’s good. But boy, is he little.’ ”
Jeff at top speed in his No. 16 sprint car at Kings Speedway, Hanford, California, March 1985.
When the concerned track owner came over, John turned a deaf ear. “They came in,” Jeff recalls, “and they were like, ‘I’m sorry, but that boy is not getting in that car.’ And John just said, ‘Try and stop me.’ He’d done his homework, and there was nothing they could do.” After all, they’d driven three thousand miles to get Jeff some experience, and that’s what was going to happen.
John’s philosophy was simple—or crazy, considering Jeff had still never driven a sprint: Learn by being around the best. Watch them, talk with them, race with them, absorb what they do. “When you’re there with the best in the world,” John says, “something’s got to rub off, right? So he’s going to get the right stuff.”
As for Jeff, the doubts and insecurities flooded back the moment he settled behind the wheel. The very fast, half-mile track was made even more slick and muddy after a rain. They were going to “hot-lap”—run the track with other drivers to test the cars out before the competition. “Obviously, John believed in me more than I believed in myself,” Jeff recalls. “I was seriously nervous.” And then the green flag dropped.
Jeff started off slowly, tentatively. “Vroom, vroom, vroom, vroom! Cars were going by me,” he recalls. “And I was trying, but I really wasn’t doing it. And then I stood on the gas.” The car shot off, and as Jeff came out of a turn, the powerful sprint’s back end slid around on the rain slicked track and scraped the retaining wall. It wasn’t a bad impact, but it was enough. Jeff stopped. The caution flag came out. It began raining harder, which ended the race for the night. No matter. Jeff was done. Done with Florida, done with sprints.
“I was crying,” he remembers. “It scared the daylights out of me. I was really upset. I went up to John and said, ‘You lied to me! There is no way I can do this.’ ”
“He said, ‘You don’t understand, I’m scared to death. I cannot do this. We need to go home,’ ” John recalls. “He was pretty upset with me.”
Still, John was convinced that if Jeff could just get over his fear, he had more than enough skill to make this work. Rain ended the racing for the night. They went back to the hotel and had a heart-to-heart. “I just needed some time to build his confidence up,” John says. Somehow, John’s calm demeanor and a night’s rest brought Jeff back into the fold. “I remember John saying, ‘Nobody said it was going to be easy. Every one of these guys had to learn how to do it, and I believe in you. You can do it.’ I was so petrified prior to that. The fact that I got back in that car two days later is, to me, the miracle of all miracles,” Jeff says.
Despite Jeff’s rekindled confidence, he and John were met by even stronger opposition when they pulled in to East Bay Raceway. This time it wasn’t only the track owner that had issues. Bert Emick, president of the All Star Circuit of Champions, was adamant Jeff wasn’t going to compete.
“Bert, you let us race at Jax Raceway,” John said.
“Well, that wasn’t an official All-Star Race. This is,” declared Emick.
“But you’ve already promoted that Jeff Gordon’s coming from California to race,” John reasoned. “What are you going to tell the folks in the grandstands?”
Emick wasn’t having it.
“Bert, we didn’t have any issues at Jax. We’ll start at the back,” John pleaded. Emick, a man Jack Hewitt describes as “too nice a guy for the job,” stopped and thought for a moment. Looking at John, Emick grinned and said, “All right, you can race.”
Jeff kneeling beside his No. 16 sprint car, 1984.
So there he was, on a cold Wednesday night in his microscopic race suit, still scared but sliding around Tampa’s East Bay Raceway with sprint car racing’s cream of the crop. “We were pretty excited that he was as good as he was,” John says. “He had just run with some of the best in the world.” John was clear about their mission: They were not there to try to win. No matter how high Jeff qualified, he was to start in the back of every race, and he wasn’t allowed to pass anyone unless they dropped off. “We were there for the experience, for the laps,” he says. “I didn’t want him out there mixing it up with professional guys who were earning a living, who were making house payments and paying for their kids to go to school. He was there to learn. And you’re going to learn a whole lot more following cars and understanding how they use the track than you are trying to drive past a guy because you think you’re faster.”
The next night, Jeff was back at the track, and his qualifying time was even better. He was quickly becoming a fan darling, the track announcer regularly drawing attention to “Jeff Gordon, a thirteen-year-old racer from Valley-Joe, California.” “It was a steep learning process,” Jeff says, “but I excelled quickly. By the third night, I wasn’t petrified anymore, didn’t embarrass myself. I wasn’t winning, but I was out there running very competitive laps.”
Jeff blistering the competition in his yellow No. 16 sprint car at Warsaw Speedway, Warsaw, Indiana, 1987.
Pages of the filed emancipation document granting Jeff partial independence from his parents and the right to sign the track legal waivers.
On the final night of the event, John removed the reins. In his heat race, Jeff qualified for the third-tier main event. This time, he started in sixth position out of twelve cars, but with a green light to pass other racers, he nearly won, finishing a close second. The performance bumped him into the second-tier ‘B’ main event, with a chance to qualify for the top-tier ‘A’ main event. Starting sixteenth out of twenty-two cars, he quickly worked his way up and was running among the top ten when a chunk of dirt kicked up by another car nailed him in the helmet obscuring his vision. He pulled up the track to get his bearings, but he hung tough, kept control, and finished seventeenth. “He pulled in after the race, and we’re all excited,” John recalls. “The grandstand is going nuts. TV cameras, they’re interviewing him. He was on the Speedweek show on ESPN. He did excellent.”
Jeff in his school photo, 1986.
Bob Kinser, the father of Jeff’s racing idol Steve Kinser and a racer himself, came down to the infield to get a closer look at the young phenom. “Kid, this your car?” John remembers him asking. “Yes, sir,” Jeff replied. Kinser then put a hand on the young man’s shoulder and said, “Kid, my balls wouldn’t fit in that seat.”
Even Jack Hewitt, who had been so adamant about the dangers Jeff posed on the track, seemed to be singing a different tune. “John didn’t let it get out of hand. Jeff went in there tippy-toeing. He just had to stay out of the way and learn the skills, and that’s what he did. And it made him a smart little racer right off the bat.”
He was, to everyone’s knowledge, the youngest person to ever race a sprint car. His name was now on the professional motorsports radar, and most observers expected they’d be seeing a lot more of hi
m. But it was impossible not to hear the critics, the charges of irresponsible parenting, recklessness, even abuse. These were accusations that would dog John and Carol throughout Jeff’s early teens. A journalist in Arizona, after witnessing Jeff’s performance in Florida, demanded that John be prosecuted for child endangerment.
“It’s not something I would recommend a lot of parents do,” John says today, half-jokingly. “Why did I? I’m eccentric, I guess.”
“Looking back,” Jeff admits, “when you see how young and raw I was, I’m surprised John didn’t get taken to jail. I’m not saying he was putting me at death’s door, but there’s no way I could ever do that as a father. To actually say, ‘Yeah, let’s go put our thirteen-year-old son in a sprint car.’ . . . But I say that laughingly, too, because I couldn’t be more thankful that he did.”
Back home in Vallejo, Jeff settled into day-to-day life as a normal eighth-grade kid. Few of his friends knew anything about his experiences in Florida. “Racing was just something he did on the weekends,” Rod Sherry remembers, “not something he talked about all that much.”
A newspaper ad for an autograph signing with Jeff at Dave Heitmeyer’s car dealership, H&M Motors, July 23, 1985.
“No matter how successful he was or how much he was winning, I never saw Jeff get arrogant,” Carol recalls. “He was very grounded, and he never got a big head about it. He just doesn’t have that in his nature.” John agrees: “Jeff always downplayed how good he was in anything that he did.”
He may not have been especially vocal about his racing, but in his head he was already entertaining dreams of a future. Yet finding opportunities to race sprints in California was proving next to impossible. Nobody wanted to let him compete. Most sanctioning bodies insisted he be at least sixteen—some said eighteen—and have a driver’s license. There was the negative public opinion, plus legal barriers and insurance issues. Finally, a track in Hanford, about five hours south of Vallejo, agreed to let them come down—not to race but to hot-lap. It was opening day of the season, and a number of California’s better-known sprint racers would be there. When it was announced over the loudspeaker that there was a thirteen-year-old who was going to run practice, there was a general sense of bemusement.