by Joe Garner
Jeff ran one lap at a decent speed, and then he turned it on. “He just slammed it to the floor,” John recalls, “and he never lifted off the throttle.” Jeff kept it in control and finally brought it into the infield. The other racers stood gape jawed. “I look at my stopwatch, and he’s running as fast as the veterans,” John says.
“I couldn’t afford to crash or do anything dumb, or they would have said it was because I was too young,” Jeff says. “And luckily I didn’t. I still have people come up to me saying they were at Hanford that day, and they tell me how they couldn’t believe it.”
By the end of the afternoon, the older drivers were coming up to Jeff to talk shop about track conditions and car adjustments. “Big West Coast guys like Brent Kaeding and Jimmy Sills,” John says. “They didn’t down-talk to him. . . . I was pretty proud of him.”
The raceway asked John and Jeff to come back to hot-lap again in a few weeks. In the absence of other opportunities, they agreed, but they both wondered how long it would go on. Three to five years of just running laps was flushing away Jeff’s talent.
It was a legal issue. All tracks had racers sign a waiver ensuring they wouldn’t sue in the case of death or injury. In California, any contract signed by a minor could be legally voided. So Jeff couldn’t sign. And John couldn’t sign for Jeff.
Cary Agajanian, an attorney and well-known Los Angeles–based track promoter, had refused to let Jeff race at Southern California’s Ascot Park for precisely that reason, and when he addressed a year-end gathering of racing promoters and outlined his legal explanation for shutting Jeff out, the doors of every track shut.
Ironically, it was Agajanian who decided to help. “I knew Jeff Gordon knew how to race,” Agajanian recalls. “He was a prodigy. It wasn’t like you were putting a kid in a car who had never driven before.” So he set to work drafting a document that would offer Jeff partial emancipation—a status that would allow him to legally sign track liability waivers while maintaining his standing as a minor in most other areas. They took the document to court, along with affidavits attesting to Jeff’s driving ability, and sent the thirteen-year-old before the judge. In the end, the judge approved the emancipation. Today it is known as “approval of a minor’s contract,” and has been used by countless underage athletes since.
A “California Kid” souvenir button featuring Jeff and his yellow No. 16 sprint car.
“We had this paper, so now we can legally sign,” John says. “But nobody gave a shit.” The approval to let Jeff race remained at the discretion of the tracks. As the school year wound to a close, it became clear that if they had any hope of finding some real, honest competition, they’d need to set their sights elsewhere. And the one place that seemed promising—with the fewest age restrictions—was the Midwest. Basing themselves out of Ohio, they crisscrossed the region, running more than twenty races over the next three months.
Dave Heitmeyer, a used-car dealer who’d seen Jeff run in Florida, offered Jeff and John a couple rooms in his Findlay, Ohio, home for the summer. Being a devoted racing fan, he often traveled with them from track to track, helping out. The first time Jeff ran at Findlay’s Millstream Speedway, Heitmeyer recalls, “he started at the tail and passed three or four cars, and by the end of the back straight he was in the lead. And the people just cheered. That was probably the first time they’d heard of him, but immediately he had a big following.”
With John’s knack for promotion and the support of Findlay-based print shop owner ‘Big’ Jim Streicher and his son Mike, they started capitalizing on Jeff’s growing popularity. A onetime Indy car mechanic, Jim also provided a building for John and Jeff to work from. They had a background sheet they handed out so everyone knew their story, and provided T-shirts featuring Jeff and his yellow No. 16 sprint that local track announcers gave away. There were “California Kid” bumper stickers and other paraphernalia. Jim had the idea to run off three-by-five sticky pads with Jeff’s image that he could use for autographs. “Isn’t this what other drivers do?” John asked. It wasn’t, but it worked.
“As he started getting more popular, the girls swarmed him,” Heitmeyer says. “We’d get to the racetrack and the girls were falling all over for him. And he was just thirteen.” They all wanted a signature or a T-shirt or just a moment with the eighth-grade cutey. “Oh, hell yeah,” John remembers. “Every girl from ten to nineteen.”
Jack Hewitt, the Ohio-based open-wheel racer who had competed against Jeff in Florida, took the young novice under his wing. He gave Jeff some simple advice: sign his name so that people could read it, and always be there for the fans. “But you didn’t have to tell him that. He knew it already, the little creep,” Hewitt recalls with a chuckle.
As much as Jeff’s post race sessions resembled a teenybopper stampede, he had come to race. He qualified for the top-tier “A” race roughly a dozen times and finished second in several races. He also managed to flip his car at K-C Raceway in Chillicothe, Ohio, as well as slide off the track sideways into the fans’ parking lot at Millstream. He was learning—quickly. “Obviously, he was special because of his age and the fact that he wasn’t intimidated by the other cars,” Heitmeyer says. “You knew there was no doubt he was going to climb the ladder.”
“All the steps John took were the right steps. But believe it or not, Jeff had a little bit to do with it, with his driving ability,” Hewitt says. Add to the fact that he always conducted himself like a professional, the team was building a solid foundation for success. “He was just a kid, but gosh, he had manners you wouldn’t believe,” Hewitt says.
Jeff at the track in 1987.
Still, it was going to be a long year back in California. From September until the following June, John and Carol scrimped and saved, whittling down their nest egg to get Jeff to the races across the country. “We had invested in a sprint car, a trailer, the rig—everything—to go racing,” Carol says. “And we were just sitting there in California with all of this stuff. To keep Jeff racing, we needed to make some kind of drastic move.”
Jeff’s childhood home in Pittsboro, Indiana.
For John, it was a no-brainer. He laid out his “relocation” checklist for Carol: Jeff could grow up in the Midwest, where he wouldn’t get into trouble. They’d be close to where sprint cars were manufactured. They could race three nights a week without having to schlep two thousand miles, and they might even find a car owner to race for. The cost of living was lower. John could set up a shop to make some extra cash building sprint parts. Kimberly was leaving for college in the fall, so she’d be fine. They could put someone in charge of their medical supply business and just go. He even had the location: Pittsboro, Indiana.
Jeff holding the checkered flag and first-place trophy following another Friday night feature race victory at Bloomington Speedway, Bloomington, Indiana, 1987.
John was never one to get sentimental, but Carol needed time to think. “That was scary,” she remembers. “It was hard for me because of my family and friends. In the beginning, I didn’t want to do it. But there were a lot of things about it that would be good for Jeff.” Truth was, she’d never felt Vallejo was a great place for him socially, and Kimberley had warned her more than once to pull him out of the school he was in. Even Jeff agreed. “We didn’t live in a rough neighborhood, but Vallejo is a rough town, and it definitely has certain rough areas.”
Jeff had few qualms about moving halfway across the country. “It didn’t bother me at all,” he says. Sure, he’d miss some of his buddies, and there was one girl he’d have to kiss good-bye for the last time, but a single factor seemed to override everything. “I knew I was going to get to race.”
Just before summer, Carol set out alone for Pittsboro, Indiana, to find a place for the family to live. She still laughs when she remembers John and Jeff, towing the sprint trailer and all their belongings, arriving in Indiana. John phoned her for the address of the five-acre property she’d purchased. “I said, ‘I don’t know. I don’t think it
has an address. It’s a rural route or something.’ I mean, there were only four or five houses on the whole road.” The real estate agent didn’t even have a key for the house. Everyone just left their doors unlocked. One thing was clear: they weren’t in Vallejo anymore. “I think Jeff would tell you it was one of the best moves we did for him,” Carol says. “Absolutely.”
Jeff prior to the “Night Before the 500” race at Indianapolis Raceway Park, 1989, where he set a new track record and won the race.
3
BRING ON THE THUNDER
“I REMEMBER THE DAY HE GOT HERE,” says Chris Cooper, who became one of Jeff’s close friends in Pittsboro. “Todd Osborne brought him to a little party, fresh off the boat, and said, ‘This is my buddy Jeff Gordon and he’s an up-and-coming sprint car racer.’ And you got this little, scrawny wet-bag. The kid didn’t weigh 110 pounds. He looked like he was six-years old with hair on his lip. We thought there was no way a guy can drive a race car and look like that.”
For the next few months, they put the newbie through the wringer. You big enough to see over a steering wheel, Jeff? You sure you can reach them pedals, Jeff? Hey, Jeff, I think you got a little dirt there under your nose. Jeff took it all on the chin. “I’ve never been somebody who shied away from making new friends,” Jeff says. “And I wanted to fit in.”
“We gave him a hard time, but he actually loved it,” Cooper says. “He was just one of those funny guys—he’d feed it right back to you. Next thing you know, he was just one of us.”
At Tri-West High School, the urban transplant was shocked to find there wasn’t a single male with long hair or an earring. No gangs, no drugs, no one trying to lay some devious plan on you. “These were country people,” Carol recalls. “The kids, when they left school, they went and worked on their parents’ farms or their grandparents’ farms.” It wasn’t a place where skateboarding or break dancing held sway. Rather it was rustic pursuits like barn basketball in haylofts.
“It was the weirdest combination I’ve ever seen in a guy,” recalls Jim Bear, another of Jeff’s high school friends. “So laid-back and humble and nice until it comes to being competitive.”
At fifteen, he was a driver, and there was no place he was more cutthroat than on the racetrack. They’d come to the Midwest to race, and that’s what they did. “I can’t even dream how many thousands of hours we ended up driving,” John laughs. “We’d leave Pittsboro, drive ten hours to Kansas City and race, get in the truck and drive twelve hours to Haubstadt, Indiana, and race, drive six hours back to the house.” “It was crazy, that’s about the only way I can describe it,” Carol remembers. “But I enjoyed every bit of it.”
That first year, Jeff racked up a number of good finishes, was written up in Open Wheel magazine, and managed to notch his first main-event win at K-C Raceway in Chillicothe, Ohio.
“When I first moved to Indiana, it was just racing cars, going to school, hanging out with friends, and girls. There was no pressure. I was happy. I didn’t feel any real sense of responsibility. . . . Only John knows if we were paying the bills.”
They were, but barely. John and Carol were drawing a small sum from their business in California, which they’d sold part of to finance the move. John was manufacturing and selling sprint racing parts out of his shop behind the house. For the time, Jeff’s racetrack earnings, meager as they might have been, were the family’s primary source of income.
As the first race season drew to a close, some drivers were heading to sprint-crazy Australia. It seemed a perfect way to keep Jeff’s skills sharp and, with a little self-promotion, begin building a fan base overseas. But they might as well have been sending the boy to the moon, for the overhead it required. So John and Carol sent a letter printed on letterhead featuring a Jeff Gordon Motorsports logo and an image of his winged No. 16 sprint car to dozens of friends and associates to request donations—an approach they used several times over the years. It worked. In February 1987, John and Jeff touched down in Perth.
Jeff playing with a kangaroo in Perth, Australia, February 1987.
The Australian track promoters played up the “baby face” angle. They christened him the “Teenager Rager” and photographed him, mulleted and micro-mustachioed, holding a baby kangaroo. But he also showed them why he’d come, setting a track heat record, winning one main event, and finishing second in another while racing against Australia’s best, and American stalwarts like Jimmy Sills and Randy Smith.
That year, Jeff, who had been racing competitively since he was five, finally became street legal. His Indiana driver’s license opened doors to the more prestigious races sanctioned by the United States Auto Club (USAC) and the World of Outlaws. He soon found himself regularly pitted against the likes of Steve Kinser, Doug Wolfgang, and Brad Doty—titans of short track who weren’t going to take a back seat to Jeff.
“There were two things in my racing career I didn’t want to beat me—a girl or this kid,” recalls Jack Hewitt. “I’d probably crash before I let that punk beat me.” But for all the bluster, Hewitt and a number of other older drivers took a shine to Jeff. “It was always nice being around him, because you did like him, you know?” Hewitt says. “We’d tease him about girls and stuff like that. And when John wasn’t around, he’d try to get back and say little things that were cute. He wanted to be one of the boys so bad.”
“I looked up to all those guys,” Jeff says. “And I wanted to race with them. . . . It was weird. I guess because I was young and looked up to them. I wanted to be their friend.”
Hewitt remembers one of Jeff’s first big victories, an All-Star race at Sandusky Speedway. “He won the feature, and we were so tickled and so pumped. This little shit went out and did it, you know?” But for Jeff, the highlight came at Eldora Speedway in New Weston, Ohio, where he bested Steve Kinser, his childhood hero. “Granted, it was just a heat race, not a main event,” Jeff says, “but talk about me beating my idols. And Steve came up to me after the race, and I’ll never forget what he said. He’s like, ‘Boy, you going to be a good ’un.’ Not ‘a good one’ but ‘a good ’un.’ I was like, wow, Steve Kinser just spoke to me and told me I was going to be good. That was huge, huge, huge for me.”
While Jeff and John posted a handful of wins in local non-sanctioned features, they weren’t dominating in the upper level of sprints. With the added pressure of USAC races, World of Outlaws events, and the extra travel, it was getting tougher to keep Jeff in a top-of-the-line sprint car and still make ends meet. “We were just a mom-and-pop organization,” Carol recalls. “We weren’t going to pour every last nickel and dime into it, plus we still had a daughter that was going to college.”
John kept reaching out to contacts, looking for any opportunity to land a sponsor or lock Jeff in a good ride with financial backing. “I’m sure there was pressure on John to pay the bills on the race car, which he didn’t really make me aware of,” Jeff says. “But sometimes he would say, ‘Hey, you need to call this guy, he’s interested in sponsoring the car,’ or, ‘I got a call from this guy who’d like you to drive for him and I think you need to call him back and talk to him.’ ”
The letter from John and Carol on Jeff Gordon Motorsports letterhead soliciting contributions for Jeff’s trip to Australia; A Jeff Gordon autographed hero card, 1986; Jeff (far left) out to dinner with the Rush family and friends during his return trip to Australia in 1989 (Garry Rush, in the striped shirt at far right, is ten-time Australian national sprint car champion); Jeff’s first passport for his trip to Australia; A newspaper article about Jeff competing at Western Springs in New Zealand, 1987.
Cover for the International Speedway Stratford program 1988–89 season, featuring Jeff.
Jeff standing next to Terry Winterbotham’s black No. 6 sprint car after a feature win at Millstream Speedway, Findley, Ohio, 1988.
They ran a few races for two different owners that year, winning a feature for one, but nobody was ready to gamble on a sixteen-year-old high school student. Tha
t winter, Kiwi car owner John Rae, who ran in both New Zealand and Australia, invited Jeff to come race for him for a few weeks. He’d seen Jeff’s potential in Perth the previous year and had followed his progress back in the States. Jeff’s natural evolution as a racer kicked in. He demolished the competition, winning fourteen out of fifteen races. Nobody treated him like a novelty act any longer.
Back home in Pittsboro, John heard that well-known Ohio race-team owner Terry Winterbotham was down a driver and convinced him to give Jeff a shot. “Truthfully, I had a great driver in Kevin Huntly at that time,” Winterbotham confesses. “But John told me what he could bring to the deal and I went for it.” The two men did have one disagreement before finalizing their deal. “John didn’t believe that I should pay Jeff if he ran worse than third. That was John trying to teach Jeff how to become a real racer,” Winterbotham surmises. “In John’s words, ‘He’s just practicing if he finishes worse than third.’ ” But Winterbotham refused to put that kind of pressure on Jeff. They agreed to split the prize money equally for a win. Jeff received thirty percent for anything other than first place.
Jeff was thrilled. He’d raced against the team’s drivers and knew their equipment was top quality. He also realized he needed to make the most of the opportunity, for his career and for John and Carol. “Terry gave me a chance at a young age that nobody else was really willing to give me,” he remembers. “I felt a lot of pressure to excel with that team because it was a big step for me.”