Jeff Gordon: His Dream, Drive & Destiny

by Joe Garner

  He didn’t disappoint. Jeff’s first race out, he set a track record and won the main event. The rest of 1988 only got better. “It was amazing how he could adapt to a track,” recalls Winterbotham. Jeff scored thirteen victories and captured track championships at three Ohio raceways.

  In his two years in Pittsboro, Jeff felt more at home than he ever had in Vallejo. “I loved being out in the country,” Jeff recalls. “I’ve always been a person who likes that. And I loved how easygoing, how laid-back and just comfortable everything was.” Jeff’s success in 1988 was a minor windfall for the family. His earnings gave them some room to breathe, but they weren’t about to start throwing money around. “I’ll be the first to admit, I never felt like an overly spoiled kid,” Jeff says. “My mom and John didn’t shower me with a lot of things, and they made me appreciate what I had. . . . When I started making money in racing, they were really good about saving for my future . . . but they did allow me to spend some of that money.”

  Jeff proudly displays some of his many trophies at home in Pittsboro, Indiana, 1988.

  Jeff settled on a cell phone and a new Chevrolet step-side pickup. “It was a model that just came out,” he recalls, “and I put aluminum wheels on it, and that thing was, wow—that thing was awesome.” His friends remember that it didn’t take much to goad him into demonstrating what it could do. “You’d just kind of give him that, ‘Come on, show me what you got, Mr. Racecar Driver,’ ” recalls Chris Cooper.

  He’d turn donuts, run 110 mph down dark county roads, tailgate his buddies within millimeters, see how close he could get to bridge pylons before his passengers yelled uncle. “But when he drove, he wasn’t, like, angry. He could just do it like it was nothing,” says pal Bruce Pfeifer. “He’s literally so laid-back that we’d be going through the neighborhood I live in, like nintey miles an hour everywhere, and he’d be asking, ‘So, what’ve you guys been up to?’ And we’re like, ‘Aaaahhh!’ ”

  On one occasion, Cooper was driving Jeff to go play pickup basketball on an evening when the fog was so thick that the headlights reflected back into the car. “We’re driving down the road and got the music going, and the next thing you know, we see this sign and bang! We go airborne. It seemed like Dukes of Hazzard. We hit a telephone pole, snapped it in two, and ricocheted into a line of trees.

  “I bent the steering wheel over and hit the windshield, and I had a little cut on my head. And I look over, and I think, ‘Oh my god.’ Gordon’s over there lying in the seat, this little itty-bitty fellow, and he’s like, ‘Ugh, ugh, ugh.’ The windshield is just shattered, it’s got a head imprint. His knees are cut, he’s got blood running down his legs. There’s smoke coming from everywhere. I’m thinking the car’s going to blow up. So I go into panic mode, grab a hold of him, drag him across the car, and pull him out.”

  The local homeowners came running, followed by the cops, fire department, and paramedics. “We were both physically hurt—it was traumatic. So they’re cleaning us up, and within three minutes, Jeff’s like, ‘Hey Coop, I’ll see you later, man, I’m going to play basketball.’ Brad Hawkins picked him up. I about kicked his ass. I told him later on, ‘Man, you must be a racecar driver to get your ass out of the car and make a big show like that.’ ”

  While Jeff participated in the usual high school pranks—painting abandoned barns with some less-than-savory slogans and helping to organize a twenty-five-car senior class automotive “parade,” replete with a giant combine that backed up local traffic for miles—he avoided any serious trouble.

  He was a typical high school student, albeit one who experienced an unusual number of absences on Fridays. He had a close-knit group of pals and a steady girlfriend. He played barn ball and basketball and was in the stands cheering at school football and basketball games. In his senior year, he and his girlfriend were voted prom king and queen. Only his closest friends had any inkling how he spent his weekends.

  Todd Osbourne, John Bickford, Jeff, and renowned sprint car builder Bob Trostle, Knoxville Raceway, Knoxville, Iowa, July 1987.

  “He never talked about it. Never wanted to talk about it,” says high school friend Greg Waters, who frequently helped Jeff and John at the track. “He’d talk racing, but he’d never talk about how good he was. He was quiet. Laid-back. Real laid-back.” At times, a teacher might make a comment about his racing in class, and on a few occasions, he spotted someone with Jeff Gordon Motorsports paraphernalia. “I remember him coming home one day,” Carol says, “and he said he saw someone with one of his T-shirts at school. That pretty much blew him away, I think.”

  Jeff’s No. 6 sprint car at Eldora Raceway, New Westin, Ohio, 1988.

  The line between his racing fame and his day-to-day life became thinner toward the end of his senior year. “That’s when I won this race in Indiana, live on ESPN, and that’s when it all kind of took off.” Little in his life would be the same after that. “I have a great appreciation for friends who knew me before any of this really took off,” he says. “I can just be myself and we can have regular conversations because we go back to those days . . . I think it’s important to have friends in your life that think of you as just a regular person, because, really, that’s all I am. That’s all any of us are.”

  The win that changed the course of Jeff Gordon’s young career did not come in Terry Winterbotham’s No. 6 sprint car, nor did it come in the No. 16 sprint car with John. In fact, it didn’t come in a sprint car at all. Rollie Helmling was a businessman who owned grocery stores and fielded a midget car race team. John, Jeff, and car builder Bob East attended the first race of the 1989 season at the Louisville Motor Speedway. Bob, who had recently set up Beast Chassis, near Indianapolis, wanted to talk with Helmling about selling him a car while John wanted to introduce Jeff to several of the team owners, including Helmling. “Rollie seemed pretty busy, so we just exchanged a quick handshake,” Jeff recalls.

  At that race, Helmling’s driver was caught up in a wreck that destroyed their brand-new race car. With only three weeks before the ESPN-televised “Night Before the 500” race, held at what was then called Indianapolis Raceway Park, he was down a car and a driver. He told Bob he’d need a car from him and then asked if he had any thoughts about a driver. “Bob says, ‘Well, what do you think about Jeff Gordon?’ ” Helmling recalls, forgetting he’d met Jeff briefly in Louisville. “I kind of took a breath and said, ‘Isn’t that that fourteen-year-old kid that’s running sprint cars?’ ” East clarified that Jeff was now seventeen and urged Helmling to give the kid a shot. “So I called Jeff and we had a really good conversation,” Helmling recalls. “The first thing I had to tell him was to quit calling me Mr. Helmling and call me Rollie. And when I talked to him, even at his young age, he was very good not to make any claims he couldn’t back up and to convey a message that if he was given this opportunity, how much he’d appreciate it.”

  “Rollie was taking a huge risk,” Jeff says. “I was a dirt sprint car driver who never raced on pavement, and this was, for him, the biggest event all year long. I was this unknown.” They met a couple days later at Bob East’s shop to see if they could hammer out a partnership. “Here’s this little guy, very nice, very polite, and very much trying to look older than he was,” Helmling recalls. “I was skeptical, and we weren’t going to get any testing done, but I thought, ‘Well, okay, let’s give it a try.’ ”

  Carol, who was visiting Kimberly at college, remembers Jeff calling her to give her the news. “I’ll never forget getting that phone call from him. He was like ‘Mom, I met this guy, he’s got this car, he wants me to drive it, it’s on asphalt, I’ve never been in a midget.’ He’s got all these emotions going on. And I said, ‘Well what are you going to do?’ He said, ‘We’re gonna do it. We don’t know how it’s going to turn out, but we’re going to try.’ ”

  When ESPN launched its Thursday Night Thunder racing series the previous year, it brought a whole new cache to short-track racing. John had seen the possibilities and had begun p
ositioning Jeff toward an opportunity. “We were trying to race anything and everything, and that’s how we found out about midget car races,” Jeff remembers. “At the time, I was racing winged sprint cars on dirt, and none of that was on TV.” USAC midgets, on the other hand, were the new television darling. So when Jeff wasn’t behind the wheel, he and John would hit the midget races, glad-handing team owners, car builders, crew chiefs, anybody who might be able to help them and get their name into the mix. John knew at some point something would click. “You make your own luck,” he says. “You create your own opportunities.”

  Getting a shot was one thing. Jeff still had to run the race, and do it in front of tens of thousands of television viewers. For a teenager who harbored dreams of a career in Indy car racing, the hunger to impress not only Rollie Helmling but scores of Indy fans was almost overwhelming.

  “I’ll never forget it,” Helmling says of Jeff’s reaction to the brand-new midget. “He was so impressed when I unloaded the car and he saw the side of it—it said ‘Driver Jeff Gordon.’ His eyes just lit up.” Helmling got a few sidelong glances and snickers from associates at the track, but once his young driver got out and ran a few practice laps, he felt better. The car was fast, and Jeff seemed perfectly comfortable.

  Sixty-one car-and-driver teams had shown up to qualify for the race. Stan Fox, Johnny Parsons—all the big-time teams were there. Jeff promptly went out and logged the fastest qualifying time, setting a track record. “I’m thinking things are looking pretty good,” Helmling remembers. “But we’ve still got a race to run.

  “Jeff was pretty nervous. . . . When he got in the car, I looked down, his knee is just bouncing up and down. And I told him, ‘Just finish the race. When that checkered flag flies, you drive under that checkered flag and finish the race. That’s all I ask.’ ” Helmling says.

  Standing (left to right) Rollie Helmling, Terry Winterbotham, Jeff, John Bickford (Carol in the chair at the far left) preparing to race both the No. 4 midget car and the No. 6 sprint car. Lawrenceburg Speedway, Lawrenceburg, Indiana, 1989.

  Because the race format inverted positioning of the twelve fastest cars, Jeff started out the fifty-lap race in twelfth position and quickly moved up to sixth, then fifth. “Then, pretty soon, he’s third, then all of a sudden he’s second, and he’s coming and he just takes the lead and he just drives away,” Helmling says. “I don’t know who was the most surprised, Jeff, myself, or everybody that was there. But it was just amazing.”

  Jeff’s graduation photo, 1989.

  Jeff’s Tri-West High School Diploma.

  “Set a new track record, won the race, and just stomped them,” Jeff recalls. “When I think back on that, it was like winning the Brickyard 400 for the first time. You just shake your head in amazement. This is Rollie Helmling and his car winning the biggest race—and who’s this kid he hired? It was just, bam! Just unreal. And it was live on ESPN. All of a sudden, things started to change.”

  The win boosted Helmling’s status and gave some visibility to Bob East’s new chassis-building operation, but Jeff got more attention than he’d ever dreamed of. Racing folks were reaching out to congratulate him, talk about opportunities and his next TV race. People at the gas station recognized him and wished him luck. “It was so wild,” Jeff says. “We weren’t really aware how much TV could influence things. So we’re like, we need to focus our attention on doing TV races.” Helmling, who agreed to a longer-term partnership with Jeff and John on a handshake, was more than glad to oblige.

  Two weeks before his big victory, Jeff graduated from high school, May 13, 1989, but he didn’t hang around and party. “He just high-fived his buddies,” John says, “jumped into the Suburban, and we hauled ass to Bloomington. He changed into his uniform at the track, and that was that.” Racing was now his full-time job, and in addition to his midget deal with Helmling, Jeff was still trying to climb the ladder of sprint racing and put a little more cash in their pockets.

  He continued performing well on the local level for the Winterbotham team, but in the summer of 1989, he got an offer from Stan Shoff, who ran one of the most respected operations in the Midwest, to pilot his No. 23 sprint in top-level USAC and World of Outlaws races. It was a deal he couldn’t pass up. But as his pavement success blossomed, his fortunes in sprint dirt-track racing began to wilt. “We won some races, and I even qualified for the main event at Knoxville. Not an easy thing to do,” Jeff recalls. “I was a good dirt sprint car driver, and on a local level I excelled. But when it came time to step up to the next level, especially at tracks I didn’t know, I was mediocre. And I don’t know if the pressure got to me, but I just started wrecking a lot of equipment.”

  Ultimately, Shoff would fire Jeff. It was the only time Jeff was fired by an owner, but it proved to be for the better. “Part of me was devastated,” Jeff remembers, “but part of me was relieved because things were going so well for me on the pavement side of things—I was winning everything over there. The signs were on the wall, and by that happening, it really shifted more of my attention to the USAC pavement races on TV.”

  Jeff racing Rollie Helmling’s No. 4 midget car at the “Night Before the 500” at Indianapolis Raceway Park, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1989.

  He finished up the season with Helmling on a high note, winning USAC’s Midget Series Rookie of the Year award following a number of stellar performances on Thursday Night Thunder. “We just crushed it out of the park,” Jeff says.

  A future in Indy racing began to seem like a real possibility. He also realized that honing his image was as important as steering his car. John and Carol had been big on image since day one—you wear a polo shirt and khakis to the track, not some grease-stained rags. Speak intelligently. Act professionally. Sell yourself. But now, with TV cameras in his face, Jeff needed media skills.

  John sat him down, and the two would examine televised races and the drivers’ interviews. “We’d watch. ‘What’s that guy doing wrong? He’s doing this, he’s doing that.’ ” John remembers. “I was a relentless parent who was irritating the kid by making him pay attention.”

  Andy Graves, who now runs Toyota’s NASCAR program, was then an eighteen-year-old car builder who moved in with the family to help John with the pavement sprint. “We were still teenagers,” he remembers. “It would become frustrating at times for Jeff. He’d say, ‘John is just on me all the time, he’s dogging me about it.’ But he always knew John was right. John’s a very intelligent, very sharp man. He could see where the sport was headed.”

  It helped that the Thursday Night Thunder staff took to Jeff. “Jeff just had that quality, almost like a Sugar Ray Leonard or Ali, or even Isaiah Thomas, who had that shit-eating smile that just drives the other competitors crazy,” Thunder producer Terry Lingner remembers. Commentator Dave Despain describes Jeff’s look at race time: “The icy blue eyes, those cold blue eyes that were just totally focused and intense. He had that look in his eye that let you know he didn’t care if the sun came up in a gunnysack.”

  Capitalizing on those qualities—the boyish charm coupled with that killer instinct—was the key to making entertainment. Jeff quickly became one of the show’s featured stars, someone they’d go to for pre-race and post-race interviews, comments about track conditions, whatever else was needed. “ESPN host Larry Nuber, in particular, worked with Jeff early on to prime him for the spotlight. Along with Gary Lee,” John says. “They’d help him understand what a storyboard is, understand the producer’s job, the interviewer’s job, the cameraman’s job—then you’re way better at being interviewed. And Jeff knows they’re trying to create excitement.”

  Naturally, he was creating excitement on the track as well. There was one driver, in particular, who was none too happy about it. At thirty-nine, Rich Vogler was a five-time USAC midget champion and two-time USAC sprint titlist who dominated the early stages of the Thunder series. “He wasn’t very sophisticated,” Lingner says. “He ruled with his right foot, and his right fist if he h
ad to.”

  Throughout 1989 and early 1990, the two went at it on midget and sprint tracks. “The first year we competed against each other,” Jeff recalls, “Rich and I kind of went back and forth on victories. But then I started getting the best of him, and you could tell it was affecting him,” says Jeff. “Here’s this kid coming in and giving Vogler all he could handle, but doing it in an ‘aw shucks’ way,” Lingner says. “And man, creating that conflict and drama is what storytelling is all about. So we ran for all we were worth with that.”

  On the July 21, 1990, Thunder telecast, Vogler was leading Jeff going into the final lap of the sprint race at Salem Speedway. “He was driving so aggressive, like nothing was going to stop him from winning that race,” Jeff recalls. Volger made contact with a lapped driver and lost control. His car sailed into the protective fencing and flipped back onto the track, losing its front axle and fuel tank and scattering debris everywhere. Vogler, whose helmet had popped off, was rushed to the hospital where he was pronounced dead of massive head injuries.

  Jeff, John, and Carol were at a restaurant after the race when they got word. There had been a fatal accident in one of Jeff’s quarter-midget races as a youngster, and John had seen more than his share of deathly wrecks in the sixties. Passing caskets never becomes easy, but they all knew that true racers learn to live with that fear buried deep in a corner of their mind. “There’s danger in life,” Carol says, “and if you just focus on all of that, you’re not going to ever achieve anything. You can’t just quit because a tragic accident happens.”

  “The week after Rich Vogler got killed,” Thunder’s Lingner recalls, “we went and talked to the drivers, specifically Jeff. I thought it was going to spook this young kid . . . Heck, Jeff went out that next week and just smoked everybody. No problem.”