by Joe Garner
A week after that, on the day he turned nineteen, he won the prestigious Midget Nationals in Belleville, Kansas, lapping all but the second-place car in what Helmling called the “most dynamic” race Jeff had ever run in a midget. “Jeff just had an innate, God-given ability to drive a race car,” he says. It was also the richest race of the year. It paid $9,200 in cash—$2,200 for winning the preliminary race two nights earlier and $7,000 for the championship—and the team owner still recalls how uneasy he was walking around with that bounty.
“I’ve got ninety-two one-hundred-dollar bills in my pocket and I’m in the middle of this little fairground in a small town in Kansas,” Helmling says, “I told Jeff, ‘Get in the truck,’ and he kind of looked at me funny. We get in, we lock the door, and I pull out this big wad of cash, and Jeff’s eyes got pretty big. We always split the prize money, so we just started out—‘one for me, one for you.’ ”
Jeff posing with his car after winning the 1990 Belleville Nationals.
Jeff and his team celebrate his victory at the 1990 Belleville Nationals, one of the most spectacular races of his career. (left to right) John Bickford, Bert Dodd, George Tucker, Jeff Gordon, Trophy Girl, Rollie Helmling, and Lanny Gheridelli.
John embraces Jeff at the finish of the Belleville Midget Nationals, 1990.
That win, along with a repeat victory in the “Night Before the 500” and eight other checkers helped him earn that year’s USAC Midget Series championship, making Jeff the youngest ever to capture the title. At the same time, he logged seven wins in the sprint car.
For years, a transition to Indy had been the natural pipeline, but the industry was changing. Big money was flooding in from well-funded foreign drivers, spawning a new buy-your-ride culture that left team owners far less eager to take chances on rookies with thin wallets. The earnings the family banked over the previous few seasons were light-years away from the going price—$2.5 to $5 million for a full season’s ride.
There was the possibility of spending a couple seasons in a developmental series like Indy Lights, or there was Jackie Stewart’s overture to run Formula 3 cars in Europe for a few years with the possibility of moving up to Formula 1. But neither option had any assurance. NASCAR was beginning to seem like a real option.
When Jeff visited the Grand Prix of Cleveland that summer, shopping himself to an Indy team, he trudged from hauler to hauler handing out his one-page bio and giving his pitch to anyone who would listen. He did manage a few fateful words with Al Unser Jr. and A.J. Foyt. Getting into Indy was going to be a long uphill battle, they told him, “You should go NASCAR racing.”
John and Jeff didn’t know a lot about stock cars. “I’m not so sure we didn’t think ‘Winston’ was just some guy’s name,” John jokes. Nuber and Terry Lingner from Thunder covered the Winston Cup Series in addition to sprints and midgets. “When Jeff became the breakout guy,” Lingner remembers, “the drivers would go to Larry and say, ‘Don’t let him get to Indy car.’ ” Humpy Wheeler, the NASCAR promoter and longtime president of Charlotte Motor Speedway, echoed that. “When I saw him drive that midget, I knew he had the ability,” he recalls. “I said, this guy is going to make it big in NASCAR.”
John knew he had to keep Jeff progressing and was willing to try anything. He and Nuber made a deal with Buck Baker, a former two-time NASCAR champion and the owner of a stock-car driving school in Rockingham, North Carolina. Jeff would come down and run their three-day program with an ESPN crew in tow, giving the school a bit of free publicity, in exchange for Baker waiving the $4,000 school fee.
Jeff flew down with Carol because he wasn’t old enough to rent a car or hotel room. The only real worry he had, aside from the fact that the cars had manual transmissions, was that Baker wouldn’t let him go as fast as he wanted. The first day on the track, he ran his first set of laps, and it was as if he was struck by a bolt of lightning. For Jeff, it had suddenly become clear what he was meant to do. Carol remembers him bursting into their hotel room that evening, breathless and wired. “This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life,” Jeff spit out.
A sticker commemorating the Hoosier Auto Racing Fans 1990 Driver of the Year Award for Jeff Gordon.
It seemed everything had been leading to this. It didn’t matter that a stock car was 3,400 pounds or that the thing took longer to accelerate or that it handled differently in the banked turns. “I felt like when I got in a stock car, this is what I’ve been training my whole life for,” Jeff says. “It just suited me. It fit what I’d been doing. I liked the way it felt, and I liked what I felt I was capable of doing with that car.”
Jeff drove the school’s standard cars, which, from a power and performance standpoint, didn’t quite measure up to the real deal. Hugh Connerty, a property developer and aspiring racer who kept his Busch-ready car at the school, was at the track and noticed the young hotshot driver. At Baker’s urging, Connerty offered to let Jeff take his car out for a run. Connerty took the car out for some hard laps first to shake off the cobwebs. Then Jeff climbed in. On the mile-and-a-sixteenth track, he bested Connerty’s time by almost a second-and-a-half. They were astonished. Then he climbed out and accurately diagnosed the car’s shortcomings, pointing out everything they could do to make it faster. It was only his second day in a stock car.
Jeff at Indianapolis Raceway Park, Indianapolis, Indiana, 1989.
Jeff arrived for his final day with all the self-assurance and satisfaction of someone who had found his calling. He wasn’t sure how they were going to crack into the stock-car world, but he knew it was the place he had to be. Connerty invited Jeff to lunch. “He says, ‘You know, I realize now that I don’t need to be driving this car. You need to be driving this car. What do you think about that?’ ” Jeff beamed.
He hopped in his rental car and sped back to the hotel to give Carol the news. “I was just trying to slow him down,” Carol remembers, “because, you know, people will tell you a lot of things, but whether they’re ever able to come through, that’s another story.” It didn’t matter to Jeff. He grabbed his mom, rushed her back to the track, and introduced her to everyone.
In Carol’s eyes, Hugh Connerty, whose father-in-law happened to be Winston Cup team owner Leo Jackson, may have been promising them the moon, but he delivered it. “Hugh basically hired Jeff on the spot,” John says. “Just said, ‘Well, let’s do a three-race deal and we’re going to the Busch Grand National races. We’ll put a team together and get some races in this year.’ And that’s exactly what he did.”
Suddenly, after all the travel, money worries, time spent bent over cars, handshakes, hours at the track hunting down every potential opportunity, they were realizing a dream that had been born all those nights ago on a weed-strewn patch of fairground pavement in California. “All the right dominoes were falling at the right time,” John recalls.
A hero card commemorating highlights of Jeff’s 1990 season, including the USAC National Midget Champion.
Jeff (at far left) and the graduating class of Buck Baker’s Driving School, 1990.
Jeff proudly standing next to his No. 1 Baby Ruth Ford, 1992.
4
MR. HENDRICK WANTS TO MEET YOU!
RAY EVERNHAM WAS AT HOME IN New Jersey in September 1990 when he got a call from his friend Andy Petree asking if he’d be willing to head south to be the crew chief of a NASCAR Busch Grand National race team. Petree, the crew chief for the No. 33 Winston Cup car driven by Harry Gant and owned by Leo Jackson, explained that Jackson’s son-in-law had just hired a kid to run the last few races of the season. Petree was trying to do Jackson a favor by getting the Busch car ready and throwing together a crew. He’d already nabbed Phil and Steve Barkdoll to set the car up, and they mentioned Evernham might be available. Would he be interested?
“Who’s the kid?” Evernham asked.
“Jeff Gordon,” Petree told him.
Evernham smiled to himself. This was going to be good.
The thirty-three-year-old Evernha
m made something of a name for himself as a racer, running open-wheel modifieds around his native Northeast, but his reputation rested more on his mechanical know-how and technical ingenuity. To those who knew him, he was a mad scientist in the garage. “I was very interested, largely because Jeff was the guy everybody was talking about in the short track,” Evernham says. “He was beating the veterans, and he was just fast, man. He jumped in several different cars and he was just fast.”
Evernham was soon in Hendersonville, North Carolina. He arranged to sit down at a local hotel with Jeff and Carol, who had just arrived from Pittsboro, to introduce himself. When they met in the lobby, the lanky, six-foot Evernham was instantly struck by how small Jeff was. He also had to stifle a chuckle when he noticed the nineteen-year-old was carrying a briefcase, just like he was. “I had my notepads and my books and my notes for the Charlotte track, all those things,” Evernham says. And in Jeff’s briefcase? “I think he had some gum, a Game Boy, a stock-car magazine, he had peanuts. It was kind of funny.” The two hit it off. “You want to work with people who are really excited to do things, and Jeff was,” he says. “So I think we celebrated by taking his mom to Hooters.”
Jeff behind the wheel of the Hugh Connerty–owned No. 67 Outback Steakhouse Pontiac, 1990.
The next day, they rolled Hugh Connerty’s No. 67 Outback Steakhouse Pontiac onto the speedway at Charlotte. It was an open-practice day, and several other Busch competitors were running the track, including Davey Allison and Chuck Bown, who would go on to claim the series championship that year. It had taken some finagling to even get Jeff a practice spot, as raw and untested and potentially dangerous as he was. It would be his first time in a stock car since Buck Baker’s school.
“I was doing okay, but I wasn’t doing great,” he says. “I was off the pace a little bit. And Ray went over to Chuck Bown and said, ‘Jeff’s having some issues in Turn 3. Can you help him out and get in the car and make some laps?’ So Chuck agreed and got in and went three- or four-tenths of a second faster than I did. I didn’t know the car was capable of going that fast. He came in and said, ‘Nope, y’all, the car’s really good.’ So I got in and then I went three- or four-tenths faster than he did. As soon as I knew the car could go that fast and that I could push it that hard, I was like, ‘All right, we’re good.’ ”
Jeff continued to get faster all day, and by the time the practice was over, he was second in time only to Davey Allison. His speed was impressive, but what impressed Evernham even more was the way Jeff could break down what was happening with the car and the track and translate it to him with a clarity and precision that made it simple to see what adjustments were necessary. “At IROC, I’d worked with the greatest drivers,” Evernham says, referring to the International Race of Champions. “And there’s something those guys have when they communicate with you. . . . And that first day I worked with Jeff, I just realized he communicated at that level. When somebody is that young, it can’t be experience, so it’s just got to be natural ability and instinct. I knew he was a special kid.”
For his part, Jeff was thrilled that Evernham was receptive to his feedback. “I mean, I didn’t know anything about these cars, and he was willing to take input from me,” he says. “It was similar to the way John and I worked together.” In many ways, Evernham was a version of John. There was the same intensity, the same natural intelligence and wide-ranging technical expertise, and the same obsessive work ethic.
John himself wasn’t there to meet Evernham—he’d stayed behind in Indiana to work on Jeff’s sprint car for an upcoming race. “Jeff called me that night after the practice and he said, ‘You’re not going to believe this guy. He never stops working on the car, ever. He’s even working on the car in his mind when he goes back to the hotel. He’s constantly working to make the car better.’ And he told me how organized Ray was, and I said, ‘Really? He takes notes?’ Jeff said, ‘Yep, takes notes, writes everything down. He’s just like you!’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that,’ and we laughed. So I pretty much knew Ray was the right guy before I ever actually shook his hand.”
It certainly set John’s mind at ease. The upcoming Busch races would be the first time in fifteen years Jeff would compete without any of John’s input or hands-on help. He’d be just another guy standing in the infield and watching the cars whiz by. Which is exactly where he and Carol were on October 20 when Jeff climbed into the Outback Steakhouse No. 67 for the AC-Delco 200 at North Carolina Speedway (now Rockingham).
Jeff’s first attempt at a Busch race, two weeks earlier in Charlotte, had been a bust. Rain washed out individual qualifying races, thus starting positions were allotted based on drivers’ point standings. Jeff’s goose egg meant he was forced into a short hooligan race in which the top finishers qualified for the main event. Running well after several laps, he collided with Randy Baker—ironically, his former instructor at the Buck Baker driving school—spun out, and hit the wall. And as quickly as that, their day was done.
It was a disappointment, but they still had two races. The team kept their spirits up and fingers crossed for Rockingham, and they got more than any of them bargained for. Jeff went out and logged the second-fastest qualifying time, beating thirty-eight other racers, including Winston Cup regulars like Dale Earnhardt, Davey Allison, Dale Jarrett, and Darrell Waltrip. In his first-ever NASCAR race, he would be starting on the outside of the front row. “That impressed a lot of people,” Jeff remembers. “People who had never heard of me were now, all of sudden, going ‘Oh, who’s that kid?’ ”
His mom wasn’t nearly as excited. “I was extremely worried,” Carol recalls. “I wanted him to start in the back for all the reasons you can imagine. . . . The mother in me was, like, ‘Maybe they’ll just be really nice and let him start in the back because he’s new and it’s his first race.’ So that was very nerve-wracking for me.”
The No. 67 Outback Steakhouse Pontiac, Winston Classic promotional card, 1990.
In practice, Jeff told the crew he wanted his car loose so it would turn easier. Once the race started, he knew the adjustments backfired. His Pontiac needed to be tighter. He began the race in front, catty-corner to Earnhardt, and just in front of Bobby Labonte. He got too free, sliding into the outside wall on the thirty-third lap, giving him a thirty-ninth place finish. The team pocketed a paltry four hundred dollars, but they all saw the performance as a victory. Evernham, the Barkdolls, and the rest of the crew proved they could deliver a car that could run with the best of them, and Jeff showed he could compete.
Jeff’s first NASCAR competitor license.
The final race at Martinsville was a bookend to the first, with qualifying canceled due to rain and another hooligan race that ended with a busted crankshaft. Any hopes that Hugh Connerty would carry the program over into the 1991 season ended with the Iraq War. There wasn’t a sponsor willing to part with a nickel in the face of an uncertain economic future. Without any great fanfare, the Outback Steakhouse team members shuffled back to their corners. Evernham returned to Jersey, and Jeff made the trip back to Indiana to finish out the last few events of his midget and sprint seasons.
It’s tempting to ponder what might have been if certain shots had been missed or chance meetings had not occurred. So goes the story with Jeff Gordon’s early career. Through a mixture of prodigious talent, hard work, timing, and luck, the right things seemed to happen.
Lee Morse, the manager of performance operations for Ford’s racing division—the man responsible for scouting new talent—witnessed Jeff’s startling qualifying run at Rockingham. Morse had heard Jeff’s name from Larry Nuber, the former Thursday Night Thunder host. He heard it from others, too. Watch this kid. He’s going to be something.
He agreed to meet with Jeff at the close of the Busch season. In late fall, Jeff, John, and Larry Nuber arrived at Morse’s office in Dearborn, Michigan, armed with a videotape Nuber had helped produce chronicling Jeff’s fifteen years in racing. “I took them to my director’s
office, Mike Kranefuss . . . We sat down and watched the video,” Morse recalls. “It was a very, very well-done video, and I remember thinking at the time that it was very impressive. I had nothing at that time to offer them. But I had met Jeff and was impressed with what I saw. And it wasn’t too much longer after that meeting that I learned that [driver] Mark Martin was wanting to move on and do his own program, so that left an opening in the Carolina Ford Dealers–sponsored Bill Davis Busch Grand National team.”
The meeting in Michigan had sold Morse on Jeff Gordon, but convincing owner Bill Davis and the Carolina Ford Dealers organization to take a gamble on a teenage unknown with only thirty-three laps under his belt wasn’t going to be easy.
Davis received a slew of calls from “countless people we’d never heard of, as well as people we were flattered to hear from,” all looking to plant themselves in Martin’s seat. Financially, he’d just rolled the dice by relocating his shop from his home in Batesville, Arkansas, to Thomasville, North Carolina, to be closer to the NASCAR campfire. He and his wife, Gail, were running their race program pretty bare bones. Ideally, what they needed in their car was a proven entity, but Morse was determined. He continued to talk up Jeff’s potential, hinted at a bit more factory assistance, and offered to help by kicking in some extra cash to boost the Carolina Ford Dealers sponsorship.
“Ford came full bore. They wanted us to do it,” Davis recalls. “They offered us what was probably a little bit better deal than we had. It wasn’t any big money. . . . But hey, it was something. And it was a manufacturer at least.” Ultimately, Davis told Morse they were keen but, naturally, couldn’t invest in merchandise sight unseen; they set up a test in the No. 1 Ford at Rockingham that would include Jeff and two other drivers.