by Joe Garner
“I talked to Lee Morse,” Jeff remembers, “and he said, ‘We got an opportunity. We got this team that Mark Martin currently drives for and they’re interested in you coming and testing for them.’ And I was like, ‘You better believe it. I’m there, man.’ I didn’t have anything else. That was it. I went to Rockingham and tested for Bill Davis in December or January—I remember it was cold as can be—and I was superfast, made great laps. They were impressed.”
On that test performance, Davis decided to take the plunge, but it wasn’t without some lingering trepidation. “Jeff really was a nobody,” he recalls. “[Team owners] were pretty jaded—they weren’t interested in some pretty boy from California that was driving open-wheel cars. . . . We took one of the very first big chances on a really, really young, totally unproven kid.”
All that was left to do was sign on the dotted line. Bill and Gail Davis made the trek to Pittsboro to finalize the deal. The Davises were small-town Dixie through and through, used to dealing with Southerners in business and racing. Gail remembers a touch of apprehension about how the California couple might come across. Carol and John put them up in Jeff’s bedroom and took them to dinner at Frank & Mary’s Tavern, the legendary Pittsboro catfish joint and racer hangout. While Jeff periodically bowed his head to fiddle with his Game Boy, they hammered out a deal. Ultimately, they agreed to a year contract with a guarantee of at least fifteen races, the minimum needed to qualify for Rookie of the Year. Jeff wouldn’t draw a salary—an unusual move in NASCAR racing—but he would earn half of whatever the car made.
Both sides came away from the meeting eager for the upcoming season. Those couple of days had also given the Davises an opportunity to get to know their future driver a bit better. Both Gail and Bill were smitten. “He was very, very cute,” she says. “I mean, he was just darling.”
Busch Grand Nationals meant Jeff was taking a step closer to his dream of someday competing at stock-car racing’s highest level, but it also meant a move to North Carolina. At nineteen, he had never lived apart from Carol and John. “You bring up your kids to be self-sufficient, independent thinkers and doers, and that’s what we did with Jeff,” Carol says. “We did the education and we were sending him off. We were always going to be there to give advice and help out, but he needed to be doing stuff. Jeff needed to be an independent person.”
Nineteen-year-old Jeff behind the wheel of the No. 1 Carolina Ford Dealers Ford.
His buddy Andy Graves, who had lived with the family for much of 1990, had taken a job in the chassis-building division at Hendrick Motorsports, which ran two teams in the Winston Cup. Jeff and Andy decided to share an apartment in North Charlotte.
Jeff at top speed in the Fred Ede–owned No. 4 Silver Crown car, 1991.
On the track, Jeff seemed to have something diabolical in him. Two weeks before the Busch season started, he reeled off a major victory in Phoenix in a Silver Crown car owned by California-based Fred Ede, for whom he would race the entire 1991 season. And while he failed to qualify for the Busch season’s first race at Daytona—the car was simply too slow, he said—he gradually began to find his footing. By his sixth race, in April at Darlington, he logged his first top-ten finish. He followed that up two weeks later with a second-place finish at Lanier, in Georgia, and then a fifth place fourteen days later at Nazareth, Pennsylvania. Three weeks after that, he finished second again at Dover.
Jeff clearly had the skills. To Rollie Helmling, his midget team owner, it was his ability “to control his emotions and instinctively make the best decisions.” ESPN’s Terry Lingner cited his penchant for keeping his momentum while carving through traffic. For race commentator Dave Despain, Jeff’s calling card was his ability to gauge the evolving situation on the track, stalk, and make passes in half the time it took any other driver. Humpy Wheeler said that even then, Jeff was one of the best loose racecar drivers he’d ever seen. There was one thing nobody would deny: Jeff was fast. “He was a Tasmanian devil in disguise,” says Wheeler. “He didn’t look it. He didn’t act it. But good lord, when that flag dropped, he became a different human being. It was almost like he was shot out of a damn cannon.”
That speed would sometimes get the better of him. In all, Jeff would damage the No. 1 Carolina Ford Dealers’ car seventeen times in the first season. “If you’re going fast, you’re going fast,” Bill Davis says philosophically. “They’re just cars. You fix them.” Gail felt the same way. “He had to learn someplace. But he was fast, and we liked him. He was getting lots of attention.”
He was getting plenty of attention off the Busch circuit, too, running Silver Crown cars—which are slightly larger than midgets—for Ede, as well as USAC midgets for Helmling, sprints for John, and he was still a major player on the ESPN Thunder series. It all made for some dizzying back-and-forth travel. On Friday, May 24, 1991, he flew into Indiana from Charlotte, won the Holman Trophy in a nighttime Silver Crown race at Indianapolis Fairgrounds, then flew back to North Carolina the same night, arriving at his apartment at 4:00 a.m. for a few quick winks before showing up bleary-eyed at Charlotte Motor Speedway at 9:00 a.m. for his noontime Busch race, in which he finished a disappointing eighteenth. Then it was a helicopter trip back to the airport and a 4:20 p.m. return flight to Indianapolis to make it in time for the “Night Before the 500” midget event, in which the two-time defending champion finished second. ESPN jokingly christened him “Air Gordon.”
It was also the year he made his legendary two-wheeled pass in a midget race. He came together wheel to wheel at full speed with another racer, his car popped up on its two left-side tires, and he still managed to make the pass. “Just jaw-dropping,” says Dave Despain. “Like, ‘Oh my God, did you see that?’ ” Producer Terry Lingner recalls the ESPN announcers, Larry Rice and Gary Lee, “peeing their pants” with excitement. “They were just both shouting at the top of their lungs. It was awesome. That was an incredible moment.”
Jeff wasn’t just racing on all these different circuits—he was earning pay from each as well. But his facility with a checkbook was about as good as dirt. “I’d make trips down there for races,” Carol recalls, “and I’d ask him, ‘Hey, did anybody pay you lately?’ And he’d go, ‘Oh, yeah, I think I might have a few checks in my helmet bag.’ Wonderful. He probably still has some checks that never did get cashed.”
Pulling into the winner’s circle at the Holman Hundred, a hundred-mile dirt track race at the Indiana State Fairgrounds, 1991.
Jeff celebrating his Holman Hundred victory with the race promoter and Indy Car racing legend A.J. Foyt.
“I like cash,” Jeff admits. “Cash is always better. For whatever reason, you hand me cash, I can keep track of that. You hand me a piece of paper with a number on it, I seem to lose it.” Even when he did have cash in hand, he didn’t spend much. “He was the most frugal guy you’ll ever meet,” John says. “If he’d get carried away, he might buy a really nice pair of tennis shoes.” And once in a while, he’d treat his friends to a little bit of fun.
Childhood friend Rod Sherry remembers Jeff showing up out of the blue after a midget race in California, carrying his brown briefcase. “I was like, ‘Dude, why are you carrying a briefcase?’ I mean, we were like eighteen. And I remember him opening it up, and he had some random stuff and like a fistful of cash in it. I was broke. I mean, I was living off Top Ramen and frozen burritos. So we found someone to buy us a case or two of beer.” The party of two grew into a party of half a dozen.
Bill Armour, who handled marketing and PR duties for Bill Davis, says, “There were times I forgot he was nineteen until we’d be somewhere on a media tour or something and Jeff would say, ‘There’s a mall. Let’s go to the arcade,’ and then he would play arcade games for two hours. And I’d just think, ‘Okay, well.’ ”
But when he was behind the wheel, the frivolity dissipated. By the end of June, after sixteen Busch Series races, Jeff had seven top-ten finishes and four top fives, including three second-place finishes, and he ha
d captured his first pole at Orange County, North Carolina. But the summer was not kind. Over the next eight weekends, he registered only one top ten, a third-place finish at Bristol. The day before his twentieth birthday, at his home track of Indianapolis Raceway Park, he finished eighteenth. Sometimes the issues were driver related, and sometimes they were mechanical, but the team hung in.
“The 1991 season was not instantly successful,” Lee Morse remembers, “but I kept the interest going with the Carolina Ford Dealers. They’d been used to having Mark Martin in their car, and Mark won a lot of Busch races for them. Now they were taking a chance on a new young fellow. I kept asking them to be patient and it would pay dividends.”
Winning or losing, Jeff approached his work like a consummate professional. Veteran racer Dave Dion remembers Jeff’s first attempt at Oxford Plains, in Maine. “He asked a lot of questions about the track, and he didn’t do well the first day in qualifying. The next day, he came back and said, ‘If you are willing to talk again, I’m willing to listen.’ You could tell right then he was going to be a heck of a driver.”
It was something a lot of people in the racing community saw. Jeff was a brilliant but raw talent who was willing to learn—he just needed some miles and molding. Cale Yarborough, the retired three-time Winston Cup champion, had been running his own Cup team since 1987. Midway through the 1991 season, he’d already fired Dick Trickle and Lake Speed and was looking for another driver to help lift the struggling program. He reached out to Jeff.
“I had a conversation with Cale, and I went and tested for him,” Jeff recalls. It was Jeff’s first-ever experience in a Cup car, and Yarborough was impressed enough that he asked Jeff to finish out the Cup season then and there. “I turned him down,” Jeff says. “Partially it was because of Bill Davis.”
“Bill was really pissed that Jeff had tested for Yarborough,” John recalls. “I remember him saying, ‘Don’t do it for some team that’s fading and pulling at straws. If you’re going to do it, do it.’ ”
“And he was right,” Jeff says.
The Yarborough test made it clear to Jeff that he still needed a bit more minor-league experience. To Bill Davis, it became clear that if he had any intention of creating a long-term future with Jeff Gordon, he was going to have to figure out a way to get to the Winston Cup himself.
Jeff came back from the three-week Busch series break a little heavier in the pocket, having won a $10,000 midget feature at Eldora Speedway in Ohio, and ready to gun for the Busch Series Rookie of the Year award. Despite his uneven showing so far, he was still in the running with four races remaining, but with subsequent finishes of thirty-fifth, nineteenth, and thirty-seventh, the prize seemed to be slipping from his grasp. And then bad news: Davis had no cars left. With Jeff’s wreck in the second-to-last race on October 19, there was no way the team could have a ride set up for the October 27 finale at Martinsville.
As fate would have it, Bobby Labonte, a good friend and neighbor of Bill Davis who would win the Busch Series championship that year, happened to have an extra car. There was one catch: it was an Oldsmobile. The irony of a Ford Motor Company driver winning a major NASCAR award with the help of a General Motors car was not lost on Lee Morse, but in the end the Ford executive reasoned that any criticism would be outweighed by the prestige of Ford having a new Rookie of the Year.
Jeff races door-to-door in the No. 1 Baby Ruth Ford.
Jeff, in his Carolina Ford Dealers firesuit, contemplates an upcoming race, 1991.
Now all Jeff had to do was go out and get it. His eighth-place finish in Labonte’s car kept him just ahead of David Green, who finished twenty-fifth, to clinch the rookie title. Between all the Busch racing, Jeff also managed to capture the 1991 USAC Silver Crown championship, becoming the youngest driver to ever win that title. For the second year running, he was named to the Auto Racing Writers and Broadcasters Association All-American Team.
It became clear the gamble by Ford, Davis, and the Carolina Ford Dealers had paid off. While he hadn’t won a race, Jeff notched three runner-up finishes among his five top-fives, and he’d taken the checkered flag in the top ten in a full one-third of his races. Credit was due to the Davises, who for the first time ran a full schedule of thirty races in the Busch Series with a sponsorship that covered only about half that load. Bill Davis, his co-crew chief and engine builder Keith Simmons, and the rest of the team had poured their heart into the season, and Jeff’s overall eleventh-place finish was reason to smile. The outlook couldn’t have been better for 1992.
“Bill was great. He was super nice,” Jeff remembers. “I liked Bill a lot, and I loved driving for him.” Bill Davis, like Rollie Helmling, found himself developing a sincere fondness for this smart, unpretentious youngster. “Oh, he was a good kid. We had a great relationship. It was a whole lot more than just a car-owner and driver relationship,” Davis says. “We loved him to death. . . . He was refreshing. He was funny. He was witty. He was sensible, had his head on straight. Never screwed anything up the whole time. And I knew that we had something we could build on.”
The off-season brought some changes. For one, Jeff bought a house—or a third of one. Along with Andy Graves and Graves’s childhood friend Bob Lutz, whose father owned some dirt tracks in upstate New York, Jeff put a down payment on a home in Withrow Downs, near Charlotte Motor Speedway. “We thought he was crazy,” says Carol, who admits she was surprised her son even qualified for a loan. “We were like, ‘You can’t do that. That’s a lot of responsibility, owning a house.’ But I was actually quite proud of him for doing that at that age.”
The other change was that John and Jeff negotiated a new Busch Series contract with Bill Davis. According to Davis, it was John who requested a contract. John recalls simply being sent a “Roush contract”—Jack Roush ran a Ford-affiliated team in the Winston Cup—“all Roush wording, with Bill Davis’s name at the top of it.”
“So I read through this big, long contract,” John remembers, “and I called my friend Cary Agajanian,” the attorney who had been instrumental in helping Jeff gain partial emancipation as a teen. “I’m not sure we really want to sign this thing,” John told him, “but we don’t have anything else.”
Over the phone, they combed through the document and made several edits. The contract contained a clause allowing the team owner, at the end of one year, to either terminate the contract or renew it for an additional two years. According to Agajanian, it was not unusual in racing, but in what the lawyer today calls “the seminal legal moment in Jeff Gordon’s career,” he and John inserted language that put Jeff on equal footing with Davis, allowing him the same discretion to terminate the contract at the end of a year.
Jeff’s No. 1 Baby Ruth Ford being worked on at Darlington Raceway, Darlington, South Carolina, 1992.
At the time, it seemed like a trifle—they’d just finished a promising rookie season and were flush with good feelings. Bill Davis agreed to the alteration, along with a continuation of the fifty-fifty split. It wasn’t long before that small change took on a much larger significance.
Bill Davis Racing started the 1992 season with new optimism and a new part-time sponsor, Baby Ruth, but they still weren’t able to swallow Daytona. Just as in 1991, the team failed to qualify, but this time, Jeff snuck into the race on a “provisional”—a spot for non-qualifying racers who finished well in the previous season’s point standings. Starting forty-fourth among forty-four cars, he completed 102 of 120 laps before engine problems ended his run. He finished twenty-third.
The opening-day disappointment was tempered by some encouraging news. “All through 1991, I was thinking to myself, Jeff needs Ray,” John remembers. “He’s the guy that could help this program.” But during that first Busch season, not only did Bill Davis not need a new crew chief, but Evernham was racing modifieds on the East Coast. Midway through the modified season, Evernham was involved in a hard wreck. When he awoke the following day, doctors told him he had sustained a brain-stem injury.
Although Evernham would compete six weeks later, winning his first race back, he realized he had probably taken his final checker. In December, he was offered a job crewing for Winston Cup racer Alan Kulwicki, and he took it. During qualifying for the Daytona 500, the headstrong Evernham and Kulwicki locked horns, and the two unceremoniously parted ways. Over time, John and Davis maintain different versions of what happened next.
John recalls that Davis didn’t want to bring Evernham on, but John felt that if he could get Ford to cover half of Evernham’s $50,000 salary, he would cover the other half. Davis remembers Evernham coming by to say good-bye, and thinking that if they could work out a deal with Ford for half his salary, they could hire him on. “Long story short, I agreed to pay Ray’s salary through the race team to bring Ray on board as crew chief,” Lee Morse says. “And in my opinion, that certainly helped Jeff’s 1992 season turn out to be as successful as it was in that Baby Ruth car.”
Keith Simmons stayed on as the engine builder, and Evernham took over the crew-chiefing duties. “Ray and I, we immediately had that line of communication and rapport. It started very quickly,” Jeff says. The results came equally as quick. Following Daytona, they won the pole at Rockingham and finished ninth. The next week, at Richmond, they qualified first again and finished eighth. One week later, in the Atlanta 300, they got their third consecutive pole position, and Jeff, after thirty-five races, finally broke through with his first Busch Series win in a dramatic, drive-the-wheels-off performance.
Jeff and Bill Davis embrace in Victory Lane following his first Busch win at the Atlanta 300 Busch Series event at Atlanta Motor Speedway, March 14, 1992.
Bill Davis was thrilled. This was a team that had the potential to jump to the next level. “We wanted to go Cup racing,” he says. “That was our plan.” They were only four races into a thirty-one-race season, but the feelers were out there for potential 1993 Cup sponsors. The Atlanta race was pivotal for another reason. Andy Graves’s employer, Rick Hendrick, happened to be at the speedway for a sponsor appearance ahead of the next day’s Winston Cup race in which his two teams—the No. 5 Chevrolet of Ricky Rudd and the No. 25 Chevrolet of Ken Schrader—would be competing. He stopped momentarily to clock the action near Turn 4, just as Jeff came flying into the corner, smoke rolling off his tires. Hendrick recalls waiting for the wreck he was sure would follow, but it never came. Again and again Jeff came charging through that turn, right up against the wall, so loose he was nearly sideways, but he somehow never lost momentum.