by Joe Garner
“I saw his car control and his ability to drive over the edge and maintain control, and how fast he was,” Hendrick recalls. “He was one of the best I’d ever seen. His God-given talent and hand-eye coordination was unreal. . . . I said this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I just felt this was my chance to have a Michael Jordan, to have a Larry Bird. It’s like you own an NBA team or an NFL team and you just saw one of the most impressive quarterbacks you’ve ever seen in college football and you’ve got a chance to get him. You better get him now.”
The North Carolina–based car-dealership mogul knew Jeff Gordon was the complete package. He was so convinced that, having never met the kid, he was prepared to build a new third team around him and run it out of his own pocket if necessary.
Back in the shop that Monday, Hendrick met with his organization’s general manager, Jimmy Johnson, to explore the possibilities. When they heard that Andy Graves, then a crew member on Ricky Rudd’s car, was Jeff’s housemate, they called him to the office. “Jimmy and Rick were sitting in Jimmy’s office,” Graves remembers, “and evidently Rick was talking about Jeff. He said to me, ‘It’s a shame Jeff Gordon has a contract with Ford because I’d like to start a team for him.’ I said, ‘He doesn’t have a contract.’ ”
Jeff and the Davises happily pose with the first-place trophy following Jeff’s first Busch victory, Atlanta Motor Speedway, 1992.
In Winston Cup racing during the early 1990s, Hendrick Motorsports was among a handful of powerful, resource-rich multicar teams. Launched in 1984, Hendrick didn’t have a championship plaque on the wall yet, but they were a modern, well-funded, technologically aggressive operation that was knocking on the door. Tim Richmond, the colorful and bombastic playboy and Hendrick driver on whose life the movie Days of Thunder was loosely based, finished third in the Winston Cup standings in 1986.
A collection of Jeff Gordon Busch Series trading cards; An article from the Evansville Press paper announcing Jeff had signed with Rick Hendrick, Evansville, Indiana, June 3, 1992; Jeff racing the No. 1 Carolina Ford Dealers Ford.
Jeff signing autographs in Radford, Virginia, 1992.
It was in part Richmond’s legacy that drove Hendrick’s decision to pursue Jeff. “I’ve always liked an aggressive driver and a driver that had unbelievable car control. Tim Richmond was that kind of guy. When I used to watch Tim race and watch him make moves that I couldn’t believe, I was so excited. And when I lost that and I saw Jeff come along, I thought, here’s a guy with the same, maybe more, talent, and young. He can be the future of our company.”
Jeff had heard a thing or two about Hendrick cars, the operation, and the facilities during evening conversations with Graves—all of it was “top-notch.” So when Graves arrived home after the meeting and told Jeff that Rick Hendrick was interested in having him drive and had personally requested a meeting with him, Jeff balked. “He thought I was pulling a prank on him,” Graves says laughing.
“It was just beyond my comprehension,” Jeff recalls. “I mean, I’m on a team in the Busch Grand National Series, I’m not associated with any Cup team . . . And now I go from that to one of the top teams? To have one of those teams reaching out to me, I was just like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ”
It took a lot of convincing, but several days later, Graves finally convinced Jeff and dragged him into Rick Hendrick’s office for a sit-down. Hendrick presented his vision. He had run three cars between 1987 and 1990 and was looking to do so again, as long as Jeff would agree to drive. He would have access to everything Hendrick Motorsports had to offer. And Hendrick was even willing to let him bring Ray Evernham on board as crew chief.
“I remember Jeff was super excited in thinking he’d have an opportunity to join an organization and get good equipment at such a young age,” Hendrick says. “No young guy had ever gotten an opportunity to go with a big team, one of the top teams. It was unheard of. And I just told him that I felt like he was going to be a future champion, that he’d have a long career here and that I really wanted to work with him and see him blossom into a champion. I didn’t have a sponsor, which was really out of character for me, but I just said, ‘This kid is so good, we’ll find one.’ ”
“Mr. Hendrick didn’t sign him on the spot,” Graves recalls, “but he basically gave him his word. He said, ‘Let’s figure this out. I want to start a team for you. I give you my word I’ll find a sponsor. Please let’s do it.’ Rick has that personality and influence over people. He could sell Eskimos snow. He’s such a charismatic person that you would do anything for him. And standing there in his office, Jeff agreed.”
“Jeff called me immediately after leaving Hendrick,” John says, “saying, ‘Oh, this guy’s the greatest guy in the world! This is what he wants to do, and he’s going to put this car together and I’m going to be the third team.’ I don’t think I remember him ever being that excited before.”
The whole arrangement was still just a word and a handshake. Graves had been a little off suggesting Jeff had no contract, but his deal with Davis allowed him to leave the team with proper notice. Legal and contractual details needed to be worked out. There were cars to be built and a team to assemble. To announce anything at that point would surely have scuttled any sort of deal. Hendrick still had his two other Cup drivers to focus on, and of course, Jeff was still racing for Bill Davis, who was trying to turn his own dream of taking Jeff to the Cup into a reality.
“The more [Jeff] thought about it over the next several days,” Graves recalls, “the more it started to weigh on him how difficult it was going to have to be to tell Bill Davis, who gave him his break, that he was going to leave. And from what I remember, Jeff was even wavering a little bit, just because the pressure of having to tell Bill was so stressful. . . . He felt a big obligation to Bill, and they had a tremendous relationship.”
Jeff in front of the No. 1 Baby Ruth Ford.
Over the next month, Jeff continued his high-level run for Davis, logging four more top-ten finishes, including two top fives and one pole. While the deal was still very much on the table with Hendrick, Jeff bided his time as Davis continued looking for a new sponsor for the Cup team while dumping his sweat into the current Busch season, where he was again attempting a full schedule with limited funds.
“But things were going really well, and Bill was like, ‘We’re going Cup racing! In ’93, we’re going Cup racing!’ And I remember asking Ray, ‘What do you think about this?’ And he said, ‘Oh, man, we’re a long way from going Cup racing.’ I mean, Bill had the making of it. He was building, but certainly not for the next year. And if it did happen in ’93, it was going to be very small, and I didn’t feel like it would be a very competitive program,” Jeff says.
Meanwhile, the Hendrick folks were beginning to make preparations. John was hammering out contract issues and the business side of a potential deal, and Evernham had been invited to come tour the operation’s facilities. “At that time, Hendrick Motorsports was not performing like it should,” Evernham recalls. “I toured the facility with a man named Jim Johnson, who was the manager at that time. I went back to Jeff and told him it was an incredible opportunity. Everything you could ever ask for is there. I just don’t believe they’re using it properly.” It was Ray’s appraisal that sold Jeff on Hendrick.
As secretive as it all was, NASCAR was like a big family. Inevitably, rumors began circulating. “At the time, I was aware that Rick Hendrick had an interest in Jeff, but I didn’t know that it was a serious interest,” Lee Morse says. “But based on that, I initiated discussions with two of my top Winston Cup teams, Jack Roush and Junior Johnson, about hiring Jeff, and both of them indicated that they would consider it. I felt pretty positive that I could make that work.”
Still, with it being so early in the season, Morse didn’t feel any great sense of urgency. If he pressed too hard, word might get back to Davis that Ford was trying to find a new home for Jeff behind his back. It likely would have been easier for Ford to support Davi
s in his own Cup aspirations. “One of the reasons I didn’t actively pursue it as soon as Bill started talking about it was that I didn’t feel that program would be the best program for Jeff,” Morse admits. “They were successful, but it’s a much bigger deal than what Bill knew to go from Busch to Winston Cup.”
Ultimately, over the following weeks, Ford’s big boys—Jack Roush and Junior Johnson—did reach out to Jeff, along with a number of other teams, including the Stavola Brothers team. But none were willing to take on Ray Evernham, the one selling point Jeff and John were insistent on, and a demand Hendrick had already agreed to.
By the first week in May, Jeff was ready to sign the deal. But his excitement was nearly smothered by the knot growing in his stomach. He just wasn’t sure how or when to break the news to Bill, the only party who had been left completely in the dark. “Jeff knew it was going to be a big letdown, a big problem,” John says. “But at the same time, he had to think about his career. He had to think about the fact that Bill had no sponsor, he’d never run a Cup team, and it was already May and he had no Cup cars built.”
Jeff’s resignation letter to Bill Davis, June 30, 1992.
To make matters worse, the week Jeff, John, and Ray met with Jimmy Johnson of Hendrick Motorsports to put pen to paper, Bill Davis called with what he thought was the news they’d all been waiting for. It looked like they had a Cup sponsor. A big one.
On May 6, with the ink still drying on the Hendrick contract Jeff had signed the day before, he, Davis, and PR man Bill Armour boarded a plane for Minnesota for a meeting with Target executives. Armour’s friend Henry Rischitelli, who was head of motorsports for International Management Group and had helped set up the talk, joined them. Rischitelli had worked with Target in Indy racing and was eager to bring them into NASCAR; Jeff Gordon, with his youth, charisma, and clean-cut image, seemed just the right person for them.
“Jeff was perfect in that meeting,” Armour recalls. “I wasn’t surprised, because he was so impressive in those situations.” Yet none of them had any inkling of the secret he was harboring.
“To me, the news was not going to go well, regardless of when it came,” Jeff says. “And I really got my mindset behind going to Minneapolis because I wanted what was best for Bill. I really wanted him to get that sponsorship. But it wasn’t going to change my decision.”
“That was as good a meeting as I was ever in,” Davis recalls. “They were very interested in NASCAR. As I recall it, they were more interested in a limited schedule, maybe run eighteen races or something. . . . It probably wouldn’t have been a bad starting point for us at that time. . . . I would say there was probably a very, very, very good chance they would have done it.”
Jeff saw it all a bit differently. “I remember Bill being excited about how the meeting went. I had a different impression. I felt their interest level was minimal and their knowledge of NASCAR was also minimal, so it would be a long shot if it happened and a long way from getting it done if at all.”
On their way down in the elevator, Jeff told Davis they needed to talk. Once they reached the lobby, the two of them split off. Jeff remembers first explaining to Davis that he didn’t think Target was anywhere close to coming on board. Then he delivered the news. “I said, ‘I hate to tell you this, but I’ve made a decision that I’m going to go work for Rick Hendrick.’ And he was floored. He was absolutely floored. He fought a little, like it wasn’t quite a done deal yet. . . . And he just sunk down, you know, and went into a shell, like I stabbed him in the heart.”
“He said, ‘I’m a Hendrick driver next year,’ ” Davis recalls. “It was quite the moment. I’ll never forget it. I was in such shock. There wasn’t a red-faced curse match or anything. It was lots of stunned silence, disbelief. Man, it was real ugly. Just hurt, resentment. ‘My god, how unfair. How could you?’ ”
As hard as it was, Jeff and Bill Davis continued working to win races through the rest of the season, 1992.
With the race in Nazareth, Pennsylvania, coming up in a few days, Davis flew home alone to get the car and hauler, while Rischitelli returned to Cleveland. Armour and Jeff spent the night at an airport hotel before flying off to Pennsylvania the following day. Armour still remembers vividly the two of them sitting on the corners of their hotel beds as Jeff ran through the story. “I remember Jeff crying,” he says. “That was one of the few times I felt parental with him. Because it hit me: What else was he supposed to have done?” They got John on the phone, who helped further explain the situation to Armour and calm Jeff down.
“I knew it was happening,” John says, “and I felt for him. It’s really hard to tell a guy that has basically been the catalyst for your dream as a racecar driver that you’ve got another opportunity. But you’ve got to think of your own career versus Bill Davis’s dream. And you’re basically going to disrupt his dream. It was very hard on him. I think it’s maybe one of the hardest things he’s ever had to do.”
After the race at Nazareth, in which Jeff completed only eighty-seven of two hundred laps due to engine trouble, he called Lee Morse. The bitterness was so harsh that no one had yet told Ford what was happening. “Jeff knew he had to make that call, and I certainly understood it was a very difficult call for him,” Morse remembers. “He was very emotional about it, and he was feeling bad. Jeff was young, and he wasn’t a hardened individual. He was just a nice person.” Morse tried everything he could to dissuade him. He again raised the topic of potential opportunities with Roush and Johnson. But Jeff was adamant. “In hindsight,” Morse says, “I should have talked to him about those opportunities much earlier on. We talked for a long time . . . He knew I wasn’t happy, but he understood that I understood. And in the end, if it ended up being what Jeff told me Rick offered him, there was nothing I could have come up with that would have matched it anyway.”
Not everyone was as understanding. When the news officially broke, there was an uproar beyond anything Jeff could have anticipated. “Ford Brass Fuming after Being Spurned,” read one headline. The article went onto state, “Officials of Ford Motorsports in Detroit reportedly feel angry, disappointed and betrayed that Jeff Gordon has spurned them and signed . . . to drive Chevrolets for Winston Cup team owner Rick Hendrick.”
Morse’s boss, Michael Kranefuss, told any media willing to listen that Jeff was, in essence, an ungrateful punk who had repaid their faith in him with out-and-out betrayal. Race commentators, other drivers, crewmembers, and Bill Davis came down hard on him. It was like getting “kicked in the teeth,” Davis told one television reporter.
“When Jeff announced to Bill that he was leaving us, oh my gosh, the media was just up in arms,” Gail Davis says. “It was the first bad media he’d ever gotten. And that was hard.”
“The way he was treated by the media who decided to take Bill Davis’ side tortured Jeff,” John recalls. “I mean, just literally, newspaper article after newspaper article just crucifying Jeff for his decision.”
Jeff tried to hold it all together. He tried to be philosophical and take the high road. He didn’t whine or complain or hit back in the press. “It was probably one of the worst times of his life,” Carol says. “He was down there in North Carolina, and he had Bill Davis and all of his people calling him everything in the book. . . . Jeff called up one day and said, ‘Mom, I can’t take it anymore. John has to come down here. I can’t handle this.’ He just needed some positive reinforcement.”
Ray Evernham was leaving Davis, too, but he wasn’t “Ford’s fair-haired boy, its favorite superstar-in-waiting,” as the press had dubbed Jeff. “My feeling was that Jeff was treated unfairly through some of that because of other people’s emotional reaction,” says Evernham. “Bill Davis was really good to me, a fun man to work with, but feelings were hurt. Bill’s an emotional guy. . . . He felt like he gave Jeff a shot and Jeff should’ve stuck with him no matter what. But the reality was—and this is even where Michael Kranefuss, I think, got emotional—Ford really didn’t have that much for J
eff.”
Jeff Gordon receives an award after capturing the pole at Richmond, March 6, 1992.
To be fair, there were people in the racing community and media who understood Jeff’s decision and supported him. Both ESPN’s Dave Despain and Terry Lingner remember thinking that come hell or high water, he had made the right decision.
The situation with Bill Davis couldn’t have been more uneasy. Jeff was still his driver, and they had another twenty races that season. But when he got in the car, it was as if none of the acrimony had transpired. The first race after the announcement was on May 23, 1992, at Charlotte, which offered a $100,000 bonus for any team that could capture the pole and win the race. Jeff went out and did both. But the bitterness had reached such a level that Armour recalls Davis approaching Michael Kranefuss and Lee Morse after that win and asking, “You’re not going to have a problem with me firing him in Victory Lane, are you?”
By the time the season was over, Bill Davis Racing was fourth in the standings and had put up the best numbers they had ever achieved. “We put everything into it, and ’92 was an incredible year,” Gail Davis says. “We won three major races. We still hold the record for the most poles won in that series. We led the most laps, won the most money. It was quite the year.”