by Joe Garner
The success didn’t do anything to soften the Davises’ resentment; it was a feeling that would last the better part of two decades. In the end, they would make it to the Winston Cup in 1993, but with Bobby Labonte in the driver’s seat and a sponsorship from Maxwell House coffee.
“Jeff did help take it to another level,” Bill Davis admits today. “And we probably wouldn’t have gone Cup racing without the experience of two years with him. It certainly worked out for both of us.”
On November 15, one week after he took his final Busch race, Jeff climbed into Hendrick Motorsports’s No. 24 Chevrolet for the first time. Rick Hendrick wanted to give the twenty-year-old a taste of Winston Cup racing before they went whole hog on the 1993 season. Symbolically, Jeff’s presence on the starting grid at Atlanta Motor Speedway couldn’t have been weightier. He was back where Rick Hendrick had first seen him sliding through the corners en route to his first NASCAR victory. More importantly, he was lined up against seven-time champion Richard Petty, who would be running the final race of his long and storied NASCAR career. Nobody knew it then, but one racing era was drawing to a close, and a brand-new one was dawning.
Jeff in his No. 24 DuPont Chevrolet Lumina leading the field at Martinsville, Virginia, April 25, 1993.
5
RISE OF THE RAINBOW WARRIORS
“AT THE AGE OF TWENTY-FOUR, OUR next guest won an impressive seven races on his way to becoming the NASCAR Winston Cup Series champion,” David Letterman trumpeted on the December 1, 1995, Late Show. “Ladies and gentlemen, here he is, the Boy Wonder of NASCAR, Jeff Gordon!”
With that, Jeff came flying down Manhattan’s West 53rd Street in a replica of his No. 24 Chevrolet Monte Carlo, leapt out the window, and bounded into the Ed Sullivan Theater to the strains of “Life in the Fast Lane.” If the show’s 4.5 million viewers hadn’t already seen his image on a cereal box or toy-car package, they were getting their first glimpse of the young man who was quickly becoming the new face of professional auto racing. But absent were the worn-down cowboy boots, belt buckle, and blue jeans. Everything about Jeff exuded youthful pep and polish, from the casual suit without a tie, to the freshly blow-dried hair and radiant smile.
“Look at you,” Letterman chuckled, “you’re just a kid, for heaven’s sake.” Jeff grinned good-naturedly, laughed, told stories, and made jokes. He did everything right, and the tiniest drop of boyish awkwardness that seeped through seemed to make him all the more endearing.
Later that evening, he and his then-wife, Brooke, a former Miss Winston model, would attend NASCAR’s year-end banquet at the Waldorf-Astoria, where he would accept his first championship trophy. He would then party late into the night with the 240 guests that had flown up from Charlotte before heading to ABC the following morning for a guest spot on Good Morning America. The whirlwind week in New York—the TV appearances, the parties, the sightseeing, the courtside tickets to the Knicks, hobnobbing with Spike Lee and NHL great Mark Messier—was part of his newfound status.
In a mere three years, his life had outpaced his dreams. He’d made millions and was poised to make many more. He seemed to have it all. “It should be illegal to be that young, that good-looking, and that talented,” Dale Jarrett famously quipped that year. Jeff was doing his best to enjoy the fruits of his hard work and good fortune, but by his own admission, everything was blazing by at such warp speed that his head was spinning.
Jeff’s rocket rise to stardom began just thirty-four months earlier, when, as a twenty-one-year-old, he first rolled onto the track at Daytona in his DuPont-sponsored Chevrolet. If Hendrick Motorsports was trying to get their rookie noticed, the flashy No. 24, with its eye-catching rainbow paint scheme, did the trick.
A few competitors had gotten a quick peek at Jeff in the final race of 1992 in Atlanta, when he first sampled the Cup waters. Jeff had gotten into the wall mid-race. In their hurriedness to repair the damage, his pit crew accidentally left a roll of duct tape on his deck lid. Once he was back on the track, the tape rolled off and lightly damaged championship contender Davey Allison’s car. Jeff wound up finishing thirty-first.
Jeff’s 1993 Winston Cup test badge.
But that was already forgotten. Daytona was the real coming-out party. There was a buzz around Hendrick’s new third-car team, and the racing world was eager to see what kind of waves these newcomers in their flamboyant fire suits might make in 1993.
In the first 125-mile qualifying race, Jeff stunned everyone by taking the checker, becoming the youngest driver to win a Daytona 500 qualifier and earning third position on the starting grid. He then survived a wreck-strewn afternoon to jockey into second place behind Dale Earnhardt with twenty laps to go, before both were overtaken late by Dale Jarrett. Jeff ended up fifth, but it was a very impressive showing. It was clear the No. 24 team was there to compete.
Now all they needed was a map. “We didn’t even know how to get to half the racetracks when we left the Hendrick building,” Ray Evernham laughs. “Jeff and I used to drive together sometimes, and I remember we’d ask each other, ‘Where do we go?’ ‘I don’t know, I thought you knew.’ . . . The good news is that we faced a lot of the challenges with our inexperience in NASCAR racing together.”
Most of those challenges were racing related—learning the tracks and the surfaces, understanding how they affected fuel mileage and tire wear, finding out how loose a bigger, heavier Cup car could get during a race, and determining where a track’s fastest groove was, what lines to take, and which marks to hit. Except for their brief tenure in the Busch Series, neither of them had any stock-car experience, which was unheard of for a driver–crew chief combination in the Winston Cup.
Andy Graves douses Jeff in Victory Lane after winning the Gatorade Twin 125’s at Daytona, February 11, 1993. At the time, Jeff became the youngest winner of a Gatorade 125-mile qualifier.
“The way I looked at it, I was like a baseball player coming into the NBA,” Jeff says. “And they looked at me as an outsider. A lot of the other younger drivers, they grew up racing one another as they progressed up through the ranks. Well, I had come from a totally different type of racing, and I was having to break in and find my place.”
Jeff and Ray had to gain their bearings culturally as well. You simply couldn’t get farther afield from NASCAR’s nerve center than the San Francisco Bay Area and New Jersey.
The cover and fact sheet from the Hendrick Motorsports press kit introducing the No. 24 DuPont Chevrolet and new star Jeff Gordon, 1993; Jeff’s No. 24 leading off at Charlotte; Jeff prepares to race in his first-ever Daytona 500, February 14, 1993.
“I remember going into that drivers’ meeting,” Evernham recalls of their first encounter with the predominantly Southern racers. “And here’s some kid from California wearing high-top freakin’ Michael Jordans and some guy from New Jersey, and we’re sitting there with all these guys from Georgia and North Carolina.”
Front page of the Jeff Gordon Newsletter from June 1994, reporting his win at the Coca-Cola 600.
The No. 24 DuPont Chevrolet leads at Charlotte Motor Speedway.
On the track, however, racing was racing. It made no difference whether your name was Petty, Jarrett, or Gordon, or whether you came from Appalachia or the moon. Jeff built on his promising performance at Daytona with a sixth-place finish at Richmond and a fourth-place finish at Atlanta. But then he wrecked, and wrecked, and wrecked again.
Darrell Waltrip, the three-time Cup champion, remembers speaking with Rick Hendrick that season and telling him he was skeptical about the youngster’s ability to hack it in the big time. “He said, ‘So what do you think about my young hot-shoe?’ ” Waltrip recalls. “And I told Rick I didn’t think the kid was ever going to make it. I mean, seriously, he hit everything but the pace car that year.”
Rick Hendrick and Jeff pose before a race.
“I think he wrecked about seventeen times,” Hendrick chuckles. “But he had the speed. I knew he could do it. He’d get in the wrong spo
t and get tangled up in a wreck, but I knew it would come.”
In the end, despite the crashes, handling problems, and occasional engine blowups, the No. 24 logged some strong finishes, including runner-up performances at Charlotte and Michigan, as well as their first pole. They didn’t have a points-race win, but eleven times—in more than a third of the races—they finished in the top ten. Ultimately, Jeff came out of the season with the Winston Cup Rookie of the Year trophy, just shading Bill Davis Racing’s Bobby Labonte.
What also came out was that, for the entire season, Jeff had been secretly dating Miss Winston model Brooke Sealey, one of the Southern beauties tasked with presenting trophies to Cup drivers. “There was a rule that Miss Winston could not date a driver,” says Jeff’s friend and housemate Andy Graves, who worked for the No. 24 team. “They didn’t want to get caught, and she didn’t want to get in trouble. So that first nine months, they had to do it in secret.”
Their connection had started in February 1993, when the two made eyes at each other in Victory Lane as Jeff celebrated his Daytona qualifier win. Their budding romance quickly assumed the air of a cloak-and-dagger comedy, as they found themselves having to slip out the side doors of restaurants, stagger their entrances to hotels, and use Graves as a buffer to avoid the prying eyes of the NASCAR community. The charade was successful enough that Dale Earnhardt jokingly inquired whether the young, handsome, and inexplicably single rookie driver was gay.
But the confusion didn’t end there. With Brooke frequently lingering on the edges of the No. 24 car camp, at least one crewmember was convinced that Cupid’s arrow was aimed squarely at him. “We had a guy who would drive the van and clean the cars,” Evernham recalls. “And he would always tell us, ‘Yeah, she’s hanging around here because she likes me.’ Jeff and I talked a lot, so I knew what was going on, but this guy would keep telling us, ‘Hey, I think she’s sweet on me.’ ”
Jeff was serious enough that one year after they met, he proposed to Brooke at Daytona. He then went out and won the Busch Clash, a non-points invitation race for the previous season’s pole winners. In that race, he pulled off a bold move to the inside on the second-to-last lap to beat Brett Bodine, Dale Earnhardt, and Ernie Irvan. A week later, in the Daytona 500, he finished fourth. But the No. 24 team was still looking for that first win. In the season’s third race, Jeff came close, finishing third at Richmond, but soon slid through an ugly six weeks in which he finished no better than fifteenth and failed three times to crack the top thirty.
Coming off that, few expected him to challenge for the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte, the season’s longest race and one of the most grueling. Still, the No. 24 team won the pole, just as they had in the October race the year before, and although Jeff led the first lap, he quickly got shuffled back. The lead changed hands twenty-five times that day. With eighteen laps to go, the race leader, Rusty Wallace, pitted for fuel and a four-tire change. Geoff Bodine, who was running second, did likewise. Evernham called for just two tires, and the quick stop put Jeff back on the track ahead of both of them, with only Ricky Rudd, now running first, to pass. To the announcers, it seemed a fool’s gambit. What they didn’t know was that Evernham and Jeff had run two-tire stops in practice and discovered they could muster around fifteen good, fast laps. When Rudd eventually had to pit for fuel, Jeff took the lead and never looked back. After he crossed the finish line, Earnhardt pulled up alongside him and gave the first-time winner the thumbs-up.
Jeff receives a congratulatory hug from his mother, Carol, following his victory.
Jeff is overcome with emotion as he celebrates his Coca-Cola 600 win with his crew in Victory Lane.
Jeff pulled into Victory Lane in tears, a rare display of emotion for a Winston Cup driver. “This is the greatest day of my life. I don’t know what to say,” he stammered, then regained his composure and thanked his team. When he finally climbed out of the car, the grandstands erupted, and he broke down again. “My emotions showed how much that meant to me that day,” he recalls. “It just all came out. I couldn’t hold it back.
“I hadn’t even dreamt of being in the Cup Series, and there I was, realizing how much I wanted to be a part of it and how hard I had worked and how much I had wanted to be successful at it. So that moment was a relief, but at the same time, it was just the pure joy and excitement of winning at that level. To me, that was the ultimate level.”
His win at Charlotte set the stage for what, just eight races later, would become one of the greatest performances of his twenty-three-year career. For the first time in history, NASCAR would be running at the cathedral of car racing, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, the most storied track in all of motorsports and the Holy Grail to Jeff’s childhood hopes and ambitions. He never imagined he’d get there as a stock-car driver, but the unthinkable had come true. “If ever there was a dream, that was the dream,” he says. “Just to be racing at Indianapolis, just to drive onto that track as a racecar driver, competing.”
The 1994 Brickyard 400 would be the most anticipated stock-car race in history and would far surpass any NASCAR event in attendance, television viewership, and prize money. The buildup had been so big, and the potential payoff so huge, that racers from every corner lined up to join the current Winston Cup regulars gunning for a starting spot. The eventual field of forty-three would include 1985 Indianapolis 500 winner Danny Sullivan and the iconic four-time Indy 500 champ A.J. Foyt, who would make it the final race of his career. Even during pre-race testing, the crowd was so hyped that at least one fan tried to scale the grandstand’s chain-link fence for autographs. “And on race day, it was packed—350,000 people,” Jeff recalls. “You just knew that whoever won that race, it was going to be a huge moment in history.”
A pair of tickets to the qualification and practice, 1994 Brickyard 400 Inaugural Race at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Evernham was brimming with confidence from the outset. “I was enjoying the fact that it was square one, it was a level playing field, we were all going there for the first time. Not even the Indy guys had an advantage,” he says. When the No. 24 car qualified third, he felt good enough about their chances to skip the final practice.
“We showed some speed at the test,” Jeff recalls, “but when that race started, I knew immediately we were—wow—we were fast, we were one of the top three cars, I felt. And by the halfway point, it seemed to be between just me and Ernie Irvan. We were racing hard, going back and forth.” Each time one of them would take the point, the other would come up strong, take the air off the lead car’s spoiler and loosen him up, then pass. It went on and on. “We had a great battle.”
But with five laps left, Jeff, running second, moved down to pass Irvan in the turn. Irvan suddenly dropped off the pace, the victim of a cut tire. “When he fell out, I remember Brett Bodine coming on pretty strong; I was worried a bit because he was catching me, but I felt confident. I had a pretty good lead.” He told himself: Concentrate. Just don’t make any mistakes, hit all your marks. And then the white flag: the final lap. “That’s when I started getting chills up my spine,” Jeff remembers. “I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, this is really happening. This is real.’ ”
The No. 24 DuPont Chrevrolet speeds past the grandstands during the Brickyard 400, 1994.
Evernham barely remembers Jeff crossing the finish line. “It didn’t hit me until we got to Victory Lane and I realized we had done it,” he says. “And at the time, the whole stage used to go up in the air. And they raise it up, and you look out at Indy, the front stretch, and I’d never seen that many people. It was just wall-to-wall people. And you realize, ‘Holy shit, this is Indianapolis.’ ”
The No. 24 DuPont Chevrolet races to victory at the Brickyard 400, 1994.
After soaking up the crowd’s adulation, fulfilling his sponsor commitments, signing enough autographs to get hand cramps, and talking to more reporters than he could count, Jeff trudged back to his nearby hotel with Brooke, drained. “I was starving,” he remembers, “
and I wanted something quick and easy.” He rang up Pizza Hut and ordered a pepperoni and pineapple pizza for delivery. But when he gave them the hotel’s address, he heard a sigh. “Uh, yeah, that’s going to take a while,” they told him. “A couple hours. They just had a big race out there, and there’s a lot of people, lot of traffic.”
“And I thought, if there’s ever a moment to pull the card, it’s now,” Jeff laughs. “I said, ‘Yeah, I’m aware of the race. Would it help if I told you I won it?’ And they’re like, ‘Excuse me?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m Jeff Gordon. I won the race. I’m staying here at the Brickyard Hotel.’ They said ‘Okay, we’ll see what we can do.’ ” Jeff hung up, skeptical the pizza would arrive any time soon, but thirty seconds later, the phone rang. It was the front desk calling. “The desk clerk asked, ‘Did you just order a pizza? I’ve got Pizza Hut on the other line and they’re wanting to confirm it.’ I said yeah, tell them it’s me and to please get the pizza here as fast they can. That thing was there in thirty minutes. I think I gave them a $100 tip.”
The post-Brickyard insanity provided a good snapshot of what Jeff’s life would become from that moment forward—the media, the fans, the hangers-on, the public appearances, autograph signings, the hospitality events for his sponsors, and a host of other obligations.
“That’s when it really took off, when he hit the Brickyard,” says Ron Miller, Jeff’s DuPont public relations representative. Miller remembers thinking toward the end of 1992 that in a matter of years, “his name, Jeff Gordon, will be a household word.” It was happening sooner than Ron, or Jeff, had imagined. “There’s nothing that can prepare you for the media attention or the fans or the demands on your time,” Jeff says.