by Joe Garner
Jeff’s friend from Vallejo, Rod Sherry, was stupefied the first time he got a glimpse of the spectacle surrounding NASCAR’s new star. “I knew he raced, but I didn’t know anything about racing,” Sherry admits. Jeff invited him to an appearance at a DuPont distributorship near Vallejo following the Indy victory. Sherry, who agreed to give Jeff a lift back to his hotel after the event, says security guards instructed him to back his ’78 Chevrolet Nova up to the rear of the building so he’d be able to make a quick getaway when his friend was through. The precautions struck him as unnecessary. “I just thought these guys were way over the top,” he says.
“So we hear him finishing up, and then Jeff comes walking out with three security guys around him, and he hops in the car and I’m like, ‘All right, so where are we going?’ ” Before Jeff could answer, a throng of fired-up fans swarmed around the back of the building and converged on the Nova. “People started climbing on my car. People started climbing through the windows. I couldn’t believe it. I had a guy climbing over my lap with a die-cast car he wanted Jeff to sign—climbed right through the window, over my lap, and handed Jeff the car. . . . And he finally said, ‘Just go, just go, just gas it.’ . . . And that’s when it hit me. I was like, ‘Wow, dude, you are actually big-time. This is serious.’ I had no idea.”
A ticket to the Winston Pole Night at the Charlotte Motor Speedway, October 5, 1994.
That was nothing compared to race days at the track, when armies of admirers would descend on him for autographs. “I’ve been in situations with Jeff where I was actually worried about his safety,” Evernham remembers. “People would get around him and I’m thinking, ‘Wait a minute, now, they’re going to trample him, poor guy.’ So I would grab him out of the middle of something and he’d have Sharpie marks on his shirt, his face.”
As Jeff navigated the waters of his newfound celebrity, he also embarked on an equally transformative journey in his private life. Religion had never been big in the Gordon-Bickford household. Neither John nor Carol were churchgoers, and for most of his life, Jeff didn’t seem to have an ecclesiastical bone in his body. That all changed when he got to the Cup Series and met Brooke, who had been raised a strict Baptist.
“I was really influenced by Christianity at the time, because that’s what surrounds North Carolina and NASCAR,” Jeff recalls. “I saw a lot of people talking about God, praying, having church services at the racetrack. I had friends inviting me to Bible studies. I was curious and had questions about the Bible, about Jesus. And Brooke was one of those people that had a fairly good knowledge of it from her upbringing, so she facilitated a lot of that and sort of led me in that direction. And it just grew from there.”
Soon he and Brooke were spending time with other devout racing couples and discussing scripture with Rev. Max Helton, who ran the traveling chapel at the Winston Cup tracks. They hosted Bible studies and prayed together each night. At the time, it helped Jeff find some kind of peace, both in the race car and amid the growing bedlam outside of it.
After the end of the season, in which Dale Earnhardt won his seventh championship and Jeff finished eighth in the point standings, he was baptized at Brooke’s family church. On November 26, 1994, they took their wedding vows.
Since he’d first arrived at the Hendrick Motorsports facilities the spring of 1992, Ray Evernham had been a transformative presence. Not one to keep his ideas bottled up, he quickly took stock of the operation. “I saw resources and people willing to do stuff and just incredible opportunity that wasn’t being used,” he recalls. “They had all the right things to go into the ‘new’ way of racing, but they were very much old-school. It had nothing to do with Rick Hendrick’s dedication. It was about understanding that it takes more than a big motor and a fast driver to win races.”
To Evernham, that new way of racing was a much sharper focus on engineering, on car handling, on weight and chassis design, on aerodynamics, on springs and shocks, and on struts and tubing. He set about building a program for the No. 24 that incorporated every engineering advance he knew of. “I had to fight pretty hard to get some of the things done that I wanted to have done,” he remembers. “But I think they started to realize, ‘Wait a minute, these guys are on to something here.’ ”
What they were on to sometimes ran up against NASCAR regulations, as Ray pushed the envelope for any competitive advantage. There were the occasional fines and sanctions, but most of the time, there was a genuine collective awe at his unbridled creativity and at the results on the track. “That was a time before NASCAR could build a box around everybody, and there was a lot of gray area,” Hendrick recalls. “And boy, Ray knew how to work that gray area.”
“I remember the days when we kept the penalty notices on index cards and kept them all in a file box—and you could say Ray maybe had his own file box,” jokes NASCAR vice chairman Mike Helton. “We look at it as part of the sport. We lay down a rule and the first thing everybody will do—in particular, a guy like Ray Evernham—is figure out how to work around it.”
Ray’s innovative approach brought changes to the crew as well. He revolutionized pit stops by hiring athletes to helm his over-the-wall team and drilled them like marines to maintain their fitness and speed. But it was his leadership in the shop, and his willingness to boot anyone who didn’t share his relentless work ethic, that shaped the team into an unbeatable force. By 1995, Ray had sacked some sixty crewmembers but had finally found the twenty-five-man combination he was looking for.
“It was a culture that we had in there. I felt like I set some of that example,” Ray says. “A lot of people are willing to do whatever it takes, as long it doesn’t make them get home late for their favorite TV show or miss a family barbecue. But the No. 24 team was really committed, dedicated. I’ve never been associated with a group of people, before or after, that was willing to sacrifice as much for a team as that group.”
And for Ray, there was no one but Jeff who could have completed that prize-winning package. “I always had one hundred percent confidence that he was the best guy I could put in the seat of that car,” he says. “He’s just one of those guys that can get more out of a car than somebody else.”
Jeff and Ray Evernham discuss the No. 24 pre-race at Dover International Speedway, 1995.
While the behind-the-scenes domain was Evernham’s, the track belonged to Jeff, who continued to climb the Winston Cup learning curve, absorbing lessons from each of his sixty-three races. “It didn’t take him long to figure out what he needed,” says Hendrick. “As time went on, he put the combination together—the talent, the experience, being smart enough to know when to race, how to race, and how to save the car. I’ve been doing this a long time, and you can have the best equipment out there, but if you don’t have somebody in that seat that can do it, you’re not going to be successful. And as good as Jeff was as a driver, Ray was just as smart as a crew chief. So you had a dynamic duo there.”
As in anything where passions run high, the two of them had spats in 1993 and ’94. They were incidents both of them in hindsight chalked up to a variety of factors including exhaustion, dehydration, and Jeff’s exposure to carbon monoxide in the car—an issue the No. 24 team was able to fix by 1995. “One of the side effects of that,” Jeff says, “is a quick temper and being short about things and being easily frustrated.”
Jeff Gordon proudly holds his and Hendrick Motorsports’s first-ever Winston Cup Championship trophy following the race at Atlanta Motor Speedway, November 12, 1995.
“He could be a little bit childish sometimes,” Evernham says. “You’d ask a question during a race and he’d give a smart-ass answer, and I knew everybody could hear us on the radio, and that was embarrassing to me. But I felt like I was doing a good job with him, because rather than grabbing him by the collar and shaking him, I’d just sit him down and say, ‘Look, I’ve got to be able to ask you a question without you biting my head off.’ ”
With a fourteen-year difference between them, their r
elationship could be sometimes characterized as a brotherly bond, sometimes as a father-son dynamic. And while they never had much social interaction off the track, they communicated about racing at a level that was so intense and intimate that there were times, Ray admits, when it seemed something akin to a marriage.
“Whether it’s a marriage or a crew chief and driver, I will say that trust, honesty, and respect are the biggest things,” he says. “If Jeff would’ve come in and said, ‘Look, I really need you to cut the roof off this thing and turn it backwards,’ we would’ve seen how fast we could do it.”
For Jeff, it was as much a matter of loyalty as trust and respect. “I had a responsibility to him, and to the team,” he says, “because they were sacrificing so much, and I didn’t want to let them down.” All either one expected was that they give everything they had to each other and to the team.
When February’s Daytona 500 was interrupted by rain a third of the way through, Jeff was leading the pack, with Sterling Marlin and Dale Earnhardt rounding out the top three. When they got back to racing two hours later, he continued to dominate. At the race’s halfway mark, Jeff came into the pits under caution. And then a bad blunder ruined their day. “We dropped the car off the jack, tore the left fender up,” Evernham recalls. The miscue put Jeff a lap down, and the aerodynamic damage to the car’s body never allowed him to get back in contention. He would end the day twenty-second.
The crew chief waited for the inevitable verbal onslaught from his dismayed driver, but it didn’t come. “Instead of him acting like a child or yelling or screaming at us,” he recalls, “[Jeff] said, ‘Look, we have a fast car, we’re going to have plenty more Daytona 500s, we’re going to have plenty more shots to win. We’ve got to put this behind us.’
“I always look back at that race as a major turning point, like okay, now we have a leader. . . . That was a key moment. Our team matured, and Jeff matured. And I think that day made us a championship-caliber team.”
They showed up to Rockingham the following Sunday wearing “Refuse to Lose” T-shirts and made good on the promise, capturing the pole and the race. Two weeks later, they won at Atlanta and then grabbed a victory at Bristol. In the space of a single month, they’d won more races than they had the previous two years. By the season’s midpoint, sixteen races in, they’d added two more victories and five top-five finishes. That momentum carried through the season’s second half, as they captured two more wins and finished outside the top ten only twice.
The No. 24 team celebrates their first championship in a champagne shower.
By the final race in Atlanta, Jeff had the title all but sewn up, having to finish just forty-first or better, or lead for a single lap to claim the championship over Dale Earnhardt. Early in the race, he jumped out to the front and held on long enough to clinch. But the car had been plagued by handling issues most of the race. “The steering box had debris in the valve,” Evernham recalls. Jeff found himself fourteen laps down before the finish. With nothing to lose, during his final pit stop, an elated Rick Hendrick hopped in to do windshield-cleaning duty, while Evernham changed a tire. “We had some fun with it,” Jeff laughs. “Obviously, it was a very slow pit stop.” Jeff won his—and Hendrick Motorsports—first-ever Winston Cup trophy with a thirty-second-place.
“To me, it was all happening at the speed of light,” Jeff remembers. “The whole thing—moving to Charlotte in 1991, Busch Series Rookie of the Year, getting signed by Hendrick, winning the 600, the Brickyard, the championship. I couldn’t believe the way it was ramping up and going full steam ahead at a steep climb.”
At the year-end banquet in New York, Rick Hendrick recalled looking over at the young driver he’d hired three years earlier in the hopes of finally landing a title, who was now the youngest racer to ever win the Winston Cup championship, and saying to him, “God, we’re going to win a lot of these things.
“And I said, ‘Do you realize, at your age, you’ll be the greatest that ever did this?’ I was just so proud of him for what he’d accomplished.”
Jeff preparing to get back in the car at the Mountain Dew Southern 500, 1997.
6
A FAMILY DIVIDED
JEFF’S WINNING OF THE CHAMPIONSHIP was certainly one of the proudest moments of John’s and Carol’s lives, but it wasn’t one of the happiest. “It was a difficult time because of all the things that were going on with us on a personal level,” Carol remembers. “He was married to Brooke at the time, and that wasn’t the most pleasant experience.”
The relationship between Jeff’s parents and his wife had been strained since his wedding day, and Carol in particular felt as if Brooke was gradually trying to push them out of Jeff’s life. Although they still, in essence, worked for Jeff—John had been overseeing all of his financial, scheduling, and contractual issues—things had quickly become cold and distant.
In April, in the midst of the 1995 championship run, they got a call from Jeff stating that he no longer wanted them to have a hand in his financial and business affairs. It was a demand initiated by Brooke, but Jeff felt it was necessary to support her. “It didn’t bother me that they were involved,” he says, “but it bothered the person I had partnered with, and that was a commitment I was making. I didn’t want to have that issue. And so when it became clear to me that it was an issue, I was going to try to fix it. And they were hurt.”
In some sense, a split was natural, and perhaps inevitable, with Jeff being newly married and starting a fresh chapter in life. It was understandable that a young wife might not be keen on her in-laws inspecting their marital finances. “The problem Brooke had was that she felt like they had a little bit too much access to our lives,” Jeff says. “Some of the financial things they questioned were expenses related to her, so I think she just felt like a little bit of privacy and discretion was not there. And I think she felt like she was being judged, which was understandable.”
Both John and Carol understood that on principle. But it was harsh news when coupled with the already frosty relationship, and harsher still because Jeff didn’t seem to grasp what the change would mean. John and Carol had dedicated much of their lives to Jeff’s progress—they’d moved from Pittsboro to Charlotte to be closer to him and NASCAR—and for the past ten years, the business side of Jeff’s career had been their primary source of income. Now, at forty-eight years old, John would essentially have to start life over again and look for a job.
“It was harsher than I intended it to be,” Jeff admits. “It could have been handled better. I should have said, ‘Hey, guys, let’s work out a transition here. I’m growing up, I’m getting older, and I want you to still be a part of all this, but not in the way you are currently.’ But Brooke was fed up with a lot of it. And I had hinted to my parents a little bit, but it wasn’t happening at the rate she wanted it to happen.”
Ultimately, there was little John and Carol could do. “I didn’t want to be the source of pain in my son’s life,” Carol says. “I kept telling John, ‘He’s going to figure it out. We’ve been his parents his whole life. There’s no reason why we can’t continue to do that, but we don’t need to work for him.’ And that was definitely hard on John.”
Jeff toasts Dale Earnhardt with a champagne glass of milk at the 1995 NASCAR banquet.
John eventually found a replacement for himself in Bob Brannan, a former Charlotte-area banker who had been working in the motorsports licensing industry. And while Brannan assumed the title of vice president and general manager of Jeff Gordon, Inc., John set out to find a new role for himself without Jeff Gordon.
First, there was “Wonder Boy.” Then there were headlocks and hat twistings and all manner of jibes about Jeff’s youth. Throughout 1995, a season in which Dale Earnhardt, the Intimidator, was contesting for his third consecutive Winston Cup championship, Earnhardt wore Jeff out. When the rugged racer from Kannapolis, North Carolina, won the 1995 Brickyard 400, he crowed about being the first man to do it. When he was asked about No.
24’s chances of winning the title that year, he cracked that the kid would “have to toast everybody with milk” at the awards ceremony.
“Dale loved to play it up,” Jeff remembers. “And he had the ability to play it up like that, on and off the track. He would just make comments about everything. Me, I’ve always been too serious to take that on. I was always worried that if I went there, it was going to take away from my ability to focus on what I wanted to accomplish.”
Jeff was not a joking showman, but he did have enough of a sense of humor and pride to tweak Earnhardt back once in a while. When he got up on stage to deliver his championship address at NASCAR’s year-end banquet in 1995, he took the veteran at his word, saluting him with a champagne glass full of milk.
“Sorry, man,” Jeff went on. “You’ve been having so much fun with me all year. I had to loosen up a bit. And I hope you didn’t mind what I said about you on Letterman the other day.”
Earnhardt clearly enjoyed the moment, and Jeff graciously highlighted his vanquished rival’s immense contributions to the sport. Dale hadn’t earned his sinister nicknames by being a gentleman on the track. He was exceptionally fast, exceptionally intelligent, and tough as hickory bark. He had few qualms about aggressive banging and pushing and scraping, and if you saw his No. 3 car knocking on your back bumper, it was generally a good idea to scoot aside. That abrasive, bare-knuckle style had earned him a lot of respect on the track, and more than a few enemies. It had also helped him win seven championships and made him a blue-collar, honky-tonk hero to legions of hardcore fans. And then Jeff Gordon showed up.