by Joe Garner
Jeff and Ray nearing the end of their storied partnership, 1999.
“Right away, after a couple races, I saw how much he liked it,” Jeff says. “He loved that it was his race team, his name was on it, and he was able to be in control of what happened. I was happy for him. But I will say I was a little concerned what it meant for his future at Hendrick, because I saw he wanted to be more than a crew chief. So when the Dodge thing came along, it wasn’t surprising to me at all that he wanted to do it and was going to do it.”
The logo for Gordon–Evernham Motorsports.
With the rise in NASCAR’s popularity and revenues in the mid-1990s, DaimlerChrysler was looking to return its Dodge brand to racing after a quarter-century absence. And who better to shepherd the project than Jeff Gordon and Ray Evernham? Early in the season, the company had quietly approached the pair with an invitation to start and own two new Dodge teams and build the reentry operation from the ground up. It was a major offer, and for Evernham, as an ambitious, meticulous, and domineering nuts-and-bolts field commander, it seemed especially appealing.
They mulled it over for months, even as Rick Hendrick, still battling leukemia and unaware of the deal, floated the idea of Evernham assuming an executive position with more oversight over company operations. But it was too little too late. By the end of summer, Evernham had already made up his mind that Gordon or no Gordon, he was going with Dodge.
“When Ray came and told me he was going to do this,” Hendrick says, “he still had another year on his contract, and at first I was kind of bitter. At the time, I was still sick. But I let him out of his contract. And I was concerned, because the rumors were that Jeff was going to go with him. But I talked to Jeff, and he said, ‘I’m going to stay, I want to stay here.’ ”
The driver-crew chief-owner partnership that seemed as if it could last forever was over. Seven years. Three championships. Forty-seven victories in 216 starts. A spectacular climb from rookie upstarts to the height of NASCAR. And while the Dodge deal was ostensibly the wedge that drove them apart, the groundwork had been laid by all those incendiary elements that lurk in the depths of any competitive team—ego, pride, and vanity. Who deserved the most credit for their success? It was a question that had been pondered and dissected for years in the press and among fans. Was it Ray? Was it Jeff? Was it Hendrick’s equipment and resources? Could they survive, and thrive, apart, or was it all just a synergistic tapestry?
“It’s the same things that tear rock bands apart, or any great team,” says Evernham, who admits there were times when he felt he wasn’t getting his due. “You start to get like, ‘I’m the one that’s working a gazillion hours with these guys.’ And that’s when you start to drift apart, you lose communication, you get to the point where all of sudden it’s about me, I’m not getting enough. . . . Our pit crew guys started to do that, too. And then the Dodge people came to me, and I was feeling underappreciated. I’m thinking, ‘Man, Jeff is making $25 million a year, and I’m making $1 million.’ ”
That perception of disparity was, like a cancer, slowly eating away the heart of the team. And if he could pinpoint a moment when the edifice began to crumble, Evernham says, it would be when Jeff’s financial manager, Bob Brannan, came to him after the 1998 season to get his rubber stamp on the blueprint for that year’s championship ring. Evernham had some ideas of his own that would have cost a little more, but he figured he and Jeff could chip in to make it happen. Brannan, he recalls, wasn’t listening.
“Was it really a terrible request, for all the hours I was putting in?” Evernham remembers thinking. “And Brannan said, ‘This is the ring design, this is the way it’s going to be, this is what we’re paying, and that’s the end of it.’ When he said that to me, I said to myself, ‘Here’s my two choices: I can punch him square in the face, or I can just go find something else to do.’ And right then is when I think it really changed for me, that day.”
The Dodge offer was a once-in-a-lifetime chance for forty-two-year-old Evernham to prove his worth to himself and to all the doubters. “In some ways, I think Jeff wanted to try it without me,” he contends. “I think Jeff, really deep down inside, wanted to be his own person. John had guided him all the way here, and then I had picked him up and guided him to three championships. I don’t mean that Jeff wanted to get rid of me, but I think, honestly, it was time.”
It was a fair assessment. Despite everything, it gnawed at Jeff that there was a notion his success had always been orchestrated by “masterminds” and “handlers.” This was his moment to stand on his own and show his merit. “I would never say that anyone doesn’t deserve the credit,” he says. “Ray did. But I wanted to feel that my contribution was significant as well. And I knew I would never get that with Ray being my crew chief—and that’s only a credit to Ray.”
The two ran their last few Cup races together in early fall, culminating with the MBNA Gold 400 in Dover on September 26, where Jeff finished a disappointing seventeenth. On September 28, Hendrick and Evernham officially announced Ray’s departure to the media. The following day, as the story broke, Ray cleared the last of his items from the shop and walked out, taking the No. 24’s chief mechanic, Ed Guzzo, and two other crew members with him and leaving a giant vacuum in his wake.
“There was huge concern,” Whitesell admits. “They’d had all this success, they’d done all these things, and now the spoken leader had left the building. . . . It was a big deal, like ‘Oh my god, the world is going to fall apart, what are we all going to do?’ ”
They did the only thing they could do. They moved forward. Jeff and Hendrick installed Whitesell as the interim crew chief, they hired several new employees, and the shop began readying the car for the NAPA AutoCare 500 on October 3. By the time they rolled into Martinsville that Sunday afternoon, the news about Evernham was all anyone could talk about. “Never in modern-day motorsports,” said ESPN commentator Jerry Punch, “has so much attention been paid to the separation of a driver and crew chief.” Everyone was wondering what would happen next for the No. 24 team.
Within a few hours they had an answer, as Jeff took the checkered flag just ahead of a charging Dale Earnhardt. The hard-fought effort was punctuated by Whitesell’s gutsy decision not to pit under caution with twenty-eight laps left and Jeff running third behind
Jeff and Brian Whitesell pose with the trophy after their momentous win at Martinsville, October 3, 1999. Earnhardt and Bobby Labonte, both of whom went in for fresh tires. That gamble put Jeff in the lead on the restart, and he did a masterful job of holding off the wolves for the win.
Jeff celebrates the No. 24 team’s second consecutive victory at Charlotte Motor Speedway, October 10, 1999.
The team went crazy, hooting and high-fiving, and hoisted Whitesell onto their shoulders. As a teary-eyed Jeff pulled into Victory Lane, he leaped out of the car and doused his new crew chief with water. “I’ve never wanted to win so bad in my life, I tell you,” Jeff said in the post-race interview. He praised Whitesell’s effort. He thanked God. He thanked his sponsors. And he thanked Ray Evernham. The thirty-five-year-old Whitesell, who had been with the No. 24 since the team’s inception, also had praise for his former captain. “Ray Evernham taught us well,” he said. “He’s the reason we’re here—ain’t no doubt about it.”
A week later, the No. 24 team repeated the feat, surprising everyone with another emotional victory at Charlotte for their Cup-leading seventh win of the season. If they were looking for a sign that the ship would continue to float, they had it.
“The first person that texted me after those victories was Ray,” Jeff recalls. “He said, ‘See, you don’t need me after all. You’re going to be just fine.’ And I sensed in those conversations I had with him that he was happy for me, but in a sort of sad way. It was like he saw his child moving on.”
For Jeff, those wins, “were very gratifying because so many people said, ‘Well, it’s all Ray.’ And it was nice to go do something without him. And yet I d
idn’t want to shout that out to the world, because he was my friend and I respected him.”
Those wistful and fraternal feelings between Jeff and Evernham took a hit a few weeks later, when after winning a Busch race in the Pepsi car at Phoenix, Jeff told his former crew chief they were going to have to disband Gordon–Evernham Motorsports. There was just too big a chance that proprietary information might slip from Chevrolet to Dodge if they continued.
“That didn’t go over too well with him,” Jeff says. “It was kind of ugly. Here we are posing in Victory Lane, and he was not happy with me. He hated me at that time. I was a little harsh in the way I told him, and I just didn’t handle it the way I wanted to.”
Jeff and Rick Hendrick signing the lifetime agreement, October 6, 1999.
In hindsight, Ray says, “I think if we’d talked through some things, we probably could have stayed together.” Whitesell agrees, “You know, a little bit of love here, a little bit of love there, and everything would have been textbook.”
As the 1999 season drew down, the euphoria of the two wins at Martinsville and Charlotte faded. They had gone from the most dominant force in racing just twelve months earlier to a sixth-place team. And when the famed Rainbow Warriors over-the-wall pit crew announced they were leaving Jeff to work for the new champion, Dale Jarrett, it only compounded the sting.
If there was a silver lining to any of it, it was that Rick Hendrick decided to sign Jeff to a lifetime contract with Hendrick Motorsports and give him an equity stake in the No. 24 team, something Jeff had hinted at earlier in the year.
“Jeff was so close to me, and he had done so much for us that I just wanted to give him an opportunity to do what he wanted and be part of the company,” Hendrick says. “I just cared that much about him that I felt like he could help me run the company after he retired. And I wanted to reward him for what he’d done and have him not have to worry about negotiating again.”
Their first move as partners would be promoting Whitesell to team manager and choosing a permanent replacement for Evernham. They found their man in thirty-three-year-old Robbie Loomis, a crew chief from Richard Petty’s Cup team.
Jeff Gordon celebrates another win at Sonoma Raceway, June 25, 2000.
8
THE END OF ONE ERA, AND THE START OF ANOTHER
NOT ONLY WAS ROBBIE LOOMIS STEPPING into some enormous shoes, he was going to have to wear them in their previous owner’s home. Loomis was the first outsider to take the helm of the No. 24 team. The guys in the shop had gotten used to doing things a certain way—Ray’s way—and not everyone was ready for a change. Commanding an Evernham-level of respect was going to be a tall order.
“I told him the week he came on board, ‘The first thing I want you to do is go in and fire two people,’ ” Jeff recalls. “ ‘You need to find the weak links and fire them. If you want to grab hold of this team and get their attention and make sure they respect you, that’s what you need to do.’ ”
Loomis never did. That wasn’t how he learned to crew chief, and it wasn’t in his blood. He wanted to build relationships, earn the team’s trust. The reluctance to bring the hatchet down irked Jeff. “I felt like we suffered that first year because of it,” he says.
There were other issues, not the least being the Ford Taurus’s clear aerodynamic advantage over the new Chevrolet Monte Carlo. In the season-opening Daytona 500, Fords swept the top five spots and continued to dominate the next few races before NASCAR allowed midseason changes to achieve more parity. The No. 24 body shop had to adjust quickly to the new design. Still, Jeff managed to reel off five top-ten finishes in his first eight races heading into Talladega.
Starting from way back in thirty-sixth position, he waged a knock-down battle with Mike Skinner over the last six laps to grab the fiftieth win of his career, snapping a thirteen-race winless streak and making him only the seventh driver in history to achieve a career Grand Slam—wins at Daytona, Charlotte, Darlington, and Talladega.
But through the spring and summer, the highlights were few and far between. He mustered a win at Sonoma in June, his record-setting sixth straight road course victory, but he also, for the first time in his career, stumbled through a four-race series in which he couldn’t crack the top twenty. It wasn’t what he wanted his first post-Evernham season to look like. He was at least reassured by DuPont’s announcement that they would sponsor the No. 24 through 2006.
The No. 24 DuPont Chevrolet in the lead at Talladega, April 16, 2000.
As the year wore on, Jeff and Loomis struggled to find the right connection. Loomis wondered how much encouragement Jeff needed. Should he be a rah-rah guy or keep it cool? How far should he push it if they disagree? Should he ask him to help rally the troops when they were down? For Jeff’s part, he was still concerned over whether Loomis could develop into the team-leading hard-ass he felt his crew chief needed to be.
“Ray always had the right metaphors and the books and the leadership skills and all these things,” Jeff says. “I didn’t have to do anything other than go win races.” But now he found himself showing up to the shop more often, throwing out some positive words. After all, he was no longer just the team’s driver—he was also a co-owner. But it was a struggle. Eventually, he would finish ninth in points, his worst performance since 1994.
Yet despite the overall mediocrity of the 2000 season, as summer had rolled into fall, something seemed to gel. They got a fourth place at Dover, then a win at Richmond, and they kept rolling. They posted eleven top-ten finishes—six of those were top-fives—in the final twelve races. Except for a momentary stumble at Daytona in 2001, their hot streak continued. By summer 2001, sixteen races in, they had finished outside the top five only five times, had wins at Las Vegas, Dover, and Michigan, and were sitting atop the point standings.
No one could deny something special was happening. “I think Jeff really felt the cohesiveness of the team and the guys,” Loomis says. “We got our communication together, and the guys in the shop started accepting the ‘new guy’ and that I was asking for things differently.”
“To my surprise,” Jeff admits, “Loomis’s more conservative approach worked in 2001.”
There was certainly a burgeoning sense of destiny, but the No. 24 team’s excitement was tempered by two tragedies. On February 18, on the last lap of the Daytona 500, Dale Earnhardt had been involved in a wreck that took the forty-nine-year-old legend’s life. For Jeff, losing the competitor and mentor who had in many ways defined the early part of his career was a heavy blow. The loss left everyone starkly aware of their own mortality.
But Earnhardt’s death was more than a monumental loss for racing; it left Bill France Jr. and the NASCAR front office without their back-channel connection. For years, when something in the sport needed fixing, Dale would walk among the drivers, get a consensus, then march over to the NASCAR trailer, sit down with France, and hammer out a solution. It might not have always been what everyone wanted, but by sheer force of personality, he was able to make it stick. With Earnhardt gone, some eyes turned to Jeff to fill that role. It was not something he wanted.
But by virtue of Dale’s absence, Jeff was now “the face”—no other driver even approached the same public notoriety. Rick Hendrick remembers that soon after Earnhardt’s crash, France told Jeff he would now have to be NASCAR’s true and sole figurehead. “He was a man of few words and an iron fist,” Hendrick says of NASCAR’s CEO, “but he told Gordon, ‘You will have to be the flag bearer for this sport.’ Jeff didn’t say a word. Then he said, ‘I’ll do my best.’ He didn’t make a big deal about it.”
Jeff (left) and Robbie Loomis pose with their trophies in victory lane at Talladega, 2000.
(left to right) Jimmie Johnson, Rick Hendrick, and Jeff Gordon meet with the press.
What he did do was what he’d done from the beginning—present a clean image and make the fans and sponsors happy. He was also busy clearing the decks at Hendrick Motorsports for his new protégé, a young Busch Series
racer and fellow California native named Jimmie Johnson, whom he had encouraged Hendrick to hire as the new fourth-car team in 2002, a team Jeff and Rick would co-own. But most of all, he kept winning races.
In August 2001, he gave himself a thirtieth birthday present with his third career victory in the Brickyard 400. The next week, he won at Watkins Glen, then had three more top-ten finishes and a pole, before tragedy struck again on September 11. Racing, along with nearly all professional sports, was canceled the following week as the nation mourned those killed in the terror attacks. When NASCAR returned on September 23, Jeff joined Bill Weber and Benny Parsons on NBC’s pre-race broadcast and was asked, as “a leader in the garage,” about the atmosphere among the race teams, many of whom had been busy raising money for the victims.
“That’s what I love so much about our community within NASCAR,” he told them. “The drivers, the crew members, the car owners, NASCAR itself—everybody in this garage area has always supported those in need. And right now, there’s a lot that we can do, and that we are doing . . . to donate toward these needy causes out there. I’m not only proud to be an American, but I’m proud to be a NASCAR Winston Cup driver.” If Bill France Jr. had been looking for a flag-bearing performance, he couldn’t have gotten a better one.
After finishing fourth that afternoon, Jeff went on to win again the next week in Kansas. It was looking like the No. 24 juggernaut was going to be hard to beat. By that point in the Cup season, Jeff was already nearly 400 points ahead of second-running Ricky Rudd, with just five races to go. He finished sixth that weekend in Phoenix, then had poor showings at Rockingham and Homestead, but by the time he reached Atlanta on November 18 for the season’s second-to-last race, he only needed to finish thirty-second or better to claim his fourth championship in seven years. It was everything he’d worked for and dreamed of since that fateful fall of 1999, and he capped his two-and-a-half year crusade with a sixth-place finish, finally stuffing a sock in the mouth of all the naysayers.