Jeff Gordon: His Dream, Drive & Destiny

by Joe Garner

  And then word came down. NAPA Auto Parts, who had just signed on as the new primary sponsor of the No. 24 for 2016, was eager to make the news of their deal public. But they couldn’t go ahead until Jeff had disclosed his pending retirement. Everyone agreed that Thursday, January 22, would be the day.

  “I was fine with it,” Jeff recalls. “I was already prepared for it to happen. . . . But what I underestimated was that day. When I woke up, it hit me.”

  “He called me when he was driving up to Hendrick to make the announcement,” Carol remembers. “And I knew it was coming, but I didn’t know it was going to be that day. He was very emotional. We both were.”

  When he reached his office, he began making a series of tough phone calls. He first contacted each of his sponsors, most of whom already knew the news was coming. Then he called his teammates: Jimmie Johnson, Kasey Kahne, and Dale Earnhardt Jr.

  “[Dale] was the most shocked,” Jeff remembers. “He’s like, ‘No, man, that cannot be happening. You’re messing with me. That can’t be true.’ ” Jeff assured him it was. “And he said, ‘I’m having a hard time. I hear you, but I don’t hear you. I’m having a hard time letting these words sink in.’ And he told me how appreciative he was that I thought to call him.”

  Meanwhile, downstairs, all the No. 24 team members were gathering in the shop for what they had been told was an important announcement. When Jeff came in and informed them, he struggled to keep it together. “Telling them definitely impacted me in a big way because of how hard they work, how supportive they had been, how much I had enjoyed working with these guys,” he says. “The coolest thing was that every single one of them came up and shook my hand and thanked me for all that I’d done for the team and for them. . . . It’s still hard for me to hold back my emotions about that experience.”

  Once the media had been notified, Jeff headed out to do a video press conference and a series of interviews for newspapers and television. The reaction from the public and other drivers came quickly. There was shock. Disbelief. A tremendous outpouring of love and respect. There was plenty of sorrow to go around, too, especially among the fans.

  At one point, while he was preparing for a television interview, Jeff decided to check his text messages. There was one from his mom.

  “I knew it was going to be on the sports news,” Carol remembers, “so I was watching, and it came across on the ticker thing: ‘Jeff Gordon Announces Retirement.’ I had tears in my eyes. So I texted Jeff and said that I never would have thought that watching Sports Center would make me cry.”

  Jeff surveying the track, Auto Club Speedway, 2015.

  “I remember her texting me and me thinking, ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have read that.’ When I got it, it made me tear up again,” he laughs.

  It was a day full of bittersweet experiences, but perhaps the most heartrending moment was one that occurred before he’d even left the house that morning.

  “I was shaving when Ella walked in,” Jeff remembers. “She was curious to know why I was shaving. And I said, ‘You know, I’m going to be telling people that I’m no longer driving.’ And she said, ‘What? What do you mean you’re not driving anymore?’ And I said, ‘This year, it will be my final year, so I’m letting everyone know.’

  “ ‘No,’ she said. ‘You can’t do that today, Papa!’ And I told her I was sorry but I’d already made that decision. She said, ‘What am I going to tell my friends? What are they going to say? If you’re not driving, they’re going to think different of me.’ She was basically saying that because I was famous, she was sort of famous and that because I was no longer going to be driving, I wasn’t going to be famous and neither was she. I said, ‘Let me finish up here, Princess, and you go back to your room and get dressed for school and we’ll discuss it some more.’ ”

  “She left and I just lost it. I started crying out loud. Well, she comes walking back in and says, ‘What’s wrong, Papa, what’s wrong?’ I said, ‘I’m sorry. I’m happy. I just can’t believe this day has come, and I’m proud and everything, but I’m just really emotional.’ . . . I thought of how far I had come from just being a kid, getting started, looking up to people like A.J. Foyt and Rick Mears and then to be thought of by other kids the same way.

  “And I just thought, oh my gosh, what an amazing career, what an amazing thing for me to actually be able to say, on my own terms, that I’m walking away from something that has been the most incredible experience and changed my life forever.”

  Jeff anticipating the final Cup Series race of his career, Homestead-Miami Speedway, November 22, 2015.

  14

  THE FINAL CHECKERED

  FROM THE TIME PREPARATIONS BEGAN for 2015, Jeff knew his final season was going to be a balancing act. There had been enough forewarning that NASCAR, the fans, the sponsors, the press, the tracks, and pretty much the rest of the world were ready to send off the champ in style. On one hand, Jeff wanted to be present enough to savor that flattering farewell tour to the fullest and soak up the accolades in the company of his family and friends. On the other, he worried about limping through the final checkered like some worn-out warrior.

  After his great run in 2014, NASCAR’s new changes to the cars’ horsepower gave Jeff some concern going into the season. “It was a pretty significant reduction,” Jeff says. “I always like cars with more horsepower and not less.”

  Naturally, he and the team would have to work hard, as they always had. A championship? Challenging, he thought to himself. A win? Sure, that would be great—even expected—but he wasn’t going to heap any extra pressure on himself if it didn’t happen right away. “I went into the season thinking I was going to enjoy this final year and just take it all in, and no matter what happens on the track I’m just going to enjoy myself,” he recalls. “I’m not going to let a bad finish ruin my final year for me.”

  That uncharacteristically light-hearted approach seemed to pay dividends immediately. After a thousand and one interviews and other demands in the week leading up to the Daytona 500, he went out and won the pole. Before the race, he was lauded with a series of video tributes from other racers, most of them far younger, many who had grown up idolizing the man they’d now be competing against for the final time. FOX race broadcaster and three-time Winston Cup Series champion Darrell Waltrip, who in 1993 had pointedly asserted Jeff could never cut it in the Cup Series, now professed him one of the greatest drivers of all time.

  By the time the race was halfway run, it looked like Jeff might have a fourth Daytona 500 victory to add to that book. He had a strong car and led all but twenty-three of the first 110 laps. “At the time we were leading, I was enjoying it—my final year, my final Daytona. And the thought did go through my mind of how great it would be to win,” he admits. But on the restart after a caution flag, he gradually slipped into the lower portion of the top ten, where he hung around for the second half of the race. With ten laps to go, he’d worked his way up and was battling for third before getting knocked back again, falling victim to Daytona’s wreck roulette on the final lap. His promising season debut devolved into a thirty-third-place finish.

  After the race he was philosophical. “I’m still smiling and enjoying every moment of it,” he told a FOX reporter. “I’m just in this place that’s so foreign to me but so incredible, to just be taking it all in and enjoying every moment.”

  Jeff gives his mom a hug just before the Daytona 500, February 22, 2015.

  It was a bit harder to keep smiling the following week, when he got caught up in a late-race wreck in Atlanta, bidding an unceremonious good-bye to the track where he’d first grabbed Rick Hendrick’s attention, and where he’d run his now mythical Cup race No. 1 against a retiring Richard Petty back in 1992. It was tougher still when, a week later, after capturing the pole in Las Vegas—the seventy-ninth of his career—he was crunched in practice by a spinning Danica Patrick and had to start dead last in a backup car. To add insult to injury, after working his way into contention, he rammed t
he back of Jeb Burton, who had slowed up when Jimmie Johnson blew a tire, and, with reams of duct tape holding his Chevrolet’s busted nose together for the last eighty laps, he hobbled over the finish line in eighteenth place.

  Jeff gets “good luck” kisses from Leo and Ella at Texas Motor Speedway, November 8, 2015.

  Jeff races past Joey Logano and a “Thank you Jeff” tribute banner at Las Vegas Motor Speedway, March 8, 2015.

  With three disastrous races kicking off Jeff’s swan song, one reporter called him the “poster child for the unlucky.” It certainly seemed apt. “I just can’t believe the way these races have been going,” he said at the time. But then the pendulum slowly began swinging the other direction. He finished ninth at Phoenix, seventh at Fontana, and ninth at Martinsville in a race he felt he could have won if he hadn’t been penalized late in the race for speeding on pit road again.

  After an Easter break that included a visit to the White House with Ingrid and the kids for the president’s annual holiday celebration, Jeff returned to Texas for the first time since his run-in with Brad Keselowski. But the only battle he had this time was with the car. Fortunately, a call by Alan Gustafson to go with just two tires instead of four during a late pit stop helped Jeff secure a seventh-place finish. At Bristol the next Sunday, where Ella and Leo were named grand marshals of the Food City 500, he had an excellent shot to win, starting second in a two-lap overtime restart, but ultimately finished third behind Jimmie Johnson and race winner Matt Kenseth. That first top-five may have boosted him to ninth in the standings, but he wasn’t blowing anybody’s doors off and felt like the No. 24’s performance was middling at best.

  Jeff chasing down teammate Dale Earnhardt Jr. at Texas Motor Speedway, April 10, 2015.

  “The Last Lap” party invitation hosted by Jeff and Ingrid, November 22, 2015.

  “We ran so well in 2014,” he says, “and we got into 2015 and we just weren’t there. We weren’t as competitive as we had been. It wasn’t from lack of effort. The effort was there, but the speed just wasn’t there.”

  It was just a quarter of the way through the season, but the circumstances were beginning to hammer away at his “let’s enjoy this” attitude. He didn’t want to emotionally sequester himself from all the hoopla on and off the track, but he found himself growing edgy. “It’s a fine balance between making sure the team understands you’re committed to driving the car the best you can with as few distractions as possible and the reality of there being more demands on your time,” he says. “And I think during the first part of the season, the demands definitely were a distraction, more than I anticipated.”

  But the biggest squeeze on his time and attention wasn’t the fans, the press, or the sponsors—it was his own self-imposed effort to make his final season as memorable for everybody else as it was for him. He had invited scores of old friends, race colleagues, and acquaintances, including some he hadn’t seen for twenty years, to join him at upcoming races in Charlotte and Indianapolis. But perhaps most pressing was the post-Homestead party in Miami he and Ingrid were planning for two hundred guests.

  “He decided to have a party to celebrate his career, and that was, I think, a great decision,” Ingrid recalls. “Instead of just going home . . . we’re going to celebrate it.” But getting it set up meant phone calls and discussions, venues, dancers, and DJs to hire, menus to work out—a million tiny details that all needed attention.

  “The way John taught me was that if we’re going to do something, we’re going to do it right,” Jeff says. “This was sort of my way of giving back to all those people and friends who supported me. And there’s a lot of time and effort that has to go into making it right. If we’re inviting people to come, I want them to have the right experience.”

  “Making experiences,” whether it was for his kids and wife, his friends, his teammates, his fans, children with cancer, or anybody else, was something Jeff had always prided himself on. “I remember when we would win,” recalls his former crew chief Robbie Loomis, “he would go to the new guys on the crew and just love seeing the looks on their faces and the excitement. . . . Jeff loves surprising people and seeing their excitement and joy at experiencing something they could only experience because he gave it to them.”

  And while Jeff kept all those responsibilities secret from Gustafson and the crew, he found that he increasingly had to remove himself from the organizing process. “I started getting really frustrated because things weren’t going well on the track and I was really busy off the track planning these things,” he remembers. “It became a bit overwhelming.”

  On April 27, a day after Jeff logged an eighth-place finish at Richmond to keep himself in the top ten, the No. 24 team began a two-day tire test at Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Organized by Goodyear to help the company gauge what type of tire was best for the season’s new aero and horsepower package, the test also gave a select group of Cup teams the opportunity to gain some valuable insight into their cars’ handling characteristics.

  Displayed in a commemorative case, the steering wheel from the Corvette Z06 pace car Jeff drove to kick off the 99th running of the Indianapolis 500, May 24, 2015.

  A selfie Jeff took in the Chevrolet Corvette pace car at the Indianapolis 500, May 2015.

  Ingrid, Leo, Ella, and Jeff pose at the Indianapolis 500, May 2015.

  By that time, Jeff was noticing Gustafson’s growing frustration. “Things weren’t going well,” Jeff says. “He was frustrated with me, I was frustrated with him. The car wasn’t where it needed to be.” At the same point in the previous season, they’d already had four top-five finishes; now they had one. At Indy, they were fast the first day, but not fast enough to put a grin on either of their faces. “What can I do to help this situation,” Jeff remembers thinking. “Can I be giving the team better information and details about what the car is doing?”

  Jeff pacing the field at the Indianapolis 500, May 2015.

  He figured it might be a good idea to take the team out for dinner, do a little bonding, and enjoy some of the last moments he was going to have with his teammates. Almost everyone came along. Gustafson didn’t. “Typically Alan was the first to join in and be a part of team get-togethers like this. I think he was totally focused on Indianapolis, he really wanted to win that race,” Jeff says. “So I’m hanging out with the team, taking them out to dinner, drinking wine. And that led to probably too many drinks. . . . One thing led to another, and the next thing you know, the next day we’re all not feeling too good. . . . And Alan was pissed. He was super-pissed. He just said, ‘We’re not fast, and I’ve got nobody here to work on the car because these guys are so hungover they want to either throw up or go to bed.’ I felt terrible.”

  That night, Jeff and Gustafson exchanged text messages. Jeff assured him that everything he’d said had been spot-on. “You were right, I was wrong,” he recalls telling Gustafson. “From this moment forward, you’re going to have nothing but the best from me.”

  “It’s a delicate situation,” Gustafson admits. “He’s the only guy at the track competing with these circumstances, all these other events going on. And it changes your perspective a little bit. So we vowed to each other that we weren’t going to phone it in and just make it through.”

  Jeff’s happy-go-lucky approach just wasn’t working. “That impulsive thought process is not really me at the racetrack,” he admits. “I had said I was going to go into this relaxed, calm, cool, that no matter what happens, it happens . . . Well that’s not possible.

  “We could very easily just sit and hang around and ride off into the sunset, but that’s not who I am, that’s not who Alan is and that’s not who this team is.”

  On May 3rd, Jeff came into Talladega with more career wins at the track than any active driver, and a racecar that crushed the competition in qualifying. Starting from the pole for the eightieth time in his career, he led forty-seven of the race’s 188 laps but was again robbed of a potential opportunity for victory when he was
nabbed for speeding on pit road. “The setting on the front splitter was too low,” Jeff explains. “When coming to pit road, the hard braking caused the nose to go down. Once the splitter hit the hard surface, I could no longer slow the car, there was no grip.” He rebounded from that unfortunate thirty-first-place finish with a fourth place at Kansas, which kept him ninth in the points.

  (left to right): Jeff’s wife Ingrid; son Leo; his mother Carol; daughter Ella; stepfather John; and Jeff on stage for the special ceremony honoring Jeff before the All-Star race at Charlotte Motor Speedway, May 16, 2015.

  The non-points invitational All-Star race at Charlotte started with a special treat when Jeff was surprised on stage during driver introductions by John, Carol, Ingrid, the kids, and Ray Evernham in front of a sea of fans holding signs reading, “Thank You, Jeff #24,” but he wasn’t particularly thrilled with his fourth-place finish. At the very least, he said after the race, he could take some of what he’d learned into the following week’s Coca-Cola 600, where twenty-two years earlier he’d won his first Cup race and wept in Victory Lane. But handling issues and a late race pit stop for fuel left him finishing in fifteenth place. “That was a lot of darn work for us to finish fifteenth,” he remarked afterward.

  There was one bright spot on the track for him that day, but it didn’t come at Charlotte. Earlier in the afternoon, he’d boarded a flight from North Carolina to Indianapolis, where he was honored as the pace-car driver for the ninety-ninth running of the Indy 500. “That was amazing. Definitely one of the highlights,” he says. “It was surreal. I couldn’t believe they thought of me to do it. And for me, it was probably more significant than people realize.” Indeed, for a kid who grew up idolizing A.J. Foyt, Al Unser, Rick Mears, Johnny Rutherford, and Mario Andretti, it was the next best thing to competing in the storied race. “To be able to go and pace that race in my final year as a racecar driver was huge. It was a once in a lifetime event.”