by Joe Garner
Jeff and Ray Evernham in front of hundreds of cheering fans holding “Thank You Jeff” signs, Charlotte Motor Speedway, May 16, 2015.
And if all the extracurricular activities and planning weren’t enough, Jeff had also found time to work as a broadcaster for FOX Sports, calling Xfinity Series races at Texas, Bristol, and Talladega. On May 21, he had ended any speculation about what he’d be doing after he hung up his helmet, announcing his plan to join Darrell Waltrip and Mike Joy in the booth as a FOX race analyst, beginning with the 2016 Sprint Cup season.
While a number of his peers, among them Ray Evernham and sprint-car racer Jack Hewitt, had warned that he would never find anything that would bring him the same satisfaction as sitting behind the wheel of a race car, Jeff was more than satisfied with his decision, and talking about Cup cars was perhaps as close as he could come to the thrill of racing.
Jeff having a frustrating day at Pocono Raceway, June 7, 2015.
It was a decision that pleased NASCAR’s Brian France and also Rick Hendrick, who, although he still had Jeff signed to a lifetime contract, saw it as an opportunity for Jeff to continue to serve as one of the sport’s—and one of Hendrick Motorsports’—great ambassadors. “He’s earned the right to do whatever he wants to do in the morning when he wakes up,” Hendrick said, “and not have to satisfy me, the fans, or the sponsors. It’s going to be such a relief to him. I know him well enough to know he doesn’t need the fame, but he’s going to be more popular on TV, you watch. He’s not going to be beating anybody, so all of his fans and then the rest of the fans are going to love to see him.”
The chips were falling into place for the post-Cup phase of Jeff’s career, but on the track, despite their best effort, the team seemed to be dragging along. Things came to a head two weeks after Charlotte, at Pocono, when toward the end of a race in which Jeff started fourth and then ping-ponged from the front of the pack to the back several times, eventually finishing fourteenth, he and Gustafson got into an expletive-laced feud on the radio. The press picked up on it, and within hours the fight was all over the Internet.
“We had a horrendous day,” Jeff recalls. “Nothing went right. In my opinion, we needed more track position, but Alan pitted us. I was questioning the call. He was questioning me. But there were things that led up to that. Maybe they weren’t clear-cut moments, but it was just a building up of his frustration, my frustration, the team’s frustration.”
The two got things sorted out, but the exchange was indicative of the pressure both of them were starting to feel to make something good happen. “It’s my job to make sure I’m giving everything, the best I possibly can,” Gustafson said. “It’s his job to make it go. There are times, obviously, that it gets difficult and you have to disagree. I never in my life want to disrespect Jeff, and I never will. But at the same time, I’m passionate about what I do, and I’m going to fight for success, and the success of this team.
“There’s pressure, a ton of pressure. I want him to be the champion. I want him to quit at the top. I want him to do that—for the person he is more than for the driver.”
The race in Sonoma presented more than just the opportunity to add to his Sprint Cup–record five victories at the road course. It was a chance to journey back to the beginning, to the little bull ring–sized quarter-midget track in Rio Linda, about an hour from the Sonoma Raceway, where in the 1970s, as a five-year-old, Jeff, and John, had first discovered he possessed something special behind the wheel. “It’s the whole thing coming full circle,” Jeff says.
Jeff arrived with his own young children—and a small entourage—to show them that patch of his history, a bona fide piece of racing Americana that, in fact, he had helped save from insolvency some eight years earlier. With races raging and a couple hundred people in attendance, he put his hand to the track and felt its hard-packed dirt. Then he toured the grounds, signing autographs, and chatting with children and well-wishers—some of whom had known him back in the day and hadn’t seen him in years, and some to whom he was quite simply a superhero.
“The only thing I could compare it to is when I got Rick Mears’s autograph at Indianapolis, or one time in Indiana when I got the Kinsers’ autographs,” he says. “To me, that was the only time I could think of, looking at a driver and looking up to them as somebody I wanted to be like or that I thought of as a hero or role model.” But that was him now. As much as his life had been transformed, being back at that Rio Linda track was as close as he could come to stepping into a time machine.
Jeff and Ella wave the checkered flag at Jeff’s first track, Capitol Quarter Midget Track, Rio Linda, California, June 20, 2015.
“What I loved was that very little had changed. And it started bringing back a lot of memories of racing there and the great times I had. That truly is where it all began,” he says. And as he stood watching the little three-horsepower engines howl and buzz, soaking in the sights, sounds, and smells of the tiny track, he was gripped by a certain nostalgia. “I was wishing I could go back to those days and just watch from afar,” he remembers. “I wish I could see what I was doing, what my thought process was, what my personality was like—and what might have been there to show I might go on to become a NASCAR champion one day.”
Indiana Governor Mike Pence proclaiming July 23, 2015, Jeff Gordon Day and presenting Jeff with the Sagamore of the Wabash award, the state’s highest civilian honor. Pittsboro, Indiana.
At Sonoma Raceway on June 28, he picked up a sixteenth-place finish. A month later, he continued his trip down memory lane when he was honored with a parade and celebration in his adopted hometown of Pittsboro, Indiana. “If you want to look at the steps of how I got to where I am today,” he says, “Pittsboro played a huge role in that, and so did a lot of people that were there that day.” A thousand locals and folks from surrounding areas lined the ten-block stretch of downtown to cheer Jeff on as he rode by in a white convertible flanked by a couple high school buddies.
“What was cool,” says his old friend Bruce Pfeifer, “was we’d point people out, and he knew everybody. He was like, ‘Are you kidding me? That’s so-and-so?’ ”
Even his mom got in on the act. “I got to wave at my son in a parade,” Carol gleefully told one reporter. “I love that.”
At a ceremony in the local park, with news helicopters hovering above and children bouncing on trampolines, he received nearly every distinction a small-town-boy-made-good could warrant, with the governor proclaiming July 23, 2015, Jeff Gordon Day in Indiana and presenting him with the Sagamore of the Wabash award, the state’s highest civilian honor. The local police chief made him an honorary officer and outfitted him with a badge. Even his old high school gave him a plaque featuring a replica of his diploma. “This is one of the best days of my life, and I say that sincerely,” he told the crowd.
Jeff riding in a special No. 24 emblazoned Chevrolet Camaro convertible from Indianapolis Motor Speedway, waving to his fans during the “Jeff Gordon Day” parade in Pittsboro, July 2015.
“When you talk to him, Jeff’s just the same,” says his friend Chris Cooper. “I laughed because he’s the same kid from high school. We sat and told stories and joked and clowned around. When you get him alone, it’s just us again. We can laugh and be the goofballs we used to be. He was like a kid again. It was great.”
Jeff posing with some of his heroes, competitors, and friends from his sprint and midget career next to his No. 24 3M Chevrolet prior to the 2015 Brickyard 400. (left to right) Steve Kinser, Randy Kinser, Rick Ferkel, Kelly Kinser, Jeff Gordon, Gary Stanton, Jimmy Sills, Jack Hewitt, Kenny Jacobs, and Rodney Duncan.
Some admitted they had a tough time explaining to their children and wives and coworkers that they weren’t awed by his presence; they were just glad to see the Jeff Gordon they’d always known. “To my son, he’s an icon,” Greg Waters says with a smile. “I guess he kind of is. We know he is. But he ain’t.”
Three days later, in a suite at Indianapolis Motor Speedway
just before his final Brickyard 400, Jeff gathered a veritable who’s-who of his sprint and midget career, from owner Rollie Helmling and car builder Bob East to legendary racers like Jack Hewitt and Steve Kinser; there were his heroes and competitors and friends, each of them instrumental in their support of his career. He’d spent a lot of time organizing the get-together. “It was so special to me that they came,” he says. “They had all played unique roles in my career, whether they knew it or not.”
It would have been icing on that week’s cake if he could have gone out and done something special in front of that crowd, but he nailed the wall in the first third of the race while attempting to avoid a sideways-spinning Clint Bowyer. The crew tried to make some quick repairs on pit road and send him back out, but he soon pulled off again. The car was garaged for more extensive work. He would ultimately join the race one last time completing only 110 of the race’s 164 laps and settling for forty-second in the forty-three-car field. It was the worst Brickyard finish of his career and one of the greatest disappointments of his final season.
In the time between Sonoma and Indianapolis, the No. 24 picked up four top-tens, and following the Brickyard debacle, they logged a third-place finish at Pocono. The next four races were uninspired, with finishes of forty-first, seventeenth, twentieth, and sixteenth. Twenty-five races into the season, Jeff had only three top-five performances and still didn’t have a win. The idea that he might not get a win, or worse yet, might not qualify for the Chase, had been hanging over the team.
Jeff and the No. 24 team grabbing a third-place finish at Pocono Raceway, August 2, 2015.
“Once we got past the summer and we hadn’t won, then the pressure was on,” Jeff says. “I didn’t want to go through my final year without winning. All I had hoped for was to be competitive, and we weren’t even that. Heck, we were just trying to get top-fives and make the Chase first and foremost. It was touch and go for a long time before Richmond whether we were going to do that or not. When there’s sixteen cars that make it to the Chase and you can’t be one of them, and you’re at Hendrick Motorsports driving the No. 24 car, you’ve had a really rotten year.”
It galled him that the story of his twenty-third and final season had gone from celebration and expectation to one of raised eyebrows at the mediocrity of his performance. “It started to turn into ‘Well, is he even going to win a race?’ and ‘Boy, they’re not very good.’ And that bothered me more than anything, for the team, for me, for Ingrid and the kids. I didn’t want that. Plus, Ingrid and I had invited quite a few people down to Homestead and for the after-party. We knew it would be a much different experience for all of us if we didn’t even make the Chase.”
From the first third of the season on, he had been struggling with finding his edge, enough to have purchased a book a friend had recommended to him, on confidence and winning streaks and handed out copies to Gustafson and several others. John Bickford asked what the team needed. Rick Hendrick asked what they needed. Even Ingrid had discussed with Jeff the possibilities of approaching things differently. Nothing had seemed to work. Maybe it was just unluckiness. The only thing Jeff could do was to keep doing what he’d always done.
Jeff told himself, “Don’t stop doing what you know how to do, what you do best as far as the driving techniques. Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Don’t try to change yourself. Just do what’s worked for you in the past, but do it with confidence and kind of let that spread to others.”
It didn’t work magic, but it at least kept them right on the Chase bubble. Heading into Richmond, the final race before the Chase, Jeff held the fifteenth spot of sixteen qualifying positions. All he had to do was hold on. Surprisingly, even competitors, who in NASCAR are notorious for almost never offering words of encouragement to fellow drivers, wanted to see him make it.
“They were extremely supportive, even more than I anticipated, especially as it started winding down,” Jeff recalls. “Rarely does a competitor ever say, ‘Hey, man, I’m pulling for you’ or ‘Man, I think it’d be really cool for you to win here, or win the championship,’ but I had competitors say that to me. It was kind of overwhelming, but really gratifying at the same time.”
And when the checkered flag fell at Richmond’s Federated Auto Parts 400 on September 12, Jeff and his team breathed a huge sigh of relief. Their seventh-place finish, after starting twenty-third, secured them a spot, one of just five winless teams to make it to the Chase. When he stepped out of the car, Rick Hendrick hugged him from behind, wiping the proverbial sweat from his brow, and waggishly proclaimed to the press that Jeff would be driving for one more season in 2016. “Don’t listen to him,” Jeff replied.
“The one thing we had done pretty well all year long, as bad as we performed, was be consistent,” Jeff remembers thinking before entering the Challenger round of the Chase. “The one positive was that we were slightly improving—we might have been fourteenth, but we were doing it on a consistent basis. And my opinion was that if we could pick up our performance slightly, we were going to advance past round two. And then we’ve got Martinsville. You never know what’s going to happen, but we’ve got a great record there.”
Jeff and Leo share a moment together pre-race at Martinsville Speedway, October 26, 2014.
Jeff and crew chief Alan Gustafson talk during practice for the Daytona 500 at Daytona International Speedway, February 13, 2015.
In the Chase’s first race, at Chicago, Jeff had a strong performance. He was running in the lead on the final restart when he took a risk and decided to stay out on older tires. Denny Hamlin, who ended up in Victory Lane, made an aggressive move on the restart and got inside of Jeff, who lost momentum and started fading because others had fresher tires. He finished fourteenth. The result might not have been great, and a win would have automatically put him through to the next round, but his confidence was bolstered by the performance. “At Chicago, we were on fire,” he says. “Really, I thought we were going to finish first or second in that race. On that last restart, if I hadn’t screwed it up, I think we probably would have won. I was very encouraged by that.”
His seventh-place finish at Loudon in the next race bumped him up to tenth in Chase points, and with a so-so performance and twelfth-place finish at Dover, he captured the seventh position among the championship hopefuls, sending him, along with eleven other drivers, into the Contender round. For a team that had sweated bullets about actually getting there, things were starting to look up.
The No. 24 3M Chevrolet races past a “Thanks Jeff!” sign at Dover International Speedway, May 31, 2015.
Jeff, accompanied by his daughter, Ella, greets enthusiastic fans during driver introductions at New Hampshire Motor Speedway, Loudon, New Hampshire, September 27, 2015.
And Jeff now had one more accomplishment in his final season to be proud of. By starting the Loudon race, he surpassed Ricky Rudd as NASCAR’s “Iron Man,” with 789 consecutive career starts in the Cup Series—more than any driver in history. Not since his first run in Atlanta on November 15, 1992, twenty-three years earlier, had Jeff ever missed a race. Baseball’s Iron Man, Cal Ripken, offered his new racing counterpart a public tribute, highlighting Jeff’s “passion and skill” and “his ability to compete at the highest level of such a demanding sport for so long.”
“That was very cool. I know Cal, and it meant a lot to me,” Jeff says. “That was big. It takes a lot of effort, no matter who you are. If you’re a racecar driver and you race long enough to get those kinds of numbers and stats, you have to have done a lot of things right and be pretty fortunate.”
He was hoping his good fortune would carry into the second round of the Chase, and he was beginning to feel the weight of a grueling season lift. “We did exactly what I felt we could do,” he recalls. “We were putting consistent finishes together, showing a little more speed. And we were building on that, which was nice. We had momentum—the first time we’d had it all year.”
He qualified poorly for the Charlotte r
ace, but transformed a day of struggling to find the balance of the car into an eighth-place finish. Kansas the following week was not kind. In a race that was most memorable for Joey Logano spinning out Matt Kenseth, Jeff struggled mightily and felt like he was on the verge of wrecking in every corner. He figured maybe he wasn’t getting the proper information to the team to make adjustments. He ultimately got tenth place—“one of the hardest top-tens I’ve ever had to go through,” he said at the time—but his confidence, and the team’s, had taken a major hit.
Still, he went into the next race at Talladega with an uncharacteristically good attitude, given his general “white-knuckle” dread of the place. “It was certainly the first time in many years where I went to a restrictor-plate track, especially Talladega, very positive,” he recalls. Even though he’d suffered through problems on those tracks, he also felt like he’d had some of his strongest moments that season at Talladega and Daytona.
“I felt like we had a slight advantage. But I was sort of like, screw it, whatever happens, happens,” he remembers. “I was going to do everything I possibly could throughout the whole weekend to stay positive. It’s about an eighty percent chance that you’re going to wreck in the race, typically. And part of me was like, gosh, maybe the twenty percent is on my side today, because the last eight races I wrecked.”
The bet paid off. He started from the pole and posted a third-place finish, becoming the only Hendrick driver—Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. having been eliminated—to make it to the penultimate round of the Chase.