by Joe Garner
The number 24 painted on the Talladega Superspeedway infield, October 25, 2015.
Jeff racing to a third-place finish, becoming the only Hendrick driver to make it to the next round of the Chase. Talladega Superspeedway, October 25, 2015.
Just days before his first Eliminator round race at Martinsville, Jeff was sick as a dog, laid up with a sinus infection. “I remember feeling really, really horrible,” he recalls. His doctor had prescribed a combination of medications to knock it out, but even the drugs made him woozy and discombobulated.
“I took it, but I had such a bad reaction to it. It was really making me feel strange,” he recalls. “And I was concerned whether I was going to be able to give my best.” By race day, he found that the worst of the bug had passed, “but the medication was messing with me more than the illness at that point.”
It wasn’t how he wanted to approach Martinsville, where his eight career wins were more than he had at any other track. He wanted to be firing on all circuits. But he knew feeling under the weather or not, once he strapped into that race car, he was going to be able to bring something to the game. “I went into the race with confidence, and we qualified pretty good,” he says. “But once I was in the race, I wasn’t feeling great about our chances. We were burning tires off the car faster than we should have, so I had to hold back the whole time. I felt like I had a faster race car, but I could never show it. I couldn’t get everything out of it because as soon as I tried, the rear tires would completely wear out and we’d start dropping. It was like holding back a racehorse.”
Jeff had led for a short time in the first half of the race, but by the midpoint, it was the No. 22 of Joey Logano and the No. 2 of Brad Keselowski swapping the lead.
Then everything began to change, slowly at first, with sixty-six laps to go. On a restart after a caution, Keselowski, who started on the front row, inside, slowed up to allow his teammate, Logano, to drop down into the lead, creating a bottleneck. Kurt Busch, who was behind Keselowski, wasn’t too happy about having his progress slowed, and got into the crawling No. 2’s back bumper, which sent Keselowski up the track into Matt Kenseth, who was trying to drive by on the outside. The resulting wreck took out Kenseth, Keselowski, and Busch. Jeff, who had been sixth on the restart, avoided any damage.
But there was more to the wreck than sheet metal now. There was a personal battle brewing. Kenseth’s championship hopes had been quashed two races earlier at Kansas when he was spun by Logano. To make matters worse, Logano had gone on to win all three races in the Chase’s Contender round. Kenseth was on the verge of blowing his top. “He was mad,” Jeff remembers. “But I didn’t think he was mad at Logano at the time, because the No. 22 didn’t have anything to do with that crash. But of course I knew of the incident in Kansas.”
Logano remained the leader. After some patchwork on pit road, Kenseth’s team managed to get his car back on the track, but by that time, he was slow and several laps down. “So now I’m running second,” Jeff recalls, “and I’ve got Jamie McMurray just beating on my bumper. I’m holding him up because my car hadn’t quite kicked in yet.” With less than fifty laps to go, Logano pulled ahead of Jeff by five or six car lengths. Jeff was followed closely by McMurray and Kyle Busch. Up ahead, Jeff saw Kenseth’s hobbled No. 20. “I’m not thinking they’re going to have an incident,” he says, “but when we got on the front straightaway and I saw Matt come up, I was like, ‘Uh-oh, this is really happening.’ And sure enough, boom!”
Kenseth got into Logano’s left-rear quarter panel and drove him hard into the wall on Turn 1, totaling both cars. “I just said, ‘Oh boy, this is going to get big,’ because I figured there would be a brawl. I mean, this guy just took out the leader of the race. He had his reasons for doing what he did, but I just thought, wow, that was huge—one, because of what happened, but it was also huge because I felt like Joey was my toughest competition at that time, and he’d just been eliminated.”
After a long red-flag interval to clean up the track, the yellow flag came out, and Jeff and Gustafson decided to pit for new tires, along with most of the field. A.J. Allmendinger and Denny Hamlin stayed out, and Jeff started behind them, in third, on the restart. “I felt like we were going to blow right by these guys and we’re going to be sitting in a perfect position. I felt like it was ours to lose at that point,” he says. But the No. 24 didn’t have the getup to overtake them, and he was still running third when another caution flag fell. With twenty-eight laps left, Jeff’s car began to come back to him, and he knew he had to make his move. He muscled up on the inside of Hamlin. “He wasn’t happy about it,” Jeff remembers. “He was blocking me and trying to prevent me from getting position on him to make the pass, because he knew if I got by, it was over for him. We had some contact, but I made the pass.”
Then he zeroed in on Allmendinger in the lead. Jeff could sense it wouldn’t be much of a hunt. Allmendinger was still on old tires. “I felt like there was a pretty good chance he’d fade.” With twenty-two laps to go, Jeff was riding right up on his back bumper, and Allmendinger relented. “I was thinking, ‘He can’t put up too much of a fight on those old tires,’ but we are talking about A.J.,” Jeff says. “He can be very aggressive, but luckily I was able to get by without much of a fight.
Jeff out in front of Jamie McMurray at Martinsville Speedway, November 1, 2015.
“But then Jamie McMurray came up through there and got into second, and he was pretty darn fast. He was running hard.” There were seven laps to go. “Just don’t make any mistakes,” Jeff told himself. “Run your line.” And then another caution—Sam Hornish Jr. spun out. “I was like, ‘Ahh, man! Are you kidding me? You’ve got to be kidding me. This is not happening right now!’ ” They restarted again with just three laps remaining, Jeff on the front row, inside, and McMurray just outside of him.
Jeff stands on the No. 24 AARP Member Advantages Chevrolet window at the finish line after winning the Goody’s Headache Relief Shot 500 at Martinsville, November 1, 2015.
Jeff celebrates in front of the flag stand at Martinsville Speedway, 2015.
They took off side-by-side, McMurray battling hard. But Jeff got a good jump coming out of Turn 4 and put a little bit of a gap between them. They took the white flag—one lap to go. “I got through turns one and two pretty good. And then I drove down in three, and my whole thought was, all right, Jamie drives in really deep, so I can’t let him get to me. I overdrove it a little bit, and I remember him kind of getting close to me, but as I got the car turned and back on the gas, I knew we had it won.”
Jeff took the checkered flag for the ninety-third win of his career, the first win of the season, and an automatic berth to the championship race at Homestead. If there was someone at Martinsville Speedway that evening who wasn’t screaming their lungs out for Jeff Gordon, they must have been hiding beneath the grandstands. “All of that emotion, it was like a volcano eruption,” Jeff recalls. “It was just intense and crazy and wild.”
After his victory lap, he parked his car on the start-finish line, balanced himself on his side door, and jubilantly raised his arms to the crowd. The noise reached a whole new crescendo. “I could see there was no one filing out,” he says. “They were standing up in their seats, cheering.”
He hopped down off the car, grabbed the checkered flag, and saluted the crowd once more. “Jeff Gordon might be celebrating as much as we’ve ever seen,” the broadcasters remarked. Then, helmet still on, he ran and jumped into the arms of his waiting team, who mobbed him. “You see the look in their eyes, the excitement, the joy,” he says. “You see how they’re running at you. You don’t have to say anything to them. You feel it, you know how significant this was for them, they know how significant it was to me.”
The cheering went on and on, and so did Jeff’s excitement—with his crew, with his teammates, with his family, and with the media. It was as if somebody had lit him on fire and he just kept burning, illuminating everyone around him. “It was a huge wi
n, a huge win. And it went back to all the expectations and pressure and hopes of the season, all those things. That’s why I was so excited,” he says. “And the way that I celebrated was because I knew how huge that moment was for the season, for my career, for our championship hopes, for Ingrid and the kids and for all our friends and family that were coming to Homestead. The significance was massive.
“For me, the best part of that win was seeing Ingrid and the kids there,” Jeff continued. “The kids were feeding off of Ingrid’s energy and excitement as they watched from the bus. They realized the significance of it. So to see them all happy and excited and understanding the moment was incredible for me and that was the moment that I will remember the most.”
Later that night, when the applause died down, he spoke with Carol, who had watched the race on TV. “Jeff called me after that race . . . I was so, so happy for Jeff and so, so happy for the team. It was just too good to be true. I mean, what a fairy tale that was. And then he told me, ‘I’m afraid to go to bed because I’m afraid I’m going to wake up tomorrow and this will all really be a dream.’ ”
“The win at Martinsville lifted a tremendous amount of pressure off,” Jeff says, “but at the same time, now we had an opportunity to win the championship.” It had been a long, painful grind of a final season, and no one, especially after those dog days of summer, had truly expected Jeff Gordon to be there at the end racing for a title. So in many ways, just getting to Homestead was the pinnacle, and everything after Martinsville was mere gravy. But the championship was a delicious possibility.
Jimmie Johnson gives Jeff a congratulatory hug after his Martinsville win, 2015.
Jeff and Ella celebrate in a shower of glittering confetti in Victory Lane.
Jeff and his family proudly apply NASCAR’s “Winner” sticker to the No. 24 AARP Member Advantages Chevrolet in Victory Lane at Martinsville Speedway.
Jeff, Ingrid, Ella, Leo, and the entire No. 24 team poses in celebration of the Martinsville victory, 2015.
The press went into overdrive. They wrote more than just the nostalgic paeans to the extraordinary racecar driver winding down a brilliant career. Now the storyline was about the greatest career finishes in sports history, about that select group of athletes who walked away at the top of the game and about what it would mean for racing if Jeff Gordon could actually pull this thing out of a hat.
Texas Motor Speedway and track president Eddie Gossage presents Jeff with two Shetland ponies—one for Ella which she named PomPom and one for Leo which he named Nutella—as a final season gift. Texas Motor Speedway, November 6, 2015.
“Those next three weeks were some of the most enjoyable ones of my life. It was rewarding on so many levels,” he recalls. “We didn’t have to worry about Texas. We didn’t have to worry about Phoenix. All we had to do was focus on how to win at Homestead. I was going to the racetrack and smiling, watching all these other guys stressing out. I felt like I was the only happy driver in the garage. Me and my team were the only ones enjoying it. The guys were whistling, they’re all happy.”
Jeff had never asked for gifts or honors in his final season, but they had come in droves. From the tracks alone, he’d received a Bandolero race car with Ella and Leo’s names inscribed on the doors, a blackjack table, a helmet, an eighteen-liter bottle of wine plus one of his favorite bottles, ninety-six bottles of whiskey, a check for the Jeff Gordon Children’s Foundation, a weekend at Michigan’s Mackinac Island, a Bristol Motor Speedway terrace named in his honor, and a model train set, to name a few. That was in addition to all the tributes that had taken place at races throughout the season. But the most eye-catching gift was certainly the present he received at the AAA Texas 500 the week after Martinsville, when track president Eddie Gossage, done up in full cowboy regalia, approached him leading two Shetland ponies—one for Ella and one for Leo.
“What the hell am I going to do with two ponies,” Jeff remembers thinking at the time. “I don’t want two ponies.” He had no place to keep them, no place to board them, no idea of how to take care of them. He immediately texted Carol, “I really hope you like ponies.” Carol replied: “The ponies are not coming here, so don’t even suggest that.” John chimed in, texting Carol: “Yeah, they’re coming here. Where else are they going to go?”
A HOT Pass for Homestead-Miami Speedway, November 22, 2015.
Ultimately, they found stables in Charlotte so the kids could visit. “I was not too thrilled with it at the beginning,” Jeff admits. “But since then, they’re probably one of the best things I got all year.”
Homestead was still the sole target, and the team focused their efforts on prepping the car for that final race, but they also showed surprising grit in their two free-pass contests in the Eliminator round, notching a ninth-place finish in Texas and a sixth in Arizona.
And once the cars were all loaded back in their haulers at Phoenix, the final field was set. Jeff would battle it out in Florida one week later against the defending Cup champion, Kevin Harvick, as well as Martin Truex Jr. and his former Hendrick Motorsports teammate Kyle Busch. Jeff couldn’t have been more excited. “You feel very special to be a part of that final four. Knowing this is my final race, my final year . . . it’s like somebody scripted it and made it happen for you. It was almost too good to be true.”
As for pressure, even that felt like a positive burden, coming into it as the dark horse. “There’s way more pressure when they expect you to win or you’re the favorite to win. We weren’t. We were the one that survived and did a great job and executed. We weren’t expected to be there, but we won Martinsville and we were there. And that’s the story of my final race, my final season. So it was all positive and good. Oh, and by the way, we might surprise some people.”
One of the thousands of letters and “well wishes” Jeff received once word of his retirement was made public.
The night before Homestead, Jeff met Ingrid and a group of about ten friends at one of his favorite restaurants in Miami. But as the evening wore on he found himself checking his watch. Bucking tradition on the advice of Jimmie Johnson, he had decided not to stay at a hotel with his family and helicopter to the track in the morning, but to spend the night on his own, in his motorhome at the speedway. Bidding his guests good night, he made the hour-long trek out to Homestead in the rain. In his bus, he watched a little television, surfed the web, and relaxed before turning in for the night.
In the morning, he rose before his alarm, at eight o’clock, and started to let it all sink in. “All the way up to Homestead, I had been saying to myself that the day is slowly coming. It hasn’t hit me and sunk in just yet, but it’s coming. And that day, I woke up and it was, ‘Wow, this is it. This is it.’ ” The culmination of twenty-three years of Cup racing—the very last chapter in a racing story that had begun nearly forty years earlier. He could feel it welling up inside him.
Still in his sweats and T-shirt, he made himself some coffee, raised the blinds, and then he saw Carol coming toward the bus. He opened the door and invited her in. “As soon as my eyes met hers, I immediately grabbed her and started crying,” he recalls.
“I was crying pretty good,” Carol says. “It was just one of those moments that happened. It was awesome. I’ll cherish it forever.”
They sat and talked about Vallejo and Pittsboro, about the Busch Series and the Cup and what an amazing and crazy journey it had been, about how neither of them, or John, or anybody for that matter, could have anticipated these past four decades with all their twists and turns. He told her about the appreciation he’d received from the press and other drivers, the handshakes and heartfelt words in the garage area, about the congratulatory tweets and the mob of fans that had spontaneously broken into chants of “Jeff, Jeff, Jeff ” as he walked to the garage the previous day. And then they hugged again. “Don’t read the papers,” she warned him before she left. The tributes would get him all choked up again.
Jeff suiting up for his final Cup race, Homestead-Miam
i Speedway, November 2015.
“It was like I’d already won, you know,” he says of that moment. “I get to have this conversation with my mom on this day. There was nobody I would have rather had that moment with than her. She’s my mom, but she had been there and helped make this happen. Making the choices she made. Leaving my dad, finding John, supporting the racing in all its aspects. Going along for this ride the whole way. And so there was nobody more significant to have that moment with. Even as significant a role as John has played, to me, that moment with my mom was the most special.”
The commemorative ring box Jeff gave each driver competing at Homestead, 2015.
Everything that day seemed like a scrapbook moment, from the whole family being there to share the experience with him, even his sister, Kimberly, and his father, Billy, to his friends and Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton and racing legend Mario Andretti, who toured around the track with him, lending their support. Even former president Bill Clinton tried to call him to wish him well. Everywhere he went, there were mob scenes, there was cheering, there were fans thanking him, just looking for a final glimpse of their hero. Not even the periodic rain showers could dampen the mood. “There was just a great vibe and a great feeling to the day,” he says. “I really was on this high-on-life kind of energy right from the start.”
In one of the day’s more touching moments, Richard Petty thanked him for everything he’d done for the sport—for helping build it and transform it, for shepherding it into a new era, and for bringing millions of fans so much enjoyment and so many memories—and handed him ninety-three dollar bills, for his ninety-three wins, to stuff into the custom-made money clip he’d presented to Jeff and all his other competitors at his final race back in 1992.