Jeff Gordon: Racing Back to the Front--My Memoir

Jeff Gordon

ATRIABOOKS

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Copyright © 2003 by Jeff Gordon, Inc.

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ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-8979-2

ISBN-10: 1-4165-8979-1

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Contents

Introduction

One: Travel and Leisure

Two: Wonderboy

Three: Busch, Bill, and the Boy Who Didn’t Bust His Butt

Photographic Insert

Four: Car and Driver

Five: Golden Rule

Six: Behind the Curve

Seven: Running Tenth on a Two-Dollar Part

Eight: Daytona

Photographic Insert

Nine: Four Times a Charm

Ten: Evolution

Glossary

Jeff Gordon Career Highlights

Acknowledgments

Introduction

A man and his family are standing on top of a twenty-year-old yellow school bus that has been modified with curtains, a rooftop viewing platform, and a television aerial. According to a friend of mine in the infield who saw it all, the man is at least sixty with a long gray beard and wisps of white hair blowing in the breeze beneath his cap. The cap is black with a white number three on the front, an Earnhardt cap. He wears a black Earnhardt shirt as well, untucked and hanging over his jeans. As I pass through turn three, he stands and applauds. I’m waving, and the man does something completely unexpected. He takes off his cap and bows as I pass: a salute, or at least a show of respect for what we’ve accomplished.

It’s the perfect ending to a perfect day, a day that started like every other Sunday in the NASCAR Winston Cup racing season.

Three nights a week, for thirty-six weeks a year, I sleep in the rear bedroom of a forty-five-foot Marathon motor coach, a custom-designed bus with all the comforts of home. I have a queen-size mattress, three plasma televisions, a couch, a recliner, a full-size shower, and enough of a kitchen to cook pizzas and keep the Pepsi cold. Considering how much traveling I do, this rolling house should be my permanent residence. Virtually every week of the NASCAR season I arrive at the track on Thursday night where the coach is waiting in a reserved section of the infield. I don’t drive the coach, which normally tows a Hummer to and from the track. That duty falls to a member of my team named Scott Whitmore. I usually fly into the nearest airport and either rent a car or have Scott pick me up.

By the time I arrive on Thursday, the track looks like it’s hosting an RV convention. Some of the rolling houses have been parked in fields outside the track for a week or more. The infield campers file in on Thursday night. That’s when the party begins. NASCAR fans are the most dedicated and enthusiastic in all of sports. Stereos blare, kegs are tapped, grills are lit, and the smoky aroma of steaks, burgers, and barbecue drifts through the infield. Imagine a college football tailgate party and multiply it by ten; that’s what we have every week. By Sunday morning, the day of the race, many of the fans are partied out. Others are catching their second wind. Either way, it’s nice to enjoy a bowl of cereal and watch Speed Channel in relative peace and quiet.

It’s the last weekend in October 2001, and we’re in Atlanta. I’m up early this Sunday. DuPont, my primary racing sponsor since I began in the Winston Cup series, has a hospitality suite—which is usually a large, lavish infield tent—and I’m scheduled to spend fifteen minutes visiting a group of DuPont customers. At smaller tracks like the one in Martinsville, Virginia, the hospitality tents are in a vacant field outside the track, which makes them hard to get to given the size of the crowds flowing in on race day, but Atlanta Motor Speedway is a big place. I can be at the DuPont suite in a couple of minutes. Then I’ll spend a few minutes with a group from my other longtime sponsor, Pepsi, in their hospitality suite twenty yards from the DuPont tent. It’s not exactly how I like to spend my mornings, but I understand how important sponsors are to the success of our race team.

It shocks a lot of new NASCAR fans when they learn that drivers schedule sponsor appearances on the day of a big race. I heard one say, Can you imagine Nike asking Michael Jordan to come by and glad-hand a few execs before game seven of the NBA Finals? That’s what makes our sport so great: the drivers have always been accessible. From my first day behind the wheel of a Winston Cup car, I knew how important my sponsors were to the success of our team, and I’ve done everything in my power to make sure they’re happy with their investment.

I walk into the garage area at around ten forty-five, fifteen minutes before the weekly drivers’ meeting that precedes every race. This is where we receive our instructions for this particular day and track, such as where the entry and exit are to pit road. The entrance to pit road is seventy-five feet in front of the first pit box. The exit of pit road is seventy-five feet beyond the last pit box. Most of the instructions from NASCAR are the same week in and week out, and most drivers and crew chiefs can recite them from memory.

That said, these meetings are mandatory for drivers and crew chiefs. In today’s meeting I see my crew chief, Robbie Loomis, for the first time. He’s as good-natured as ever, smiling and speaking to everyone. Robbie and I have become close; we’ve come a long way together in the last couple of years. I just hope we have a good day today, so Robbie, the crew, and I can add a little icing to the good-size cake we’ve been baking all season.

If we finish thirty-second or better in today’s NAPA 500 in Stockbridge, Georgia, our Hendrick Motorsports 24 DuPont Chevrolet team will win its fourth Winston Cup title, joining Dale Earnhardt and The King, Richard Petty, as the only teams to win NASCAR’s highest honor more than three times. Stockcar racing doesn’t have a play-off system or a Super Bowl. The best drivers compete against each other head-to-head thirty-six weekends a year at racetracks all over the country. Points are awarded for finishing positions. At the end of the year, the driver with the most points earns the Winston Cup trophy. Winning a lot of races usually translates into winning the championship, but not always; the system rewards consistency. You earn points for leading a lap and for leading the most laps. A team with a dozen or more second-place finishes might earn the most points even if they never win a race. And a driver who wins three or four races but wrecks a dozen times probably won’t win the title.

We’d won our fair share of races in 2001, but I’ve been in this position before, and I know it’s never a good idea to get too far ahead of myself. A good finish locks it up for us, and simply starting the final two races secures the championship, but I’m not taking anything for granted, especially this year. This season has been different for all of us. If we win this championship, I know it will be the biggest accomplishment of our careers.

I won my first Winston Cup title at age twenty-four, becoming the youngest champion in the modern era of the sport. That was an emotional time for our team, but even though I knew it was a big deal, a twenty-four-year-old man looks at things a lot differently from someone with a few more years behind him. When I won the title again at age twenty-six and a third time at age twenty-seven, people began to question whether I understood and appreciated what our team had done. Some fans and journalists said I hadn’t paid my dues. Others said I wasn’t old enough to grasp how tough our sport could be. But they were all saying the same thing: they thought I was too young to get it. I don’t believe that was the case; I knew what it meant to be champion, and I was certainly aware of the significance of winning at my age. Still, winning a championship at twenty-four was different from winning at thirty-one. Taking the Winston Cup trophy back to our shop in 1995, 1997, 1998, and finishing second in 1996 was thrilling, but I was young. Every race I won was a joyous experience, but not long after the check presentations and press conferences, I turned my attention to the next week, the next race, and the next goal.

Now, a little older and a little wiser, I see things from a different perspective. This championship will be a first for most of the members of my 2001 team. The crew chief, pit crew, and many of the engineers and support staff weren’t with me during our previous three championship runs. They haven’t felt the pressure of having a title on the line. They’ve never known the exhilaration of touching that big trophy, and seeing your name, the car number, and your team owner’s logo engraved in that mammoth wooden base on which the Winston Cup is perched.

I’ve never seen it the way I see it now, either. Unlike our other championships, I’m now an equity partner, a co-owner of this 2001 team. I’ve had more input in assembling this team than I’ve had since the days when my stepfather and I traveled the country towing a sprint car. I’ve also felt the struggles and the pressures of rebuilding a team, hiring new people, motivating them, teaching them, and keeping them focused on the prize. In previous years, I’ve been the driver, the quarterback of the race team, who leads the effort on race day. Now I’m more involved in all the affairs of the team.

The eyes I look through in November of 2001 have seen plenty of mistakes. At times they’ve burned with frustration. I have stared into the hearts of good men and asked them to dig as deep inside themselves as they ever have.

Today, they are about to deliver.

Robbie and I, along with twenty or so other drivers and crew chiefs, hang around after the drivers’ meeting for the Motor Racing Outreach (MRO) chapel service. Since we travel every weekend, this is the only church service many of us are able to attend. It’s always a good one. In the years I’ve been driving on the Winston Cup circuit, I’ve seen the services grow from a handful of people to a roomful of drivers, crew chiefs, their families, and usually several hundred fans who stand in the back and worship with us.

After the service, I put on my sunglasses and prepare for the trek back to the transporter that hauls both cars—the primary and the backup—as well as all the parts, the pit box, the uniforms, the radios, the diagnostic computers, a television, a desk, a couple of couches and chairs, lunch, dinner, and just about anything else you might need to run a five-hundred-mile race. The transporter is only fifty yards away, but the walk gets a little tricky, especially in Atlanta where several thousand fans have garage and pit passes—credentials that allow them into the garage and transporter area, as well as up-close access to the pits during the race. More than a hundred people stand between the transporter and me. They’re carrying posters, programs, photographs, T-shirts, hats, die-cast cars, and (in the case of some uninhibited women) body parts they want me to autograph. I do what I can to accommodate as many fans as possible, but I can’t spend all day here. That’s where my PR representative, Jon Edwards, comes in. Jon not only handles all my media requests, he keeps me on schedule. Now he’s faced with getting us back to the transporter so I can get ready for driver introductions.

Okay, I need everybody to stand to one side or the other. Give us a lane, Jon shouts to the crowd. He looks like a Secret Service agent decked out in a black leather jacket with matching slacks and sunglasses. The radio earpiece just adds to his air of importance. It’s there for a good reason: he needs to be in contact with the team, and radios are the only way we do that.

Jon does a great job of clearing a path without being too abrasive. It’s a fine line. We don’t want to offend anyone, but we have to be able to move around. I sign as many pictures and souvenirs as I can while I walk, but it’s never enough. I know I’ve missed somebody who has been waiting all morning to get an autograph. In recent years NASCAR has become more popular than Major League Baseball, PGA Tour golf, ATP tennis, and the NBA, and a big part of that popularity stems from the fact that fans have access to drivers, cars, and teams. But you can only see so many people and sign so many autographs. At autograph sessions for my sponsors we’ve worked out a system limiting the number of people to two hundred an hour. If I’m scheduled to appear for three hours, the maximum number of people is six hundred. Those six hundred people will get more than one item autographed, get a photo with me if they want, and I can spend quality time with them. Hopefully, everyone leaves the room having had a pleasant experience. Today, there are six hundred people between the transporter and pit road, and I’ve got about ninety seconds to make that walk. I keep my head up and try to make eye contact with as many people as possible, but I’m sure I miss many. I hope they understand.

By now, 150,000 revved-up fans have found their seats. It’s fitting that we have the chance to lock up the title in the town where the first stockcar race was held. I’ve been told that it was sometime in the mid-1930s when a group of moonshiners carved out a quarter-mile track in a cow pasture a mile away from the current Atlanta Motor Speedway to settle an argument over who had the fastest car. Today, AMS takes up fifty acres and has luxury skyboxes and million-dollar condominiums on the front stretch. Our sport has come a long way.

Once in the transporter I close the door to the lounge, a small area in the front of the trailer with a gray leather semicircular couch, a desk, a laptop, a small closet, and a television. This is my quiet time, the time when I get myself ready for the intensity of the next three hours. I change into my race suit, catch a light bite of lunch, stretch, and tune out everything around me.

Driver introductions are thirty minutes before every race. I gather the team together about five minutes before that. With floor-to-ceiling shelves and cabinets on both sides of the trailer, there’s not a lot of room, but the crew manages to cram into the small corridor for a team meeting just before the race. This has become a ritual. At Robbie’s suggestion, I started holding these gatherings early in our 2000 season when the team was struggling, and many of the newcomers started questioning what was going on in my head. As we won more races and continued to improve throughout the 2000 season, I decided to continue these sessions. The team needs to know I’m with them. At these meetings, I talk briefly about the week, and any last-minute issues with the car, then lead the group in a short prayer and a chant. These aren’t cheers we’ve memorized; the chants are usually one word or one phrase that represents something we’ve worked on or a goal we’re striving to accomplish at a particular track. The chant changes every week, and it’s my way of giving our race-day crew one final we’re in this together pep talk.

This week I have another message. We have an opportunity to lock things up today, I say. But we can’t get ahead of ourselves. This is another race. We’ve run well this week. The car is handling great, and you guys have done an outstanding job.

Like all good crew chiefs, Robbie has learned to anticipate my every word. Still, he remains an attentive listener, especially at these meetings where the crew looks to him for leadership. Cool and collected, Robbie leads by example. He’s been the man at the center of a two-year storm during which time he’s heard it all. Journalists had been saying that Robbie couldn’t step up to the job, that he simply wasn’t up to the task of assembling a crew and running a team the way his predecessor, Ray Evernham, had, or that the successes we had achieved in earlier years had all been because of Ray. These criticisms were unfair and unfounded. Nobody’s worked harder or is more deserving than Robbie Loomis. Now we’re on the cusp of winning another championship, and I can’t wait to see what the experts write now.

We have two races left, I continue. Let’s have a good run. If we do our jobs, everything else will take care of itself. This is code for Don’t focus on the Winston Cup trophy, focus on the race, but I don’t need to spell it out for these guys. They’re professionals.

Any questions? I ask. Does anybody have anything they want to add? Nobody does. We all touch hands in a huddle, just like you see on the sidelines of the Super Bowl, and chant, Finish the job, which is exactly what we have to do.

We’re ready to go racing.

- - - - -

There are no doors on a racecar. Even though the paint scheme and body design give the impression that my Monte Carlo is just like the one you can buy at your local Chevrolet dealer, that’s not exactly the case. Every part, including the chassis, has been manufactured at the Hendrick Motorsports complex in Charlotte according to the NASCAR body template. That’s why the Fords, Chevys, and Dodges look so similar. The engine package delivers eight hundred horsepower, and the springs and shocks on all Winston Cup cars more closely resemble what you’d find on a freight train than what your dealer would recommend for the family sedan. The transmission, engine, and steering all have radiators to keep temperatures under control, and the oil tank has its own hundred-ten-volt heating blanket. Every brace, bracket, belt, and bolt is custom engineered, and each part is scrutinized and tested hundreds of times under the most grueling conditions. We have a team of engineers at Hendrick Motorsports who do nothing but analyze data, test tolerances, calculate drag, weight, resistance, torque, and temperature in an effort to squeeze out a few more horsepower.

The interior of the car looks like something out of a gritty science fiction film. Most of the protective cage is exposed so the crew can make visual inspections. There’s only one seat, custom molded from foam and aluminum to fit my body. (It would be the ultimate easy chair if it weren’t so hard.) The cockpit has a number of gauges and switches that look relatively low-tech; there are no digital heads-up displays, no computer GPS systems; no idiot light telling me my air bag needs attention. There isn’t even a speedometer. When you’ve been racing as long as I have, your butt tells you how fast you’re going. The last thing you need is another dial to watch. I have a tachometer, an oil-temperature gauge, water-temperature gauge, and a voltage meter.

The temperature in the cockpit can climb to 120 degrees, so there’s a small air hose in my helmet, and with the flip of a switch I can blow fresh air into my helmet and suit. This keeps my carbon monoxide intake to a minimum, and it helps cool me down. It isn’t air-conditioning, just outside air venting through the helmet, but it helps. I also have a drink hose in my helmet, a plug for the radio, and a small microphone built into the foam padding near my chin. With earplugs to help muffle the engine noise, I can communicate with Robbie and my spotter, Ron Thiel.

Ron lets me know when a car is on my outside or inside, and when I’m all clear to make a move. He also lets me know what other cars are doing and gives me any information he thinks might help me drive the car faster. Ron was a driver; he ran his