Jeff Gordon took a lot of unexpected detours to NASCAR and the Hendrick Motorsports No. 24.
A young hot shoe who moved from California to Indiana, it was actually the Indianapolis 500 that was the intended best-case career scenario and not the Daytona 500 that Gordon ended up winning three times.
But realistically, Gordon thought he could make it as a World of Outlaws Sprint Car star, and spent his formative years working towards that goal. That is why stepfather John Bickford moved Gordon to Indianapolis in the first place.
Gordon became the youngest driver to start a World of Outlaws race at Eldora Speedway in 1984. He made the feature in four of his five overall World of Outlaws appearances.
Speaking on an episode of the Dale Jr Download in 2019, Gordon said he expected to spend the rest of his career in Dirt Sprint Cars.
“All I wanted to do was race these cars,” Gordon said. “That was when I first started racing professionally –where you go to the pay window and they give you a few hundred bucks if you did okay.
“I wasn’t thinking NASCAR at all. Actually, I was thinking World of Outlaws Sprint Cars. I wanted to be a World of Outlaw sprint car driver. My heroes were Steve Kinser and Doug Wolfgang. I got to race with those guys when I was like 14, and it was insane.”
It was in a Sprint Car fielded by Terry Winterbotham in 1988 that Gordon first tasted national success. They won championships at Eldora, Mansfield and Millstream. They scored a couple of podiums with World of Outlaws too.
It didn’t last.
“I get this ride with this awesome team, (and) I’m like, ‘This is my break. This is going to do it.’ I don’t know if I just felt the pressure or if I just didn’t have what it took, but I started wrecking the hell out of this thing and costing this car owner a lot of money.
“I got fired.”
That is how Gordon ended up on pavement, first driving pavement Midgets for Rollie Helmling, who bought the car from Bob East, who in turned recommended Gordon as the driver.
Gordon entered and won the prestigious ‘Night before The 500’ at Indianapolis Raceway Park in his first ever start.
“I went. New track record, won my heat race and won the race,” Gordon said.
Bickford and Gordon thought that would open up a realistic pathway into IndyCar but that group of team owners rejected the driver on the condition that he didn’t bring with him the finding needed to field an entry.
Larry Nuber, the television voice of Thursday Night Thunder on ESPN, suggested Gordon reach out to NASCAR teams. He tested a Hugh Connery-owned NASCAR Busch Grand National car at Rockingham. He impressed in the No. 67 to such a degree that he ended up joining Bill Davis Racing with crew chief Ray Evernham.
Gordon impressed Hendrick
It was during his tenure driving the Baby Ruth No. 1 Ford for Bill Davis Racing that Gordon caught the eye of Cup Series team owner Rick Hendrick — a story the legendary driver detailed in a Hendrick Motorsports social media clip.
“It was at Atlanta, and I was running the Busch Grand National Series for Bill Davis and driving a Ford and (Rick) just happened to be there on a Saturday, which was pretty rare for him,” Gordon said. “He was walking to a suite along the side of the track and saw smoke rolling off the right rear of the car I was driving and it made him stop and look.
“He told the people he was with ‘let’s stop and take a look, I think he has a tire going down or is blowing up or something,’ but I kept going, was still smoking the tire and he was like ‘this kid is going to wreck, who is that’ and they told him ‘that is Jeff Gordon, you might know him from Thursday Night Thunder’ and he said ‘let’s keep watching’ and I won the race.”
It was his first career Busch Series win, which came off three consecutive poles at Rockingham, Richmond and Atlanta to start his second full-time season.
Coincidentally, Gordon was sharing a home with a young engine builder named Andy Graves, who would go on to become one of the sport’s all-time great engineers as well.
“The next day he happened to be on campus at Hendrick Motorsports and at that time Jimmy Johnson was who was running Hendrick Motorsports. He walks into this office and says, ‘a shame, I think that Gordon kid has a deal with Ford.’ It just so happened, one of my roommates, Andy Graves, who was working in the R&D and engineering department, happened to be sitting in there at the time when Rick said this. Jimmy said, ‘This is Jeff’s roommate, maybe he can tell us what the deal is.’ Andy said, ‘I’ll find out but I am pretty sure he doesn’t have a deal next year that locks him in with Ford.'”
“Andy came home and he says, ‘Hey, you are not going to believe this. I was in Jimmy Johnson’s office and Rick Hendrick walked in and asked about you.’ I think the next day I was at Rick’s office and we were talking about how do we get you to Hendrick Motorsports. At that time, there wasn’t even a third team. It was a two-car operation with Ken Schrader and Ricky Rudd as the drivers. I want to say that was March or April in 1992 and by the end of that year, I was driving in my first race as a rookie and starting my (full-time career) in 1993 with Hendrick Motorsports. From that point, the rest is history.”
Historically, Gordon made his first start at Atlanta in the same race that Richard Petty made his final start. It was also one of the all-time great NASCAR races in which Alan Kulwicki won the championship in a five-car natural championship thriller against the likes of Bill Elliott, Davey Allison, Harry Gant and Mark Martin.
From there, Gordon with Evernham and Hendrick became one of the all-time great combinations. They won three championships together (1995, 1997 and 1998) with Gordon adding a fourth in 2001 with Robbie Loomis. All told, Gordon won 93 races at NASCAR’s highest level.
Rainbow Warrior
Even how they ended up driving the iconic ‘Rainbow Warriors’ paint scheme was a matter of random circumstance.
In May 1991, Evernham stopped by the gallery of the late Sam Bass, who at the time was already designing several paint schemes across the sport, to purchase a birthday gift for his driver. Bass already knew that Hendrick had signed them both to a deal to drive a third Cup car and asked a favor in lieu of payment.
“I said I wanted him to do something for me instead,” Bass recalled in a 2016 story. “I told him that I knew he had been hired to be Jeff’s crew chief and I knew they would have the DuPont paint company as a sponsor, and I wanted the chance to design the car.
“He told me that he would see what he could do and call me once he found out. And sure enough, a few months later, he called and said, ‘You’ve got your shot.'”
DuPont fielded designs from 43 different artists but ultimately selected one Bass had at the last minute.
“I actually drew the rainbow car the morning they picked the treatments up,” Bass said. “I had this idea driving to work, that DuPont Automotive Finishes offered a rainbow of colors. I was thinking about the oval on the hood and how the lines above it would naturally form a rainbow. I knew the moment I drew it, that this was the one. I just felt it.”
It wasn’t even supposed to be a No. 24 back then as No. 46 was meant to be Gordon’s original number leading up to that first start at Atlanta. The reason for the change was a licensing issue surrounding the Days of Thunder movie, which was based in part around Hendrick and driver Tim Richmond.
“I don’t know if it was a full-time licensing issue or whatever with the ‘Days of Thunder’ movie or Paramount or whoever, but we had to change to number 24 because we had actually built some and I think we might have tested some cars and actually had some cars with the number 46,” Evernham told SiriusXM Radio back in 2015.
So really, everything related to Gordon and the No. 24 was just a big random circumstance.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.