NASCAR drivers owe huge debt of gratitude to Gordon
Joey Logano launched his seventh NASCAR Sprint Cup season two weeks ago by winning the Daytona 500. He’s still just 24 years old. He owes Jeff Gordon a huge debt of gratitude.
Kyle Busch, not yet 30, has amassed 141 victories in NASCAR’s three national series. He achieved the first two of his 29 in the premier Cup series as a rookie in 2005 at age 20. He, too, should be thanking the racing gods for Gordon.
Brad Keselowski lofted his Cup championship trophy at age 28, in only his third full season. He clearly needs to join the chorus of appreciation for the four-time champion who this year is writing the climactic chapter in an iconic driving career.
Gordon, 43, has announced that 2015 will be his final season at the wheel of Hendrick Motorsports’ No. 24 Chevrolet. With his 93 Cup victories exceeded only by Richard Petty and David Pearson in a far different era, he ranks among the legends of the game.
Additionally, his four titles are surpassed only by the seven achieved by Petty and Dale Earnhardt and six by Hendrick teammate Jimmie Johnson. Gordon’s trophies include three for Daytona 500 triumphs and a record five collected in Indianapolis’s Brickyard 400.
There is little left to accomplish. But he demonstrated in an uplifting four-victory 2014 season that a fifth crown remains viable.
Gordon’s impact, however, cannot be measured by numbers alone.
Undeniably, he changed the face of NASCAR when he burst onto the scene full-time in 1993 at age 21. He proved quickly and beyond the shadow of a doubt that success in stock car racing’s major league did not require a five-to-10-year apprenticeship.
Owners took note. Talent didn’t come accompanied by a number. It didn’t take a driver in his 30s, with a few wrinkles starting to appear around the eyes and a little graying hair at the temples, to ascend the throne.
Not only didn’t Gordon appear old enough to be driving a car on Daytona’s high banks; he looked too young to be steering a passenger car on the streets. But he became, in retrospect, the father of the youth movement that transformed the sport.
He did it by winning. He was a tender 25 when he hefted his first of four Cup championship trophies in 1995. Midway through that season, he not only was the youngest series regular by two years; he could have been seven years older and remained the youngest active driver with a victory.
Team owner/partner Rick Hendrick asked rhetorically at Gordon’s official announcement in January, “How many of the drivers (active) today would never have had the opportunity if Jeff Gordon didn’t blaze a trail at such a young age?’’
Bill Elliott once talked about how the Gordon-pioneered invasion of dynamic young drivers and their successes altered the landscape and forced veterans like him to “really change the way (they) look at things. If you’re not willing to change, you’re going to get pushed out.”
Elliott could not have foreseen then how impactful Gordon’s transforming ascent would prove to be to him personally. Chase Elliott, the son of “Awesome Bill,” won the 2014 Nationwide (now Xfinity) championship. At 18, he became the youngest national series champion in NASCAR history.
In 2016, Chase Elliott will strap into the No. 24.
