Jeff Gordon: His Dream, Drive & Destiny by Joe Garner

Author:Joe Garner [Garner, Joe]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Jeff Gordon, Inc.
Published: 2016-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

Jeff leads the pack at the 1998 Brickyard 400.

If anyone had his eye on the horizon, it was Evernham. “I think he was yearning for more,” Jeff says. “We’d had a lot of success, and I think he was looking for the next challenge, whatever that may be.”

Whitesell saw the same thing in the shop. “Ray had done all he wanted to do as a crew chief. He didn’t necessarily want to stay and click off eight championships so he could say he won the most ever as a crew chief. He had aspirations of bigger, better things for himself.”

Evernham’s restlessness was no secret. As early as the March race at Darlington, he was interviewed by ESPN about how much longer he planned to soldier on through the day-to-day grind of crew chiefing. “As long as it’s fun,” he replied. “And right now, it’s still fun.” A politic answer, perhaps, but in a word, he wanted control, whether that meant a greater hand in steering the Hendrick ship or an opportunity to own his own team.

The fact is, he already was an owner. In late 1998, he and Jeff had launched Gordon–Evernham Motorsports, a Busch Grand National team sponsored by the Pepsi-Cola Company. For Jeff—who, along with Rick Hendrick’s son Ricky, raced the No. 24 Pepsi car on a limited schedule in 1999, his first time in the Busch Series since 1992—it represented a business opportunity, a co-branding arrangement from which both he and Pepsi could benefit. For Evernham, it was a chance to escape the “politics and counterpolitics” of being a Hendrick employee and run things his own way without bureaucratic interference.

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