Photo Credit: Noel Lanier
797 starts, four championships, 93 wins, 325 top-fives and 475 top-10s with 24,929 laps led over the course of his career just touch the surface when it comes to the career of Jeff Gordon. On Sunday evening while the sport celebrated a brand new champion, another champion rode off into the sunset. The Ford EcoBoost 400 marked Jeff Gordon’s final race as a Sprint Cup Series competitor.
The Hendrick Motorsports competitor had a solid season in his 23rd year, making his way through each round of the Chase to be one of the four drivers competing for the championship at Homestead-Miami Speedway. While Kyle Busch won the race to score the championship, Gordon would cross the finish line in the sixth spot.
Gordon was strong through the beginning portion, leading some laps before being passed for the lead. However, from there, the handling went downhill and Gordon fell all the way out of the top-10. He would fight back in the final portion of the race to finish sixth.
“I’ll be honest, you know, the competitor in me got a little bit ‑‑ just so caught up in the moment of the race where we took the lead and I got really excited,” Gordon admitted. “I thought, okay, we’ve got clean air, let’s see what we have, and I knew we needed a few adjustments. The track was really slick. I actually felt like when I got ahead of Kyle that we actually pulled away from him. I kind of got excited and got my hopes up there, but then Kevin started coming on pretty strong, and then we had that restart, and you know, I knew when those guys got by me I just didn’t quite have what they had. I was just lacking a couple little things.
And then the sun started going down and it really started changing and we lost a bunch of positions and just couldn’t gain them back. Right now there’s definitely a part of me that is caught up in that moment that we couldn’t make it a little bit better and couldn’t keep up with it. But I thought we showed what we’re made of and what got us here. We fought really hard, fought back, and we finished sixth. For that I’m proud and excited.”
Despite the race not playing out as he would’ve hoped, Gordon isn’t walking away disappointed, as he says he’s learned over the years that the perfect day and perfect life isn’t something that’s possible.
“I think had I won this race and this championship it would have been perfect, and I don’t think I could have accepted that,” he added. “I wouldn’t have known how to.”
Gordon added that it was still a really great day and way to close out his career, beginning with the morning conversation that he had with his mom Carol.
“That just made my day start so amazing, to be able to sit down with her on that day, first thing in the morning, and all the emotions and everything were just able to come out, and then we just had a great conversation,” Gordon stated. “And then my stepdad came in and then a little bit later Ingrid and the kids showed up. It was just perfect.”
Gordon said the conversation with his mother was very emotional, including tears pouring down Gordon’s face as he thanked her for everything that she had done for him and thankful that she could be there with him to experience it.
“It was perfect,” Gordon stated. “And then, yeah, we just kind of followed along those lines with some of that stuff, and I just said to her, ‘Mom, I wish you could have been here yesterday and saw when I walked over the car. It would have blown you away because it blew me away,’ and she’s like, ‘Yeah, John told me a little bit about that and that’s so cool and then we read this article and then we read that. That’s awesome. We’re so proud.’ And that led to some other things I was talking about.
And then we got off to a completely different subject, just talking about my sister and family and life and what’s going on here and there and just stuff like that, had a coffee. We had coffee together.”
The veteran was also appreciative of the comments and compliments from his fellow competitors during pre-race on twitter, saying that it kicked up the emotions on his end.
“That’s just unheard of,” he commented. “That’s just to me unheard of that you’re going to be going out competing against individuals, even the ones we were competing against for the championship, when Kevin Harvick took that picture next to my car, that to me ‑‑ I don’t know if it gets much better than that. In that sense, you’re absolutely right. That sendoff at the drivers’ meeting, you know, drivers are so competitive, and they don’t show ‑‑ they might have it inside them, but to show it publicly, their appreciation for other competitors, just doesn’t happen like that very often, and I really, really appreciate it very, very much.”
Gordon’s reception pre-race continued by the swarm of fans and people that surrounded his car during pre-race festivities, with fans wanting to catch a final glimpse of the superstar. Gordon admitted that he held back a bit pre-race as he wanted to stay focused and keep his pre-race routine on schedule, due to wanting to perform as best as he could on the race track.
“It was very cool and I enjoyed it very, very much, but at the same time, in the back of my mind I’m blocking out some things, getting ready for the race,” he stated. “Those are the things that over the next days, hours, days, weeks, months that I’m going to go relive and just, again, get a huge smile on my face, and probably emotional, as well, for things like that, the way the fans were, you guys. I mean, my gosh, my parents and people keep telling me, Don’t read that one right now. You don’t want to read that one before the race. Wait until after the race. But very complimentary, very appreciative, and I look forward to pulling all those together and seeing ‑‑ it’s very, very cool that the fans and the competitors and the media treated me that way, and I’ll never forget it.”
Gordon knows that he’s leaving his career behind without any regrets, feeling pride in the success throughout his career, and in his final year in being part of the Chase for the Sprint Cup Series.
As he got out of the car post-race, the emotions were evident on the face of Rick Hendrick, the face of the crew guys, and the faces of others around him. However, not Gordon, who held it all together in front of everyone’s eyes.
“I mean, I’m an emotional person, and I show it, but you know, I prefer to do that in private,” he stated. “Just sometimes the moment overwhelms me, and I can’t hold it in. When I was there with Rick Hendrick after the race, it definitely ‑‑ if he’d have kept going with the things he was saying, it was going to get out of control there.
“But yeah, you know, Jordan (Allen), who handles all my what we call driver comforts, he does a lot more than that, but he takes care of my seat, my helmet and steering wheel, all these things that get me ready for a race weekend, and he almost got me going right before the race started because he’s usually the last one that gives me a fist pump before I take off, and he’s all choked up crying when he did it, and I was like, man, you can’t do that right before I’m getting ready to pull off.
“So those guys, they mean so much to me. But I’m not going anywhere. I’m going to see all them, and I get to hug on them all night tonight. We’re going to go have a little party afterwards, and it’s going to be fun, whenever you guys are done with me anywhere.”
