Rare is the race car driver who rolls onto the bad road that is Darlington Raceway and feels relatively comfortable from the opening laps.
Jeff Gordon was a rare race car driver.
Racing in a Cup event for the first time at Darlington in March 1993, Gordon, then a rookie, was battling eventual race winner Dale Earnhardt and Mark Martin for first place on lap 100 when his car was slammed in the rear by Michael Waltrip. What should have been a fine day for Gordon ended in a 24th-place finish.
But Gordon, then 21 years old, had met Darlington and proved to be up to its challenge.
“I was running third in that race,” Gordon said. “I won’t say what happened because it’s not a fun subject, but we were having an amazing day in our first day at Darlington. That place was always special to me.”
Special, indeed. During a decorated Hall of Fame career, Gordon won seven times at Darlington, third on the all-time list behind acknowledged Darlington masters David Pearson (10 wins) and Dale Earnhardt (nine). Gordon won the Southern 500 a record six times, including four straight.
“For whatever reason, for me and for Hendrick Motorsports, whatever we were doing seemed to fit always there,” he said. “At the time, we were just going to the next race, and you know you’re in a car capable of winning and that if you don’t win, you’re disappointed. We were stacking up a lot of wins. Ray Evernham (crew chief) and I were both in awe of what we did together and doing things that in some ways will never be done again.
“When I got to Hendrick Motorsports, the cars were better than I was, and I had to catch up. As my experience level grew, we grew together and did a lot of great things together. So, to me, Darlington was always a track where I felt pretty comfortable where a lot of other people were like, ‘Oh, it’s so intimidating and the most difficult track.’ I didn’t see it that way because right away it was just a track that I seemed to feel comfortable at.”
Gordon said he picked up tips about Darlington and other tracks by watching Earnhardt.
“I finally saw a couple of things where I realized, oh, it’s not his car. He’s doing that,” Gordon said. “He’s understanding how to back up the car to the car behind him to get people to go with him and using that to have an advantage or to make a pass when I didn’t think you could.”
Now Gordon is on the other side of pit wall, supervising Hendrick Motorsports’ efforts and drivers William Byron, Kyle Larson, Chase Elliott and Alex Bowman in Sunday’s Southern 500 at Darlington as the Cup Series playoffs begin.
“It’s always been a challenging race track, but we could kind of pace ourselves in the late 1990s,” he said. “I think now you’re just living on the edge, even that much more because you can’t give up a position, and there’s just not as much give and take.”
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