James: Jeff Gordon made and left his mark at Indianapolis Motor Speedway
Jeff Gordon and his family had traversed a labyrinthine path from the cozy private suite adjacent the Pagoda courtyard, through a set of glass doors and up a set of stairs. They were in a hurry. Little Ella Sofia didn’t even get to finish her ice cream cone.
Ed Carpenter greeted him on the landing. Simona de Silvestro gazed ahead in a near-trance contradicting Helio Castroneves’s bounding feet as massive headphones barely remained atop his head. Most of the fire-suited drivers in the Indianapolis 500 green room noticed Gordon. Some exchanged greetings. Some continued with their pre-race ritual as the NASCAR star, his wife Ingrid Vandebosch, and children, Ella Sofia and Leo, passed.
Gordon seemed oddly out of uniform, but enthralled.
A record-five-time winner of NASCAR’s Brickyard 400 and the ceremonial pace car driver for the Indianapolis 500 in May, Gordon was led outside to a platform where he was greeted by Mari Hulman-George, the matriarch of the company which owns Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and Florence Henderson, who would soon sing “God Bless America.” He received an enthusiastic kiss from “First Lady of Racing” Linda Vaughn. Crimson residue wiped clear from his cheek just in time, Gordon and his family posed for a photograph.
Minutes later, Gordon’s latest storybook moment at Indianapolis, this one played out in a pair jeans and a casual shirt, approached on the minute-by-minute schedule that dictates pre-race pace. Down another staircase and now on a shaded sliver of the fabled yard of bricks that form a spin under the Pagoda, holding Leo on his arms to keep him close in a crush of drivers and celebrities, Gordon came chest to chest with a familiar face in an eddy of bodies.
Gordon had raced against Juan Pablo Montoya for parts of nine seasons in the Sprint Cup Series before the former Formula 1 driver and 2000 Indianapolis 500-winner returned to IndyCar racing last season.
“Good luck, man,” he said to Juan Pablo Montoya. “You got a great shot at this.”
Gordon had professed the same sentiment about reigning IndyCar champion Will Power earlier, perhaps hedging his bets or just sharing the manufacturer pride, but good enough, as Montoya outdueled his Team Penske partner in the final laps to win open wheel racing’s most treasured event for a second time.
As the 43-year-old Gordon returns to the hulking speedway at 16th and Georgetown exactly two months later — this time to drive the No. 24 Chevrolet instead of a pace car — he can expect to be the center of attention again. Having announced that this will be the final year of a Sprint Cup career that currently stands at 92 wins and four championships, Gordon will likely never again compete at a track where he won the first NASCAR race in 1994, the most recent last year, and three others in between. These laps will count. Very much.
Because as much as Gordon has won at other storied tracks, his roots wind around the Pagoda and push up through the mortar of the yard of bricks. Gordon was a transformative figure in both the history of NASCAR and Indianapolis Motor Speedway, which for most of a century before the incursion of stock cars had been the private cathedral of the open-wheel cars that once commanded the imagination this country’s racing fans.
Gordon’s Indiana and racing pedigrees and success and charisma helped validate a burgeoning NASCAR series with its appearance on the yard of bricks, and the series has held that positon of dominance ever since as the Verizon IndyCar Series gropes to regain its niche. And Gordon’s path from the sprint car tracks of the Midwest to NASCAR’s high banks and high profile diverted the channel for a generation of drivers who might have made it to Indianapolis in open cockpits.
Despite his assertions that he wishes this season to be a final drive for a championship — he is currently winless but within the Chase for the Sprint Cup field on points — Gordon has been presented all manner of gifts from track promoters, from race cars for his children to the renaming of Phoenix International Raceway for a day in his honor. IMS officials haven’t yet announced their offering, but maybe they don’t have to. Maybe the drivers for the Indianapolis 500 had done it best, simply, respectfully, for a man whose success had helped alter the course of their form of racing, in their shrine.
Maybe Carpenter had said it best.
“Thanks for being here,” Carpenter said. “It’s cool.”
And it’s almost over.
Follow James on Twitter @brantjames
PHOTOS: Jeff Gordon through the years