Junior Feeling At Home With Gordon, Hendrick

(Originally published on Sept. 13, 2008)

Jeff Gordon had not yet supplanted Dale Earnhardt Sr. as NASCAR’s most dominant driver—but according to Dale Earnhardt Jr., his dad must have already known something.
“I was running late models up at North Wilkesboro and he introduced me to Jeff, in 1994,” Junior remembered while he and other Chase participants met with the media in New York Wednesday. “And if my dad introduced me to somebody—he only did that probably 10 times in my life…he was a busy guy, thinking about his race cars, and what he was doing with his life—and for him to take a minute to introduce me to someone, it must have been really important.”
More than a decade later, Gordon and Junior are teammates. And as frustrating as 2008 has been for Gordon, Earnhardt coming to Hendrick Motorsports has been one of the highlights.
“I’m really proud of the way he committed himself to come into the organization and be a part of it,” Gordon said Wednesday. “He could very easily be Dale Earnhardt Jr. and just come in and be lazy and sit back and take his money and do whatever it is that he does. But he doesn’t. He wants to win. You can tell he has that fire in him.”
Whether that fire will produce a championship this year, when the trio of Kyle Busch, Carl Edwards and Jimmie Johnson are such prohibitive favorites, is uncertain. But regardless, the season has been a resounding success for Junior in ways that have nothing to do with wins and losses.
At Dale Earnhardt Inc., NASCAR’s perennial Most Popular Driver, a Daytona 500 champion and the late owner’s namesake was so low on the totem pole he was denied when requesting something as simple as having red car skirts instead of black, to match his No. 8 Bud Chevy.
The reasoning provided to Junior, a merchandising juggernaut: cost containment.
Junior said his team members finally overruled the brass and made the skirts red for the second half of his final season at DEI, as a show of appreciation. In one of the most memorable segments of the documentary “Shifting Gears,” chronicling Junior’s move to Hendrick Motorsports, Rick Hendrick marveled at the fact that Dale Jr. had such a petty issue at his former employer.
Needless to say, Junior got the desired car skirts on his new ride. Having an owner who takes care of those little things is one area in which Junior and Gordon have found an immediate allegiance.
“We both have one thing in common, and that’s looking after Rick, and doing what’s right by Rick,” Earnhardt said. “Rick sort of makes you feel that way and makes you want to do that. Everybody who works for Rick is all in it for Rick.”
Besides his respect for the boss, Gordon says Junior is “hilarious,” a description most would agree with after giving Earnhardt a little time. When he first sat down with New York scribes his head was down and his answers truncated. But after a few minutes getting comfortable in his surroundings, he was including some salty language in lengthy responses, and complaining that Matt Kenseth got a better line when the drivers participated in a Top 12 List on The Late Show With David Letterman Tuesday.
Junior says his teammates have gotten a similar indoctrination.
“Me and Jimmie [Johnson] were buddies and I’ve Jeff forever but they didn’t KNOW me,” Earnhardt explained.
With the introductions out of the way, winning consistently for years to come is all that’s left. And every time Dale Jr. heads into a debrief, he looks across and sees Gordon, a good choice to base his goals off of.
“I know for a long time fans had an unpopular opinion about him, but I always knew who he really was,” Earnhardt said. “I like to outrun the hell out of him because he’s really, really good. And him and my dad even had a rivalry, even though they worked together off the racetrack with some business deals. When you outrun Jeff—remember, he’s gonna go down probably as one of the top-three drivers who came into the sport—so when you go out on the track and you can beat him, you feel good.”
He’s thinking a lot about beating him right now. As the Chase begins, allegiances start to wane.
He’s won a lot of championships, and I haven’t won any,” Junior said about Gordon’s on-track struggles. “So I don’t feel too much sympathy.”