The driver who changed NASCAR forever

Twenty-five years ago, on 29 May 1994, the future of NASCAR, stock car racing and American motorsport changed forever when Jeff Gordon and his crew chief Ray Evernham scored their first career victory together for Hendrick Motorsports.

The most significant and storied partnership in NASCAR history had begun in a North Carolina hotel ahead of a test in 1990. This would lead to a programme in the second-tier Busch Series, and their Cup series debut came in '92 at the season finale at Atlanta. While NASCAR's last proper owner/engineer/driver Alan Kulwicki emerged from a five-way title fight to take the win and the championship crown, and seven-time champion Richard Petty took part in his last race, only later would it be appreciated how significant that race was.

A year and a half later, the first win for Gordon and Evernham - in the Coca Cola 600 at Charlotte - kickstarted an era of utter domination, and would catapult the duo into a battle with one of the greatest of all time, Dale Earnhardt, from 1995 onwards.

"I was pretty young at the time and pretty overwhelmed with everything, so I definitely didn't take enough time to absorb the moment and what it meant to my career, but looking back on it now I certainly have fond memories," Gordon says of that first win.

"Charlotte Motor Speedway was a special track for me. It was one of the first racetracks I ever saw, it's one of the first tracks I practiced at, and it's the first track I took a Cup series pole at.

"I got two wins at Charlotte in 1992 in the Busch Series, so it was a track I felt really comfortable at and I went really quick there from the beginning. I couldn't have picked a better track and a better race. It's a long, gruelling race and it doesn't come easy if you are going to win that race."

The irony of the fact that he'd won his first race in one of the longest single-driver races in motorsport is not lost on Gordon, or Evernham, given the driver's inconsistency on track that year up to that point. Triple champion Darrell Waltrip famously said to Rick Hendrick before the Charlotte race that he wasn't sure about the young upstart: "He's hit everything but the pace car this year!" The problems, either through car issues or Gordon's hit-and-miss start to his life in NASCAR's top tier, made the 600 win all the sweeter.

Late in the race, Gordon - then only 22 - took two new tyres at a caution when his rival Rusty Wallace took four. It was an inspired strategy that jumped Gordon into an unassailable lead. Strategy would become just one way in which the duo changed NASCAR.

Neither Gordon nor Evernham had stock-car backgrounds, which made them stick out like sore thumbs, but it meant a new approach. Evernham wanted to push the rule boundaries as far as possible, shape his car like a bullet, make it as light as he could and even employed athletes to speed up his pitstops. Commonplace in modern motorsport, but unheard of in early-1990s NASCAR.

If Gordon's paint scheme wasn't enough - his pitcrew were nicknamed the 'Rainbow Warriors' for their overalls, which matched the car's outlandish DuPont livery - his Hollywood good looks and Californian upbringing were alien to NASCAR, whose biggest star was old-school southern 'Intimidator' Earnhardt. It was a changing of the guard to the polished and business-savvy series that NASCAR and its teams and drivers would become over the next decade.

The Charlotte victory isn't even Gordon's biggest win from that season

"You can't really know it's a changing of the guard until many years later," Gordon adds. "Now we can look back on it and certainly understand the significance of it. I was trying to make my mark, not only win races but build my own fanbase and my own branding. Even at the time, I realised if we could go and battle against Dale, if it was for a race or a championship, it was huge.

"I realise that was one of the best things that ever happened to me in my career - to go against him. If I could go up against and be successful against the best, it was going to legitimise who I am, elevate the sport and the interest in the sport, and Dale recognised that too, even if he wanted to be the guy who came out on top."

Off the track the two were friends, even going into property business together, but on the track Earnhardt was a beast.

"He taught me a lot about the business side of the sport and the questions I had," Gordon adds. "He was very open to giving me advice. I appreciated that very much.

"When you got to the track, the reason his nickname was 'The Intimidator' was because he lived up to that. He loved to push, shove and bully you and psychologically get in your head, as well as physically push you around. In more of a playful way, and he thought it was fun, but for the rest of us who were on the receiving end of that it wasn't much fun!"

Evernham was a big fan of Earnhardt, and the significance of competing against him was not lost on the crew chief either. Fighting a legendary name motivated both Gordon and Evernham on the path to the 1994 Charlotte win.

"We judged everything we did off Earnhardt - he was the bar," says Evernham. "We were willing to make our cars lighter, to take care of unsprung weight, to do pitstop training. We were doing a lot of things to increase our odds of winning.

"I knew that Earnhardt and the Childress organisation were amazing, right? And then we had Rusty, Mark Martin, Dale Jarrett, these great organisations, and you had to find a way to beat them. It was the small things in lots of different areas. There was no one big gain. We really strategised and made plans a lot to work out how we could beat these guys and win championships."

The Charlotte victory isn't even Gordon's biggest win from that season. The championship visited Indianapolis later that year for its first race at the venue, with 350,000 people turning up on race day to see the inaugural Brickyard 400.

Gordon won, beating Ernie Irvan, who had a cut tyre late on. It was just as significant as the Charlotte win, but both Gordon and Evernham argue that the Indianapolis victory wouldn't have happened without that earlier breakthrough success.

"The significance and history of the Indianapolis Motor Speedway and that inaugural race I think makes that one of the top - if not the top - of my list," adds Gordon, who had dreamed of winning the Indianapolis 500 as a child and had moved to nearby Pittsboro with his family as a teenager.

"But I don't think we would have won there had we not won at Charlotte. Up to that point, we were asking, 'What do we have to do to win, what are we missing?' I don't know that I could have handled the pressure and gone on to win at Indy if we hadn't won that race at Charlotte.

"To me the 600 is one of the biggest races - it was my first race win, and the bigger significance is that it gave us confidence and put us in position to go and win at the Brickyard."

Gordon's biggest legacy - alongside Evernham - is ushering in NASCAR's new commercial area

Evernham adds: "For Indy we built a special car, we were fast and he had a heck of a race. It allowed people to see we were legitimate, and to see Jeff's talent. They saw we could build a great car. The Indy win gave us the confidence to go into 1995 and go head to head with the rest to fight for the championship."

Gordon won titles with Evernham in 1995, '97 and '98. He dominated TV commercials and cereal boxes, becoming one of the US's best-known sportsmen. From the start of '95 to the end of '99, Gordon took 104 top-fives in 161 races, 47 wins and an average finishing positon of 9.5. For context, over the same period Earnhardt scored 51 top-fives and 11 wins.

It was an incredible time, during which Evernham rallied the troops and pushed for excellence and innovation in every area, while Gordon took care of the action on track.

"He was good until the pressure is on, and as soon as that pressure is on he's great," Evernham adds of Gordon. "Or maybe he's great all the time and then he becomes phenomenal."

There's no doubt that Gordon should have won more than four titles (if you use the standard points system rather than the end-of-season Chase, he would have matched Earnhardt's seven).

But his biggest legacy - alongside Evernham - is ushering in NASCAR's new commercial area, opening it up from what many deemed to be a fairly backward, southern championship to one that became attractive to investment bankers on Wall Street and 'rednecks' in equal measure. A quarter of a century ago, NASCAR changed forever.

Images courtesy of Charlotte Motor Speedway and Indianapolis Motorspeedway