Jeff Gordon looking for a Hollywood ending

Jeff Gordon rose in the West, bringing Californian looks and Californian attitude to the motorsport associated with moonshine and the rural Deep South. While Dale Earnhardt, a son of the Carolinas, dressed in black and white with a take-no-prisoners attitude, Gordon smiled and wore the rainbow, his No. 24 car shining bright in the iconic DuPont paint scheme. He won rookie of the year in 1993, and the 1995 Cup championship in just his third full season, not long after his 24th birthday. Then he won it another three times for a dominating four championships in seven years.

He won three Daytona 500s. He hosted Saturday Night Live, appeared on magazine covers, gave this weathered-face, cigarette-smoking, beer-guzzling sport a decidedly corporate look that it rode to overwhelming success in the first decade of the new millennium.

Yet Gordon’s sun will set in the East, at Miami-Homestead Speedway a scant 10 weeks from now. Gordon remains a name brand -- being the winningest driver in the modern era is a key point on his resume -- but he hasn’t managed to find Victory Lane in this, his final season. He no longer stands out in a pack of Stepford drivers, handsome faces made for television commercials and cardboard cutouts in stores.

But he and the 24 team will always be remembered, always be celebrated, as Gordon makes his final loop around the circuit. Fortunately for Gordon, and for NASCAR fans, he still managed to qualify as the 13th seed in the Chase for the Sprint Cup playoffs, one of 16 drivers on equal footing each with a chance to call themself the 2015 champion.

“I would have been very disappointed had we not made the Chase,” Gordon said. “So, I’m glad we made it and these guys have worked hard. They deserve to be in it. And that means a lot; especially in my final year; and to know that 11 out of 12 Chases, we’ve made it. So that’s why there is a lot of relief and we’re not done yet. We’re going to work hard and see what we can do and see how far we can go.”

Gordon’s Chase status was in doubt until nearly the end.

He won four times in 2014, including the final race of the Chase Cup’s first round. He advanced to the final eight, finishing second at Martinsville to put himself in a good position to advance to the championship round. But a 29th-place finish at Texas after having his tire cut down by Brad Keselowski while racing for the lead during a green-white-checkered finish meant he had to win or have a little assistance in Phoenix to advance. He finished runner-up and could only speak about his disappointment as four others advanced when Ryan Newman passed Kyle Larson on the final lap.

“We did everything so good this year,” Gordon said after the race. “That one race is going to stick with me for a little while. I got over it this week, knowing that we could come here and compete like this. Now it makes it sting that much more.”

Two months later, in January, he announced 2015 would be his final season. 2015 did not pick up where 2014 left off. With three top-five finishes in 26 races and 13 top-10s, Gordon may have done enough to sneak into the Chase, but he has struggled too often to elicit feelings that he has any real shot at winning it. He earned three poles but has finished no better than 18th with them and has led just 167 laps all year -- and just six in the last 16 races.

To say this isn’t how Gordon pictured his final season would be cliche. After the way he finished last year, the success he had and the championship he was so close to, 2015 wasn’t supposed to be a victory lap. It was supposed to be a victory. But although Gordon has had to put a little extra time into the off-track activities that go hand-in-hand with being a star in the sport -- as well as receiving gifts ranging from a blackjack table at Las Vegas to a grandstand named in his honor at Bristol -- he’s not accepting “distractions” as the blame.

“I think when I look at certain races this year, I feel like there have been races where I’ve performed very well,” Gordon said. “And I feel like there have been ones that I haven’t performed as well as I would have liked. But, overall, if I had to put my finger on where we’ve been missing it, it’s not because of distractions.”

While fellow Hendrick Motorsports drivers Jimmie Johnson and Dale Earnhardt Jr. have combined for six wins, 23 top-fives and 34 top-10s, earning the Chase’s first and sixth seeds, respectively, the 24 team hasn’t been able to replicate the success -- yet. Gordon hopes his team will continue making the adjustments to match the speed of other teams.

“I think we are behind as an organization,” Gordon said. “I think we are behind as the No. 24 team. We are missing some speed and we are working hard to try to find it. It’s very competitive out there. Some other organizations have gotten ahead of us. You don’t just find that overnight. It is certainly not from a lack of effort, but we are in the position that we are in right now not because we are not performing well enough. It’s because we are having … the brake line at Watkins Glen, getting caught up in that wreck at Indianapolis, just things that are a little bit out of our control. ... We are not where we want to be.”

Now age 44 and nearly 23 years removed from his then-Winston Cup debut, Gordon took a humble view of his NASCAR legacy when speaking before the start of the 2015 season. He says he just happened to be top driver at the time the sport was really beginning to take off. He doesn’t take credit for its success.

“To me, when I think back and maybe it’s just my way of looking at it, my personality, is that I was one of like a hundred different things that were going on in the sport at that time that were good decisions, good choices, good things happening,” Gordon said not long after announcing his decision to retire following this season. “That really contributed to the sport growing at a fast rate and giving opportunity.”

Growing up in northern California before moving to the outskirts of Indianapolis as a teenager, he came in feeling like the outsider, feeling like he wasn’t accepted, feeling like he had to do something to earn respect. That all has changed. Ninety-two wins and 23 years of racing others in the same manner he expects of others will do that. He won the respect of the drivers on the track, and the respect of the fans off it -- even those of Earnhardt.

“You always, first and foremost, want them to recognize your ability in the race car as being above most or at a high level,” Gordon said, speaking about what he would like to hear as his legacy. “You want to be respected as a competitor and the way you went about it, how much passion you had for it and just how good you were at what you did. ”

But first he’d like to win just a few more times, to give the fans a reason to stand and cheer for his current accomplishments, not his past. These final 10 races give him a chance. He knows that when the Chase begins, the points get reset. What a driver did in the preceding six months gets wiped clean.

“I’m very competitive,” Gordon said. “But if I just take one step back, this has been one of the best years I’ve ever had. Things like this, just reminiscing with long-time friends and family and people that have been a part of my career. Just interacting with the fans, talking with the media, this is a highlight of my career.

“I have thoroughly enjoyed many aspects of this year and I have no second thoughts about it at all. I’m very much looking forward to the future, but I’m also looking forward to working my butt off to give this team everything that I’ve got this year to close it out the best we can.”

Closing it out with a fifth and final championship would be the ultimate Hollywood ending for the kid from California who, whether he knows it or not, forever changed the sport.