Editor’s note: This is the second installment in a seven-part series celebrating the 30th anniversary of Jeff Gordon’s first NASCAR Cup Series championship and the first for Hendrick Motorsports in 1995. Join us each Thursday as we relive all the moments and talk to many of the players involved in one of the organization's and the sport's most unforgettable and important seasons.
For Jon.
CONCORD, N.C. - From the outside looking in, Jeff Gordon's meteoric rise from fresh-faced, hot-shot rookie to world-wide racing phenomenon may have seemed like an overnight success story.
Sure, in becoming a NASCAR Cup Series champion at the ripe-old age of 24, perhaps Gordon and the No. 24 team were a bit ahead of schedule in 1995.
After all Gordon and crew chief Ray Evernham, with their open-wheel background, lack of age and experience and unconventional methods and strategies were perceived by the NASCAR garage establishment as outsiders.
In any sport, certain seasons are bound to stand out as tentpole moments. The NFL certainly has had them; for instance the 1966 season, which ended in the first Super Bowl. Or 2001, which ended in Tom Brady's first championship. The NBA will forever have 1979-1980, the rookie seasons for Larry Bird and Magic Johnson.
Gordon's largely unforeseen and rapid ascension to the pinnacle of racing in 1995 certainly included that same kind of historic gravitas complete with a star-making turn from an exciting, young newcomer. But combined with a confluence of other factors - the birth of the Gordon/Dale Earnhardt rivalry, an explosion of popularity in the sport and the arrival of a new, game-changing race car - the year served as a permanent and landmark changing of the guard that lifted Gordon, Earnhardt and NASCAR into the upper reaches of the cultural zeitgeist forever.
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Yet, every rocket ship needs a launching pad. And long before the 24 team's formative years in 1993 and 1994, seasons in which the team steadily built chemistry and momentum toward what would become one of the most dominant and defining eras in American motorsport, the foundation was being laid under the careful leadership and sculpting hands of Rick Hendrick.
By 1995, Hendrick's venture into stock car racing was an American success story in and of itself, chocked full of storybook moments and driven by the same sort of competitive obsession and outside-the-box approach that would define the 24 team in the coming seasons. Scattered throughout Hendrick Motorsports' first decade-plus of operation were wins in all of NASCAR's major events - the Daytona 500, the Southern 500, the Coca-Cola 600 and the inaugural Brickyard 400, won by Gordon in 1994.
Thirty-eight victories in all and yet, somehow, a Cup Series championship had continued to elude Hendrick. There were close calls: Ricky Rudd finished second in 1991 points, Tim Richmond was third in 1986 while Darrell Waltrip won six races in 1989 and finished fourth. Even the year prior in 1994, Ken Schrader came home fourth. All told, 21 times in the company's first 11 seasons, a Hendrick Motorsports driver had finished in the top 10 overall.
"... a championship is different. It's the ultimate team accomplishment. I wanted it for our people. For everyone who worked day and night, for the teammates who missed time with their families, for everyone who believed in what we were building."
Rick Hendrick
Certainly, by the midway point of the 1990s, there was a sense of urgency within the organization to check the last box. But none who were around in those days who spoke to HendrickMotorsports.com for this series recalled any rah-rah speeches or demands from the team's leader. It's not Hendrick's style.
But Hendrick wanted that title. And everyone knew it.
“I knew they had been close. I don’t really remember having that conversation with Rick though, he has a unique way, especially back then, to motivate you,” Gordon told HendrickMotorsports.com. “He’d even come on the radio and say, ‘If you win this, you might have a boat show up at your house or a car show up in your garage.’ We didn’t need that, but it was more of, you knew how much it meant to him. But I think he was feeling the pressure too. I think we all were. And he wanted to get that championship badly.
“But you’ve got to remember, the first two years I was pretty aggressive," he added with a laugh. "So, I don’t think he wanted to push me too hard. We needed to finish some races.”
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Now, three decades later, Hendrick admitted that his desire to win a title was indeed intensifying by the season. But maybe not for the reasons one would think.
"We’d been fortunate to win a lot of big races by then – the DAYTONA 500, the Coca-Cola 600, the Brickyard – but a championship is different," Hendrick told HendrickMotorsports.com. "It’s the ultimate team accomplishment. I wanted it for our people. For everyone who worked day and night, for the teammates who missed time with their families, for everyone who believed in what we were building. I knew we had the people to do it. I just wanted to see them get the reward.”
As the decade turned from the 1980s to the 1990s, Hendrick upped the ante in that pursuit.
Retool and refocus
Even arriving late in 1992, Evernham quickly observed the doubling down on car building and performance had already begun.
“When we talk about ’95, you have to go all the way back to the changes in ’93 and ’94 that Mr. Hendrick was making within the company,” Evernham recalled. “It was really changing then development wise. We were bringing in engineering, changing the way the cars were built, and we’d really strengthened the engine department and the car department.”
One of the initial stepping stones was the team's first chassis, 'Dusty', which was run at Talladega Superspeedway in 1990 with Greg Sacks finishing second. Two months later, he took the pole at Daytona International Speedway, which sparked confidence and intensified the desire to become an all-in-house race team.
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As Larry Zentmeyer, current Hendrick Motorsports CNC shop manager remembers, a little movie magic aided in further pushing those efforts.
Hendrick Motorsports provided cars and stunt drivers in addition to serving as a source of inspiration for the film, "Days of Thunder," filmed early in 1990. While the movie certainly put the sport in front of bigger audiences, Zentmeyer, who was hired in 1987, said it also served as a turning point for the company.
“We started building our own cars right after ‘Days of Thunder’ and I think we started honing in on what we were doing there,” Zentmeyer recalled. “During that era is when we started building our own cars from scratch. There was a learning curve there and once we got our feet on the ground with building a proper chassis, then it started rolling.”
Jeff Andrews, who is now the president and general manager of Hendrick Motorsports, came aboard late in 1991 to work in the engine department under lead engine builder, Randy Dorton. He too recalled a ramping up of efforts around the organization in the years leading up to '95.
“I do remember Mr. Hendrick’s emphasis on wanting to get resources pulled together and get everybody pulling in a common direction,” Andrews said. “And for sure, spending some money on chassis and development and aero-development and bringing some key people in here and that really started with the construction of building our own chassis. Also bringing in some lead General Motors aerodynamicists to try and understand the aero side of the vehicle. We were getting a lot of funding from General Motors on the engine side to advance engine development. It was definitely a time of transition, and it went in phases. It took us a lot of time and a lot of work and certainly, a lot of Mr. Hendrick’s money, to get it to where it is today, under one roof and four race teams pulling together.”
For Andrews, Zentmeyer and the rest of the engine shop, the early part of the 1990s was a time of rapid technological advances coupled with enough leeway within the NASCAR rulebook to allow for ingenuity and experimentation.
Zentmeyer, in particular, recalled a few, 'a-ha' moments born from primitive practices, all aiding in speed and durability for the years to come.
“I know we were having problems breaking the front of the snouts off of the crankshafts in the early 90s and Randy Dorton came up with a way to address that situation,” Zentmeyer explained. “Him and Sonny Bryant (owner of Bryant Racing, an outfit that specialized in custom crankshafts) basically ended up putting a big block snout on a small block crank and got creative with some fasteners and we put a stop to that.
“The snout on the front of a crank on a small-block Chevy was relatively small. We were snapping those things off and Randy came up with a way to take this real long -basically a stud more than a bolt - and we would set the cranks up in a Bridgeport and we’re hanging the crank off the side and it’s below the table. We’ve got the head all turned around and we’re drilling the front of that snout and drilling it deeper to where you’re actually getting into the meat of where the number one main (bearing) is and putting the threads there with this long stud fastener. So, you end up putting the snout in compression because you’re actually squeezing all that together.
“This is early 90s technology. We used to take a rod and slide it through the oil hole of the crank and then bring our drill down and touch off of that and then back up, however much it was, and that was how we knew how far to drill down. And you’re doing all this by hand and you’re like, ‘Oh my God, if I break into this oil galley, this crank is scrap.' We did that for a while.”
Coopetition and the growing pains of team racing
It's said that iron sharpens iron.
At Hendrick Motorsports in the early 1990s, the same could be said about steel and fiberglass.
The landscape of team racing that encompasses the sport today - an organization's cars sharing a garage, crew chiefs exchanging information, free accessibility of SMT data, etc. - was a far cry from the temperature of the shops back then.
Andrews, an engine builder for the No. 5 Hendrick Motorsports team in 1995, has seen and had a hand in the growth of collaboration that has helped sustain the company as the years have gone by. However, in the mid 90s, in-house rivalries were only heightened by the pursuit of a long-awaited first championship and the battle lines were clearly drawn.
“There was no doubt, that 24 group, led by Ray, was emerging as kind of the top team on campus and that lit a fire in a lot of other teams around here, specifically the one I was associated with,” Andrews said. “We wanted to beat those guys, really bad. (5 team crew chief) Gary (DeHart) would push very hard.
“It was a bit of a closed-door thing where each of us individually were trying to make more power and bring different things to the table and spending way too much money doing it. It was incredibly inefficient, looking back at it now, but it was a good competition.”
And it was a competition that involved three teams, three crews and three drivers.
Schrader, who by the start of 1995 was the clear elder statesman of the group entering his seventh year with the company, recalled conversations with Hendrick and hearing his grand vision of how a multi-car operation should function.
“I know Rick was looking ahead more than other teams and looking at all the different avenues with the engineers and stuff,” Schrader said. “There were a lot of crew chiefs and drivers that didn’t buy into the team concept as far as sharing. He was explaining it to me, how the dealerships worked and stuff and I said, ‘This seems like a no-brainer to me.’ Just the way everything worked as far as thinking big team and not just your car.”
While Schrader was rooted in place with the 25 team and Gordon and Evernham went full time with the 24 in 1993, it was time for a change in the No. 5 the following year. After his championship near-miss in '91, Rudd followed with a seventh-place finish in 1992 and after a 10th-place showing in 1993. He chose to leave the organization to build his own race team.
With that news beginning to trickle out by May of 1993, Hendrick began the search for a replacement. Terry Labonte, meanwhile, just happened to be looking for a new opportunity with his second stint at Hagan Racing coming to a close.
The 1984 Cup Series champion, Labonte brought experience and his title-winning pedigree to Hendrick Motorsports' campus for a visit in the fall of '93. But it was what the organization presented to him that had Labonte excited.
“A couple of the guys that worked at Hagan knew I was going to go do something different and I told them, ‘You all have no idea how good we’re doing with what we have to work with. There’s a whole other world out there,’” Labonte laughed. “We weren’t even close to what we were racing against. I knew when I went there and toured the facility with Gary DeHart and Randy Dorton and then Mr. Hendrick joined us about halfway through, I said (Hendrick Motorsports) had everything to win a championship, without a doubt. There was no question in my mind. They had all the pieces in place, and it was just a matter of time before they had it put together.”
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Entering his 17th year in the sport, Labonte had accomplished many things in his career already. But one thing he hadn't experienced was driving for a multi-car operation.
Echoing Andrews and Schrader, Labonte also recalled some rough patches in the early days of team coopetition.
“You would not believe all the people that said, ‘Man, I don’t know if that’s a good idea,’” Labonte said. “Everybody said, ‘You’re going to get the third car, all the leftover stuff.’ I just said, ‘Well, it’s better than what I’ve got right now.’
“There were times it wasn’t that great. I can remember DeHart asking me one day, ‘Hey, have you talked to Ray Evernham lately?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I spoke to him last week at the track,’ and he said, ‘I haven’t talked to him in three months.’ Those guys competed against each other. There were some challenges with that team deal and it took a while to get everybody to buy in.”
Whatever the challenges and in spite of the warnings, Labonte found success almost immediately at Hendrick Motorsports.
Prior to his first season with the team, Labonte hadn't won a Cup Series race since taking the checkered flag at Talladega Superspeedway in 1989, carrying a winless skid of 129 races into the 1994 season. In just his seventh race behind the wheel of the No. 5, that streak came to an end. The team would win three events that season, finishing seventh in points, one spot ahead of Gordon.
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Suddenly, in new equipment with a fresh outlook, Labonte was rediscovering his championship form. Gordon had certainly taken a step forward in 1994, winning his first two races, but Andrews said the prevailing thought was that if Rick Hendrick was to break through in 1995, it would likely be with Labonte in the cockpit.
“Mr. Hendrick put Terry Labonte in that 5 car and there was quick success and multiple wins and it was thought and felt that it was probably our lead car for a potential championship,” Andrews said. “It was a tremendous quest to be that team that brought the championship to Mr. Hendrick first. I don’t think any of us on this campus expected that to be the 24 team.”
The most productive blind date in racing history
In the fall of 1990, not long after "Days of Thunder" wrapped, in a hotel lobby in Charlotte, the most productive professional blind date in auto sports history was taking place. Unbeknownst to Hendrick, the two central characters in what would become his championship fairy tale were getting acquainted.
That’s where Evernham first connected with Gordon. It was an introduction set up by Andy Petree, who would go on to play a pivotal role in 1995 as well, serving as the crew chief for Earnhardt.
At the time, Petree was atop the box for Harry Gant and the No. 33 Leo Jackson Motorsports Oldsmobile. As Petree tells it, he was approached by Jackson and tasked with putting together a Busch Series operation for his son-in-law, Hugh Connerty, who had a certain young driver in mind.
“He came back from a weekend off and said, ‘Hey, I’ve got a problem. My son-in-law bought a car that he wants to run in the Busch Series, and he’s got this kid he wants to run in it. He bought this car, and we’ve got to run it for him,’” Petree recalled in an interview with HendrickMotorsports.com. “We had a small team anyway and we were trying to run for a championship with Harry, so I said, ‘Look, we don’t have the bandwidth for that.’ He said, ‘Well, we’ve got to figure it out.’”
Like many in the racing scene, Petree was already aware of Gordon, due largely to his exploits on “Thursday Night Thunder”, a now-defunct ESPN series showcasing United States Auto Club dirt and pavement midget and sprint car events from around the country.
So Petree turned to friends Phil and Steve Barkdoll for help in preparing the car. As far as someone to call the shots atop the pit box, Petree thought of Evernham, who he’d formed a friendship with after working together in the IROC series.
Evernham recalled his first encounter with Gordon in his book, “Trophies and Scars”, claiming Gordon’s mother, Carol, accompanied the young driver as he was too young to rent a car. But regardless of Gordon's youth, Evernham said the connection betwixt the two was apparent from the start.
The memory that most sticks out to Gordon, wasn't necessarily that first impression, but a now-legendary test session shortly thereafter at Charlotte Motor Speedway. Working with Evernham his first time in a stock car, Gordon displayed his raw talent from the start, clocking faster lap times than reigning Busch Series champion, Chuck Bown.
It was the rapport with Evernham that day and the instant feeling that the pieces were falling into place that now resonate with Gordon.
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“Just instantly, it was, ‘Oh man, this guy is on it. He’s sharp. He’s listening to me. He’s got confidence in me and I have instant confidence in him,'" Gordon said.
Gordon failed to qualify in his first Busch Series attempt at Charlotte Motor Speedway. In his second try, he put his No. 67 Pontiac sponsored by Outback Steakhouse on the outside of the front row before a crash relegated him to a 39th-place finish.
The following year in 1991, Gordon was nabbed by Bill Davis Racing for a full-time Busch Series campaign. Davis had gotten his start just a few years prior, building cars for Mark Martin, a friend from Arkansas who had signed in 1988 to run in the Cup Series for Jack Roush.
At Martin’s insistence, Davis relocated to the Charlotte area and spent the 1988 and 1989 seasons backing his Busch efforts. In 1991, Martin would run just one race in the Busch Series, at North Carolina's Hickory Motor Speedway. But his garage shared a space with a young driver-crew chief combination, one that made an immediate impression on him.
“My Busch car was in the same shop as (Gordon’s). Him and Ray Evernham were eyeballing the hell out of my race car and asking a lot of questions,” Martin told HendrickMotorsports.com with a laugh. “They were good learners and good racers. They saw what I was doing to my car and took it further. I respected that. That’s what racers do.”
Gordon expressed how integral a role Martin played in his career in his formative days, weeks and months as a stock car driver.
“I tapped into Mark on a regular basis,” Gordon concurred. “The very first time I’d heard of that car and team was watching him dominate a (Busch Series) race at Dover before I ever got the call. And then I get that call from Ford and it’s like, ‘It would be this car,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, I know that car. I just saw Mark Martin dominate in that car.’”
“So, because of that relationship and interaction and getting to meet Mark in that way, I just became a big admirer of his, but I also picked his brain as much as I possibly could because I knew how good he was. He knew a lot more than I knew and I didn’t know anything about stock car racing at that time. So, I needed somebody to gather information from and there was nobody better I could’ve gotten that from than Mark.”
Gordon would score the first NASCAR win of his career the following season at Atlanta Motor Speedway. Martin, who is still the second-winningest driver in the history of the Busch Series (now Xfinity Series) with 49, finished eighth in that race, driving for Roush.
By then, Martin had long known what everyone else was only beginning to discover.
“They had speed from day one,” Martin said of Gordon and Evernham. “It was never a question of, ‘If?’ It was a question of, ‘How long was it going to take?’
“We knew the potential was there. It was just a matter of time.”
And Petree knew it too. So much in fact, he went to Jackson with a proposal for a succession plan for Gant, who would turn 52 after the 1992 season.
“I knew Harry was getting older and I begged Leo to hire Jeff, and he was adamant that he hadn’t proven himself yet,” Petree said. “I said, ‘OK,’ but I felt like that was my shot to win a championship.”
Arriving at Hendrick Motorsports
Just how and why Gordon slipped through the fingers of Cup Series owners throughout the early 90s remains one of the mysterious and miraculous fortunes of Hendrick Motorsports.
But Hendrick has long had an eye for talent and the ability to maneuver pawns on the chessboard, pairing the right people at the right time to achieve success. And he's never been afraid of taking a risk. Or being ahead of the curve.
The first time Rick Hendrick laid eyes on Gordon was as he took his car to victory lane that same fateful day in Atlanta.
And Hendrick wasted no time.
As Gordon told HendrickMotorsports.com’s RJ Craft in January of 2024:
"(Hendrick) was at Atlanta and I was running in the Busch Grand National Series for Bill Davis and driving a Ford. He just happened to be there on a Saturday, which was pretty rare for him. (He) was walking to a suite along the side of the track and saw smoke rolling off the right rear tire of the car I was driving.
"It made him stop, look and tell the people he was with, 'Let’s see what’s going on here. He’s got a tire going down or he’s blowing up or something.' I just kept going and I was still smoking the tire and he was like, 'This driver is going to wreck. Who is this?’
"They said, 'Oh, that’s Jeff Gordon. You might know him from Thursday Night Thunder. Let’s keep watching.' I went on and won the race.
"The next day he happened to be on campus at Hendrick Motorsports and at that time (former general manager) Jimmy Johnson was who was running Hendrick Motorsports. He walks into this office and says, '... a shame, I think that Gordon kid has a deal with Ford.' It just so happened, one of my roommates, Andy Graves, who was working in the R&D and engineering department, happened to be sitting in there at the time when Rick said this. Jimmy said, 'This is Jeff’s roommate, maybe he can tell us what the deal is.' Andy said, 'I’ll find out, but I am pretty sure he doesn’t have a deal next year that locks him in with Ford.'
"Andy came home and he says, 'Hey, you are not going to believe this. I was in Jimmy Johnson’s office and Rick Hendrick walked in and asked about you.' I think the next day I was at Rick’s office and we were talking about, 'How do we get you to Hendrick Motorsports?' At that time, there wasn’t even a third team. It was a two-car operation with Ken Schrader and Ricky Rudd as the drivers. I want to say that was March or April in 1992 and by the end of that year, I was driving in my first race as a rookie and starting my (full-time career) in 1993 with Hendrick Motorsports. From that point, the rest is history."
Gordon was just 21 years old when he made his first Cup Series start at Atlanta in the 1992 finale, which coincidentally was also the final race for Richard Petty.
And yet, the early returns on Hendrick’s investment weren’t exactly earth shattering, although plenty of race cars returned to the shop in pieces. In 30 races in 1993, Gordon fell victim to 11 DNFs and only registered 11 lead-lap finishes.
“Jeff bounced off of a few things,” Martin said. “He was setting it on fire but he hit a few things. But some guys never learned and you just knew he was going to get his arms around all of that.”
There were signs. Gordon led 230 laps as a rookie and showed improvement late, winning the pole at Charlotte in the fourth-to-last event of the year and later, leading 48 laps before bowing out in the season’s penultimate race at Phoenix Raceway. Ultimately, it added up to a 14th-place finish in the points standings.
The first true shots to the bough of the establishment, however, came in 1994. One of those, of course, was a breakthrough win in the Coca-Cola 600, a crown-jewel event in which a late two-tire pit call from Evernham gave the team the track position it needed.
But Gordon’s first win was a mere body blow compared to the second, a landmark victory at Indianapolis Motor Speedway in the inaugural Brickyard 400. Nearly everyone in the Hendrick Motorsports fold at the time now circle that triumph as the spark that would become the fire in 1995. And for several reasons.
First, the mere prestige of NASCAR’s maiden voyage to Indy cannot be understated. Estimates put the race day crowd around 300,000.
But second and more importantly, for the first time, Hendrick Motorsports’ young driver-crew chief combination went to a track on even footing in terms of experience and notes. And won.
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“We were getting experience, learning to read race tracks, understanding racing and strategies and how the game was played and we won two big races," Evernham said. "We proved when we went to Indianapolis if we could get on common ground with everybody and they didn’t have a 10-year-old notebook, we could win. That gave us a lot of confidence going into ’95.”
Labonte's first impression of Hendrick Motorsports late in 1993 was correct: It was a sleeping giant, an organization on the verge of a title. And in retrospect, Gordon's Brickyard beatdown was certainly a harbinger as to which driver and team that championship would come from.
And regardless of who realized it or not, most of the fragments had snapped into place.
But there was still one, vitally important piece of the puzzle missing.
It was developed throughout the fall and winter of 1994.
It would arrive in 1995.
It came in the form of the meticulously shaped, aerodynamically pioneering, Chevrolet Monte Carlo.