Even if Dale Earnhardt had lived and continued to race, Jeff Gordon would have surpassed him in career victories.
Says who?
Dale Earnhardt Jr., that’s who.
Gordon, with 75, stands at the brink of tying Earnhardt Sr. for sixth, at 76, on the all-time winners’ list for NASCAR’s top circuit.
The best and friendliest time and place for it to happen would be in Sunday’s Allstate 400 at the Brickyard. Gordon already has won four times at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, more than any other NASCAR driver.
“It’s inevitable,” Earnhardt Jr. said during practice. “And he’ll go on and surpass maybe another driver or two.
“I don’t know how many more races Daddy would have won if he had been around,” Earnhardt said. “But in time, even if he’d raced four more years or so, Jeff eventually would have passed him because Jeff’s still in his prime.”
Earnhardt Sr. was nearly 50 when he was killed in the 2001 Daytona 500. Gordon turned 35 Friday, hedging questions about tying Earnhardt and expressing his usual disinterest in statistics and records.
“I just want to win,” he said. “It doesn’t matter to me where it happens, how it happens. I would love to get to 76, but that’s certainly not my goal, when I go out there and start the races, that we have to reach a certain number.”
Gordon already has missed two opportunities since his 75th victory, recorded July 9 at Chicagoland Speedway. But Indy is one of his strongest tracks and one of the few places where he is cheered unanimously rather than booed heavily.
Hoosiers claim the California native as their own because he spent his teen years based in nearby Pittsboro, Ind., working his way up through the ranks of sprint-car racing.
It was winning the 400 of 1994, the first NASCAR race ever run at the hallowed old Speedway, that launched Gordon into the national limelight.
Earnhardt Sr. won the second one and immediately hit the late-night TV talk-show circuit with a time-delayed joke about the prodigy he loved to pick on.
“I was the first man ever to win the Brickyard 400,” Earnhardt Sr. said to David Letterman and others that summer of 1995. He would pause, issue that mischievous grin and ominous glare of his, and add: “Wonder Boy won the first one.”
That was Gordon’s second career victory. After his first, at Charlotte that spring, Earnhardt Sr. had ridden him unmercifully for being “a baby,” for weeping for joy in Victory Lane.
Now Gordon is as tough on the tracks as the Intimidator was–Gordon’s Chicagoland victory came after he knocked leader Matt Kenseth out of the way near the end, and that ill feeling still hasn’t healed completely.
What would Big E think of Wonder Boy now?
“I’m sure he’d have a few words and laughter with him [about the rough tactics],” Earnhardt Jr. said. “A little joke or two.”
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Gordon always has been very aggressive by nature, and simply disguised that early in his Cup career, the younger Earnhardt observed.
“I’ve watched Jeff ever since he came into the sport,” he said. “When he raced in the Busch series he was way more aggressive than he was when he started racing Cup cars.
“So [Earnhardt-esque aggressiveness] is part of his makeup; it’s part of who he is,” Earnhardt said. “But he just decided to take a different route when he got into the Cup series.”
When Gordon shoved Kenseth on the pit road for wrecking him in a race at Bristol, Tenn., last spring, and then when he slammed Kenseth at Joliet, it didn’t surprise Earnhardt.
“I think he has a natural tendency to get as angry as anybody else would in a situation like that,” Earnhardt said of the Bristol incident. “When the tables were turned [at Joliet], he made a split-second decision right there.
“It’s not whether it’s wrong or right. What we’re discussing is how that’s come out in him as a person. And I think it’s OK to be that way sometimes.”
Gordon is excited about Sunday.
Even denying the numbers matter, Gordon would concede that “this track has been good to us. So I feel like our opportunity to win here is good.
“We always seem to shine at this track, and with things going well for us right now, I’m very excited about getting out there,” he said.
“I can’t think of a better place to pull off a win right now for us and gain momentum than right here.”
Gordon also has a chance to tie Formula One’s Michael Schumacher for most career victories at Indy with five–although Schumacher’s mark has been questioned because his Ferrari team has been so dominant generally in the 21st Century and because the 2005 U.S. Grand Prix was a debacle with only six cars.
Gordon is already statistically tied with four-time Indianapolis 500 winners A.J. Foyt, Al Unser Sr. and Rick Mears but has consistently refused to compare histories in the two vastly different races–or with even more-different Formula One.
“I’ve said it a hundred times and I’ll say it again: I can’t compare what we do in NASCAR here to the Indy 500 and those guys . . . and certainly can’t compare to the F1 guys and what they do.
“It’s the same facility as far as the walls are concerned, but it’s three completely different races and series.”
Gordon did confess to gratification that “sometimes I get my name mentioned in the same sentence with those other guys . . . “
Gordon calls Earnhardt Sr. “the all-time great, certainly, who I’ve had a chance to race against.”
But he acknowledges he never raced against Richard Petty, NASCAR’s all-time winningest driver with 200 victories, or David Pearson, who had 105.
Gordon was on the same tracks in the twilight years of Darrell Waltrip, who is tied for third with Bobby Allison with 84 victories. But he never competed against Allison or fifth-place Cale Yarborough, who had 83.
Where does Gordon rank among drivers Earnhardt Jr. has raced against?
“I didn’t race against my dad that much, but I consider him the best,” Earnhardt said. “Jeff has to be second, Jeff and probably Tony (Stewart, reigning Nextel Cup champion and defending champion of this race).”
But statistically Stewart has only 26 Cup victories, and is a long way from tying Earnhardt.
For Gordon, it could happen any Sunday–very possibly this one.
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