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Blood drained from the faces of baseball purists earlier this year when someone suggested putting advertising on the sleeves of players' jerseys. But NASCAR covers every square inch of a driver's uniform and is proud of it. The right side of Gordon's Chevrolet is plastered with more than 40 logos, and fans say they go out of their way to buy the sponsors' products.
On race day in Bristol, 120,000 fans walk into the stadium wearing roughly half a million racing-related logos. The Winston people are giving away cigarettes. The cars are burning fossil fuel. The noise is obscene. There's a Remington firearms car, a Winston No Bull car, a Skoal car. The smells of raw horsepower, burned rubber and expectorated snuff are cooked by a wicked sun.
This is the most unapologetic, politically incorrect, crassly American spectacle I've witnessed since my last trip to Vegas.
I'm beginning to see the appeal.
Unfortunately, I still don't know the first thing about racing. What's the driver got to do with it, for one thing? Isn't it the car that wins? Ray Evernham, Gordon's crew chief, helps me out a little. Every track is different, so the preparation of the car, and the strategy, changes from week to week. During a race, he and Gordon talk by radio. A half-pound of air pressure in one tire, added or subtracted during a pit stop, can tighten handling and make the difference between winning and losing.
"Jeff has a good car and a good crew, which is a big part of his success," Evernham says. "But he also has something extra, like Michael Jordan and Mickey Mantle had. He has a different sense of time than you and I. He can slow the race down in his mind, see things coming around and react before the next guy." The key in a race, Gordon says, isn't to drop the hammer "but to tell yourself to be calm, be calm, be calm. And just have a lot of patience to let the race unfold."
At the Daytona 500 earlier this year, the entire field tried to gang-tackle him, deliberately closing off the passing lane, so to speak. But near the end of the race, Gordon sensed his moment and pulled a spectacular stunt, diving down off a banked turn to the apron of the track to limbo around two other cars. He won with Dale Earnhardt as close to his bumper as a license plate. Gordon says he drives without fear and that there is a point in every race when "desire overrides everything, and if you really want it badly, special things happen."
Nothing special happens to Gordon in Bristol. He gets into a minor wreck and finishes in sixth place, with his car literally duct-taped together. The week after that, in Goody's 500 in Martinsville, Va., he stays close enough to win but finishes a frustrating third. For the first time in four years, race fans who despise him are smiling.
My notion that the drivers' 750-h.p. days at the track would be followed by even faster nights ends up a wreck too. There's a traveling ministry on the NASCAR circuit, and drivers and their families attend Sunday services in a makeshift chapel near the pits. Gordon and his wife Brooke, a former Miss Winston, are often the first two people at Saturday-night Bible study. On race day she'll give him a verse from Scripture, and he'll tape it to his steering wheel.