SPEEDWAY, Ind. – On the second day of a family vacation to the south of France, Jeff Gordon received a simple text message.
“Call me,” it read.
The sender? Hendrick Motorsports owner Rick Hendrick.
“If I could scroll through my phone and look at the texts that I’ve gotten from Rick saying ‘Call me,’ I can tell you that you sit down when you call him on those instances,” Gordon said. “It’s usually something pretty big.”
This time around, that proved to be true yet again.
So Gordon sat down and gave the owner a call.
“Of course he’s concerned about Dale, and I said, ‘What are you doing next weekend?’” Hendrick recalled. “He said, ‘Well, I’m going to be in Indy making an appearance.’ I said, ‘Well, if Dale can’t go, bring your uniform.’”
Gordon said it took him only a moment to realize that Hendrick wasn’t kidding.
“I knew right away the seriousness after that -- he wasn’t joking,” the driver said. “Honestly, I didn’t even have to think twice about it.”
The driver flew home from France on Tuesday, and by that evening he was already on campus at Hendrick Motorsports preparing to fill in for Dale Earnhardt Jr. at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Three days later, he was at the Brickyard, ready to climb behind the wheel of the No. 88 Axalta Chevrolet SS.
“When I think about this whole scenario -- I mean, I’m driving in the track last night just going, ‘Wow,” Gordon said. “The last seven days have just been a whirlwind. And the fact that it’s Indianapolis, it’s kind of hard for me to really wrap my brain around it right now.”
The fact that Gordon’s first stint in a NASCAR Sprint Cup Series car since last season’s finale comes at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, where his five wins lead the all-time Cup rankings, is not lost on the 44-year-old.
“Rick (Hendrick) and the whole team have given me a lot of confidence in myself by choosing me and asking me to do this,” Gordon said. “I felt like if there’s one place that I was capable of doing it, it’s here.”