Jeff Gordon, No. 24 team reach stardom with inaugural Brickyard 400 victory | 40 wins in 40 days

Editor’s note: This is the 36th in a 40-part series highlighting 40 of the greatest wins in the history of Hendrick Motorsports to finish its 40th anniversary season. A new installment will be released each day from Nov. 22, 2024 through New Year’s Eve. Votes were taken from Hendrick Motorsports employees as well as representatives of the NASCAR Hall of Fame and Racing Insights with all unanimous selections being ushered in automatically. The remaining wins were deliberated and decided upon by a small panel.

CONCORD, N.C. - Head spinning and stomach rumbling, Jeff Gordon was faced with his first moral quandary in the immediate aftermath of becoming the auto racing world's biggest superstar. 

Just an hour or two before, Gordon had taken the checkered flag to win the inaugural Brickyard 400 at historic Indianapolis Motor Speedway. It was his second career NASCAR Cup Series win, and it came in arguably the biggest and most hyped race in the history of the sport. 

Soon would come trips to Disneyworld, full-page Chevrolet adds, billboards and spots on national TV shows. But that would wait. In that moment, Gordon, who'd turned 23 years old earlier that week, only had one thing in mind. 

“I was whipped and starving and I’m like, ‘What’s the fastest, best thing we can get. Let’s get pizza,’” he recalled with a smile in a recent interview with HendrickMotorsports.com. “So, I called a Pizza Hut, I think it was, that was down the street and placed an order. As we’re winding down the call, they said, ‘We just want to give you a heads up that there was a race at the speedway, so there’s a lot of traffic and there’s a pretty good chance it’s going to be like two hours.’” 

HENDRICK MOTORSPORTS 40 WINS LIST: See all wins that have made the list so far!

SEE EVERY WIN: All the victories from Gordon's Hall of Fame career

With the clout of the event, Gordon knew that his life was likely about to change. Whether he could anticipate the dizzying heights in which his career would reach in the following years or not, that's a different story. 

However, he was a presented with an opportunity to test the weight of his new-found fame. And his stomach got the best of him. 

“I’m like, ‘Oh man, that’s unfortunate,’” Gordon said of the pizza delivery dilemma. “On the inside, I’m saying, ‘I hate to do this. But man, if I’m ever going to use this…’ So, I said, ‘Would it make any difference if I told you I won that race?’ And they kind of paused and said, ‘Wait, who are you?’ I said, ‘Jeff Gordon.’ ‘The jeff Gordon that just won the race?’ I was like, ‘Yes.’ They said, ‘I don’t know, we’ll see what we can do.’ And I said, ‘Great, that’s all I can ask for.’

“Immediately after, they called the front desk and then they called me and said, ‘Hey, did you by any chance order a pizza?’ And I said, ‘Yes!’ They said, ‘Well, Pizza Hut called to verify it was you.’ And I said, ‘Yes! Tell them it’s me, please!’ And I’m telling you, the pizza was there in 20 minutes. It was awesome.”

To Gordon's credit, he added that he left a big tip. And from that point on, big tips and international name recognition wouldn't be a problem any longer. 

Gordon's first win, which had come just a little over two months prior, was no doubt a big one. It came in the Coca-Cola 600, a NASCAR crown jewel race at its home track, Charlotte Motor Speedway. It also came via shrewd pit strategy from crew chief Ray Evernham, who took two tires late to give Gordon track position and he was able to hold them off from there. 

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That victory, the first of 93 in Gordon's career, certainly lives on in the annals of Cup Series lore. But if the Coca-Cola 600 was a breakthrough, the Brickyard 400 was an explosion, for several reasons. 

First, Gordon was the dominant car that day, leading 93 of 160 laps. Secondly, with the event being the first NASCAR race at Indianapolis, all teams entered on an even playing field with no notes from prior years to rely on. Third, with both Gordon and Evernham having previously harbored open-wheel aspirations, the opportunity to even race at Indy was extra special. Gordon, in fact, had spent his teenage years in nearby Pittsboro, Indiana, where he honed his race craft.

And finally, the sheer scope of the event cannot be forgotten. The Brickyard 400 was a spectacle years in the making. Testing had begun two years in prior. A total of 86 cars turned out to try and qualify for the 43-team field with Indianapolis 500 champions A.J. Foyt and Danny Sullivan earning their way in. A then-NASCAR-record $3.2 million purse was offered. And, with over 250,000 spectators, it was the most-attended race in the sport's history to that point. 

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In reflecting on the day and the win, Gordon and Evernham agree that the victory was a statement to racing world that the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports team had arrived. But it also resonated as loudly within. 

“Indianapolis is just such a special place and to go there, I just remember the amount of people that day and how overwhelming that was,” Evernham said. “The fact we had a clean sheet of paper, everyone had an open book, I felt really good about everything we had. We executed a lot of stuff that day.

“I look back at that moment in history, that day other people started looking at us as a legitimate race team, but we looked at ourselves as a legitimate race team that day as well. The amount of confidence we took away from that. It was, ‘We can beat these guys head-to-head. We don’t have to have a two-tire call or for cautions to fly at the right time.’ That was a big step for us.” 

“That was like the DAYTONA 500 back then – it was maximum effort, maximum preparation, everybody wanted to win that race,” Gordon added. “It was one of the most hyped races I’d ever been part of and one of the most hyped in the history of the sport. We had tested. Everybody had tested. It was top, top priority. So, to go there, knowing you’re going against everybody’s best and to step up like that … and it was a dominant day. We were kind of in control of the race most of the day, which was the real statement. It wasn’t just winning it, we were a major factor from the time they dropped the green flag and really, all weekend long.” 

And really, long before that. Gordon was third quickest in a test in 1993. He also qualified third. 

A key sequence, and the first of several dominoes to fall Gordon's way on that fateful afternoon, occurred on lap one. Dale Earnhardt, who'd qualified outside of pole-sitter Rick Mast on the front row, scraped the wall coming out of turn four, allowing Gordon to glide by on the inside. When a caution flew on lap three, just after Gordon had snatched the lead away from Mast, Earnhardt pitted and fell to the back of the field. He'd spend the rest of the day rallying, reaching fifth place by the event's end. 

Another contender was taken out later in a family spat. Geoff Bodine, who led 24 laps in the first half of the race, was wrecked by brother Brett Bodine after the two had made contact the previous circuit. The caution flag waved with around 60 laps to go, setting up a duel between Gordon and Ernie Irvan, one that would raise on of NASCAR's most poignant, divisive and ultimately unanswerable questions: 

Would Gordon have still won had Irvan not blown a tire? 

The two waged a battle for the ages as the laps ticked away. Gordon and Irvan restarted second and third respectively on the race's final restart with 26 laps to go and made quick work of leader Rusty Wallace. From there, it was cat and mouse, with each driver leading for stints and then succumbing to the other with each fighting a loose condition when out front. 

RELATED: Gordon wins Winston Million, third Southern 500 in 1997

Gordon still remembers the particulars and like everyone else, can only guess what may have happened had Irvan made it the distance. 

“I’d like to think the answer is, ‘Yes, we’d have still won,’ but if you asked Ernie, he’d say, ‘Hell no,’” Gordon said with a laugh. “I spoke to him this year and he reminded me.

“It’s hard not to go with experience in that situation. I think our cars were equal and back then, aerodynamics were so much different than they are today, so, the reason you coulnd’t get away from one another is because you’d get out front and all that air was making the car loose, just packing it on the front fenders and rotating around the front tires.

“I would get out front and try to run away from him but between being loose and them having good power, he would run up and get to me and get me loose and get by me, then I’d do the same thing.

“It started to be pretty evident that we were jockeying for, ‘Where can I make my move and how am I going to get position and where is that?’ More than likely, it’s, 'Get a run off or two, make the move into three and win it because I think if you did it off of four, it’s too late and if you did it off four to the white flag, it’s too early. We were both thinking the same thing, it was just more than likely me being young and him being more experienced, he probably would’ve done a better job of that, but we’ll never know.

“Regardless, it was a terrific battle, and I would’ve rather won it with him having all four tires up. While it sealed it for us, it was not the way either one of us wanted it to end.” 

Fox NASCAR analyst Larry McReynolds was the crew chief for Irvan in 1994. He weighed in on the No. 28 team perspective as well. 

“I was scanning the 24 car and I’m telling you, Jeff Gordon was squealing to the top of his lungs, ‘I’m loose, get him off me!’” McReynolds told HendrickMotorsports.com. “So, I came on the radio and told Ernie, I said, ‘You do see what you’re doing to that 24 car don’t you?’ And he said, ‘Oh, I see every bit of it.’ And when we got the lead for that last time, I really thought we had him covered. But things happen in racing and that was just one of those things.” 

Maybe Evernham had the best guess. 

“I don’t know. Probably, whoever was in third was going to win the race,” Evernham laughed.

But what-ifs and theoretical scenarios mattered little as soon as the checkered flag fell over Gordon's rainbow-colored hood that afternoon. NASCAR had its fresh-faced star of tomorrow and as the buzz around the Brickyard proved, the sport was about to burst into the national consciousness for good. 

And while Earnhardt remained at the forefront of that charge, the victory helped Gordon wedge alongside him. As the sport grew, so too did Gordon, as he claimed titles in 1995, 1997 and 1998, winning 40 races in that span. 

RELATED: Relive Johnson's first Brickyard 400

It's rare that an exact moment can be pinpointed in terms of an athlete reaching the pinnacle. But for Gordon, it's fairly easy. And in terms of his career and the status of stock car racing within the world of sports, few wins if any had or will resonate louder.  

“Off the track, that was a life changer,” Gordon concluded. “It just seemed like everybody was really marketing and advertising that race. I think the next day or maybe Monday, Chevrolet had a full-page ad and they put that up on a billboard and I’m doing big-time interviews, we’re going to Disneyworld – that had never occurred up until that point. And I think it never really went down after that. It just kind of elevated and stayed there because then the sport kept growing and luckily, we were growing with it because we were champions the next year.

“Even though I’d won the 600 and the 600 was a big deal, it wasn’t what the Brickyard was. And my life, career, persona, marketability, all those things were almost an overnight change.”