Gordon calls NASCAR Hall of Fame selection ‘surreal’
Jeff Gordon didn’t give much thought to NASCAR while racing sprint cars in Indiana as a teenager.
He was too busy trying to get into open wheel racing.
But when Gordon’s career stalled, he headed South to try his hand at stock car racing and went on to win
93 Cup races — third on the career list — and four championships while helping NASCAR move from a predominantly regional sport to the mainstream in the 1990s. Gordon was honoured for his career achievements Wednesday when he was selected to the NASCAR Hall of Fame.
Gordon said it all feels “surreal,” considering he never thought this was the direction his life would take.
“I came down to North Carolina hoping and dreaming of something, but I didn’t know much about NASCAR racing,” Gordon said. “Everything was Indycar, open wheel, sprint car and midget racing to me. I knew about the Daytona 500 and I knew who Richard Petty and Dale Earnhardt were - but that was it.”
Gordon, a first-ballot Hall of Famer, received 96 per cent of the votes from the committee, meaning only two of the 57 voters didn’t vote for him. Only Petty (200) and Bobby Pearson (105) have won more Cup races than Gordon.
Car owners Jack Roush and Roger Penske also were selected to the Hall of Fame, along with drivers Davey Allison and Alan Kulwicki.
Roush has won a record 325 races across NASCAR’S three national series, including five national series owner championships, while his drivers have won three championships. He helped Matt Kenseth ( 2003) and Kurt Busch (2004) emerge into premier series champions and jumpstarted the careers of Carl Edwards and Greg Biffle.
Penske won the premier series championship in 2012 with driver Brad Keselowski, and owns two Daytona 500 wins with Ryan Newman in 2008 and Joey Logano in 2015.
Kulwicki, known for his wrongway “Polish victory lap,” and Allison, who won 19 Cup races, including the 1992 Daytona 500, were rising stars in NASCAR before their sudden deaths in 1993. Kulwicki died at age 38 in a plane crash that April while the charismatic Allison lost his life three months later in a helicopter crash at 32. Vegas Golden Knights centre Jonathan Marchessault and goaltender Marc-andre Fleury have played integral the Western Conference champions.