At the Speedway with Jeff Gordon
Born in 1971 and a raised in Indiana, Nascar Jeff Gordon is a American race car driver who has had an astonishing record of 4 NASCAR Winston cup Series Championship winnings, 3 Daytona 500 Wins and is considered the first driver to reach $100 Million in cup series winnings. His career started at the age of five when he was still racing quarter midgets and by the age of 6 he had won 35 main events at the Roy Hayer Memorial Race Track in Rio Linda, California. At the same time he had also set 5 track records. Before he was even 18, the future champion of NASCAR Jeff Gordon had already won 3 short-track races and was awarded the 1989 USAC Midget Car Racing Rookie. He would continue to win 2 Night Before the 500 and a Belleville Midget Nationals before winning the USAC national Midget title.
At the age of 20, NASCAR Jeff Gordon became the youngest driver to win the season championship and in the same season of 1991, he won 4 crown nationals midget car races. Clearly, he was on the road to fame and fortune. In 1991, he captured 11 poles in one season setting a NASCAR record. His cup career came in 1993 when he won a Daytona 500 qualifying race and the Rookie of the Year award finishing at 14 points. The 1993 season however was not a smooth sail. Many doubted if Gordon was competent enough to race at such a young age because of his tendency to push cars too hard.
In 1994, Gordon won his first career victory by emerging number one in the Charlotte Motor Speedway in the Coca Cola 600. However, the first championship of NASCAR Jeff Gordon was in 1995 when he battled the 7-time champion Dale Earnhardt in the final race. It as a sort of a symbolic passing of the torch since the year before had seen Earnhardt win his seventh and his final championship. As a coincidence, Earnhardt also had won his first championship in 1980, the year that Richard Petty won his seventh and his final championship.
In 1997, Jeff won his first Daytona 500 and went on to win the Coca-cola 600 in Charlotte later in the year completing one of the most impressive performances in a single season in the history of NASCAR. In 1998, he defended his victories successfully and in 2005 became the only NASCAR driver to have 4 Brickyard 400 victories at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. In 2005, he won the Daytona 500 and in 2009 finished 13th in the same race. What a remarkable record at NASCAR Jeff Gordon has had, one of the recent NASCAR legends still on the tracks.
