Jeff Gordon eyes one last win at Sonoma Raceway

RIO LINDA - Leo Gordon saw his first Quarter Midget race last Saturday. It was a hot day in Rio Linda, a dusty town just north of Sacramento, and Leo and his sister Ella (who happened to be celebrating her eighth birthday) were there to mark the return of their father, famed NASCAR driver Jeff Gordon, to his original home track. He hadn’t been back in 31 years.

Leo will be 5 in August, and looking at the little guy as he playfully followed his dad around and mugged a bit for the cameras, it was hard to imagine that Jeff was even younger when he started racing at the Crackerjack Track, as it was then called.

“His son looks so much like him,” remarked Debbie Lambert, who spent countless nights flagging, announcing, keeping score and whatever else needed to be done at the small dirt track not far from the Sacramento airport. “When he walks up it’s like, there’s Jeffrey again.”

Almost as hard to believe is that Jeff Gordon is rapidly approaching his final stock car race. His blistering start in the Winston Cup circuit, now called the Sprint Cup, painted him as NASCAR’s young hotshot in the mid-1990s, and his handsome youthfulness has allowed him to retain a piece of that image.

But Gordon isn’t young anymore, not for an elite driver. He’ll be 44 in August and his back hurts like hell as he gets out of bed every morning. When he lines up for the start of the Toyota/Save Mart 350 at Sonoma Raceway on Sunday, he will be running his 777th consecutive Cup race, 11 short of Ricky Rudd’s all-time record.

“That’s a lot of damn races to try to remember,” Gordon said during a bus ride from Rio Linda to his junior high school in Vallejo on Saturday.

And those are just the races at the highest level of NASCAR. Add his Quarter Midgets and Midgets and Sprints, and Gordon’s life begins to look like a ceaseless blur of cars, roaring in circles around a track.

It started with a gift from his stepfather, John Bickford, who came home from work one day and said, “Look out the window.” In front of the house on Brooke Drive in east Vallejo were two Quarter Midget cars, one for 4-year-old Jeff, and one for his older sister, Kim. His sister never drove hers much; Jeff Gordon didn’t spend a lot of time away from his.

Bickford went over to the Solano County Fairgrounds, just up I-80, and asked if he could set up a practice oval for his son in the parking lot. The manager gave his approval, with one stipulation: If anybody came around, the race team would have to bug out. So Bickford pulled weeds and smoothed out the gravel and set out cones, and Jeff ran endless practice laps.

Gordon remembers being terrified for his first run around the cones. But he got the hang of it and soon Bickford was looking for real Quarter Midget tracks. One of the only options in the Bay Area was the old Baylands facility in Sunnyvale. Greg DeCaires III remembers the first time he saw Bickford and Gordon there.

“Here come this black stepside truck coming up. It was John driving, and Jeff was so short he’s standing on the seat of the truck,” DeCaires remembered.

DeCaires asked how it was going, and Bickford complained that Gordon kept sticking his car into the fence. Sure enough, DeCaires looked in the back of the truck to see a Quarter Midget with a smashed-up front end. Baylands was adjacent to wetlands, and if the tide was in, he said, it created ripples in the dirt track. That made the racing tricky.

So DeCaires, who was then the director at the Crackerjack Track (it’s now known as the Roy Hayer Memorial Speedway), suggested Bickford bring his stepson there for some laps.

Gordon wound up competing in Rio Linda for years, and the two families grew close. DeCaires’ son, Greg DeCaires IV, was about four years older than Gordon and became his mentor on the track. The two spent hours practicing cat-and-mouse passes.

Gordon went to school and camped with his family and did other things you might associate with a normal childhood. But his life - in fact, the life of the entire household - revolved around racing.

At first, they would drive up to Rio Linda and back in a day. But as Gordon began to enter larger, two-day events, the Bickfords would camp in their motorhome next to other families. It became their community.

Gordon’s mother, Carol Bickford, was there every step of the way. She worked in the tower at Crackerjack, scoring or handling the public address commentary. But it was John Bickford who mapped out and executed the long-term game plan. It’s hard to imagine a father more immersed in his son’s development.

As one Crackerjack alum pointed out, Gordon always had the nicest cars. And the commitment went way beyond money. Bickford coached him endlessly on race strategy and handling. Lambert recalled the two of them walking the track after races to analyze the dirt surface in detail.

“You didn’t see a kid his age get out and debrief with his father like he did,” said DeCaires IV, who still races Sprint cars. “He couldn’t run off and play in the gravel and throw some Hot Wheels in the dirt. John kept him on the straight and narrow.”

As Bickford said: “He practiced putting his helmet on, he practiced putting his jacket on, practiced putting his gloves on at home. He was basically coached to be a professional the first time he got in the car.”

We’ve heard this story before, right? The obsessive father micromanages his son’s (or daughter’s) life with the goal of engineering a super-athlete. It succeeds, but the hyper-driven athlete is unable to find happiness.

Gordon has never seemed like a tormented soul, though. He’s had his rivalries and his tantrums on the track, of course, but when he isn’t driving he comes across as pretty laid back.

Maybe that’s partly because Bickford’s instruction didn’t focus entirely on winning. He did not allow Gordon to throw his equipment if he lost, and he told his stepson that if he bumped or banged into a car to win, he’d have to hand over the trophy to the other kid. That happened at least once. Gordon figures he was 8 years old when, as Bickford says, he “did a Rusty Wallace-Bristol” and moved a boy out of the way.

“I wasn’t gonna let him have that trophy,” Bickford said.

Anyway, he insists the real goal was always to indulge his son’s love of racing, and simply to spend more time with the boy. Bickford had a previous marriage as a young man and, he says, spent too much time working and traveling, not enough on parenting. He wasn’t going to let that happen again.

“This is a perfect sport to do everything as a family,” Bickford said. “I’m not turning the kid over to a coach. He’s not one of nine kids, or one of 11 kids on a field. If I screw up, he doesn’t get a trophy. If he screws up, he doesn’t get a trophy. We’re a team. We’re just him and me.”

Gordon got a taste of it himself recently when he took his daughter to a Quarter Midget track. “I was so proud of Ella and the job she did,” he said. “And I thought, ‘Oh, my gosh, my parents must be so damn proud!’ To see your child out there, and then to see that child go to the level we’ve gone, it made me appreciate what they’ve done. It blew my mind.”

The Bickfords paid a huge sacrifice to Gordon’s racing career just after he finished ninth grade. They moved to Pittsboro, Ind., a town about 20 minutes from Indianapolis Motor Speedway, so that Gordon could move up to Sprint cars, something 14-year-olds weren’t allowed to do in California.

And the rest is part of the blur: national Midget titles, a couple years in the second-tier NASCAR Busch series, an offer to drive a Winston Cup car for Hendrick Motorsports, 92 wins at the highest levels of stock car racing, four season championships between 1995 and 2001, career earnings of nearly $150 million just at the Cup level.

Gordon has announced that this is his final season, and he confirmed Saturday that he has no plans to race ever again after November, except maybe in a Le Mans-style endurance event every once in a while. He will join Fox’s NASCAR broadcast team next year, and will maintain a financial stake in Hendrick Motorsports.

First Gordon has a little more driving to do, starting Sunday at the raceway in Carneros. He has won the 350 five times, more than any other NASCAR driver, including one time when he was sick, and another when his seatbelt came undone and he had to make up ground after vacating the lead.

He and current wife, Ingrid Vandebosch, got engaged there in 2006 - and Gordon won the race the next day.

Gordon is currently 10th in the Sprint Cup point standings, but he hasn’t won a race this year. He and his legion of local fans would like nothing more than to send him off with a victory at the road course situated less than a half-hour from Gordon’s childhood homes in Vallejo. He thinks he still has ability to pull it off.

“When I’m driving the car, I don’t feel old,” Gordon said. “I feel just like I always have. The way I think, the way I drive, the way I give information back to the team. To me, none of that’s ever changed.”

In other words, he’s still the kid behind the wheel of the Quarter Midget, at least after the green flag comes down.