EVERYONE ELSE

Back in 2006 and 2007, I was struggling to really get a foothold in the sport. I’d been through some pretty tough escapades with different race teams, and kind of bounced around. I didn’t have any connections. I didn’t have any possessions. I had no place to live. Sometimes, I stayed in hotel rooms that teams would rent for me for a couple months while I drove for them. Other times, I stayed with friends. Every team that I worked for was broke, and we never had the equipment we needed to run well.

I wasn’t really having much success.

As NASCAR fans know, the way they do the garages at the track, there are two sides: There’s the top 20, and then there’s everybody else. One day in early 2007, when I was racing for Keith Coleman Racing in the Nationwide Series, I was on the “everyone else” side. I’ll never forget looking over at a friend of mine and saying, “My goal is to get to the other side of the garage.”

Later that season, I was down at Atlanta. I ran a truck race, and I ran terrible. But when I got in the Nationwide car, we ran really, really well. There was a part of the race where we undoubtedly were one of the best cars. It just so happened that Dale, who had his car at the time with another driver, was watching the race from his suite at the top of the track.

And I passed his car.

His car had a lot of sponsorships, and a lot of resources dedicated to it. We were struggling very much. But on this particular day, it was quite the opposite. We had very little resources, and we were running well. And I think he was at kind of a breaking point, so he just put that in his mental bank.

The next week, we went to Bristol, Tennessee, and Dale, Jr. decided to run the race. He did it with his family team, DEI, but since he didn’t do it on a constant basis and they didn’t have any points, they had to park on the backside of the garage.

We wound up parking right next to each other. You have to remember, he was Dale Jr., and I was this struggling driver, so I didn’t want to bother him. I’m not that kind of guy — it just didn’t feel right. The funny thing was that he got out, walked over, and talked to me a little bit while we were practicing, which I thought was great. He was just down to earth. I was running really well again, and the first thing he said was that he liked the way I was driving. He said I reminded him, at least at that track, of how his dad used to drive it.

I thought that was really cool.

He also told me, “Man I’d like to see you get an opportunity. It would be great. I wish I knew of one.”  And then we kind of just moved on. It was one of those kind of “nice to meet you” situations.

A CHANCE

I struggled on for the next few months, and so did Dale and his team. By early June, the Nationwide team I was driving for — Keith Coleman Racing — went bankrupt.

I saw the writing on the wall once the season started, so I can’t say I was surprised. It was like one of those countdown clocks. I knew it was coming. I’m not going to say that it didn’t hurt, but when you’re prepared for something, it doesn’t hurt as much.

I began looking for another opportunity. Something. Anything.

I started spotting for someone, and I went to a truck race in Milwaukee, Wisconsin — just to watch because it’s close to where I live in Michigan, only a five or six-hour drive. There was this big wreck. One of the drivers lost his temper and had a tantrum, and he intentionally wrecked another driver. At that time, it was a big faux pas in racing. (It’s funny how times change. It seems like that happens now two or three times a year.) So NASCAR booted him out, and sat him down.

Like I said, I had been at that race just watching. The team driver for the guy who had gotten in trouble — he’d seen me drive before, and he had said the same thing to me that Dale had: “If there’s ever an opportunity, I’ll be there for you.” You sometimes think those words are lip service when you hear them. You never really know. Well, sure enough, there was an opportunity, and he made the most of his word. His team, Germain Racing, called and asked me to drive that truck while the other driver was suspended. That driver was only suspended for one week, so essentially, I had a one week trial.

That race was in Memphis, Tennessee, in June of 2007. It turned out to be one of those unique weekends where the stars align in a lot of different ways.

Dale’s Nationwide team, like I said, had been struggling. So he had a sit down with his driver, and told him, “Look, no more wrecking. I don’t care what you have to do, no more wrecking.” The same weekend I was driving in Memphis, Dale showed up in New Hampshire to watch his car run, and when he got there, they had wrecked at practice. He made the decision right then and there that he was going to fire his driver.

The responsibility, the pressure of being with a well-funded team — especially one that’s owned by the most popular guy in the sport — those things kind of hit you like a truck.

The night I ran the truck race for the suspended driver, it went well. I had qualified us on the pole. I was running really well and was winning the race until I was wrecked from behind late. As Dale later told it to me, he was actually watching the race on TV. He needed a driver for his car, he saw me, and he thought, “This is easy. Let’s put him in.”

He called me up the next day when I was flying back to Michigan. “I’d like you to drive my car,” he said. “Come on down here and check it out.” “

So I did.

I brought a suitcase and that was it. A suitcase on a plane. I landed in North Carolina, and there was a gentleman picking me up. His name was T.J. Majors, one of Dale’s best friends. He’d turn out to be my best friend. (He’s now Dale Jr.’s spotter, and he spotted for me in the Nationwide Series as well.) T.J. took me over to Dale Jr.’s guest house, and that was where I stayed for the next six months.

It was a surreal thing to go through. There were a lot of benefits, obviously, to driving the No. 88 for Dale, and having resources and opportunities that you’ve never had before to be competitive. But you start to realize quite quickly that there’s other things that come with it. The responsibility, the pressure of being with a well-funded team — especially one that’s owned by the most popular guy in the sport — those things kind of hit you like a truck. You think it’s just going to be easy. “Now we’ve got a fast car, and we’ll win.” But then other things pop up to make it difficult. The pressure was to run well, not wreck and to be a leader on a team that needed one — that’s really hard to take up overnight.

Things came together for me in Texas at the very end of 2007. The team had built a brand new car. We started at the back because of some kind of issue they had getting through tech, so I had to drive through the field, which was kind of one of those things that sticks out as being a huge accomplishment. I finished sixth. That was the first time we really ran well. I was very proud of that one. I think the team really rallied behind me.

BURN THE SHIPS

There’s a story about the explorer, Cortes, that comes to mind when I think of my early career. When Cortes sailed to the New World, he came with a bunch of ships. And when he landed, he burned them all so that nobody could go back. Nobody could talk about leaving. Nobody could think about leaving. They were committed to what they were doing whether they believed in it or not. They didn’t have a choice.

That’s kind of where I was at with racing back in 2007 before meeting Dale, I wouldn’t say I didn’t believe in myself. But I would say that I didn’t have a choice but to make it.

In my mind, there was no other option.

FIRST TEST

I got to know Jeff beginning in 2008 after I joined Hendrick Motorsports. The previous season, Jeff had turned in a career year, one of the best he’d ever had without winning the championship. His stats were amazing, among the best he’d ever produced. So he was at his peak in many ways, a legend.

But as great as 2007 had been for Jeff, 2008 was exactly the opposite. It had been going terribly. Jeff had just come off of a race in Texas where he wrecked out on the first or second lap. In less than six months, he had gone from the top to the very bottom of the sport, which is not necessarily his fault. It’s just how the sport works sometimes. All hands on deck at the time trying to figure out what was wrong with the cars.

I was one of them. It was sometime in the late spring of 2008. I was brought in to test one of his cars at Kentucky Speedway.

At the time, I was pretty nervous about the whole thing. I remember talking with Dale Jr. about it before I traveled down to the track. Kentucky Speedway happens to be right next to a gentleman’s club, so in typical Dale form, he said, “Don’t worry about it. Just stay away from Chasers, and you’ll be fine.”

After I got to Kentucky, I wound up riding from the airport to the track with Jeff. He asked me if I’d talked to Dale at all about the test.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“Well,” he asked, “what did Dale say?”

I told him. He laughed.

There were a lot of issues with Jeff’s cars at the time, and everyone on Jeff’s team was pretty aware of the gravity of the situation. You could feel it. Certain teams in sports have a reputation of excellence, and when they’re not at that level, it affects everyone. Everybody is on pins and needles. On top of that, there was the added pressure of Jeff being a living legend. I’ll never forget the first time I got in one of his cars and drove it.

All I could think was, “Oh my God. I’m driving Jeff Gordon’s car.”

The test didn’t go well. Still, the one thing I remember was the car itself. Jeff’s team was struggling so bad they didn’t have time to do test cars, so they were taking real race cars out to the track.

Jeff’s car was just beautiful. It was almost like one of these collector cars, like a really nice million dollar collector car. But it was a race car. It was in full race decal and paint. The paint and finish on it were perfect. The detailing inside of it was perfect. I’d never even come close to sitting in anything like that before in my life. 

To that point, it was the nicest car I’d ever seen.

THE PASS

It would take another few years before Jeff would go from “Jeff Gordon” to someone I simply competed against. It happened at Bristol in 2011. At some point in the race, I had to battle to get past him, and I pulled it off. It’s probably funny to hear it, but just passing him meant the world to me. In my mind, I was like, “I just passed Jeff Gordon!”

I went on to win the race, which made the whole thing that much more special.

In the time since, I’ve gotten a chance to know Jeff on and off the track. On it, as everybody knows, he’s just incredible. His skill set is very unique. Any of the tracks that require heavy braking, he’s just so good at, and that’s always stood out to me as being very impressive. He’s a very good braker. That requires incredible eye-foot coordination. He probably knows how to use the brakes better than anyone besides Marcos Ambrose on the Sprint Cup level. His success at Sonoma specifically has always stood out to me. That particular track is so difficult to get around, and he’s always so good there.

And as you’ve probably noticed, Jeff’s superspeedway talents are pretty strong, too. He made this pass in the 1999 Daytona 500 that was a wow moment for me personally. He was running underneath Rusty Wallace (in the No. 2 car), but there was a slow car on the apron. Jeff literally pointed right at the car and somehow swerved around it at the last second to take the lead, and went on to win. It was a really gutsy and savvy move all at the same time.

Off the track, Jeff’s like Tom Cruise in Days of Thunder. Height-wise, looks-wise, the boyish charm, everything. That’s who he reminds me of. In all seriousness, he’s really, really smart, thoughtful and savvy in a lot of different ways. His media savviness is on a whole other level, and has always impressed me because it’s something I’m always looking to get better at. He’s also just great with people. We know each other pretty well, but what’s funny is that Jeff makes it a point to know everybody pretty well. That says a lot about who he is, and how much he cares about the sport and his peers. He’s less reserved in person than he is in front of the cameras, someone who’s having a fun time and enjoying what he does. He’s more of a family man.

Most people probably don’t know this, but there’s actually a lot of history between me and Jeff’s current team. A lot of the current No. 24 crew actually came from my Nationwide team at Junior Motorsports. It was set up that way on purpose because the team was supposed to move with me to Cup. Ultimately, things worked out differently, and I wound up moving to Team Penske, but I know most of the people on that team because we spent so much time together. I still consider many of them my friends.

TO BEAT THE BEST

When I think of NASCAR, I think of the drivers that have dominated different eras. In the 1960s and 70s, it was Richard Petty and then Cale Yarborough. In the 80s, it was Darrell Waltrip, followed by Dale Earnhardt, who excelled through the mid-90s. Jeff Gordon took over for the late 90s, and since then, with a few exceptions, it’s been almost all Jimmie Johnson.

Looking back at 2012, one of the most meaningful things for me about winning the championship was that I had to beat Jimmie to do it. I had to beat the most dominant driver of his generation, and I had to do it while he was driving his best.

This year, the Jeff Gordon who owned the late 90s has returned. He has a win at every track. His cars are strong, he’s experienced, and he has a powerhouse team. He’s driving at his absolute best, as well as he did when he was dominating the sport.

For the other 11 drivers left in the Chase, it couldn’t be more clear: It’s going to take our best to beat him.

Every time I see that picture, I can’t tell you how many different emotions hit me. The image captures a moment in time that I would never have even imagined as a kid. It reminds me of how much has changed over the past 20 months or so in terms of our team, and the people who are part of it. And as we get set to begin the Chase, it makes me think of just how much winning another championship would mean to me.

Let me tell you why.

A DREAM TOO SMALL

Michigan, where I grew up, wasn’t (and still isn’t) a hot bed for racing. That always struck me as a little strange, given the history of the automobile and so forth. But no one, including me, has ever really associated Michigan with NASCAR championships.

When I was a kid, our family ran what was essentially a middling truck team. That was the family business. I always wanted to be in racing, but my dream — and I really mean this when I say it — was to drive and race for my family, and keep the truck team going. I didn’t dream about winning a Cup championship — not because it wasn’t cool, but because the Cup series was so far removed from my perception of reality, I never thought there was the slightest possibility I could be part of that in any way. I thought I might win a truck race someday, and that maybe if I did that, I could eventually win a truck championship of some kind.

Mostly, I just wanted to keep my mom and dad employed, and take care of them as they got older. That was my dream.

As I’ve written before, that dream collapsed in my early 20s. My dad got sick. The family team lost its sponsor. I tried to take over as the team’s driver. Everything fell apart, both for me and my family, too.

WANTING TO BELONG

Understand: When I started trying to drive in the Nationwide and Cup series, it wasn’t about achieving some childhood dream of being a NASCAR driver. I was at rock bottom. It was about making a living. It was about surviving.

Where I came from and how my racing career started have a lot to do with why winning a second championship is so important to me.

When I walked in the door of JR Motorsports in 2007, they had one Nationwide car. Literally. The driver before me wrecked every car they had. They were 15th or 20th in points, which for a fully-funded Nationwide team, was awful.

In summer of 2008, I won my first NASCAR race. At the time, I thought, “All right. This is good. I’m probably going to keep my job for a few more months at least.” The next season, we won two races, and JR Motorsports finished third in the series. We won four in 2009, contended for the championship, and finished third again.

It’s not often in life that you’re given a chance to see that you didn’t dream big enough, and an opportunity to do something about it.

But that’s what was happening as the 2009 season came to an end.

I saw the growth and potential I had as a driver, and it made me hungry to find my limits. I started to think that winning a championship in the Nationwide series was a real possibility. And after I joined the Penske organization and we won the Nationwide Series in 2010, winning a championship in the Cup series started to seem possible. It kind of reminded me of “Forrest Gump,” when Forrest starts running from his house, then across Alabama, and eventually across the country.

Each time I made some progress, I figured, “Heck, I’ve made it this far. Might as well keep going.”

The funny thing is this: even though I was having success, a lot of the time, I didn’t feel like I belonged. I felt like an outsider.

I’m sure part of it was in my head. Part of it was probably where I’d come from, literally 700-plus miles from the heart of NASCAR. Still, I couldn’t help feeling like one of the Bad News Bears a lot of the time, unable to find a place to fit in. In 2009, when Hendrick Motorsports decided to keep Mark Martin as a driver and I lost my Cup ride, there was a logical reason for it, but it still hurt.

Later, as I had more and more success, it still seemed like I constantly had to prove myself. It probably sounds crazy, but even after we won the Cup championship in 2012, I felt like we didn’t get credit for it a lot of the time. It baffled me. In two years, we had taken a 35th place Cup team and transformed it into a champion. But there was always someone ready to say, “You only won because of pit strategy,” or a bunch of other things that basically meant, “You didn’t deserve to win. It was a fluke.”

There are two ways to quiet those types of people. The first is to ignore them, which is certainly a virtue, but not one I’m particularly good at practicing.

The other is to win another championship.

FOR THE OTHERS

At the same time, winning another championship is about more than just feeling like I have the respect of the racing community. It’s about everyone else who’s gotten me here, and who I’m working with to try and reach the pinnacle of NASCAR again.

As I made my climb up the ranks of our sport, I began to understand fairly quickly that in a team format, your success is just as often dictated by others as it is by yourself. When you win, it’s because of your team. The better you are as a driver, the better the people you find yourself working with. You start to realize how special great people are. (And you also look back at your career, and think, “Man, if i’d had these guys when I was just getting started, I’d have won every damn race.” And then you realize that’s not how it works.)

To a certain extent, a big part of honoring the people who comprise your team, at least for me, is doing my job. And to me, doing my job is going out there, doing everything I can not to hurt the team, and not screwing up. I take pride in driving well — don’t get me wrong — but I don’t get overly joyous about that part of things.

What gives me joy is being a part of that collective effort, seeing the other guys on our team in victory lane, and knowing that I was part of the group. That’s the high of winning. That’s the high of being a champion. It’s being a winner many times over in a lot of ways.

You appreciate your teammates more and more. You think of how lucky you are to have them. And you don’t want to let them down. Winning a championship makes you feel like you did your part to earn the support of those elite people around you. That’s an incredible feeling.

When I think back to that photo of Homestead that I mentioned earlier, there’s a sense of sorrow because so many of the people that were with our team in 2012 have moved on. Then there’s the other side of that: new guys have come in and replaced them, guys that are just as eager to win as we were two years ago.

How excited and happy would I be for them to have that same opportunity to take that picture? How excited would I be to share that stage with them?

LEAD AND INNOVATE

In the history of NASCAR, there’s never been a Cup champion at the driver level who has had championships in all three series. My goal for this year — and it sounds a little bit ludicrous, but it’s becoming closer and closer to a potential reality — was to win all three championships: Truck as an owner, Nationwide as a participant with Roger Penske at the owner level, and Cup as a driver. That to me would be the ultimate accomplishment.

We have an incredible shot to actually pull it off.

That’s just one example of my final motivation for wanting to win a second Cup title. I want to give back to the sport in every way that I can. I want to be a leader and an innovator.

I want to give back to the sport in every way that I can. I want to be a leader and an innovator. 

To feel good about the opportunity I’ve been given and that I’m doing right by it, I need to do more than just win a race, or win a championship. As a professional, the doors that winning opens allow me to feel good about myself personally. When I can do something to improve the sport, when I can do something that improves NASCAR for our fan base, at that point, I feel good about the opportunities I’ve been given, and that I made the most of them.

I didn’t do the best job with the crown back in 2012, but looking back, even if I had, I’m not sure how much I would have been heard. The reality was that we had a five-time champion in Jimmie Johnson, a four-time champion with Jeff Gordon, a three-time champion with Tony Stewart, and Dale Jr., the most popular driver in the sport. At best, I was fifth in line. Winning a second championship isn’t getting me to the top of the ladder, but it will get me a lot closer.

I desperately want to be there. Not out of some sort of ego trip. The personal accomplishment of winning a race — or even a championship — isn’t that significant to me anymore. It’s not about me alone. I’m incredibly privileged to have had the opportunities that I have, to have the team that I have around me, to have sponsors who do what they do for me, and to have fans that care about me.

I realize that each and every time I get in the car.

It was a dream to be successful, and it’s still surreal to me sometimes that I’ve been a Cup champion. It’s so much more than I thought I ever would accomplish. And yet there’s so much more I want to accomplish now.

On to the Chase.

Kyle Larson was incredible at the Eldora truck race a couple weeks back. Kyle excels at dirt racing, and NASCAR’s truck series runs one dirt race a year. At Eldora, he drove from the back of the field to the front, hitting the car off the wall every lap, until he passed through for the lead. It is extremely difficult to pass people there one time around the track, let alone every time. He ran in the lead for about five laps before his truck fell apart — mainly because he’d hit the wall so many times to get to the front. Still, it was great. His skills and bravery were on display.

Marcos Ambrose proved again this past weekend at Watkins Glen that he is a phenomenal road course race racer. You can tell just by watching him that his speed is all related to him and the things that he does behind the wheel.

But perhaps the driver that sticks out most in my mind for his skills is Dale Earnhardt, who was known for being heads and tails better than everyone on restrictor plate tracks. He really developed, whether knowing it or not knowing it, the driver style that everybody uses today on super speedways. He would go to a restrictor plate race, drive through the field, and it was all just pure driver. It was a sight to see. There’s a race that he ran at Talladega in 2000 — October of 2000 — when he drove from somewhere around 17th to the lead in three or four laps, all because he knew how to draft at a higher level than everyone else did. Today, pretty much the entire field copies everything he created 10 to 15 years ago, as far as styles and techniques are concerned.

UNCERTAINTY & LATE RACE DRAMA

Next on my list are uncertainty and probably the most obvious thing that makes for great racing, late race drama. Alone, they’re elements of any great race. When both hit, it’s really special.

Uncertainty is just that. Can this driver make it through the field? Will that driver’s engine hold up? Will a fuel strategy work? It could be like Richmond earlier this year. Tires were blowing out after 50 or 60 laps. For me, that uncertainty was, “who’s it going to be next?”

Uncertainty is what makes Daytona and Talladega so great. In restrictor plate races, you’re on pins and needles for the entire race. When you’re in the pack, you can really feel the energy ramp up at certain times in the race. You can see the cars in front of you, and the aggressiveness of the moves they’re trying to execute. You know that there are going to be a minimum of two big crashes a race. You’re thinking to yourself, “All right, the big one is going to happen here any second. Is it going to be now? Is it going to be later? Is it not even going to happen at all?” At different points, every driver is faced with a decision: Do I want to stay a part of the pack or not? There’s an energy to all of that, which everyone feels, from the drivers to the fans in the crowd and at home.

The critical part of late race drama is that it has to be organic. A debris caution and a legitimate caution are two different things. If there is a wreck, that’s one thing. If it’s a debris caution, it’s no longer organic. It just doesn’t feel the same.

The end of the race, of course, is when you see some of the most dramatic action in our sport. Dale Earnhardt perfected a technique, the bump and run, that led to a couple of my great moments of late race drama. In two races at Bristol — one in 1995, one in 1999 — he used the bump and run to try for a win on the final lap.

The short tracks are a blast, too. I like Martinsville. It’s fun to watch because it’s tight confines, and the cars require a special skill set to drive. You can’t necessarily run side-by-side there, but you can really work each other and traffic there.

Finally, there are certain tires and track combinations where you can set your car up to run either really fast for a short run, or really fast for a long run. Those are interesting. You always get the driver that takes off kind of like he’s in a horse race, running great out of the gate with five or six lengths on the field. But later, at the back half of the race, he’s fourth or fifth, and the long run horses run him down. Those are fun to me, too.

When circumstances change at a track is when you see a great team spring into action.

Let’s say we’re supposed to race on a Saturday night, and it rains out. It was going to be 65 degrees and overcast. But now we’re racing on Sunday, and it’s 85 and sunny. The car is just not set up for that. So on the first run, the car just drives awfully. The team has to make adjustments, and those adjustments can make the race.

THE DISCUSSION BEGINS

So that’s what I think makes good racing. But everyone likes something a little different. I’m curious to know what other people think. Fans, media, other drivers: What do you think great racing is? What kind of racing do you love? And what types of racing do you want to watch the most?

I’m looking forward to hearing some of your answers in response to the blog, and when we talk about it live on Twitter next week (#GreatRacing). Together, maybe we can keep improving the sport we all love.