Jeff Gordon stays positive, embraces lack of experience at IMS event
INDIANAPOLIS — Jeff Gordon took first in the NASCAR Cup Series four times in his lengthy career. In doing so, he won 93 races and collected 477 top-10 finishes. Saturday, seven years after his last full season, he finished 22nd in his Porsche race at the Sports Car Together Fest.
The result was fine with Gordon, even if it fell far below the standards he had from the early 1990s to 2015. In a race he didn’t originally expect to run, he had two goals: keep the car clean and have fun. His finish was secondary.
“Got my heart going, that’s for sure,” he said. “It’s been a really fun experience, but also a great learning experience. I’ve never driven a car, anything like this before, something with AVS brakes. Just the weight and the brakes. Just everything the way this car operates, it’s all new to me, as well as the competitors. So it was a lot of fun to be out there, and they’re aggressive, so I had to push myself really hard, and I haven’t done that in five and a half years.”
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Gordon’s last race of any kind was in 2017. He’s driven since then, but never for as long as the 40 minutes on Saturday. It was an adjustment for Gordon, pushing himself physically and mentally, being in a competitive setting for an extended period of time.
In some aspects, the issue wasn’t that he was coming off of a long layoff so much as doing something he had never before done. Two decades in NASCAR had him accustomed to a certain type of car and setting that were absent at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
All of the uncertainty came together as he prepared to begin the race and he realized how little he knew. He didn’t know exactly where the race would start or how many cars wide the first turn would be. He even had uncertainty about what gear to be in early on.
Much of the discomfort dissipated once the race began.
“I knew Turn 1 was gonna be pretty chaotic,” Gordon said. “I got a pretty good start, got to the inside lane, and I just knew I wanted to be on the inside, not the outside, and that worked out pretty good.”
It was during the course of the race Gordon gained a better understanding of how to handle his car. He tempered expectations of a high finish after seeing his competitors’ speeds and concentrated on what he could do. He found the Porsche wasn’t as fast or sensitive to his own actions as a Cup car.
As a result, Gordon was able to drive more aggressively as the race went on. He became less cautious going around turns and got comfortable in his new setting, picking up some of the places he had lost at the beginning.
“I love the challenge of learning all over and starting, I don’t want to say from scratch, but what this series and this car is all about is these young, up-and-coming drivers mixed in with guys my age and older, so it’s a great way to go out and race, but you gotta find the category that you fit in,” he said. “And I was in the pro class and I was probably more of a pro-am, but I didn’t mind being a rookie. I’m all about learning all the time. I’m constantly learning, not just in the race car.”
https://www.indystar.com/story/sports/motor/2022/09/03/jeff-gordon-stays-positive-embraces-lack-of-experience-at-ims-event/65463828007/