By The Commish

Circle Game Sometime, you just have one of those weeks, and in May 1998, Jeff Gordon and the Rainbow Warriors showed how fortune's wheel can turn for a top level NASCAR team. The defending champion headed to the 1998 Winston all-star race on a strong streak after finding himself in seventh place after Atlanta, which was a shocking standing for a team that was never lower than fifth in the 1997 standings. "It's been kind of a wake-up call to us," Gordon said. "And I think it's definitely gotten us going here in the last four or five races."

When Gordon and the team came out strong in the first two sequences at the Winston, no one was surprised— though a lot of fans were booing Gordon's utter domination of the sport. The first segment was so caution-filled that Ray Evernham joked in an on-camera interview that "We hope we have enough gas to run these first 30 laps." Gordon did, but when it came time to start the final segment, hubris struck hard. NASCAR called off the final restart of the race, claiming that the DuPont car had jumped the start; Evernham was so vocal on the radio that Gordon had to tell him to calm down. "It's the same as Daytona!" Evernham screamed, remembering the final restart of the Bud Shootout at Daytona in February, when Rusty Wallace was not called for jumping the start after darting ahead of Gordon.

Gordon was not penalized, but the two additional laps that the field took to regroup were two too many for the amount of fuel in Gordon's tank. Evernham, having put the restart argument out of his mind, saw the white flag come out and told his driver, "All right. Bring it around." Gordon was already slowing. "Ran out of gas, guys," he said. "Are you sure?" Evernham replied. "Yes," Gordon said tersely. "I'm sure." And in the most startling stumble in the history of The Winston, Gordon had to be pushed into the pits, finishing twelfth. Mark Martin, who was also gambling on fuel, swept past Gordon entering turn one and beat Bobby Labonte to the finish line.

The estimated 160,000 fans in the stands went crazy, to put it mildly, and NASCAR had to reprimand some sportswriters in the press box for cheering Gordon's bad luck. "They had it won," said Martin. "We lucked out. I don't think that we would have ever caught them, but that doesn't matter. I saw Jeff slow at the white flag, and said, 'Oh, he's going to make a race out of it - he's going to let me catch up and make a show here,'" Martin said. "And he never started going again. I couldn't believe that."

After cooling down briefly in the hauler, Gordon faced the media honestly. "I'd rather run in the middle of the pack all day long or at the tail of the field all day long instead of taking the white flag and run out of gas and lose the race l ike this," Gordon said. "We're still not exactly sure, but it acted like it ran out of gas, a fuel pump or the fuel pressure went down. I was praying it was a broken fuel pump. I would much rather something break than for us to make a mistake. There's nothing more disappointing than when you do something like this." He refused to slam his team for the miscalculation. "I make mistakes out there, and nobody gets on me."

When the Rainbow Warriors came back to the track five days later for the Coke 600, they had their game faces on. "I sat on the back porch a while Saturday night and thought and thought and thought," Evernham said. "I beat myself up. It was my fault. It's over with, and we need to talk about the rest of the week." The crew chief was sporting a huge black eye from being hit with a flying lugnut at pit practice, and Gordon wore a determined glare as he won the pole for NASCAR’s longest race. Still, the weirdness wasn’t over. When it came time for first practice on Saturday morning, Gordon was nowhere to be found. Reporting that his alarm clock had not gone off, Gordon had awakened late and got stuck in traffic negotiating the drive from his Lake Norman home to the track. And by the time he arrived, more than 30 minutes late, Hendrick Motorsports teammate Terry Labonte had taken Gordon's car for a brief run and scraped the outside wall, damaging the right side of the rainbow-painted Chevrolet.

"I was very calm," Gordon said of his tardiness. "I knew there would be traffic, so I didn't even try to rush. Arriving at the track, I changed into my uniform, I walked over there, saw the damage to my car and I said, 'Well, my morning just got worse.' I feel bad for Terry because he felt really, really bad. But it wasn't his fault at all." After both drivers apologized to the 24 team, Labonte told the press what had happened. “I took the 24 car out for a few laps because Ray wanted to run it. The car had the race engine and everything in it. I cut a right front tire and grazed the wall," Labonte said. "I thought I had it missed and just barely got in the wall. I was going into turn one. It could have been much worse. I was coming in on the next lap because the car was fine. I bet they won't let me test the car anymore." Unable to resist teasing, a laughing Bobby Labonte told his brother, "Go see if Dale Jarrett will let you drive his car, too."

"I don't think it's that important," Gordon said when asked why he was late. "I was late, I wasn't here. I'm sorry. Because my biggest fear is to miss out on practices. I knew that was an important practice this morning. It won't happen again. There's more to it than [oversleeping], but I don't want to comment on it. Nobody is more upset than I am. ... I'm sorry it happened, but I can't turn back time and change it."

Evernham, meanwhile, wore a scowl most of the day. But at the end of it, he wasn't complaining. "I'm not going to say we had a bad day," the crew chief opined a few minutes before the garage closed at 6:15 p.m. "I'm going to say we were damn lucky today. We could have had a bad crash, a hurt driver and two teams out of commission. And we really dodged a bullet. Because it really didn't hurt the car very bad." They had been able to repair all the sheet metal damage so that Gordon wouldn’t need a backup car. By that point, the team was starting to joke about their week. "I told Jeff before he left today that between gas cans and alarm clocks, we'll have enough to last us a lifetime," Evernham said. "Since last week, people have been sending me gas cans and calculators. And I bet he'll be getting plenty of alarm clocks."

Still, no one could have blamed the team if they had run a conservative race in the 600. They were trying to take the points lead back and they couldn’t afford any more mistakes. With 50 laps to go, a caution fell and Gordon stayed out on old tires. With fresh rubber, Bobby Labonte and Rusty Wallace quickly took the lead. When Gary Bradberry lost a tire and hit the wall with 22 laps left, Gordon took advantage of the second change, gambling on four fresh tires even as everyone else took two. "We got burned so many times doing four tires when everybody else does two," said Wallace, who finished second. "We came down pit road and the whole field did two tires and (Gordon) was the only one who did four and he passed us and that was it."

The gamble paid off. Gordon shot from sixth on the restart to first with nine laps to go in winning his second straight 600 at Charlotte. "Realistically, I thought we could get a top-five, but when Johnny Benson spun his wheels on the restart, I got by him easily," the defending champion said. "And then when I got around Mark and Jarrett, I thought we might have a chance to go for it. I tried to go outside Rusty," he added. "Then I saw Bobby coming, and I said, 'Oh man, he's going to get both of us.' I just stood on the gas and said I was either going to wreck or win this thing. Everything just unfolded right into our laps the way we needed them to."

Not only did Gordon become just the fifth driver in 39 years to win consecutive 600s at Charlotte Motor Speedway, he kept Wallace, Labonte, and three other drivers from winning the Winston Million. "They were driving real hard," Gordon said of Wallace and Labonte over the final laps Sunday night. "You could see the fire in their eyes trying to pass those two guys." It capped a four-race surge in which he finished no worse than eighth, vaulting from fifth in the points to a 27-point lead over Jeremy Mayfield.

"That was a Rainbow Warrior win," Gordon said after the race. "All it took was four tires. The other guys took two. They couldn't take the gamble, we didn't have anything to lose." Evernham was ecstatic with the results. "This is an awesome, awesome team and Jeff is an awesome driver," said the crew chief. "The fans, this one is for you, for the mistake I had the other night." Gordon was equally delighted with the win. “Are you kidding me? No way. I had no idea we were going to win," he said. "These guys redeemed themselves tonight."

The racing biorhythms righted themselves after the strangest week in the 24 team's history. Was it karma? Or was it something else? Rival owner Felix Sabates had a different theory. "The kid has got a gift for driving a race car that nobody else in this garage possesses," Sabates said. "I know some of these drivers will get mad at me for saying that, but it's the fact of life." And when life got weird in May ten years ago, team DuPont buckled down and headed for its third championship. Can history repeat itself this May? We can only hope.

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