Jeff Gordon Showing Signs That His Swan Song Will Still End on a High Note

The way things looked after the first two races, Jeff Gordon’s 2015 season hopes—let alone any hope of retiring on top with a fifth career Sprint Cup championship—looked pretty bleak.

After finishing 33rd at Daytona (caught up in a last lap wreck) and an even more dismal 41st at Atlanta, Gordon’s final year in Sprint Cup racing practically looked over before it had even really begun.

But this is four-time champion Jeff Gordon we’re talking about here. If anyone could come back from such a rough start, it was the driver of the No. 24 Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet.

Sure enough, that’s exactly what Gordon has done. After finishing 18th at Las Vegas (including earning the pole), Gordon has three consecutive top-10 finishes in his last three races.

He was ninth at Phoenix and last week at Martinsville, sandwiched around a 10th-place showing at Fontana.

In so doing, Gordon has climbed from 35th in the standings after Atlanta to 15th after Martinsville—that’s 20 positions in four races, an average of five spots upward in the standings after each race.

His bid to win a fifth career title is getting back on track after this climb up the standings. 

While it will get tougher to gain that kind of jump in the rankings week after week, Gordon has done a tremendous job of not letting the early-season troubles sink his hopes for a fifth career Sprint Cup championship—and doing something every athlete dreams of: ending his career by going out on top as a champion.

Heading into this Saturday night’s Duck Commander 500 at Texas Motor Speedway, Gordon is tied for 15th in the standings with Danica Patrick and Carl Edwards.

They are each 115 points behind series leader and reigning Sprint Cup champion Kevin Harvick.

But Gordon needs only to win a race in the 20 races that remain prior to the start of the playoffs to likely earn himself an assured berth in the second edition of the revised format in the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

And considering Gordon has failed to win at least one race in a season just twice in his 22-plus full-time seasons on the Sprint Cup circuit, it’s likely a checkered flag will be coming his way sometime in the next 20 starts.

It’s pretty clear that Gordon wants to finish his career on a high note. Last season, he earned four wins, 14 top-five and 23 top-10 finishes and three poles.

Thus far in the first six races of the final full-time Sprint Cup season of his career, Gordon has zero wins or top-fives, three top-10s and two poles.

He knows and admits he fell into an early-season hole due to being in the wrong place at the wrong time and getting involved in wrecks that were not of his making.

“It didn’t fare well for us, but that’s our fault and not the schedule’s,” Gordon said prior to last week’s race at Martinsville. “We just had some things that didn’t go well for us, and we need to perform at a higher level.”

Gordon is now back to performing at a higher level—or perhaps a better way to say it is Gordon is now performing as he typically would.

And if he continues to go even higher in the standings—which appears more than likely—that could very well subsequently make people forget about his poor start.

Winning at least one race, making the Chase for the Sprint Cup and then playing the cards he’s dealt in the playoffs—to go from about as far down as you can go to rebound all the way to the top and perhaps even the championship—there couldn’t be a better storyline written in his final Cup season.

In a recent column prior to the race at Fontana two weeks ago, David Zink of The Press Enterprise had a poignant observation of Gordon’s career.

“When sprint car driver Jeff Gordon burst onto the scene in the early 1990s, many NASCAR fans and drivers had little patience for the California native with the skills and ambition to turn the “Good Old Boys” series on its ear.

“After all, NASCAR had deep Southern roots and drivers that starred on the circuit. Richard Petty was ending his legendary seven-series-championship career and the “Intimidator” Dale Earnhardt was in the midst of his seven-championship run, which ended with his 1994 crown.

“Then a 5-foot-8, 150-pound kid from the Midwest sprint-car circuit—Gordon was born in Vallejo but raised in Indiana—joined the fray, and NASCAR was never the same.”

And in much the same fashion, no matter how this season began and how it ultimately turns out, when Gordon does leave at year’s end, indeed, NASCAR never will be the same.

Follow me on Twitter @JerryBonkowski