CHICAGO — When he has gone a few days without shaving, as he has, and the gray hairs in his not-quite-a-beard outnumber the dark ones, as they do, Jeff Gordon looks every bit of 44 years.
The conversation is littered with the word “last,” too.
Last time.
Last Chase.
Last chance.
So it’s apparent as Gordon counts down from 10 to the end of his NASCAR career that he isn’t the kid who changed the business. Not by a long shot.
And if you look at the numbers Gordon has put up this season, they don’t look much like the ones that topped the late Dale Earnhardt for three of Gordon’s four championships. They haven’t been good enough to challenge a 43-year-old Matt Kenseth or 30-year-old Kyle Busch or 25-year-old Joey Logano, just three of the drivers standing between Gordon and a fifth title.
But there is a Chase for the Sprint Cup. So there is time. And there is a chance Gordon could go out with a bang.
“He’s given so much to the sport, dedicated his life to it, I don’t want to see him have a bad year,” six-time champion and Gordon protege Jimmie Johnson said Thursday at a gathering of all 16 championship-eligible drivers. “I don’t think anybody does.
“He had such a great year last year and was so close to being in that final four and having a real shot at that championship, but it didn’t pan out. It was a shock to all of us when we found out he was going to retire this year because he had so much momentum.
“Year to year is tough. I don’t like to see him in this position. I want to see him win races and be a threat to win the championship.”
Sitting in a director’s chair — maybe not the best, given his bad back — Gordon tossed out some names and hinted at others of those more likely to hold the NASCAR Sprint Cup Series trophy 10 races from now.
Kevin Harvick, the defending champion.
Logano, the Daytona 500 winner this year. Logano’s teammate, Brad Keselowski, who won the 2012 title.
Kenseth, the 2003 champ from Cambridge, Wis., with Busch, and Carl Edwards and Denny Hamlin, the Joe Gibbs Racing teammates who have won eight of the past 11 races and collected 11 checkered flags.
Heading into the Chase opener Sunday at Chicagoland Speedway in Joliet, Gordon has fewer top-five finishes (three) than Johnson, Kenseth and Busch have victories (four) this season.
Gordon is seeded 13th, ahead of only Ryan Newman, who hasn’t won since July 2013; Eau Claire, Wis., native Paul Menard, a Chase rookie; and Clint Bowyer, whose team will shut down when the season ends.
“It’s possible,” Gordon said of going out with another title. “I think anything’s possible in this format.”
Indeed, the Chase is the Chase, a whole different animal from the season-long championship format that served NASCAR through 2003, and since last year significantly different from the previous decade.
Three times after three-race segments, four drivers are knocked out of contention, cutting the field of hopefuls from 16 to 12 to eight and finally four for the season finale in Homestead, Fla.
There will be surprises. Busch and Johnson failed to make it out of the second round last year. Newman, who recorded only three-top five finishes in the 10 Chase races, finished in the championship one spot behind Harvick, who won three of them, including the final two.
“It’s so easy each round when you play out these brackets to just take, ‘Well, the bottom guys now are going to be eliminated and the next bottom are going to get eliminated,’” Hamlin said. “This thing is going to get mixed up and there will be two of your top 10 seeds miss the first round.”
There will be trash talk. Harvick is the champion of that, too, and he came out swinging Thursday, saying of the Gibbs cars: “I think we’re going to pound them into the ground.”
And just as last year, animosity that builds with the pressure could come as a bump on the track, punches on pit road or an outright chase through the garage the way the usually restrained Kenseth went after Keselowski last year.
“It got that way last year it seemed like in those cutoff races,” said Kurt Busch, who bowed out in the first round last year after contact on the track punctured a tire. “It was mainly Brad, was the common denominator last year. He put on his aggressive helmet and was bulldozing through some guys and ruffled the feathers of guys like Matt Kenseth and Jeff Gordon.”
Beyond those certainties — surprises, mind games and emotion — predicting what happens in NASCAR over the next 10 weeks lies somewhere between challenging and futile.
Momentum says an all-Gibbs final is possible. History would point to Johnson peaking at the right time. Confidence is on Harvick’s side.
And then there’s the guy who 23 years ago made it OK for owners to put 20-somethings in top rides, a practice that would serve the Busch brothers, Logano and others. The guy who put a polish of professionalism on his sport. Who bridged generations.
The greybeard hoping to beat the odds.
“All year long, I don’t feel like we’ve lived up to our full potential,” Gordon said. “If we do that in the Chase, there’s no doubt in my mind that we can turn it around. And it’ll look like it just got turned around, but really, we’re just doing what we should be doing at the beginning of the year.”
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