SteveH
05-08-04, 11:14 PM
http://chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/sports/printedition/cs-0405080269may08,1,3931083.column?coll=cs-sports-print
ON AUTO RACING
NASCAR is lucky Gordon stayed put
The driver some fans despise once seriously considered making the move to Formula One
Ed Hinton
May 8, 2004
Jeff Gordon, resurgent as NASCAR's hottest driver for the umpteenth time, is taking the most interesting weekend off of all Nextel Cup drivers.
He's in Barcelona for Sunday's Spanish Grand Prix as guest of the Williams-BMW team.
That's enough to restart recurrent rumors that America's winningest active driver (four Cup championships and 66 victories, including the last two races) is moving to Formula One.
But, one more time, it isn't going to happen.
This, to the chagrin of Gordon admirers (Jackie Stewart among them) who believe he would do well at the world's most sophisticated motor sport and of Gordon boo-birds who wish he would go somewhere, anywhere, other than NASCAR.
But, at 32, he knows he's too old to start over. So does team owner Frank Williams, whom Gordon so impressed last year in a just-for-fun drive in a Williams-BMW at Indianapolis.
Gordon's visit is just a friendly one.
What it does provide is an occasion for imagining . . .
Imagine Gordon long gone from NASCAR to F1.
It actually could have happened seven years ago, Gordon admitted recently.
If it had happened, what might F1 be like now? More profoundly for the United States and its entire sports scenario, what might NASCAR be like today?
Imagine a NASCAR that in the late 1990s came to a screeching halt as "America's fastest-growing sport" . . . an F1 with U.S. interest at heights unseen since Mario Andretti won the world championship in 1978 . . . and, along the way, a CART reprieved from its plummet to where it lies today, on life support.
The Oxford-based historian Niall Ferguson has led a movement in recent years for "Virtual History," or "counterfactuals." What if JFK had lived? What if King George III had negotiated and the American colonists had not revolted?
Consider carefully what might have been, and you can understand better what is.
Ferguson's bedrock rule of such projection is that there must have been, truly in history, a point at which a situation could have gone either way.
"It was in '97, when the BAR (British American Racing) team was being built," Gordon said recently. "They came to me and said, `We would like for you to run the CART series for a year, and in the meantime be testing an F1 car, and then come be a driver for BAR.'"
Wary of a startup team, he still was tempted enough that "I was on the phone with Jacques Villeneuve a lot." The French-Canadian, reigning world champion at the time, was leaving Williams to be BAR's first driver.
Gordon probably would have done well in CART--his season there would have been with powerful Team Green--and siphoned significant media attention away from NASCAR.
BAR was a flop out of the gate, and it ruined Villeneuve's career. But Villeneuve stayed too long because of personal and financial ties.
Gordon might have glanced off BAR quickly. F1 teams are notorious for stealing drivers from one another, contracts notwithstanding. Add the enormous factor, for F1 marketing purposes, that Gordon is American. Maneuvering for him could have begun even before he hit the Grand Prix tour.
A Gordonless NASCAR is a bleaker picture.
With Dale Earnhardt dead, there would be but one huge pop-culture figure, his son Dale Jr., who at nearly 30 has no championships and one Daytona 500 victory among 11 victories in five years.
The winningest active driver would be 47-year-old Rusty Wallace, with 55 victories, only one of them in the last three years, and one championship, won 15 years ago. Active former champions would include the laconic Labontes, Terry and Bobby, Dale Jarrett, Bill Elliott (who races only occasionally now) and Matt Kenseth.
All are popular within their limits. But could any of them host "Saturday Night Live," or fill in for Regis on morning TV, as Gordon has done so well?
Not forgetting Tony Stewart, but the question is whether he even would have come to NASCAR from the Indy Racing League if Gordon had not opened so many doors and made NASCAR so attractive to, and comfortable for, Midwestern, Western and Northeastern drivers.
It was Gordon, singularly, who brought torrents of mainstream, younger, more sophisticated American audiences with him into NASCAR.
It was Gordon who made NASCAR team owners turn their talent searches beyond the South, out to the open-wheel series and the dirt tracks of the vaster nation. Without Gordon's lead, how many "young guns" would there be today?
The old-line Gordon boo-birds might have retaken NASCAR as their dominion. But even their interest might have ebbed, with no one there to root so intensely against.
With NASCAR popularity thus truncated since '97, there might have been no $2.8 billion TV contract whereby every turn of a wheel is carried on at least a cable channel.
All of this is what might have been. One final point about what is:
Next time you throw a half-empty beer bottle at Jeff Gordon, try to think of it as half full.
Copyright © 2004, The Chicago Tribune
ON AUTO RACING
NASCAR is lucky Gordon stayed put
The driver some fans despise once seriously considered making the move to Formula One
Ed Hinton
May 8, 2004
Jeff Gordon, resurgent as NASCAR's hottest driver for the umpteenth time, is taking the most interesting weekend off of all Nextel Cup drivers.
He's in Barcelona for Sunday's Spanish Grand Prix as guest of the Williams-BMW team.
That's enough to restart recurrent rumors that America's winningest active driver (four Cup championships and 66 victories, including the last two races) is moving to Formula One.
But, one more time, it isn't going to happen.
This, to the chagrin of Gordon admirers (Jackie Stewart among them) who believe he would do well at the world's most sophisticated motor sport and of Gordon boo-birds who wish he would go somewhere, anywhere, other than NASCAR.
But, at 32, he knows he's too old to start over. So does team owner Frank Williams, whom Gordon so impressed last year in a just-for-fun drive in a Williams-BMW at Indianapolis.
Gordon's visit is just a friendly one.
What it does provide is an occasion for imagining . . .
Imagine Gordon long gone from NASCAR to F1.
It actually could have happened seven years ago, Gordon admitted recently.
If it had happened, what might F1 be like now? More profoundly for the United States and its entire sports scenario, what might NASCAR be like today?
Imagine a NASCAR that in the late 1990s came to a screeching halt as "America's fastest-growing sport" . . . an F1 with U.S. interest at heights unseen since Mario Andretti won the world championship in 1978 . . . and, along the way, a CART reprieved from its plummet to where it lies today, on life support.
The Oxford-based historian Niall Ferguson has led a movement in recent years for "Virtual History," or "counterfactuals." What if JFK had lived? What if King George III had negotiated and the American colonists had not revolted?
Consider carefully what might have been, and you can understand better what is.
Ferguson's bedrock rule of such projection is that there must have been, truly in history, a point at which a situation could have gone either way.
"It was in '97, when the BAR (British American Racing) team was being built," Gordon said recently. "They came to me and said, `We would like for you to run the CART series for a year, and in the meantime be testing an F1 car, and then come be a driver for BAR.'"
Wary of a startup team, he still was tempted enough that "I was on the phone with Jacques Villeneuve a lot." The French-Canadian, reigning world champion at the time, was leaving Williams to be BAR's first driver.
Gordon probably would have done well in CART--his season there would have been with powerful Team Green--and siphoned significant media attention away from NASCAR.
BAR was a flop out of the gate, and it ruined Villeneuve's career. But Villeneuve stayed too long because of personal and financial ties.
Gordon might have glanced off BAR quickly. F1 teams are notorious for stealing drivers from one another, contracts notwithstanding. Add the enormous factor, for F1 marketing purposes, that Gordon is American. Maneuvering for him could have begun even before he hit the Grand Prix tour.
A Gordonless NASCAR is a bleaker picture.
With Dale Earnhardt dead, there would be but one huge pop-culture figure, his son Dale Jr., who at nearly 30 has no championships and one Daytona 500 victory among 11 victories in five years.
The winningest active driver would be 47-year-old Rusty Wallace, with 55 victories, only one of them in the last three years, and one championship, won 15 years ago. Active former champions would include the laconic Labontes, Terry and Bobby, Dale Jarrett, Bill Elliott (who races only occasionally now) and Matt Kenseth.
All are popular within their limits. But could any of them host "Saturday Night Live," or fill in for Regis on morning TV, as Gordon has done so well?
Not forgetting Tony Stewart, but the question is whether he even would have come to NASCAR from the Indy Racing League if Gordon had not opened so many doors and made NASCAR so attractive to, and comfortable for, Midwestern, Western and Northeastern drivers.
It was Gordon, singularly, who brought torrents of mainstream, younger, more sophisticated American audiences with him into NASCAR.
It was Gordon who made NASCAR team owners turn their talent searches beyond the South, out to the open-wheel series and the dirt tracks of the vaster nation. Without Gordon's lead, how many "young guns" would there be today?
The old-line Gordon boo-birds might have retaken NASCAR as their dominion. But even their interest might have ebbed, with no one there to root so intensely against.
With NASCAR popularity thus truncated since '97, there might have been no $2.8 billion TV contract whereby every turn of a wheel is carried on at least a cable channel.
All of this is what might have been. One final point about what is:
Next time you throw a half-empty beer bottle at Jeff Gordon, try to think of it as half full.
Copyright © 2004, The Chicago Tribune