Luckily for motorsports history, Gordon came to his senses.
“All of a sudden, this idea came about. I was reading Open Wheel Magazine and here’s a kid who was 15 years old racing in Florida, racing sprint cars, and I love sprint cars. I mean, Doug Wolfgang,, you know, those were my heroes as a young kid. And here’s this 15-year-old kid racing sprint cars. I think I showed my dad or he showed me , I can’t remember.”Regardless, it was a pivotal point in his career.
“I think at that time I must have been 12 and a half, 13 or something like that… not old enough to drive a sprint car. I was thinking, ‘Hey, when I’m 15 I can drive a sprint car.’ And again, my dad said, ‘If he can do it at 15, you can do it at 13.”“When he got his mind set on something it was going to happen. And so we went to Indiana. There’s a guy who built my first sprint car—he also builds street rods, a guy named Lee Osborne. And so John had to talk him into building a sprint car for me.
“First of all, it’s a lot of work,” he said when I talked to him at The Amelia, where he was honored with a display of cars he’s raced, from the #24 Rainbow Warrior car to the Cadillac in which he co-drove to victory at the Rolex 24 at Daytona, to the BMW F1 car he swapped with Juan Pablo Montoya. “There’s a lot going on in the sport. When you look at a four-car operation, we build all of our own engines. There’s a whole marketing and PR department that manages our sponsors, and our drivers and our teams. And then there’s the competition side of things, too. I’m connected to all of them, but I feel like I probably spend most of my time on the business and fundraising side and the branding side.
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