The Daytona 500

(Page 7: Jeff Gordon)

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Thursday, February 11, 1993. The kid looked ridiculous with that little black peach-fuzz mustache—it was as if he drew it on with a Magic Marker, playing grown-up.

But he was standing there in Victory Lane, clearly smitten with the striking model—"Miss Winston" these women were called after they were hired out of the agency in Greensboro, North Carolina, to present trophies and smile for cameras, mainly to gain "brand exposure" for the series sponsor.

And he was winking at her.

And it would look so ludicrous coming from this almost pubescentlooking kid, if the twenty-three-year-old model weren't ... well ...

Winking back.

Her name was Brooke Sealey. His name was Jeff Gordon. She was fresh out of the agency. He had just become the youngest driver ever to win a race at Daytona International Speedway.

And here they were winking at each other in Victory Lane, moments after the first of the traditional twin 125-mile qualifying races that determine most of the starting order for the Daytona 500.

Thus began a romance, very secretive—Winston models and Winston Cup drivers are forbidden from dating each other by unwritten rule. It's just tacit policy on the part of both NASCAR and Winston, to keep racing from looking, well, too racy to the public. The wild exploits of the flamboyant driver Tim Richmond, who died of AIDS in 1989 after surreptitiously dating some Winston models and reportedly transmitting the disease to one, cemented the rule.

So the secrecy, as this 1993 season progressed, would make the kid a master of slipping unnoticed in and out of hotels.

The inner circles of NASCAR would gossip. The model never seemed to have any dates, and neither did the kid. Nobody would add it up. The hard-bitten Earnhardt would saunter up to Gordon in midseason and ask flat-out if the kid was gay.

But here in Victory Lane at Daytona, here was what was so scary about the kid: He looked like he had about as much business trading winks with Brooke Sealey as Macaulay Culkin would have trading winks with Kim Basinger. But he had just driven that car like the macho men of yore who would plant huge, lingering kisses on the mouths of models in Victory Lane—Fireball Roberts and Joe Weatherly and Curtis Turner. No. He had driven better. Smoother. Quicker. Ballsier. He had just shown up at this storied 2.5-mile tri-oval for the first time, and had driven it as if he had been driving it for twenty years. He had a gift for sniffing the draft that usually took a decade to learn. He had a superb feel for every bump and rise and dip in every stretch and turn of the pavement.

Earnhardt went out and won his 125-miler as usual, the second one of the day, and in his press conference was asked to name his top competitors for Sunday's race, and he clicked off the usual suspects, Davey Allison and Ernie Irvan and Geoff Bodine, and in just a fleeting afterthought he remembered that some kid had won the first 125-miler, and added, "and, uh, the Gordon boy."

Gordon boy my ass.

Watching just that one 125-miler, you couldn't say that Jeff Gordon was the best there was—maybe the best there'd ever been.

But you damn sure couldn't say he wasn't.

Copyright © 2001 by Ed Hinton. All rights reserved. Posted with permission of http://www.twbookmark.com. Click here for ordering information for "Daytona" at Amazon.com.