[h=1]By Mike Hembree
Jeff Gordon's career comes full circle at California track[/h]


(Photo: Jerome Miron, USA TODAY Sports)



VALLEJO, Calif. — Jeff Gordon's eyes lit up as he rode past one of the grand spots of his youth.
"There's where it was – one of the greatest go-kart tracks anywhere," Gordon said, pointing out the site off Interstate 80 near Vallejo. "Boy, was that a fun place. The carts were fast. Everybody else wanted to wreck people. I just wanted to pass everybody."
He has done that. Before the go-karts. And long after them.
Gordon ran go-karts with his pre-teen buddies for fun. By then, he already had recorded seven years as a race car driver, having started — at 5 years old — the long and winding road that will end this season with his final Sprint Cup race.
It all began — at least from a competitive angle — at what is now Roy Hayer Memorial Speedway, a 1/20th-mile quarter-midget dirt track in Rio Linda, off a side road behind Rio Linda High School. It's a rather obscure location, in a small county park north of Sacramento, but one that serves as the racing birthplace of one of the greatest drivers this country has ever seen.
Gordon returned to the Rio Linda track for the first time since 1984, in a goodbye of sorts as he prepares for his final Cup race in his home state — at Sonoma Raceway on Sunday. It was an emotional ride down memory lane for the man, now 43, who would drive from the little oval to international motorsports stardom.

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Jeff Gordon's 2015 farewell tour: Sonoma




Gordon's parents, stepfather John Bickford and mother Carol, put him in a quarter-midget racer at the venue — then known as Cracker Jack Track — and he learned quickly. Hundreds of quarter-midget wins would follow, many of them at Cracker Jack, where Gordon would become a prohibitive favorite any time he left the pit area and rolled onto the hard-packed dirt surface.
After an orientation session, Gordon was licensed by track official Tom Van Inwagen, and he was off to the races.
"I was there the first day he came to the track," Van Inwagen told USA TODAY Sports. "He was a regular 5-year-old. But John put him in a car more than any other person I've known. He'd pick him up from school and they'd go do laps. When he got here, he already had a ton of laps in a car.
"It's all about comfort and timing, and Jeff had it. It's not something you're born with, not something natural. It takes dedication. ... Between John being involved and with what Jeff was able to do, they had it."
His first competitive lap was run at Cracker Jack alongside other 5-to-10-year-olds whose parents chose racing over Little League. For almost all of them, it was recreation. For Gordon and his parents, it was much more.

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For years, Gordon was so good there that, he later admitted, the racing became dull.
The Bickfords saw the promise in their son early, and soon they were enlarging his competitive circles, running at other, faster tracks against bigger, better competition. When Gordon was 14, the family relocated to Pittsboro, Ind., dropping him in a hotbed of sprint and midget racing.
That continued a story that ends — in a fashion — this year.
Gordon is in his final season in Sprint Cup, searching for a fifth championship and more victories to add to his career total of 92, third-best behind Hall of Famers Richard Petty (200) and David Pearson (105).
Jerry Apodaca, 47, raced against Gordon at Cracker Jack.
"He was a great driver," Apodaca told USA TODAY Sports. "... He made it. I'm very happy for him. He's something special."

 

USA TODAY Sports' Jeff Gluck breaks down what to watch for at Sonoma Raceway.



Racing prodigy
About 60 miles southwest of the Rio Linda track, at the Solano County Fairgrounds in Vallejo, near the Bickford residence at 534 Brooke Dr., Gordon's journey began. Using a rake, hoe and orange cones, the Bickfords scratched out a 1/20th-mile "track" in the dirt and gravel of an out-of-the-way fairgrounds lot, put Jeff in a quarter-midget car and told him to drive.
They went so far as to bring a set of racetrack flags so that he could learn green, yellow and red in the motorsports context. Before Gordon's little sneakers hit the ground at Cracker Jack, he had run thousands of "laps" on the makeshift track.
"We did that every chance we got," Carol Bickford told USA TODAY Sports. "We had friends of ours who had kids about that age, and we'd invite them over. Just about everybody brought their kids out, and not one of them would get in a quarter-midget. Jeff got in without much hesitation."
Soon, Gordon was ready for real racing at Cracker Jack. The Bickfords flowed into the parent-kid dynamic at the little track, selling drinks and snacks at the concession stand, working scoring and timing, keeping the grounds clean.
Watching Gordon closely in those first weeks was Dennis Rice. He and his father, Ken, build quarter-midget cars and have worked with many young drivers.
"I was standing under a tree watching Jeff drive and do fantastic things with his car," Rice told USA TODAY Sports. "I said, 'I want him. That boy's got some talent.' I spent a lot of hours with him and his car."
Rice said Gordon had separated himself from the other kids by the time he turned 7.

"The things he could do with that car most kids couldn't," he said. "He controlled the car in the slide without spinning out. He could slide it under other cars and not hit them. Others would try it and spin out. He had very good car control.
"You'd tell him what to do and he'd do it, and he'd exceed your expectations."

 

 

 

 

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